Was love invented by European poets in the middle ages, as C. S. Lewis claimed, or is it part of human nature? Will winning the lottery really make you happy? Is it possible to build robots that have feelings? These are just some of the intriguing questions explored in this new guide to the latest thinking about the emotions. Drawing on a wide range of scientific research, from anthropology and psychology to neuroscience and artificial intelligence, Emotion: The Science of Sentiment (...) takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the human heart. Illustrating his points with entertaining examples from fiction, film, and popular culture, Dylan Evans ranges from the evolution of the emotions to the nature of love and happiness to the language of feelings, offering readers the most recent thinking on real life topics that touch us all. But Emotion is also a book filled with surprises. Readers will discover, for instance, that the basic emotions are felt the world over--whether we live in the shadow of Times Square or in the depths of the rain forest, we all feel the emotions of disgust, joy, surprise, anger, fear, and distress. We find out that, according to research, winning the lottery does not cause a lasting increase in happiness--a short-lived euphoria is followed in almost every case with a return to our usual emotional state, if not worse. And we meet Kismet, an MIT robot that can express a wide range of emotions, from fear to happiness. Fun to read and based on the latest scientific thinking, here is a stimulating look at our emotions. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan's thinking revolutionised the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and had a major impact in fields as diverse as film studies, literary criticism, feminist theory and philosophy. Yet his writings are notorious for their complexity and idiosyncratic style. Emphasising the clinical basis of Lacan's work, _An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis_ is an ideal companion to his ideas for readers in every discipline where his influence is felt. The _Dictionary _features: * over 200 entries, explaining Lacan's own terminology and (...) his use of common psychoanalytic expressions * details of the historical and institutional context of Lacan's work * reference to the origins of major concepts in the work of Freud, Saussure, Hegel and other key thinkers * a chronology of Lacan's life and works. (shrink)

Featuring essays by some of the most prominent names in contemporary political and cultural theory, _Sovereignty in Ruins_ presents a form of critique grounded in the conviction that political thought is itself an agent of crisis. Aiming to develop a political vocabulary capable of critiquing and transforming contemporary political frameworks, the contributors advance a politics of crisis that collapses the false dichotomies between sovereignty and governmentality and between critique and crisis. Their essays address a wide range of topics, such as (...) the role history plays in the development of a politics of crisis; Arendt's controversial judgment of Adolf Eichmann; Strauss's and Badiou's readings of Plato's _Laws_; the acceptance of the unacceptable; the human and nonhuman; and flesh as a biopolitical category representative of the ongoing crisis of modernity. Altering the terms through which political action may take place, the contributors think through new notions of the political that advance countermodels of biopolitics, radical democracy, and humanity. Contributors. Judith Butler, George Edmondson, Roberto Esposito, Carlo Galli, Klaus Mladek, Alberto Moreiras, Andrew Norris, Eric L. Santner, Adam Sitze, Carsten Strathausen, Rei Terada, Cary Wolfe. (shrink)

The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists depends in large part on what ordinary people mean by ‘free will’, a matter on which previous experimental philosophy studies have yielded conflicting results. In Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005, 2006), most participants judged that agents in deterministic scenarios could have free will and be morally responsible. Nichols and Knobe (2007), though, suggest that these apparent compatibilist responses are performance errors produced by using concrete scenarios, and that their abstract scenarios reveal the folk (...) theory of free will for what it actually is—incompatibilist. Here, we argue that the results of two new studies suggest just the opposite. Most participants only give apparent incompatibilist judgments when they mistakenly interpret determinism to imply that agents’ mental states are bypassed in the causal chains that lead to their behavior. Determinism does not entail bypassing, so these responses do not reflect genuine incompatibilist intuitions. When participants understand what determinism does mean, the vast majority take it to be compatible with free will. Further results indicate that most people’s concepts of choice and the ability to do otherwise do not commit them to incompatibilism, either, putting pressure on incompatibilist arguments that rely on transfer principles, such as the Consequence Argument. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical debates about free will, and suggest that incompatibilism appears to be either false, or else a thesis about something other than what most people mean by ‘free will’. (shrink)

Dylan Trigg on anxiety, phobia, and phenomenology.

Natural language semanticists have often found it useful to assume that all expressions denote sets of values. The approach is most prominent in the study of questions and prosodic focus, but also common in work on indefinites, disjunction, negative polarity, and scalar implicature. However, the most popular compositional implementation of this idea is known to face technical obstacles in the presence of object-language binding constructs, including, chiefly, lambda abstraction. The problem has been well-described on several occasions in the literature, and (...) in fact several solutions have been explored. This paper seeks to formalize the challenge of defining an indeterminate semantics for binding operators, and to formally establish the intuition that the challenge is in fact insurmountable. The primary benefit to this exercise is that it offers an abstract characterization of what it means to lift an operation from one semantic space to another, a notion which may be applied to domains having nothing to do with sets of alternatives. (shrink)

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual virtues, (...) editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

In the past few decades, research in the psychology of emotion has benefited greatly from being located in a firm evolutionary framework. It is argued that research in the psychology of mood might attain equal rigour by taking a similar approach. An evolutionary framework for mood research would be based on evolutionary psychology, the main thesis of which is the Massive Modularity Hypothesis. Translating the folk-psychological language of moods into the scientific language of modules might clarify many theoretical questions and (...) provide a sound basis for empirical research. It is argued that such an evolutionary approach would reveal mood to be a much more heterogeneous category than emotion. While the six basic emotions identified by Paul Ekman are probably each subserved by a single module, prototypical moods such as elation, depression, anxiety and irritability are likely to be subserved by a wide range of modules. An evolutionary approach to mood might therefore lead to the elimination of the concept of mood from scientific psychology altogether. (shrink)

Williams argues that humans have evolved special purpose adaptations for eliciting medical attention from others, such as a specific facial expression of pain. She also recognises that such adaptations would almost certainly have coevolved with adaptations for providing and responding to medical care. The placebo response may be one such adaptation, and any evolutionary account of pain must also address this important phenomenon.

Recently developed super‐resolution microscopy techniques are changing our understanding of lipid rafts and membrane organisation in general. The lipid raft hypothesis postulates that cholesterol can drive the formation of ordered domains within the plasma membrane of cells, which may serve as platforms for cell signalling and membrane trafficking. There is now a wealth of evidence for these domains. However, their study has hitherto been hampered by the resolution limit of optical microscopy, making the definition of their properties problematic and contentious. (...) New microscopy techniques circumvent the resolution limit and, for the first time, allow the fluorescence imaging of structures on length scales below 200 nm. This review describes such techniques, particularly as applied to the study of membrane organisation, synthesising newly emerging facets of lipid raft biology into a state‐of‐the art model.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays: Super‐resolution imaging prompts re‐thinking of cell biology mechanisms Abstract and Quantitative analysis of photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM) datasets using pair‐correlation analysis Abstract. (shrink)

David Hume and Simone de Beauvoir agree that human beings have a great deal of control over their moral and political lives, which is well captured in Hume's assertion that "mankind is an inventive species". But Hume argues that the most important thing needed to settle our social lives and determine justice is the agreement on rules of property, while Beauvoir thinks that the rules of property will never be enough to establish the best life, but rather that we should (...) be focusing on freedom. In this article we reconstruct Hume's argument for property, then develop a Beauvoirian critique of Hume that brings out the weakness of any theory of property that does not prevent inequalities of property from interfering with freedom. And then we give the last word to a Humean response to Beauvoir that would insist that there can be no freedom but only violence without rules of property, which she ignores. Both thinkers appeal to humanity as an overriding goal, and perhaps that is the way to reconcile the two: we need both property and freedom to achieve our humanity. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists now argue that emotions play a vital role in reasoning. This paper explores one particular way of elucidating how emotions help reason which may be dubbed ?the search hypothesis of emotion?. After outlining the search hypothesis of emotion and dispensing with a red herring that has marred previous statements of the hypothesis, I discuss two alternative readings of the search hypothesis. It is argued that the search hypothesis must be construed as an account of what emotions (...) typically do, rather than as a definition of emotion. Even as an account of what emotions typically do, the search hypothesis can only be evaluated in the context of a specific theory of what emotions are. 1 Introduction 2 The search hypothesis of emotion 3 A red herring: the frame problem 4 The search problem 5 Two readings of the search hypothesis 6 Two final remarks 7 Conclusion. (shrink)

This book contains a series of essays that explore the concept of unconsciousness as it is situated between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. A leading goal of the collection is to carve out phenomenological dimensions within psychoanalysis and, equally, to carve out psychoanalytical dimensions within phenomenology. The book examines the nature of unconsciousness and the role it plays in structuring our sense of self. It also looks at the extent to which the unconscious marks the body as it functions outside of experience (...) as well as manifests itself in experience. In addition, the book explores the relationship between unconsciousness and language, particularly if unconsciousness exists prior to language or if the concept can only be understood through speech. The collection includes contributions from leading scholars, each of whom grounds their investigations in a nuanced mastery of the traditional voices of their fields. These contributors provide diverse viewpoints that challenge both the phenomenological and psychoanalytical traditions in their relation to unconsciousness. (shrink)

_ _From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, _The Memory of Place___ __charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world._ Dylan Trigg’s _The Memory of Place_ _ __offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary (...) field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, _The Memory of Place___ __argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies. Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls _The Memory of Place _“genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”. (shrink)

If someone brings about an outcome without intending to, is she causally and morally responsible for it? What if she acts intentionally, but as the result of manipulation by another agent? Previous research has shown that an agent's mental states can affect attributions of causal and moral responsibility to that agent, but little is known about what effect one agent's mental states can have on attributions to another agent. In Experiment 1, we replicate findings that manipulation lowers attributions of responsibility (...) to manipulated agents. Experiments 2–7 isolate which features of manipulation drive this effect, a crucial issue for both philosophical debates about free will and attributions of responsibility in situations involving social influence more generally. Our results suggest that “bypassing” a manipulated agent's mental states generates the greatest reduction in responsibility, and we explain our results in terms of the effects that one agent's mental states can have on the counterfactual relations between another agent and an outcome. (shrink)

In a well-known paper, Nick Bostrom presents a confrontation between a fictionalised Blaise Pascal and a mysterious mugger. The mugger persuades Pascal to hand over his wallet by exploiting Pascal's commitment to expected utility maximisation. He does so by offering Pascal an astronomically high reward such that, despite Pascal's low credence in the mugger's truthfulness, the expected utility of accepting the mugging is higher than rejecting it. In this article, I present another sort of high value, low credence mugging. This (...) time, the mugger utilises research on existential risk and the long-term potential of humanity to exploit Pascal's expected-utility-maximising descendant. This mugging is more insidious than Bostrom's original as it relies on plausible facts about the long-term future, as well as realistic credences about how our everyday actions could, albeit with infinitesimally low likelihood, affect the future of humanity. (shrink)

The Theaetetus’s midwife metaphor contains a puzzling feature, often referred to as the “midwife paradox”: the physical midwives must have first given birth to their own children in order to have the necessary experience to practice their art. Socrates, however, seems to disavow having any children of his own and thus appears to be unqualified to practice philosophical midwifery. In this paper, I aim to dissolve the midwife paradox by arguing that it rests on problematic assumptions, namely, that Socrates never (...) gave birth to a child at all or the child of wisdom in particular, and that he is primarily an intellectual midwife. I offer a new interpretation of Socratic midwifery, arguing that what Socrates may have birthed in the past which qualifies him for midwifery is his virtuous recognition of his ignorance, and that this “epistemic virtue” is also the proximate goal of Socratic midwifery. (shrink)

Do our emotions stop us being rational? For thousands of years, emotions have been thought of as obstacles to intelligent thought. This view has been challenged in recent years by both philosophers and scientists. In this groundbreaking book, the first of its kind, leading thinkers from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience challenge this commonly held view of emotion in a series of fascinating and challenging essays.

