In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 81-98 [Access article in PDF] Leonor de Cáceres and the Mexican Inquisition Margaret Mott Introduction: The Family and the Times The Carvajál family, well-known to historians of colonial Mexico, achieved its enduring status largely through the records of the Mexican Holy Office. 1 The governor, Luis de Carvajál, after becoming embroiled in a boundary dispute with the Viceroy of (...) New Spain, was denounced as a Judaizer in 1589. He was eventually cleared of the crime of Judaizing, of performing Jewish rituals while pretending to be Catholic, but was sent to prison for one year for having concealed his Judaizing relatives from the authorities. He died while serving out his prison sentence. Many of the rest of his family, whom he brought over from Spain as part of the privileges of his office, were condemned as judaizantes pertinaz, persistent Judaizers. In the auto de fe of 8 December 1596 the governor's sister Francisca Núñez de Carvajál and four of her adult children were, in the language of the Holy Office, "relaxed to the secular arm for burning." Francisca's daughter, Mariana, was spared the stake in 1596 because she was deemed to have lost her senses. Once she regained them, she, too, was condemned as a persistent Judaizer and died in the auto de fe of 25 March 1601.From all accounts the Carvajál family was used by the Holy Office as a warning to the crypto-Jewish community of New Spain. Even Stephen Greenleaf, known for his balanced accounts on the Mexican Inquisition, 2 describes the persecution [End Page 81] of the Carvajáls as a "Counter Reformation tact," concluding that "the Holy Office wanted to use the Carvajáls as an example to the Jewish community of Mexico." 3 Yet more was at issue here than just a display of the naked power. The questions the inquisitors posed and the rhetoric they used suggest something beyond flexing a coercive muscle in front of the crypto-Jewish population of colonial Mexico.Not all members of the Carvajál family perished in the flames of so-called Counter Reformation intolerance. One of Francisca's sons, a Dominican monk, was able to maintain his commitment to his order even after being convicted of concealing his heretic relatives from the authorities. A son-in-law, Antonio Diaz de Cáceres, was reconciled after paying what biographer Martin A. Cohen considered an "unusually light" penalty, a public abjure de vehementia and a fine of a thousand Castilian ducats. Cohen explains this unusual pardon in terms of political intrigue. "Because he was a man of esteem and had served the king on several occasions," wrote Cohen, Antonio was spared the lash. 4 Yet political favors were not the only consideration. Francisca's granddaughter (and Antonio's daughter) Leonor de Cáceres, who was nine at the time of the first auto de fe, was reconciled along with her father in the auto de fe of 1601. Although she was fourteen at the time of her trial, much of the evidence concerns events that took place in her childhood, before the age of reason. Rather than a "Counter Reformation tact," her trial reflects some of the Catholic reforms of the sixteenth century, a time in Spanish political and social thought when natural law arguments for education and evangelization were on the ascendant.The term Counter Reformation implies an entrenched position against any efforts of reform. "Counter Reformation," writes historian John O'Malley, "expressed the quintessence of Catholicism, which was reaction and repression." 5 Counter Reformation underscores intolerance and obscures the radical reforms of the times (for which reason O'Malley offers the more neutral term, Early Modern Catholicism). In actuality sixteenth-century Catholicism was a time of both unification and universality, of shoring up the papacy and experimenting with evangelical techniques. Balanced against the heightened authority of the Vatican were the educational experiments of the Jesuits. 6 Alongside the racist arguments in support of the encomendero system was a very... (shrink)

Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents’ psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness is also sensitive to the moral value of agents’ lives. Five studies systematically investigate and explain the impact of morality on ordinary assessments of happiness. Study 1 demonstrates that moral judgments influence assessments of happiness not only (...) for untrained participants, but also for academic researchers and even in those who study happiness specifically. Studies 2 and 3 then respectively ask whether this effect may be explained by general motivational biases or beliefs in a just world. In both cases, we find evidence against these explanations. Study 4 shows that the impact of moral judgments cannot be explained by changes in the perception of descriptive psychological states. Finally, Study 5 compares the impact of moral and non-moral value, and provides evidence that unlike non-moral value, moral value is part of the criteria that govern the ordinary concept of happiness. Taken together, these studies provide a specific explanation of how and why the ordinary concept of happiness deviates from the definition used by researchers studying happiness. (shrink)

Legal theorists have proposed several theories to justify statutes of limitations in the criminal law, but none of these normative theories is generally accepted. This chapter investigates the related descriptive question as to whether ordinary people have the intuition that legal punishment becomes less appropriate as time passes from the date of the offense and, if they do, what factors play a role in these intuitions. Five studies demonstrate that there is an intuitive statute of limitations on both legal punishment (...) and moral criticism, and that these intuitions arise, in part, from judgments about changes in psychological connectedness over time. (shrink)

Moral Repair examines the ethics and moral psychology of responses to wrongdoing. Explaining the emotional bonds and normative expectations that keep human beings responsive to moral standards and responsible to each other, Margaret Urban Walker uses realistic examples of both personal betrayal and political violence to analyze how moral bonds are damaged by serious wrongs and what must be done to repair the damage. Focusing on victims of wrong, their right to validation, and their sense of justice, