'Globalization' provides an ambiguous cliché for psychology as the North American and European version of the discipline is being exported widely. After providing a brief history of globalization and the failure of its intended effects I discuss three episodes of psychology's place in a globalized marketplace of ideas; the pre-1900 development of psychology in Germany and North America, the failure of phenomenological psychology in Europe after World War II and the current state of the professionalization of (...) psychology. Psychology has, thus far, largely followed the enthusiasms of the globalizers. While it is far too late to create 'indigenous psychologies,' theory remains a vehicle of questioning, coaxing, and resistance through which to engage the multiplicity of subjectivities that confront us. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

v. 1. The origins of a theoretical psychology -- v. 2. Theory and method -- v. 3. Major theoretical positions in twentieth century psychology -- v. 4. The human dilemma : social, developmental, and abnormal psychology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal AuthorityThomas J. BushlackMinisters of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority Jean Porter Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 368 pp. $30.00Jean Porter’s most recent book is the fruit of her participation with the Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion since 2005. In this project she undertakes two interrelated tasks. First, she provides compelling (...) reasons for Christian ethicists to engage in questions internal to the discipline of jurisprudence. Second, she demonstrates how a natural law theory grounded in the work of the medieval scholastics can address some of the questions of contemporary jurisprudence. Readers familiar with her previous work will be delighted that she has extended her constructive account of natural law into the realms of jurisprudence and in the process also engages cultural psychology, rhetoric, political philosophy, and international law.Porter begins her engagement with jurisprudence in chapter 1 by noting a paradox recognized by many legal philosophers in the Anglophone world. Legal systems, as they have developed in the West, are characterized by a high degree of autonomy and independence vis-à-vis other social dynamics such as politics or morality. At the same time, however, no legal system can function in complete isolation from considerations of politics and morality. How can we account for the paradoxical autonomy of legal authority? Porter suggests that a scholastic account of natural law can provide a rationally defensible solution to this paradox by developing an account of natural authority (in chapter 2).The force of Porter’s argument rests on the capacity of her account to justify political and legal authority as a natural expression of the authority that any community exercises vis-à-vis its individual members. A community’s authority over its members is justified on the grounds that in prescribing or prohibiting particular acts, it must appeal to claims that could potentially be recognized as justifiable by any rational member of that community. The concept that creates this important hinge between an individual’s good and the good of the community is, of course, the common good. Scholars interested in the concept of the common good will find that her reflection upon it is both rooted deeply in the Christian tradition and applied with fresh insight to the realm of politics (chapter 3) and law (chapter 4). [End Page 210]One potential objection to Porter’s account of natural law could arise in response to her insistence that natural inclinations “underdetermine” the normative content of a natural law morality, leaving her account open to charges of cultural relativism or of being merely descriptive as opposed to normative. However, in this work she is able to turn these criticisms into assets for her account of natural law. She shows (successfully, I believe) how her theory of natural law is able to account for the plurality of moral, political, and legal systems that exist in our world today while still providing normative grounds for critiquing existing social systems. And in chapter 5 she demonstrates how nonderogable, jus cogens principles can be developed from her account of natural law and applied to the field of international law and human rights. In fact, the final section left me hungry for further development of her insights regarding the relationship between natural and international law.This book is written with the same rigorous logic and careful research that has made Porter one of the leading scholars of natural law theory in the field today. As such, this book would be suitable for academics in a wide variety of fields, such as law, political theory, and of course Christian ethics, or for advanced graduate students. It is most certainly a groundbreaking work for demonstrating how a theological account of natural law can engage in constructive dialogue with legal theory and politics at both a theoretical and a practical level.Thomas J. BushlackUniversity of St. ThomasCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The papers in this volume reflect much of the current unease of a world that perceives itself once more at the edge of chaos. The authors present different vistas of that experience and their inherent dialectic, expressed in numerous and ceaseless conflicts between ordering and disordering processes. They can be read as comments on the ongoing processes that lead toward greater complexity.

We argue that Chow's defense of hypothesis-testing procedures attempts to restore an aura of objectivity to the core procedures, allowing these to take on the role of judgment that should be reserved for the researcher. We provide a brief overview of what we call the historical case against hypothesis testing and argue that the latter has led to a constrained and simplified conception of what passes for theory in psychology.

Taking Rom Harré's social constructionism as a focus we point to and discuss the issue of the a priori psychological subject in social constructionist theory. While Harré indicates that interacting, intending beings are necessary for conversation to occur, he assumes that the primary human reality is conversation and that psychological life emerges from this social domain. Nevertheless, we argue that a fundamental and agentive psychological subject is implicit to his constructionist works. Our critical analyses focus upon Harré's understandings of persons, (...) human development and human agency. Our intention is neither to suggest that this latent entity must be understood in a Cartesian sense nor is it to ask for an explicit accounting of an autonomous agent. Rather, our claim is simply that psychological subjectivity is reflexively entailed in Harré's human psychology. We suggest that this pertains more generally to social constructionist theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Concurrent Contents: Recent and Classic References at the Interface of Philosophy, Psychiatry, and PsychologyArticlesAntonak, R. J., C. R. Fielder, and J. A. Mulick. 1993. A scale of attitudes toward the application of eugenics to the treatment of people with mental retardation. Journal of Intellect Disabilities Research 37:75–83.Arens, K. 1996. Commentary on “Lumps and bumps.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:15–16.Bavidge, M. 1996. Commentary on “Minds, memes, and multiples.” Philosophy, (...) Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:29–30.Blashfield, R. K. 1973. Evaluation of the DSM-II classification of schizophrenia as a nomenclature. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 85(2):140–150.Braude, S. E. 1996. Multiple personality and moral responsibility. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:37–54.Broverman, I. K., S. R. Vogel, D. M. Broverman et al. 1972. Sex-role stereotypes: a current appraisal. Journal of Social Issues 28:59–78.Broverman, I. K., D. M. Broverman, P. E. Clarkson et al. 1975. Sex-role stereotypes and clinical judgments of mental health. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 34:1–7.Checkland, D., and M. Silberfeld. 1996. Mental competence and the question of beneficient intervention. Theoretical Medicine 17(2):121–134.Clark, S. R. L. 1996. Commentary on “Multiple personality and moral responsibility.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:55–57.Clark, S. R. L. 1996. Minds, memes, and multiples. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:21–28.Dickenson, D., and D. Jones. 1995. True wishes: The philosophy and developmental psychology of children’s informed consent. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2:287–303.Donaldson, T. 1978. Psychoanalyzing the practical inference model. Philosophical Research Archives 4:1215.Eekelaar, J. 1995. Commentary on “True wishes.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2:305–307.Fisher, S., and R. P. Greenberg. 1993. How sound is the double-blind design for evaluating psychotropic drugs? Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 181:345–350.Fulwiler, C., and M. F. Folstein. 1995. Commentary on “Chris Walker’s interpretation of Karl Jaspers’ phenomenology.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2:345–346.Heinze, M. 1995. Commentary on “Moralist or therapist?” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2:31–32.Iturrate, M. 1977. Man’s freedom: Freud’s therapeutic goal. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 15:32–45.Littlewood, R. 1991. From diseae to illness and back again. Lancet 337:1013–1015.Maddox, J. 1993. New genetics means no new ethics. Nature 364:97.McCormick, S. 1995. Commentary on “True wishes.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2:309–310.Murray, T. H. 1995. Commentary on “True wishes.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2:311–312.Muzika, E. G. 1989. Object relations theory, Buddhism, and the self-synthesis of eastern and western approaches. International Philosophical Quarterly 30(1):59–74.Parker, M. 1995. Commentary on “True wishes.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2:313–314.Phillips, J. 1996. Key concepts: Hermeneutics. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:61–69.Pole, D. 1970. Self and personality. The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1:30–36.Priebe, S. 1989. On the subjectivity of psychiatric diagnosis. Psychiatric Praxis 16:86–89.Radden, J. 1996. Lumps and bumps: Kantian faculty psychology, phrenology, and twentieth-century psychiatric classification. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:1–14.Sampson, E. E. 1981. Cognitive psychology as ideology. American Psychologist 36:730–743.Sarbin, T. R. 1976. Contextualism: A worldview for modern psychology. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 24:1–41.Senft, P. A. 1975. The self-contradictions (antinomies) of psychotherapy: Is a solution in social action possible? The Human Context 7:367–372.Shuman, D. W. 1996. Commentary on “Multiple personality and moral responsibility.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:59–60.Sprigge, T. 1996. Commentary on “Minds, memes, and multiples.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:31–36.Wallace, K. 1996. Commentary on “Lumps and bumps.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:17–20.Wells, L. A. 1995. Commentary on “True wishes.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2:315–317.Wiggins, O. P., and M. A. Schwartz. 1995. Chris Walker’s interpretation of Karl Jaspers’ phenomenology: a critique. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2:319–343.BooksAmerican Hospital Association. 1994. Values in conflict: Resolving ethical issues in health care. 2nd ed. Chicago: American Hospital Association.American Medical Association. 1992. Code of medical ethics: Annotated current opinions of the council on ethical and judicial affairs. Chicago: American Medical Association.———. 1994. Council on ethical and judicial affairs... (shrink)

Reviews the book, Challenges to theoretical psychology by Wolfgang Maiers, Betty Bayer, Barbara Duarte Esgalhado, Rene Jorna, and Ernst Schraube . This stimulating and wide-ranging collection is composed of selections from the program of the Seventh Biennial Conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology that was held in Berlin, Germany in April and May of 1997. The 55 essays are grouped into ten major thematic fields: Psychological Understanding and the Role of Theory; Critical (...) History of Psychology; Foundational Issues in the Sciences of Mind; Agency, Action, and Consciousness; Implications of Life Narratives for Psychological Theorization; Social Practice, Discourse, and Subjects; Psychological Studies and the Notion of Culture; Technology and the Body in Psychology; Feminist Research and Subjectivity; Postmodernism, Marxism, and Critical Psychology. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This book contains new essays in honor of Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in the psychological study of justice. The contributors to this volume are internationally renowned scholars from psychology, business, and law. They examine the role of justice motivation in a wide variety of contexts, including workplace violence, affirmative action programs, helping or harming innocent victims and how people react to their own fate. Contributors explore fundamental issues such as whether people's interest in justice is motivated by self-interest (...) or a genuine concern for the welfare of others, when and why people feel a need to punish transgressors, how a concern for justice emerges during the development of societies and individuals, and the relation of justice motivation to moral motivation. How an understanding of justice motivation can contribute to the amelioration of major social problems is also examined. (shrink)

The Society for Unification Psychology was formed by a group of psychologists concerned about the growing issues of diversity and fragmentation in psychology. The Society held its first organizational meeting at the 1985 APA convention. It is intended that SUNI will become a special interest group of APA's Division 24, Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. The Society's purpose is to stimulate discussion of issues of unity and disunity in psychology by: planning symposia and (...) other presentations at APA and related conventions; conducting Society interest group meetings at these conventions; and publishing a Newsletter. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Environmental PhilosophyJ. Baird Callicott (bio)The old guy in The Graduate had just one word for Dustin Hoffman's character, Ben: "plastics." This old guy has three words for the future pursuit of environmental philosophers, young and old: global climate change (GCC).GCC is emerging as the central environmental concern of the 21st century. Back in the 20th century, E. O. Wilson's mantra was (I paraphrase) 'abrupt mass anthropogenic (...) species extinction is the crime for which posterity is least likely to forgive us.' In view of the multifaceted catastrophe graphically depicted in the recent acclaimed film, An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), Wilson's dictum seems quaint. Rather, a world whose very geography will be anthropogenically altered by risen sea levels, whose weather will be increasingly violent and erratic, whose seas will be stagnant and acidified by carbonic acid, etc., etc., is the crime for which posterity is least likely to forgive us—if there is any posterity to make a judgment.According to Al Gore in AIT anthropogenic GCC is a "moral" and "ethical" issue. But he doesn't elaborate. And at the end of the film he provides a lame list of things you and you and you and you—all of us individually AND voluntarily—can do to mitigate GCC, such as swap out halogen light bulbs for compact florescent ones and drive a hybrid car. Think "tragedy of the commons" for the efficacy of that approach to an adequate ethical response to the challenge of GCC.Gore's naivete apart, environmental ethics (EE) as we know it is singularly ill-prepared for dealing with GCC. The problem is one of scale, temporal as well as spatial. Spatially, EE concern was focused on the scale of biotic communities, ecosystems, and landscapes. And the relevant science was ecology. Temporally, the scale was also ecological: It might take Prince William Sound half a century, perhaps even a whole century, to fully recover from the Exxon Valdez spill. In temperate climates, after a clearcut a mature forest might spring up in a century and, through ecological succession, if left alone it will return to old growth in 300 years. Back in the 20th century that seemed like a long time, and we lamented that the ecological temporal scale and the economic temporal scale of [End Page 119] industries like the timber business and the oil business were out of phase, the former measured in decades the latter in quarters. But now, elderly environmental philosophers like me will personally witness little more than the initial environmental consequences of GCC—the occasional Katrina, the occasional hottest year on record, the disappearance of glaciers in Glacier National Park. We won't live to see (I hope) the cessation of the Gulf Stream or sea-levels rise more than a few centimeters. And the rectification of these consequences will be completed, if they ever are, only after thousands of years have elapsed.How then do we scale EE up to meet the moral challenge of GCC? Spatially we have a huge leap to make from the landscape scale to the biospheric scale. We have to become conversant with a new set of sciences; the relevant sciences are not ecology and conservation biology, but biogeochemistry and earth-systems science.Is a GCC EE even possible? Maybe ethics has temporal-scale limits? We used to marvel at the long view of the Iroquois who considered the consequences of present policies out seven generations. Wow! At 25 years per generation that is all of 250 years (adding on the 75-year life-span of the 7th generation). Can we have ethical concern for the 37th generation, a thousand years out? Or the 121st generation 3000 years out?J. Baird Callicott J. Baird Callicott is Regents Professor of Philosophy and Religion Studies in the Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of North Texas. From 1997–2000 he served the International Society for Environmental Ethics as president. He is author, editor, or co-editor of a score of books and more than a hundred journal articles and book chapters. Callicott's research proceeds on six major fronts: theoretical environmental ethics, land ethics, the philosophy of... (shrink)

Osteopathy is a person-centred healthcare discipline that emphasizes the body’s structure-function interrelationship—and its self-regulatory mechanisms—to inform a whole-person approach to health and wellbeing. This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for developing an integrative hypothesis in osteopathy, which is based on the enactivist and active inference accounts. We propose that osteopathic care can be reconceptualised under active inference as a unifying framework. Active inference suggests that action-perception cycles operate to minimize uncertainty and optimize an individual’s internal model of (...) the lived world and, crucially, the consequences of their behaviour. We argue that active inference offers an integrative framework for osteopathy, which can evince the mechanisms underlying dyadic and triadic exchanges and osteopathic care outcomes. We propose that this theoretical framework can underpin osteopathic care across the lifespan, from preterm infants to the elderly and those with persistent pain and other physical symptoms. In situations of chronicity, as an ecological niche, the patient-practitioner dyad provides the osteopath and the patient with a set of affordances, i.e., possibilities for action provided by the environment, that through shared intentionally, can promote adaptations and restoration of productive agency. Through a dyadic therapeutic relationship, as they engage with their ecological niche’s affordances—a structured set of affordances shared by agents—osteopath and patient actively construct a shared sense-making narrative and realise a shared generative model of their relation to the niche. In general, touch plays a critical role in developing a robust therapeutic alliance, mental state alignment, and biobehavioural synchrony between patient and practitioner. However, its role is particularly crucial in the fields of neonatology and paediatrics, where it becomes central in regulating allostasis and restoring homeostasis. We argue that from an active inference standpoint, the dyadic shared ecological niche underwrites a robust therapeutic alliance, which is crucial to the effectiveness of osteopathic care. Considerations and implications of this model—to clinical practice and research, both within- and outside osteopathy—are critically discussed. (shrink)

The presence of intelligence and rationality in Artificial Intelligence and the Internet requires a new context of analysis in which Herbert Simon’s approach to the sciences of the artificial is surpassed in order to grasp the role of information in our contemporary setting. This new framework requires taking into account some relevant aspects. In the historical endeavor of building up AI and the Internet, minds and machines have interacted over the years and in many ways through the interrelation between scientific (...) creativity and technological innovation. Philosophically, minds and machines can have epistemological, methodological and ontological differences, which are based on the distinct configuration of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Their comparison with rationality and its various forms is particularly relevant. Scientifically, AI and the Internet belong to the sciences of the artificial, because they work on designs that search for specific aims, following selected processes in order to achieve expected results. Technologically, AI and the Internet require the support of information and communication technologies. These have an instrumental role regarding the existence of AI and the Internet. Also ICT shape their diverse forms of configuration over the years.Within this framework, this paper offers a new context of analysis that goes beyond Simon’s and follows four main steps: the interaction between scientific creativity and technological innovation as the philosophico-methodological setting for Artificial Intelligence and the Internet; artificial intelligence and human intelligence as epistemological basis for machines and minds, where the differences between artificial intelligence and human intelligence are made explicit and the analysis of minds and machines is made from the perspective of rationality ; intention and its difference with design of machine learning are considered to distinguish human intelligence from artificial intelligence; and the internal and external aspects of artificial designs in contemporary society are considered through the perspective of rationality, which leads to the transition from intelligence to rationality in the Internet as well as to the historicity of information. (shrink)

I here respond to several points in Faucher and Machery’s vigorous and informative critique of my volitional account of racism (VAR). First, although the authors deem it a form of "implicit racial bias," a mere tendency to associate black people with "negative" concepts falls short of racial "bias" or prejudice in the relevant sense. Second, such an associative disposition need not even be morally objectionable. Third, even for more substantial forms of implicit racial bias such as race-based fear or disgust, (...) Faucher and Machery offer no account or explanation of when we should consider these racist, in whom, in what respect(s), or why. So, findings of implicit racial bias pose no clear objection to VAR. Fourth, because VAR allows not only racial hate, but also callous indifference, disdain, and other forms of racially driven disregard, to be racist,VAR is not "psychologically monist." Fifth, as VAR allows racist attitudes to be immoral in more than one way, offending against both the moral virtues of benevolence and justice, VAR is not "morally monist" either. I also reveal problems with some of Faucher and Machery’s other claims: Faucher and Machery take too narrow a conception of the types of psychology that can contribute to understanding racism; the internal complexity of hatred, which they approvingly mention, is irrelevant to VAR’s truth and undermines part of their criticism of VAR; whether some forms of racial bias are "racial ills" is irrelevant to VAR, which only analyzes racism; over-attention to implicit racial bias may cloak or exacerbate some of our society’s racial ills, or even constitute a new one. I conclude by noting that Faucher and Machery are not just critics of VAR but also allies of VAR in important controversies against those who insist racism lies primarily in social structures and institutions. (shrink)

The Society for Unification Psychology was formed by a group of psychologists concerned about the growing issues of diversity and fragmentation in psychology. The Society held its first organizational meeting at the 1985 APA convention. It is intended that SUNI will become a special interest group of APA's Division 24, Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. The Society's purpose is to stimulate discussion of issues of unity and disunity in psychology by: planning symposia and (...) other presentations at APA and related conventions; conducting Society interest group meetings at these conventions; and publishing a Newsletter. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Across the world people in different societies structure their family relationships in many different ways. These relationships become encoded in their languages as kinship terminology, a word set that maps variably onto a vast genealogical grid of kinship categories, each of which could in principle vary independently. But the observed diversity of kinship terminology is considerably smaller than the enormous theoretical design space. For the past century anthropologists have captured this variation in typological schemes with only a small number (...) of model system types. Whether those types exhibit the internal co-selection of parts implicit in their use is an outstanding question, as is the sufficiency of typologies in capturing variation as a whole. We interrogate the coherence of classic kinship typologies using modern statistical approaches and systematic data from a new database, Kinbank. We first survey the canonical types and their assumed patterns of internal and external co-selection, then present two data-driven approaches to assess internal coherence. Our first analysis reveals that across parents’ and ego’s generation, typology has limited predictive value: knowing the system in one generation does not reliably predict the other. Though we detect limited co-selection between generations, “disharmonic” systems are equally common. Second, we represent structural diversity with a novel multidimensional approach we term kinship space. This approach reveals, for ego’s generation, some broad patterning consistent with the canonical typology, but diversity is considerably higher than classical typologies suggest. Our results strongly challenge the descriptive adequacy of the set of canonical kinship types. (shrink)

Luck permeates our lives, and this raises a number of pressing questions: What is luck? When we attribute luck to people, circumstances, or events, what are we attributing? Do we have any obligations to mitigate the harms done to people who are less fortunate? And to what extent is deserving praise or blame a ected by good or bad luck? Although acquiring a true belief by an uneducated guess involves a kind of luck that precludes knowledge, does all luck undermine (...) knowledge? And how accurate are our luck attributions anyway? The academic literature has seen growing, interdisciplinary interest in luck, and this volume brings together and explains the most important areas of this research. It consists of 39 newly commissioned chapters, written by an internationally acclaimed team of philosophers and psychologists, for a readership of students and researchers. Its coverage is divided into six sections: (i) The History of Luck, (ii) The Nature of Luck, (iii) Moral Luck, (iv) Epistemic Luck, (v) The Psychology of Luck, and (vi) Future Research. The chapters in these sections cover a wide range of topics, from the problem of moral luck, to anti-luck epistemology, to the relationship between luck attributions and cognitive biases, to meta-questions regarding the nature of luck itself, to a range of other theoretical and empirical questions currently being investigated by ethicists, epistemologists, and psychologists. By bringing this research together, the Handbook serves as both a touchstone for understanding the relevant issues and a first port of call for future philosophical and psychological research on luck. (shrink)

Research on personality psychology is making important contributions to psychological science and applied psychology. This second edition of The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology offers a one-stop resource for scientific personality psychology. It summarizes cutting-edge personality research in all its forms, including genetics, psychometrics, social-cognitive psychology, and real-world expressions, with informative and lively chapters that also highlight some areas of controversy. The team of renowned international authors, led by two esteemed editors, ensures a wide (...) range of theoretical perspectives. Each research area is discussed in terms of scientific foundations, main theories and findings, and future directions for research. The handbook also features advances in technology, such as molecular genetics and functional neuroimaging, as well as contemporary statistical approaches. An invaluable aid to understanding the central role played by personality in psychology, it will appeal to students, researchers, and practitioners in psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and the social sciences. (shrink)

Proceeding of the Third International Conference of the French-Speaking Society for Theoretical Biology Content Type Journal Article Category Editorial Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s10441-012-9156-2 Authors Slimane Ben Miled, ENIT-LAMSIN, Tunis el Manar University, 13, place Pasteur, Belvédère, B.P. 74, 1002 Tunis, Tunisia Journal Acta Biotheoretica Online ISSN 1572-8358 Print ISSN 0001-5342.

I present a theory of alienation that accounts for the cognitive processes involved with moral thinking and political behavior in modern societies. On my account, alienation can be understood as a particular kind of atrophy of moral concepts and moral thinking that affect the ways individuals cognize and legitimate the social world and their place within it. Central to my argument is the thesis that modern forms of social integration—shaped by highly institutionalized, rationalized and hierarchical forms of social life—serve to (...) constrain the moral- cognitive powers of subjects leading to a condition of alienation as moral atrophy. This state results from the withering of the subject's internal powers of moral reflection and an overriding predisposition to rely on external value schemas to make sense of moral and political problems. I then present an analysis of alienated moral consciousness and its implications for modern social theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aristotelianism of Locke's PoliticsJ. S. MaloyThose, then, who think that the positions of statesman, king, household manager, and master of slaves are the same are not correct. For they hold that each of these differs not innly in whether the subjects ruled are few or many... the assumption being that there is no difference between a large household and a small city-state.... But these claims are not true.Aristotle, (...) Politics, 1252a1The Power of a Magistrate over a Subject may be distinguished from that of a Father over his Children, a Master over his Servant, a Husband over his Wife, and a Lord over his Slave. All which distinct Powers happening sometimes together in the same Man, if he be considered under these different Relations, it may help us to distinguish these Powers one from another, and show the difference betwixt a Ruler of a Common-wealth, a Father of a Family, and a Captain of a Galley.Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.22 [End Page 235]When the political theory of John Locke first appeared in print in 1689, the imposing authority of Aristotle stood ready to defeat it. So believed many of Locke's critics, at any rate. After his death in 1704, when it was confirmed that the internationally renowned author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding had also written the anonymously published Two Treatises of Government, Locke was widely taken to represent a distinctive type of political theory based on individual rights and the social contract. Learned opposition to this sort of voluntaristic account of politics has often rested on Aristotle, "the Philosopher," the ancient authority on the human instinct for sociability and the hierarchal communities arising therefrom. Within the modern academy "liberals," "communitarians," and "republicans" have again made a habit of pronouncing the names of Locke and Aristotle in tones of antagonism. In broad outline the reasons have not changed in two or three centuries ago: the first stands for natural-rights individualism and the second for an organic conception of community.3What are we to make of this conventional opposition in light of the awkward fact that the second of Locke's Two Treatises, "Of Civil Government," takes the reclamation of the Aristotelian conception of political power as its principal purpose? Locke announced in the opening chapter of that essay that his chief target, Robert Filmer, had misunderstood the nature of distinctively political relationships, mainly by ignoring the differences between authority in political society and authority within the family (L 2.1–2). Locke alleged that this basic conceptual mistake of the Filmerian theory of "absolute" and "arbitrary" government was the source of its disastrous practical ramifications, which he had summed up in the first Treatise as "Chains for all Mankind" (L 1.1). Filmer, in turn, had taken Plato's side in the debate about political and familial rule which Aristotle had joined in the opening lines of his Politics (A 1252a). Though a perceptive reader long ago noticed the Aristotelianism of Locke's response to Filmer—Locke and Algernon Sidney were the "two famous men" to whom Rousseau alluded as having defended Aristotle against Filmer's Platonic notions of power—no modern scholar has attempted a full explanation of the significance of Locke's intervention in this debate.4 [End Page 236]The analysis below will show that Aristotle was the classic source for both the principal theoretic argument of Locke's second Treatise and the method employed to pursue it, i.e. using analogies of power for conceptual comparison and distinction. But my argument for the Aristotelianism of Locke's politics will rest on contextual as well as textual grounds. Not only was Locke pursuing an evident variation on the central theme of bk. 1 of Aristotle's Politics; he was far from alone in doing so. This sort of project was by the 1680s typical of radical constitutionalist writing in Europe, including not only English Whigs like Sidney and James Tyrrell but also a long line of writers on both sides of the English Channel, stretching back at least a century, who deployed a particular interpretation of Aristotle in the service... (shrink)

The Second Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time was held at Hotel Mt. Fuji, near Lake Yamanaka, Japan, on July I to 7,1973. The present volume is the proceedings at that Con ference and constitutes the second volume in The Study of Time series. * At the closing session of our First Conference in Oberwolfach, Germany, in 1969, I was honored by being elected to the Presidency of the Society, following Dr. J. G. (...) Whitrow, our fIrst President. My mandate was to organize a Second Conference, consistent with the aim of the Society, which is the holding of interdisciplinary conferences for the presentation and discussion of papers on various as pects of time. Several participants expressed to me their wish to have a second conference held in Japan so as to emphasize the international and intercultural dedication of this Society. Dr. Fraser carefully evaluated this and many other suggestions, weighed the possible conference sites and our chances of raising the necessary funds to convene a meeting at such sites, and concurred with my conclusions that we should go ahead with the plans for a Japanese meeting. For the difficult and complicated task of raising funds and organizing a conference in Japan, I had to select and rely heavily on somebody both capable and reliable and also living in Japan. Thus, I asked the Reverend Michael Mutsuo Yanase, S. J. (shrink)

Michela Bella’s Ontology after Philosophical Psychology: The Continuity of Consciousness in William James’s Philosophy of Mind offers a detailed survey of James’s thought using “continuity” as its focal lens. Because the book presumes significant familiarity with James and frequently includes dense exegesis of his work’s most technical aspects, it is primarily for specialists. It will particularly interest James scholars studying the entanglement of the metaphysical with the psychological and epistemological.Combining “historical” and “theoretical” points of view, Bella tracks “James’s (...) gradual translation of psychological experimental observations of the continuity of thought into an ontological perspective... (shrink)

A. To Be Is to Be Related. In opposition to a nineteenth century version of atomistic individualism and eighteenth century romanticism, such idealists as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and Josiah Royce have contended that individual freedom rises only within an organic whole of some sort. For them the question of human freedom has to do not so much with the issue of the individual vs. society as with the kind of individuals that arise out of (...) the community. Individuals enjoy freedom, not despite the social organism, but in and through it. The idealistic doctrine of “internal relations” is carried into philosophical psychology as well as into social and political philosophy. To be is to be related—that is the idealistic answer to atomistic individualism and ethical egoism. (shrink)

The focus of this article is on representations of irregular migration in a Scandinavian context and how irregular migrants are constructed as a target group. A common feature in many European states is the difficult attempt to navigate between an urge for control and respecting, upholding and promoting humanitarian aspects of migration management. Legitimizing policies therefore become extremely important as governments have to appease national voters to remain in power and have to respect European regulations and international conventions. Doing (...) so raises questions of social, political and economic rights, of moral obligations, of sovereignty, and of equity, as well as of how to define target groups and legal and categorical statuses into the debates. Having a backdrop in the theoretical framework of Carol Bacchi, Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram and Giorgio Agamben, this article looks at how policy problematizations and constructions of target populations guide and legitimize particular policy approaches and may end up marginalizing and excluding groups in society and ultimately become a challenge for democracy.Dansk abstract: Legitimering af politik: Hvordan politiske tilgange til irregulære indvandrere formuleres og legitimeres i SkandinavienFokus i denne artikel er på repræsentationer af irregulær migration i en skandinavisk kontekst og hvordan illegale indvandrere er konstrueret som målgruppe. Et fælles træk i mange vesteuropæiske nationalstater er det svære forsøg på at navigere mellem kontrol og samtidig respektere, forsvare og fremme humanitære aspekter af migrationsstyringen. At legitimere den givne politik er derfor blevet særdeles vigtigt fordi regeringerne er nødt til at formilde de nationale indvandringsskeptiske vælgere for at forblive ved magten og er nødsaget til at respektere europæiske regler og internationale konventioner. Dette italesætter en diskussion om sociale, politiske og økonomiske rettigheder, af moralske forpligtelser, af suverænitet, af at definere målgrupper og juridiske statuskategorier i debatterne. Artiklen har baggrund i en teoretisk ramme som er udstukket af Carol Bacchi, Anne Schneider, Helen Ingram og Giorgio Agamben. Artiklen ser på, hvordan politiske problematiseringer og konstruktioner af målgrupper vejleder og legitimerer bestemte politiske strategier og kan ende med at marginalisere og udelukke grupper i samfundet og i sidste ende blive en udfordring for demokratiske principper som sådan. (shrink)

In 2021, 193 Member States at UNESCO’s General Conference adopted the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence as the first important step towards a future global standard-setting instrument on the subject. The text reflects an emerging consensus among the international community about the growing ethical concerns with artificial intelligence (AI). Among these concerns are also serious risks and dangers attributed to the manipulative effects of AI, which can be further exacerbated by the creative combination of AI with other (...) innovative technologies or applications, such as brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), robotics, and big data. The risks for individuals and society as a whole caused by manipulation through AI are already well known and have recently also been addressed by the European Union having released a proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). Among multiple risks related to AI, the AIA singles out the specific dangers related to AI systems that deploy “subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness to materially distort a person’s behaviour in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm”. The present article thus aims to highlight the known and potential dangers related to AI systems manipulating human thoughts and behaviour through subliminal and supraliminal means and methods. To this end, it advocates the joint study of law and the senses captured by the concept of legal synaesthesia to correspond to the need for an interdisciplinary debate covering the complexity of the links between AI, related technologies, human perception based on the senses and the mind, as well as the role and instruments of law in the future organization of societies in this world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place by Setha LowCarlos J. L. BalsasSpatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Placeby setha low London: Routledge, 2017Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place adds clarity to our understanding of the value of ethnographic scholarship in the study of socio-economic, cultural, and developmental transformations. The book is a thorough review of two established conceptual frames of analysis—the social production (...) of space and the social construction of space—coupled with an in-depth discussion of four newer ways to make sense of the world around us: embodied space, language and discourse, emotion and affect, and translocal space. As the world is transformed by a myriad of forces and events occurring simultaneously, its complexity intensifies insurmountably and we require clear and robust concepts, theories, methods, and tools to not only interpret it, but above all to attempt to change it in ways that are more beneficial to our collective co-existence while enabling the flourishing of those most at risk.Readers of Spatializing Culture will find plentiful theoretical constructs, lineages, diverse viewpoints, examples, and overall opportunities for reflecting on how the (built) environment, spaces, and places have been changing mostly due to our behavior. Inspired by Foucault’s take on genealogy, in chapter 2, Setha Low traces the history of space and place according to distinct interpretative schools of thought ranging from philosophical and mathematical, French social theory, geographical, architectural, environmental psychology, to anthropological, and even archeological. Five Venn diagrams are utilized to illustrate the main conceptual relationships between space and place. Most of the book’s in-depth case studies were researched by the author with only a small number investigated and written up by fellow scholars, which Low utilizes in the book with gratitude. The interrelated thematic and distinct geographical scope of the cases is one of the book’s hallmarks. The illustrative case studies come from such faraway places as Latin America (San José, Costa Rica), Asia (Taipei, Taiwan), North America (New York City; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and San [End Page 151] Antonio, Texas), Southern Europe (Smederevska Palanka, Serbia), and the Middle East (Beirut, Lebanon; Cairo, Egypt; and Tel Aviv, Israel).Spatializing Culture was first mentioned to me years ago by a former colleague at the University at Albany, SUNY. His ongoing work in Latin America, coupled with his ethnographic training and prior work in a region of the world also extensively examined by Low in other scholarly works, was likely the reason for bringing it up in a conversation about the latest developments in the field and potential research opportunities. I acquired the book when I was teaching Global Urbanism and Culture and International Urban Planning. I was pleasantly surprised with the book’s thorough conceptual lineage, historic characterizations, attention to detail, comprehensive ethnographic investigations, and implications for transforming reality as well as institutional processes. Spatializing Culture is a welcome addition to urban planning textbooks, which tend to be relatively less critical, are often covered with normative constructs and statistics, and are more institutional in their characterization of problems and recommendations for further action.For the most part, the ethnographic method is qualitative, participa-tory, detailed, and quite comprehensive in characterizing key variables as the researcher found them on the ground. This differs slightly from urban planning’s preoccupation with public policy, policy analysis, rules and regulations, institutionalized procedures, the public good, and overall positivist and rationalist concerns with documenting reality and helping to lead transformative planning processes, whether in the realm of land use, transportation, housing, economic development, infrastructure, or the environment. Although International Urban Planning was to be taught in a rather orthodox manner with recourse to understanding planning cultures, best practices, lessons learned, and implications for similar situations, the Global Urbanism and Culture course was slightly more aligned with the discussions put forward by Low. These included attention to postmodern ideals, the use of creativity in community planning, distinctions between popular and highbrow culture, and the building of iconic structures in contexts of urban regeneration and mega-event planning. As such, my students were somewhat already exposed to issues of embodied spaces and to ideas of... (shrink)

BackgroundBayesian estimation with informative priors permits updating previous findings with new data, thus generating cumulative knowledge. To reduce subjectivity in the process, the present study emphasizes how to systematically weigh and specify informative priors and highlights the use of different aggregation methods using an empirical example that examined whether observed mother-adolescent positive and negative interaction behavior mediate the associations between maternal and adolescent internalizing symptoms across early to mid-adolescence in a 3-year longitudinal multi-method design.MethodsThe sample consisted of 102 mother-adolescent dyads. (...) Mothers and adolescents reported on their internalizing symptoms and their interaction behaviors were observed during a conflict task. We systematically searched for previous studies and used an expert-informed weighting system to account for their relevance. Subsequently, we aggregated the priors using three methods: linear pooling, logarithmic pooling, and fitting a normal distribution to the linear pool by means of maximum likelihood estimation. We compared the impact of the three differently specified informative priors and default priors on the prior predictive distribution, shrinkage, and the posterior estimates.ResultsThe prior predictive distributions for the three informative priors were quite similar and centered around the observed data mean. The shrinkage results showed that the logarithmic pooled priors were least affected by the data. Most posterior estimates were similar across the different priors. Some previous studies contained extremely specific information, resulting in bimodal posterior distributions for the analyses with linear pooled prior distributions. The posteriors following the fitted normal priors and default priors were very similar. Overall, we found that maternal, but not adolescent, internalizing symptoms predicted subsequent mother-adolescent interaction behavior, whereas negative interaction behavior seemed to predict subsequent internalizing symptoms. Evidence regarding mediation effects remained limited.ConclusionA systematic search for previous information and an expert-built weighting system contribute to a clear specification of power priors. How information from multiple previous studies should be included in the prior depends on theoretical considerations, and may also be affected by pragmatic considerations regarding the impact of the previous results at hand. (shrink)

This book focuses on a key issue today: the role of values in technology, with special emphasis on ethical values. This topic involves the analysis of internal values in technology (as they affect objectives, processes, and outcomes) and the study of external values in technology (social, cultural, economic, ecological, et cetera). These values - internal and external - are crucial to the decision making of engineers. In addition, they have increasing relevance for citizens concerned with the present and future state (...) of technology, which gives society a leading position in technological issues. The book follows three main lines of research: 1) new perspectives on technology, values, and ethics; 2) rationality and responsibility in technology; and 3) technology and risks. This volume analyzes the two main sides involved here: the theoretical basis for the role of values in technology and a practical discussion on how to implement them in our society. Thus, the book is of interest for philosophers, engineers, academics of different fields, and policy-makers. The style used lends itself to broad audience. (shrink)

Decisions related to animal welfare standards depend on farmer’s multiple goals and values and are constrained by a wide range of external and internal forces. The aim of this paper is twofold, i.e., to develop a theoretical framework for farmers’ AW decisions that incorporates farmers’ goals, use and non-use values and to present an approach to empirically implement the theoretical framework. The farmer as a head of the farm household makes choices regarding production to maximize the utility of (...) the household. The overall utility of the farmer is determined by his multiple objectives. For the analysis of multi-objective problems, the multiple criteria decision - making paradigm provides an appropriate theoretical framework. However, theories from the field of social-psychology are needed to facilitate the identification of all relevant aspects in the decision making. The practical use of the conceptual framework is demonstrated using a simple numerical application of a multi-objective programming model. Two workshops were devoted to examining the scientific consistency and the practical usefulness of the approach. Implementing this approach will increase knowledge of the main factors and barriers that determine farmers’ decisions with regard to AW standards. This knowledge is relevant during the development of new AW concepts that aims to supply products that comply with above-legal AW standards for middle-market segments. (shrink)

Assuming that one believes that individuals and states can morally defend values, beliefs, and institutions with force , one logically wants just combatants to possess the physical, mental, and spiritual capacities that will enable them to win the war. On the other hand, being a just combatant in a just war does not morally entitle that combatant to do anything to win that war. The moral requirement for just combatants to fight justly is codified in international law of war (...) and in state-specific legal documents such as the United States Uniform Code of Military Justice. While it is almost unequivocally clear to soldiers and civilians who soldiers cannot harm in the performance of their duties, and why these people are exempt from harm, it is less clear what the state itself can morally do to its own soldiers to enhance their chances of victory: can the state do anything to soldiers to give them an advantage on the field of battle?For United States soldiers and their counterparts in most Western liberal democracies, the answer is obviously no. Deeply embedded social and cultural norms in Western democracies mandate that the state set and enforce rigid lines which drill sergeants and earnest commanders cannot cross, even in the name of combat readiness, grounding these norms in notion of basic rights appealed to in the U.S. Constitution. In this essay, I argue against some types of drug-induced internal biotechnical enhancement of soldiers on the grounds that, in the present state of technology, it is not reasonable to suppose that the military can perform such enhancement operations on soldiers without causing irrevocable psychological damage that would certainly and unjustifiably alienate the soldiers from the very society they serve. (shrink)

Music offers a unique opportunity to better understand the organization of the human brain. Like language, music exists in all human societies. Like language, music is a complex, rule-governed activity that seems specific to humans, and associated with a specific brain architecture. Yet unlike most other high-level functions of the human brain - and unlike language - music is a skill at which only a minority of people become proficient. The study of music as a major brain function has for (...) some time been relatively neglected. Just recently, however, we have witnessed an explosion in research activities on music perception and performance and their correlates in the human brain. This volume brings together an outstanding collection of international authorities - from the fields of music, neuroscience, psychology, and neurology - to describe the amazing advances being made in understanding the complex relationship between music and the brain. Aimed at psychologists and neuroscientists, this is a book that will lay the foundations for a cognitive neuroscience of music. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anthropological Perspectives in Psychiatric NosologyJuan J. López-Ibor Jr. (bio) and María-Inés López-Ibor (bio)KeywordsDSM, etiology, Aristotelian causes, social dramasPsychiatry and clinical psychology, as we learn in this paper, are disciplines in need of an ontological perspective. Very few branches of contemporary learning share this characteristic. Probably only theoretical physic and theology—as the rest have long ago given up trying to define and understand the essence of their object, (...) for example, life in the case of biology or mind in psychology. Consequently, the paper by Pérez-Álvarez, Sass and García-Montes, “The Ontology of Mental Disorders in Constructivist Perspective,” (2008) should be welcomed and indeed included in the reading lists for trainees in psychiatry and clinical psychology.The authors propose an approach to the understanding of mental disorders that is extremely attractive and well articulated, and which also has practical implications for clinicians. It is not just another “philosophical divertimento” devoid of scientific and practical importance. Let us analyze the article in an orderly way.Less DsmThe authors of the target paper disapprove of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-III/IV approach to defining illnesses by starting from the symptoms that are present—on the grounds that this may lead clinicians to assume that their sole role is to identify, fight, and suppress the symptoms by whichever procedure. They propose an alternative that is dear to myself because it follows the path of the so-called “anthropological” psychiatry of Binswanger, von Gebsattel, Erwin Strauss, Zutt, López-Ibor, Sr., and others. In essence, this is a phenomenological approach to the meaning of mental diseases, one that emphasizes how the illness is revealed to the patient him- or herself.The target article’s criticism of DSM should be considered in the context of the abuses committed on its behalf. The DSM is not a textbook of psychiatric disorders, nor does it contain a definition of the diseases. The DSM does not tell what a disease is (Klerman et al. 1984)—something that is impossible with a classification system based on the manifestations of the diseases, the signs and symptoms. The DSM, as its title states, is just a diagnostic and statistical manual, which does not contain anything about the origin of [End Page 259] any disease nor an explanation of why it exists or what it means. The DSM is, in fact, just a tool to determine whether a disease is present, and therefore to facilitate communication between professionals and with other individuals, without saying anything about the disease’s aitia—a key term (associated with notions of essence as well as cause) to be discussed below. In theory, most clinicians should understand these limitations; it may be, however, that this is not really the case for many who read or use the DSM. In the world there are around 200,000 psychiatrists; since 1980 the number of DSM copies sold is in the order of several hundred thousand.The misuse of a classification system is even more noticeable in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 Research Version. The instructions for the use of this version recommend that the first step is to make an inventory of all the symptoms present, and then to construct a diagnosis based on them. This how all computer-assisted systems work. This procedure can, however, only be valid if the clinician has already reached a diagnostic conclusion by other means—a diagnosis then to be confirmed for research purposes. It may be that this is one of the reasons why the ICD-10 Research Version has almost never actually been used for research.Furthermore, the concept of symptoms in psychiatry applies only to organic mental disorders (Schneider 1959), conditions in which the patient’s attitude and way of experiencing the symptoms do not play the kind of role that they play in schizophrenia and other mental disorders. The quotation from the important paper by Sass and Parnas in this context is most appropriate. It is indeed that case that “subjective experience can play an important causal role in the progressive experiential transformations of a developing schizophrenic illness... (shrink)

