As Hans Urs von Balthasar has put it, 1 This remark is the inspiration for the following rereading of Bonaventure’s inaugural lecture. Not only does the Commentary succeed to a remarkable degree in unifying scholasticism and mysticism, but it also contains the seeds of a descriptive theological method that is original in ways that parallel contemporary phenomenological thought, despite the risk of anachronism inherent in such a claim.

Empathy is a term used increasingly both in moral theory and animal ethics. Yet, its precise meaning is often left unexplored. The book aims to tackle this by clarifying the different and even contradictory ways in which “empathy” can be defined.

To date, 1.7 million US military service personnel have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, one in five are suffering from diagnosable combat-stress related psychological injuries including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). All indications are that the mental health toll of the current conflicts on US troops and the medical systems that care for them will only increase. Against this backdrop, research suggesting that the common class of drugs known as beta-blockers might prevent the onset of PTSD is drawing (...) much interest. I urge caution against accepting too quickly the use of beta-blockers for dealing with the psychological injuries that combat experiences can wreak. Beta-blockers are thought to work by disrupting the formation of emotionally disturbing memories that typically occur in the wake of traumatic events and that in some people manifest as PTSD. Focusing on a single dimension of soldiers' experience in combat, namely, their perpetration of other-directed violence, I argue that some of the emotional memories blunted by beta-blockers play important roles in the recovery of moral aspects of soldiers' selves damaged by experiences of combat violence — specifically, in the achievement of a state of grace— and, therefore, that the use of beta-blockers may come with distinct moral costs. (shrink)

Most moral theorists agree that it is one thing to believe that someone has slighted you and another to resent her for the insult; one thing to believe that someone did you a favor and another to feel gratitude toward her for her kindness. While all of these ways of responding to another's conduct are forms of moral appraisal, the reactive attitudes are said to 'go beyond' beliefs in some way. We think this claim is adequately explained only when we (...) take seriously the fact that reactive attitudes are emotions. In this paper, we appeal to insights of the emotions literature to highlight one key way in which reactive attitudes go beyond beliefs: beliefs about a person and her morally significant conduct merely ascribe to the person the property of having performed a morally significant action, while reactive attitudes are ways of experiencing that person as having performed a morally significant action. We then suggest that appreciating this is a crucial first step toward understanding why reactive emotions play roles in our practices around responsibility that beliefs do not. (shrink)

Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture explores the multifaceted moral meanings allocated to non-human suffering in contemporary Western culture.

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:540 BOOK REVIEWS automatically without requiring the intervention of human beings who are convinced of its validity" (p. 356). If, however, a representative legislature, acting according to proper constitutional procedures, should decide to effect a strict egalitarian redistribution of property, then on Kant's theory this decision of the general will would be perfectly rightful and legitimate. The wealthy could not complain that their rightful property was being taken from (...) them because their actual or peremptory right to any property whatever is conditional on submitting themselves to the general will and to whatever laws of distribution it might choose to give. The state's only responsibility here would be to make sure that each citizen's right to freedom, equality, and independence is pro· tected; and Kant was even aware to some extent (if not as much as he might have been) that under a genuinely republican system, it is always the unequal distribution of property in society which poses the most serious threat to these rights. In spirit, therefore, Kant's theory is at the very opposite end of the political spectrum from theories of the minimal or nightwatchman state. Cornell University Ithaca, New York ALLEN W. Wooo History Making History: The New Historicism in American Religious Thought. By WILLIAM DEAN. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Pp. xiv + 175. $57.50 (hardcover) ; $18.95 (paper). This hook sets out to explicate, not historicism generally, hut a particular local and American variety thereof. Indeed one of Dean's major points concerns the importance of " local knowledge." He is addressing readers located, for better or worse, in American institutions, in a time and space shaped by American experience. These, he argues, need to cultivate a distinctively American way of knowing in philosophy and religion, a way of knowing that will be historicist, pragmatic, and empirical in character; adopting it would require important revisions in how we conceive and practice theology. Like all good historicists, Dean presents his argument by telling a story, creating a narrative context for the understanding of ideas. The story is most immediately about a group of contemporary thinkers that includes secular philosophers (Richard Bernstein, Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty), philosophers of religion and ethics (Jeffrey Stout, Corne! West), theologians (Gordon Kaufman, Mark C. Taylor), and a lone literary critic, Frank Lentriccia. By treating these writers together as " the new American historicists," Dean hopes to BOOK REVIEWS 541 show that they exemplify a distinctive style of thought that is both locally valid (because rooted in American traditions and practices) and religiously interesting. At the same time, the new historicists suffer from an ironic case of intellectual amnesia. While they consistently stress the inevitability of tradition and context in shaping thought, these writers often seem oblivious to the uniquely American tradition in which they stand. Thus Dean reaches back to recover elements of an older American historicism with roots in pragmatism, religious naturalism, and the liberal Protestantism of the prewar " Chicago School." The thought of these illustrious precursors, he argues, can help save today's historicists from the formalism that is their constant temptation. But what is historicism? Dean makes an emphatic distinction be· tween the historicism that grows out of the German idealist tradition and the historicism that " can be traced to the classical era in Ameri· can philosophy," e.g., to the thought of the pragmatists (p. 2). When Dean speaks of the older, idealist-influenced historicism he does not mean simply Ernst Troeltsch's famous proposal for a form of cultural and religious relativism; he is painting with a much broader brush. " Continental " historicism means for him something more like the idealist conviction concerning the " historicity " of the subject. After Kant, we do not simply apprehend the world, we construe it; and ever since Kant we have become more and more aware that we do so from particular, contingent perspectives. " Historicism" in this wide sense might be taken as a thesis about the inevitability of hermeneutics. But belief in the necessity of interpretation or hermeneutics is com· patible with affirming the reality of certain universal anthropological structures, e.g., of "reason" or "subjectivity" or "understanding". It is just such structures, Dean argues... (shrink)

Les étudiants sourds et malentendants (ÉSM) représentent une catégorie de personnes dont les besoins éducatifs spécifiques sont restés sans réponse dans le système éducatif indien. Cette étude, basée sur un travail de terrain, a été menée à l’Anushruti Académie pour les sourds (AAS), une école pour les étudiants ÉSM située dans la ville de Roorkee en Inde. Elle repose sur l’observation de ces enfants dans les salles de classe et des entretiens approfondis avec leurs professeurs afin de cerner leurs positions (...) à l’égard des grands débats sur l’éducation des élèves ÉSM. Les questions de la langue et l’acquisition du langage parlé, les méthodes d’enseignement, la relation dialectique des élèves à la technologie et leur confrontation avec la stigmatisation sont utilisés afin de cerner les expériences vécues des élèves. L’étude souligne la nécessité d’utiliser un langage unificateur qui intègre le contenu usuel du développement académique. Cela renforcera l’accès des étudiants aux différentes disciplines académiques et leur permettra de d’aller au-delà des niveaux élémentaires de réussite scolaire. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the significance of mood for a philosophical approach to emotion. Are moods problematic because they constrain us in an affective cage? Or do they rather give us access to the world? The starting point for this investigation is the work of Martin Heidegger: I analyze what he defines as vorweltlich arguing that this term refers to the emotional dimension of human existence, in particular, to mood, or, in Heideggerian terms, Stimmung. Human existence is not just (...) a neutral being-there but a being-affected, a being-in-a-mood. I then move on to consider the role of mood in relation to the concept of transcendence, providing an analysis of two main source of inspiration in Heidegger’s thought: Augustine and Aristotle. This allows us to distinguish three aspects of Stimmung : Stimmung as openness to the world, Stimmung as teleological movement, and Stimmung as event of ontological difference. In the final section, I discuss the contribution of these aspects of Heidegger’s thought to the contemporary debate on emotions. (shrink)

Emotional information captures attention due to privileged processing. Consequently, performance in cognitive tasks declines. Therefore, shielding current goals fro...

La relación entre maternidad y trabajo ha sido materia de políticas públicas desde comienzos del siglo XX, pero en las últimas décadas ha adquirido nuevas connotaciones por el aumento de la participación laboral femenina. Ello no ha conducido a una eliminación de las discriminaciones que enfrentan las trabajadoras por su condición (real o potencial) de madres, ni a una organización del mercado de trabajo que permita articular demandas laborales y familiares, ni una redistribución del trabajo reproductivo. Para analizar cómo actores (...) involucrados en la formulación de políticas relacionadas con esta temática concebían la relación entre trabajo y maternidad y las tensiones que derivaban de ella, se entrevistó a un grupo de actores sociales provenientes de tres ámbitos. Dos ideas caracterizan sus concepciones: las normas de protección a la maternidad en el trabajo afectan negativamente la empleabilidad femenina y la relación maternidad trabajo es difícil porque la organización del mercado de trabajo dificulta la articulación de responsabilidades laborales y familiares. Respecto de las tensiones, se constataron en diferentes dimensiones: económica, demográfica, ejercicio de derechos y sociocultural. (shrink)

The essay aims to reflect on the question about how we become ourselves finding an answer in our species-specific technical creativity. By using the reflexions of Gilbert Simondon, Lambros Malafouris and Don Ihde, I want to suggest that through the modifications imported to the environment by virtue of technical mediations, human beings are in the condition of acting upon themselves. Our very technical mediations reorganize our cognitive and sensitive experience of the world.