Within philosophy of action, there are three broad views about what, in addition to beliefs, answer the question of “what to do?” and so determine an agent’s motivation: desires, judgments about values/reasons, or states of the will, such as intentions. We argue that recent work in decision theory vindicates the volitionalist. “What to do?” isn’t settled by “what do I value” or “what reasons are there?” Rational motivation further requires determining how to trade off the possibility of a good outcome (...) against the possibility of a bad one—i.e., determining how much of a risk to take. The risk attitudes that embody this tradeoff seem best understood as intentions: as self-governing policies to weight desires or reasons in certain ways. That we need to settle our risk attitudes before making most decisions corroborates Bratman’s claim that self-governing policies are required for resolving impasses of evaluative and normative underdetermination. Moreover, far from being rare or confined to tie-breakings, cases that are underdetermined but for one’s risk attitudes are typical of everyday decision-making. The will is required for most rational action. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers argue that assertion is governed by an epistemic norm. In particular, many defend the knowledge account of assertion, which says that one should assert only what one knows. Here, I defend a non‐normative alternative to the knowledge account that I call the repK account of assertion. According to the repK account, assertion represents knowledge, but it is not governed by a constitutive epistemic rule. I show that the repK account offers a more straightforward interpretation of the conversational (...) patterns and intuitions that motivate the knowledge account. It does so in terms of ordinary normative principles that philosophers already accept, none of which are constitutive to assertion. I then contend that the repK account is preferable to the knowledge account because it is simpler, its implications are less contentious, and it avoids a problem for normative accounts of assertion recently raised by Peter Pagin. I also argue that the repK account offers a satisfying explanation of selfless assertion, a counterexample to the knowledge account posed by Jennifer Lackey. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper, I take exception with a widely held philosophical doctrine, according to which agents are morally responsible only for actions they have intentionally done, or chosen to bring about. I argue that that there are positive duties of consideration and proper regard that make sense of holding persons responsible in the absence of any choice to commit wrong acts.

‘Tool of Empowerment’: The Rhetorical Vision of Title Nine This study of the mail order catalog Title Nine, a California-based women's athletic clothing company, employs symbolic convergence theory and fantasy theme analysis through the context of third wave feminism. The catalog, named after the federal law in the United States that was intended to equalize opportunities between men's and women's participation in sports, creates a distinct social reality in an effort to empower readers. Similar studies have analyzed stereotypical representations of (...) women in magazines and advertising. However, this study offers insight into a newly emerging phenomenon in a niche market, the mail-order catalog, and in the artifact under study, it offers a medium where creators intend to do more than sell women's clothing. Within fantasy theme analysis is the fantasy type, a moral or social more that repeats itself through various actors or settings within the artifact. Four fantasy types put forth by Title Nine have been identified by the researcher, including a.) "I am superwoman," b.) "I am a mom," c.) "I am an advocate for women," and d.) "I can be anything.". (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: * Introduction * Human Error * The Placebo Effect and “Faith Healing” * The Mechanical Mind * Conclusion * References * Further Reading.

In this dissertation I take exception with a widely held philosophical doctrine, according to which agents are only blameworthy for the bad actions they have chosen to bring about. My argument strategy is to present cases in which agents are blamed for involuntary actions that are not in any way connected to their culpable and voluntary choices. These failures correspond, I suggest, to occasions of culpable ignorance where agents have been negligent or careless. More specifically, I claim that violations of (...) natural duties of respect and consideration, and certain acquired role-type duties, are blamed ;-.ithout any voluntary consent. If my examples are persuasive, then the point is reached where a normative principle of 'voluntary consent' does not in fact coincide with people's actual practices and 'considered judgements'. In the final sections of the dissertation, I argue against the plausibility of keeping the principle and revising our judgements. (shrink)

This original study examines Jean-François Lyotard's philosophical concept of the differend and details its unexplored implications for literature. it provides a new framework with which to understand the discourse itself, from its Homeric beginnings to postmodern works by authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Jonathan Safran Foer.

This essay considers the role of depersonalization in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. While there has been a modest amount of interest in depersonalization from a phenomenological perspective, a critical exploration of the theme of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking itself remains overlooked ; Colombetti and Ratcliffe. This is an oddity, given that the theme of depersonalization proves instructive in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the constitution of the subject, and appears within Phenomenology of Perception at key points in his thinking. This paper serves (...) as a critical exposition of the role of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. I proceed in three ways. In the first instance, I provide an overview of depersonalization, addressing its salient characteristics, which includes: a feeling of disturbed bodily subjectivity; a diminishment of affective feeling; and a corresponding and overarching sense of unreality, carrying with it a sense of estrangement. In the main part of the paper, I consider the articulation of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty, especially as it figures in Phenomenology of Perception. My claim is that depersonalization can be best captured as an expression of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ambiguity. I conclude by considering to what extent Merleau-Ponty’s account of depersonalization corresponds with the medical understanding of the condition. (shrink)

Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism is a superb guide to the works of Flannery O'Connor; and like O'Connor's stories themselves, it is captivating, provocative, and unsettling. Edmondson organizes O'Connor's thought around her principal concern, that with the nihilistic claim that "God is dead" the traditional signposts of good and evil have been lost. Edmondson's book demonstrates that the combination of O'Connor's artistic brilliance and philosophical genius provide the best response to the nihilistic despair (...) of the modern world—a return to "good and evil" through humility and grace. (shrink)

In _Did God Care?_ Dylan Burns offers the first comprehensive survey of providence (_pronoia_) in ancient philosophy, from Plato to Plotinus, that takes into full account the importance and innovations of early Christian thinkers, including Coptic Gnostic and Syriac sources.

In this paper I argue for a doctrine I call ?infallibilism?, which I stipulate to mean that If S knows that p, then the epistemic probability of p for S is 1. Some fallibilists will claim that this doctrine should be rejected because it leads to scepticism. Though it's not obvious that infallibilism does lead to scepticism, I argue that we should be willing to accept it even if it does. Infallibilism should be preferred because it has greater explanatory power (...) than fallibilism. In particular, I argue that an infallibilist can easily explain why assertions of ?p, but possibly not-p? (where the ?possibly? is read as referring to epistemic possibility) is infelicitous in terms of the knowledge rule of assertion. But a fallibilist cannot. Furthermore, an infallibilist can explain the infelicity of utterances of ?p, but I don't know that p? and ?p might be true, but I'm not willing to say that for all I know, p is true?, and why when a speaker thinks p is epistemically possible for her, she will agree (if asked) that for all she knows, p is true. The simplest explanation of these facts entails infallibilism. Fallibilists have tried and failed to explain the infelicity of ?p, but I don't know that p?, but have not even attempted to explain the last two facts. I close by considering two facts that seem to pose a problem for infallibilism, and argue that they don't. (shrink)

I argue that believing that p implies having a credence of 1 in p. This is true because the belief that p involves representing p as being the case, representing p as being the case involves not allowing for the possibility of not-p, while having a credence that’s greater than 0 in not-p involves regarding not-p as a possibility.

If one flips an unbiased coin a million times, there are 2 1,000,000 series of possible heads/tails sequences, any one of which might be the sequence that obtains, and each of which is equally likely to obtain. So it seems (1) 'If I had tossed a fair coin one million times, it might have landed heads every time' is true. But as several authors have pointed out, (2) 'If I had tossed a fair coin a million times, it wouldn't have (...) come up heads every time' will be counted as true in everyday contexts. And according to David Lewis' influential semantics for counterfactuals, (1) and (2) are contradictories. We have a puzzle. We must either (A) deny that (2) is true, (B) deny that (1) is true, or (C) deny that (1) and (2) are contradictories, thus rejecting Lewis' semantics. In this paper I discuss and criticize the proposals of David Lewis and more recently J. Robert G. Williams which solve the puzzle by taking option (B). I argue that we should opt for either (A) or (C). (shrink)

This book treats practical and political reasoning as an active engagement with the world and other people; it cannot be understood as exclusively cognitive and this is seen as a virtue rather than a deficiency. Informal, emotional, characterological, aesthetic and interactional aspects of thought can be constituents of reasonable arguing. The work examines key capacities connected with argumentation, in a variety of fields from professional and medical ethics to work organization and the practice of art.