As transnational interactions increase, cross-cultural conflict concerning ethical issues is inevitable. This article presents a model for assisting decision makers in selecting appropriate strategies for addressing cross-cultural ethical conflict. A theoretical framework for the model is developed based on the literature on international business ethics and on conflict resolution. The model is illustrated through several case examples. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew Kieran, ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value’. Philosophy Compass 1/2 (2006): pp. 129–143, doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2006.00019.x Author’s Introduction Up until fairly recently it was philosophical orthodoxy – at least within analytic aesthetics broadly construed – to hold that the appreciation and evaluation of works as art and moral considerations pertaining to them are conceptually distinct. However, following on from the idea that artistic value is (...) broader than aesthetic value, the last 15 years has seen an explosion of interest in exploring possible inter‐relations between the appreciative and ethical character of works as art. Consideration of these issues has a distinguished philosophical history but as the Compass survey article suggests (‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43), it is only very recently that figures in the field have returned to it to develop more precisely what they take the relationships to be and why. Consensus is, unsurprisingly, lacking. The reinvigoration of the issues has led sophisticated formalists or autonomists to mount a more considered defence of the idea that aesthetic and literary values are indeed conceptually distinct from the justification or otherwise of the moral perspective or views endorsed in a work (Topic I). The challenges presented by such a defence are many but amongst them are appeals to critical practice (Lamarque and Olsen), scepticism about whether or not art really can give us bona fide knowledge (Stolnitz) and the recognition that truth often seems to be far removed from what it is we value in our appreciation of works (Lamarque). One way to motivate consideration of the relevance of a work’s moral character to its artistic value concerns the phenomena of imaginative resistance. At least sometimes it would seem that, as Hume originally suggested, we either cannot or will not enter imaginatively into the perspective solicited by a work due to its morally problematic character (Topic II). In some cases, it would seem that as a matter of psychological fact, we cannot do so since it is impossible for us to imagine how it could be that a certain attitude or action is morally permissible or good (Walton). The question then is whether or not this is a function of morality in particular or constraints on imaginative possibility more generally and what else is involved. At other times, the phenomena seem to be driven by a moral reluctance to allow ourselves to enter into the dramatic perspective involved (Moran) or evaluation of the attitude expressed (Stokes). Nonetheless, it is far from obvious that this is so of all the attitudes or responses we judge to be morally problematic. After all, it looks like we can and indeed often do suspend or background particular cognitive and moral commitments in engaging with all sorts of works (Nichols and Weinberg). If the moral character of a work interacts with how we appreciate and evaluate them, then the pressing question is this: is there any systematic account of the relationship available to us? One way is to consider the relationship between our emotional responses to works and their moral character (Topic III). After all, art works often solicit various emotional responses from us to follow the work and make use of moral concepts in so doing (Carroll). Indeed, whether or not a work merits the sought for emotional responses often seems to be internally related to ethical considerations (Gaut). Yet, it is not obvious that we should apply our moral concepts or respond emotionally in our imaginative engagement with works as art as we should in real life (Kieran, Jacobson). A different route is via the thought that art can convey knowledge (Topic IV). There might be particular kinds of moral knowledge art distinctively suited to conveying (Nussbaum) or it may just be that art does so particularly effectively (Carroll, Gaut, Kieran). Either way where this can be tied to the artistic means and appreciation of a work it would seem that to cultivate moral understanding contributes to the value of a work and to betray misunderstanding is a defect. Without denying the relevance of the moral character of a work some authors have wanted to claim that sometimes the immoral aspect of a work can contribute to rather than lessen its artistic value (Topic V). One route is to claim that there is no systematic theoretical account of the relationship available and what the right thing to say is depends on the particular case involved (Jacobson). Another involves the claim that this is so when the defect connects up in an appropriate way to one of the values of art. Thus, it has been claimed, only where a work reveals something which adds to intelligibility, knowledge or understanding in virtue of its morally problematic aspect can this be so (Kieran). The latter position looks like it could in principle be held whilst nonetheless maintaining that the typical or standard relationship is as the moralists would have it. Yet perhaps allowing valence change for such reasons is less a mark of principled explanation and more a function of downright inconsistency or incoherence (Harold). The topics themselves and suggested readings given below follow the structure articulated above as further amplified in the Compass survey article. The design and structure given below can be easily compressed or expanded further. Author Recommends 1 Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 126–60. 2 This article develops the idea that engaging with narrative art calls on moral concepts and emotions and can thereby clarify our moral understanding. 2 Carroll, Noël. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 4 Part IV consists of six distinct essays on questions concerning the inter‐relations between art and morality including the essay cited above and the author’s articulation and defence of moderate moralism. 3 Gaut, Berys. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. 4 Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 7 This monograph provides the most exhaustive treatment of the issues and defends the claim that, where relevant, whenever a work is morally flawed it is of lesser value as art and wherever it is morally virtuous the work’s value as art is enhanced. Chapters 7 and 8 defend concern ethical knowledge and chapter 10 is a development of the article cited above concerning emotional responses. Chapter 3 also gives a useful conceptual map of the issues and options in the debate. 5 Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. 9 A wide ranging and extended treatment of relevant issues which objects to generalising moral treatments of our responses to art works and defends the idea that particular works can be better because of rather than despite their moral defects. 6 Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. 11 A general argument for immoralism is elaborated by outlining when, where and why a work’s morally problematic character can contribute to its artistic value for principled reasons (through enhancing moral understanding). 7 Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. 13 This chapter argues against both aestheticism and straightforward moralism about art, elaborating a defence of immoralism in relation to visual art whilst ranging over issues from pornographic art to the nature and demands of different genres in art. 8 Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’ Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. 15 This article concisely outlines and defends a sophisticated aestheticism that denies the importance of truth to artistic value. 9 Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. 17 This article articulates and defends the claim that no knowledge of any interesting or significant kind can be afforded by works appreciated and evaluated as art. 10 Walton, Kendall. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I.’Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. 68 (1994): 27–51. 19 This article builds on some comments from Hume to develop the idea that when engaging with fictions it seems impossible imaginatively to enter into radically deviant moral attitudes. Online Materials ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: The State of the Art.’American Society of Aesthetics online (Jeffrey Dean):. ‘Art, Censorship and Morality’ downloadable podcast of Nigel Warburton interviewing Matthew Kieran at Tate Britain (BBC/ou Open2.net as part of the Ethics Bites series):. ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43 (Matthew Kieran):. ‘Ethical Criticism of Art.’Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Ella Peek):. ‘Fascinating Fascism.’New York Review of Books Piece Discussing Leni Riefenstahl (Susan Sontag):. ‘The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1450s), Giovanni de Paolo’ (Tom Lubbock):. Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss Lolita (CBS):. Sample Syllabus Topic I Autonomism/aestheticism • Anderson, James C. and Jeffrey T. Dean. ‘Moderate Autonomism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 38.2 (1998): 150–66. • Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958. Chapter 12. • Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement.Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952 [1790]. • Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. • ——. ‘Tragedy and Moral Value.’Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73.2 (1995): 239–49. • Lamarque, Peter and Stein Olsen. Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Chapter 10. • Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. Topic II Imaginative Capacities, Intelligibility and Resistance • Moran, Richard. ‘The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.’Philosophical Review 103.1 (1994): 75–106. • Nichols, Shaun. ‘Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave Like Believing’. Mind & Language 21.4 (2006): 459–74. • Stokes, Dustin. ‘The Evaluative Character of Imaginative Resistance’. British Journal of Aesthetics 46.4 (2006): 387–405. • Tanner, Michael. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, II’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 51–66. • Walton, Kendall (1994). ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 27–51. • Weinberg, Jonathan. ‘Configuring the Cognitive Imagination.’New Waves in Aesthetics. Eds. K. Stock and K. Thomson‐Jones. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 203–23. Topic III Moralism and Emotions • Carroll, Noël. ‘Moderate Moralism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 36.3 (1996): 223–37. • Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.126–60. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapter 10. • ——. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. • Hume, David. ‘Of the Standard of Taste.’Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993 [1757]. 133–53. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Emotions, Art and Immorality.’Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Emotions. Ed. Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 681–703. • Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art?. London: Penguin, 2004. Chapters 5 and 15. Topic IV Moralism and Knowledge • Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. M. Heath. London: Penguin, 1996 [367–322 BC]. • Carroll, Noël. ‘The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature and Moral Knowledge.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.1 (2002): 3–26. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapters 7 and 8. • Gaut, Berys. ‘Art and Cognition.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 115–26. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Art, Imagination and the Cultivation of Morals.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54.4 (1996): 337–51. • Nussbaum, Martha. ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination.’Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. 148–68. • Plato. The Republic. Trans. D. Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Book 10. Topic V Immoralist Contextualism • Harold, James. ‘Immoralism and the Valence Constraint.’British Journal of Aesthetics 48.1 (2008): 45–64. • Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. • ——. ‘Ethical Criticism and the Vices of Moderation.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 342–55. • John, Eileen. ‘Artistic Value and Moral Opportunism.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 331–41. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge:The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. • Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. • Patridge, Stephanie. ‘Moral Vices as Artistic Virtues: Eugene Onegin and Alice.’Philosophia 36.2 (2008): 181–93. Focus Questions 1 What is the strongest argument for the claim that the moral character of a work is not relevant to its artistic value? Does artistic or literary criticism tend to concern itself with the truth or morality of works? If so, in what ways? If not, why do you think this is? 2 What different explanations might there be for difficulty with or resistance to imaginatively entering into attitudes you take to be immoral? How might this relate to the way our imaginings work as contrasted with belief? How might different literary or artistic treatments of the same subject matter make a difference? 3 How do narrative works draw on our moral concepts and responses? Can we suspend our normal moral commitments or application of moral concepts in responding emotionally to art works? Should we respond emotionally to art works as we ought to respond to real world events we witness? Why? Why not? 4 How, if at all, do art works convey moral understanding? How, if at all, is this related to the kinds of moral knowledge art works can teach or reveal to us? When, where and why might this be tied to the artistic value of a work? How can we tell where a work enhances our moral understanding as opposed to misleading or distorting it? 5 What art works do you value overall as art which commend or endorse moral values and attitudes that you do not? Is appreciation of them always marred or lessened by the morally dubious aspect? If not, what explains the differences in evaluation? What, if anything, might you learn by engaging with works which endorse moral attitudes or apply moral concepts different from those you take to be justified? How, if at all, might this connect up with what makes them valuable as art? (shrink)