In this quantitative meta-analysis, we used the activation likelihood estimation approach to address the effects of linguistic distance between first and second languages on language-related brain activations. In particular, we investigated how L2-related networks may change in response to linguistic distance from L1. Thus, we examined L2 brain activations in two groups of participants with English as L2 and either a European language or Chinese as L1. We further explored the modulatory effect of age of appropriation and proficiency of L2. (...) We found that, irrespective of L1-L2 distance—and to an extent—irrespective of L2 proficiency, L2 recruits brain areas supporting higher-order cognitive functions, although with group-specific differences. The Chinese group also selectively activated the parietal lobe, but this did not occur in the subgroup with high L2 proficiency. These preliminary results highlight the relevance of linguistic distance and call for future research to generalize findings to other language pairs and shed further light on the interaction between linguistic distance, AoA, and proficiency of L2. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Living Organ Donors’ Stories: (Unmet) Expectations about Informed Consent, Outcomes, and CareElisa J. Gordon, Symposium EditorKeywordsEthics, informed consent, kidney, liver, living donor, narrative, transplantationLiving donor organ transplantation has become standard treatment for patients with end-stage kidney or end-stage liver disease. Live donors comprised approximately 5,769 (34%) and 247 (4%) of all kidney and liver transplants in 2011, respectively (OPTN/UNOS). The reasons why people donate, the perception that donating does (...) not entail a decision per se, and the attendant fears and anxieties living donors feel about donating, have all been previously well investigated (Lennerling, Forsberg, Meyer, & Nyberg, 2004; Papachristou, Walter, Frommer, & Klapp, 2010). But much less is known about how donors experienced the overall donation process including the donor evaluation, preparation, appreciation of risks, decision-making, informed consent, post-operative, recovery processes, and the impact of donating on all aspects of their life, from their point of view. Thus, a narrative approach is essential for gaining insights into these less well known phenomena.There is good reason to remain concerned about the safety and ethical basis of living donation considering that living donors undergo serious health risks for no direct medical benefit to themselves (Ethics Committee of the Transplantation Society, 2004; Laird, 2012; Neergaard, 2011; Ratner & Sandoval, 2010; Shelton, 2011). The situation raises serious ethical questions specifically about nonmaleficence and informed consent, and more broadly about using people as a means to an end. The absence of long-term information may not undermine a willing donor’s commitment to save a loved one’s life, but is certainly cause for concern among transplant clinicians who want to be sure to disclose information that may be material for donors in order to provide adequate informed consent. In other words, the disjuncture between what transplant clinicians find important to disclose to donors and what prospective donors need to know—which follows along the lines of what Elliot Mishler referred to as the ‘voice of medicine’ versus the ‘voice of the lifeworld’(1984)—seems to complicate donors’ preparation for donation. Donors’ stories are important for addressing these concerns by identifying risks that typically do not get reported in the scientific literature—perhaps owing to a different [End Page 1] conceptualization of what should be construed as noteworthy risks—as well as by demonstrating how personal situations can enhance or detract from the experience overall.This issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics (NIB) affords a unique entrée into both the often heard and unheard stories of living organ donors. A set of topical areas were presented for the authors’ consideration that relate to the donation process in general and the informed consent process more specifically: whether donors were prepared to donate; comprehended what they were told; could have understood the process better, as well as, the impact of donation on health, employment, finances, and personal relationships (Table 1). When soliciting donors’ stories, every effort was made to include a full range of experiences—both good and bad—from a variety of donors: kidney donation, liver donation, adult-to-adult and adult-to-child donation, related, unrelated, directed and anonymous (also known as ‘altruistic’ or ‘good Samaritan’ donors), paired chain exchange, and list exchange (Table 2)—in order to present a balanced perspective on live donation. Additionally, this issue includes a full breadth of stories about the donor experience, ranging from positive to mixed to negative (Table 3). While donors were given tremendous leeway in what stories they told, they were asked to focus their narratives on the lesser known dimensions of donation—the experience of it. While additional stories from liver donors would have helped to underscore common concerns among liver donors, we only received a few. Some of the donors are themselves health care professionals, active in the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) or their local OPO, or have leveraged their experiences to help others by becoming a donor buddy or donor advocate. Given that we received more stories than Click for larger view View full resolutionTable 1.Topical areas to address[End Page 2] Click for larger view View full resolutionTable 2.Forms of Living Donation Click for larger view View... (shrink)