Building on theoretical and empirical insights and applying the thriving theory as the conceptual framework, the authors developed two new teacher-specific scales, namely the Teacher Stress Scale and the Teacher Thriving Scale. The goal of this investigation was to evaluate the psychometric properties of these two scales. Data were collected through an online questionnaire administered to a national sample of 122 participating early childhood teachers teaching in preschool through third grade in 26 states of the United States during the (...) 2020–2021 school year amidst COVID-19. This study revealed some important psychometric results. First, with respect to their internal structures, both the TSS and the TTS appeared to be best represented as bifactorial and trifactorial, respectively. Specifically, the TSS comprised two constructs: Inadequate School-based Support, and Teaching-related Demands; and the TTS encompassed three constructs: Adaptability and Flexibility, Personal Strengths and Professional Growth, and Positive Mindset. Second, the negative correlation between the TSS and the TTS provided discriminant evidence for each other’s construct validity, while the positive correlations between the TTS and six conceptually cognate constructs demonstrated convergent evidence for construct validity for the TTS. Third, both the overall TSS and the overall TTS as well as their subscales exhibited good internal consistency reliability. Fourth, both the overall TSS and the overall TTS also demonstrated test–retest reliability. (shrink)

Zachar's commentary can be read as a sophisticated theoretical extension of the target article, and I am very pleased to see support for a relationalist turn in understanding mental disorders. Indeed, underlying causal properties are only an ingredient of essentialism and a more elaborate discussion of this issue brings us readily to the discourse on kinds and ontology. Zachar is an advocate for thinking of psychiatric constructs as practical kinds. This logically leads him to think that the problem with (...) categorical classification systems like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International Classification of Diseases are practical problems (lack of... (shrink)

In recent years, the human ability to reasoning about mental states of others in order to explain and predict their behavior has come to be a highly active area of research. Researchers from a wide range of fields { from biology and psychology through linguistics to game theory and logic{ contribute new ideas and results. This interdisciplinary workshop, collocated with the Thirteenth International Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK XIII), aims to shed light on (...) models of social reasoning that take into account realistic resource bounds. People reason about other people's mental states in order to understand and predict the others' behavior. This capability to reason about others' knowledge, beliefs and intentions is often referred to as theory of mind. Idealized rational agents are capable of recursion in their social reasoning, and can reason about phenomena like common knowledge. Such idealized social reasoning has been modeled by modal logics such as epistemic logic and BDI (belief, desire, intention) logics and by epistemic game theory. However, in real-world situations, many people seem to lose track of such recursive social reasoning after only a few levels. The workshop provides a forum for researchers that attempt to analyze, understand and model how resource-bounded agents reason about other minds. (shrink)

The present study sheds light on a new psychological construct called “AI pessimism aversion” (AIPA) describing an overly optimistic view of the benefits of AI by neglecting its potential dangers. In an international sample of N = 543 participants, we observed that the construct of AIPA strongly overlaps with single-item measures for positive and negative AI attitudes. Furthermore, the structural equation model suggests that the positive association between the internal locus of control (a personality measure describing persons who see (...) themselves as steering their own lives) and positive AI attitudes was in part mediated by AIPA. We also assessed risk aversion in the present work, because high aversion of risky situations might go along with lower AIPA (the coming AI wave is characterised by high uncertainty). Surprisingly, this was not the case, and these two constructs seem to be (rather) independent. The present work should be a starting point to dive deeper into the study of AI attitudes, a highly relevant research theme for societies standing at the eve of the coming AI wave. (shrink)

The author reviews a contemporary cognitive psychology perspective on memory that views memory as being composed of multiple separate systems. Most researchers draw a fundamental distinction between declarative/explicit and non-declarative/implicit forms of memory. Declarative memory is responsible for the conscious recollection of facts and events - what is typically meant by the everyday and the common psychoanalytic use of the word ‘memory’. Non-declarative forms of memory, in contrast, are specialised processes that influence experience and behaviour without representing the past (...) in terms of any consciously accessible content. They operate outside of an individual's awareness, but are not repressed or otherwise dynamically unconscious. Using this theoretical framework, the question of how childhood relationship experiences are carried forward from the past to influence the present is examined. It is argued that incorporating a conceptualisation of non-declarative memory processing into psychoanalytic theory is essential. Non-declarative memory processes are capable of forming complex and sophisticated representations of the interpersonal world. These non-declarative memory processes exert a major impact on interpersonal experience and behaviour that needs to be analysed on its own terms and not mistakenly viewed as a form of resistance. (shrink)

This paper provides an interpretation, based on the social systems theory of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, of the recent paradigmatic shift of mental health care from an asylum-based model to a community-oriented network of services. The observed shift is described as the development of psychiatry as a function system of modern society and whose operative goal has moved from the medical and social management of a lower and marginalized group to the specialized medical and psychological care of the whole (...) population. From this theoretical viewpoint, the wider deployment of the modern social order as a functionally differentiated system may be considered to be a consistent driving force for this process; it has made asylum psychiatry overly incompatible with prevailing social values (particularly with the normative and regulative principle of inclusion of all individuals in the different functional spheres of society and with the common patterns of participation in modern function systems) and has, in turn, required the availability of psychiatric care for a growing number of individuals. After presenting this account, some major challenges for the future of mental health care provision, such as the overburdening of services or the overt exclusion of a significant group of potential users, are identified and briefly discussed. (shrink)

We live in an ageing society, where people are living longer, and where decreases in the birth rate mean that the proportion of the population above retirement age is steadily increasing. An ageing population has considerable implications for health services and care provision. Consequently there is a growing interest among researchers, medical practitioners, and policy makers in older adults, their capabilities, and the changes in their cognitive functioning. This book offers an up-to-the-minute account of the latest methodological and (...) class='Hi'>theoretical issues in cognitive ageing. Part of the Debates in Psychology series, it sets out the arguments surrounding the currently controversial questions in cognitive ageing. What is the appropriate methodology for understanding cognitive change? How many factors are necessary to understand the patterns of age-related change? What might these factors be? The topics and arguments are explored in a series of chapters by the leading researchers in the field. Each contributor offers their view of how cognitive ageing can be best understood, and together they cover a broad range of cognitive functions including language use, cognitive slowing, and memory loss. Each of the chapters stands alone as the latest review of work in the area. Taken together, the chapters form a coherent theoretical debate through which the reader will learn about the dynamic nature of cognitive ageing research, and about the direction this research will be taking in the future. Models of Cognitive Aging will be an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the elderly, and in their cognitive abilities. (shrink)

In spite of the fact that it is required only occasionally for sanitary reasons and not legally mandatory, the practice of embalming is widespread in contemporary American society. This study explores the historical, cultural and psychological factors which gave rise to the practice of embalming and why the practice continues. Two case studies are presented in which delayed grief reactions were present; linkages with embalming are described. It is suggested that the frightening finitude of the self and a fear (...) of death in modern society have led to practices in which the corpse is viewed as looking natural, thus denying the reality of death. Embalming is seen as the final assault on the self, which can also carry with it problematic psychological consequences for the survivors. (shrink)