In this paper I will analyse the conception of human rights, considering, in particular, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Human rights, following the common-sense approach, are of course a sacred element for each individual and a necessary premise for an ethics that points to human flourishing. Here, the concept of human rights concerning the subject’s beliefs and the context in which the subject acts will be analysed. At the centre of this paper, there will be an analysis of (...) the universality of human rights. In particular, I will take in consideration the position of J. Maritain, who found in praxis – and who was aware of the horrible totalitarianisms of the twentieth century – the common ground for a definition of human rights. I will also consider, therefore, the objections addressed to the definition of human rights, and the Cairo Declaration, which stands in evident contrast with the 1948 Declaration. Furthermore, I will focus on different backgrounds of the declarations and their attempt at universality. The government of a society is responsible for the co-existence of its citizens and for the respect and protection of each individual. In this sense, civil ethics has to be based on human dignity and human rights. (shrink)

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In this paper, I shall investigate Edith Stein’s account of empathic subjectivity in light of the “affective turn” that characterises the current literature on Stein’s phenomenology. I shall argue that Stein develops an original approach to empathy that is not restricted to the model of “direct access” to others. I shall claim that, for Stein, empathy is an attitude that shares significant similarities with retention and imagining-how. More precisely, I shall show that the significance of empathy lies in striving to (...) respond appropriately to the other through the constitution of types or examples that involve features inherent in personality and values. (shrink)

The subjective feeling of free choice is an important feature of human experience. Experimental tasks have typically studied free choice by contrasting free and instructed selection of response alternatives. These tasks have been criticised, and it remains unclear how they relate to the subjective feeling of freely choosing. We replicated previous findings of the fMRI correlates of free choice, defined objectively. We introduced a novel task in which participants could experience and report a graded sense of free choice. BOLD responses (...) for conditions subjectively experienced as free identified a postcentral area distinct from the areas typically considered to be involved in free action. Thus, the brain correlates of subjective feeling of free action were not directly related to any established brain correlates of objectively-defined free action. Our results call into question traditional assumptions about the relation between subjective experience of choosing and activity in the brain’s so-called voluntary motor areas. (shrink)

A recent preoccupation in scholarly research is the capacity of firms in developing country industrial clusters to comply with international corporate social responsibility policies and codes of conducts. This research is at an early stage and draws on several—often quite distinct—scholarly traditions. In this paper, we argue that future work in this area would benefit from a more explicit examination of the connection between cluster firms and human rights defined according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent (...) covenants and treaties. We argue that cluster firms’ adoption of CSR policies, often indiscriminately imposed by global buyers, should be differentiated from firms’ actual human rights practices. Based on this distinction, we elaborate a typology of industrial clusters and identify a set of factors likely to influence their practice. Against this background, we discuss an agenda for future research and elaborate on the potential methodological intricacies related to research on the interface between industrial clusters and human rights. (shrink)

With the exception of James Ostrow’s 1990 study, social sensitivity has received scarce attention in philosophy, whilst it has become an important area of research in social and clinical psychology, where it is commonly known as interpersonal sensitivity. The latter is usually understood as a form of social skill to appropriately recognise and decode the appearance and behaviour of others. However, this view suffers from conceptual limitations in that it tends to reduce social sensitivity to standardised skilful behaviour. Drawing on (...) Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, I disambiguate social sensitivity from social skills, arguing that the former builds on the receptivity of habit to beliefs and cognitive dissonance. In this revised sense, social sensitivity informs processes of attitude change that challenge ingrained dispositions and potentially defy social codes and expectations. (shrink)

We examine whether, relative to their global peers, the financial performance of firms from developing countries leads to increases in human rights abuses. We also study the institutional conditions that qualify this relationship. Based on a combination of behavioral and neo-institutional theories, we suggest there is a positive relationship between financial performance and human rights misbehavior as home country liabilities motivate firms to misbehave to achieve their primary goal of economic leadership. We also suggest that strong regulatory and normative pressures (...) attenuate the abovementioned positive relationship, as failure to comply with norms endangers such firms’ secondary goal of achieving international legitimacy. Our analysis, based on a sample of 245 large companies from eight developing countries studied over a 20-year period, supports our hypotheses. Our empirical results suggest that such companies misbehave when they endeavor to strike a balance between maintaining their global economic leadership and sustaining their social legitimacy. (shrink)

In his new book Animals and African Ethics, Kai Horsthemke examines whether an African morality can be extended to include animal rights. He argues that the African ethical systems of ubuntu and ukama, because they are anthropocentric at heart, do not adequately make space for animal rights. In his defense of animal rights, Horsthemke responds to arguments claiming that there is a difference between racism and speciesism, and that the latter is morally justifiable even though the former is not. I (...) examine this discussion and agree with Horsthemke that the arguments in favor of speciesism are weak. I defend the claim that—like racism—speciesism is morally unjustifiable. (shrink)

Bringing together new theory and critical perspectives on a broad range of topics in animal ethics, this book examines the implications of recent developments in the various fields that bear upon animal ethics. Showcasing a new generation of thinkers, it exposes some important shortcomings in existing animal rights theory.

Veṅkaṭanātha Veṅkaṭanātha was an Indian polymath who wrote philosophical as well as religious and poetical works in several languages, including Sanskrit, Maṇipravāḷa—a Sanskritised form of literary Tamil—and Tamil. He is traditionally dated to 1269-1370, but as explained by Neevel “the lifespans of … Continue reading Veṅkaṭanātha →.

Focussing on some claims by Richard Wollheim and Clement Greenberg, I investigate how the concepts of depicted figure, background of a pictorial scene and ground of a picture are relevant for an understanding of the relation between figurative and abstract pictures, especially when it comes to considering whether abstract pictures can be said to represent pictorially.

Humans naturally perceive visual patterns in a global manner and are remarkably capable of extracting object shapes based on properties such as proximity, closure, symmetry, and good continuation. Notwithstanding the role of these properties in perceptual grouping, studies highlighted differences in disembedding performance across individuals, which are summarized by the field dependence dimension. Evidence suggests that age and educational attainment explain part of this variability, whereas the role of sex is still highly debated. Also, which stimulus features primarily influence inter-individual (...) variations in perceptual grouping has still to be fully determined. Building upon these premises, we assessed the role of age, education level, and sex on performance at the Leuven Embedded Figure Test—a proxy of disembedding abilities—in 391 cisgender individuals. We also investigated to what extent shape symmetry, closure, complexity, and continuation relate to task accuracy. Overall, target asymmetry, closure, and good continuation with the embedding context increase task difficulty. Simpler shapes are more difficult to detect than those with more lines, yet context complexity impairs the recognition of complex targets to a greater extent. Concerning demographic data, we confirm that age and educational attainment are significantly associated with disembedding abilities and reveal a perceptual advantage in males. In summary, our study further highlights the role of shape properties in disembedding performance and unveils sex differences not reported so far. (shrink)

Esej poskuša izslediti pravni, reprezentativni in družbeni status migrantskih Drugih v ≫zaprti družbi≪ Nemške demokratične republike ali Vzhodne Nemčije (NDR) kot primer, kako je Nemčija imela dobiček od delovnih migracij na obeh straneh zidu. Opisuje, kako so bile od ponovne združitve Nemčije do danes migracije predstavljene kot nenadna in začasna težava, kar zakriva kolonialno in rasistično preteklost ter nekropolitično sedanjost. Esej preučuje proces družbene dediferenciacije v družbi, ki jo obvladuje država NDR, in kako so družbene tehnike ustvarjanja drugosti in etnizacije (...) v obliki zakonov za tujce spodbujale diskriminacijo in rasizem proti ≫tujcu≪ (Simmel), zlasti gastarbajterem. Ob pogledu na proces ≫dvojne transformacije≪ po padcu berlinskega zidu in poznejši ponovni združitvi esej preučuje, kako so prekrivajoči se procesi ustvarjanja drugosti kot sodobnega ekvivalenta izraza ≫orientalizem≪ (Edward Said) oblikovali in še naprej oblikujejo ponovno združeno Nemčijo. (shrink)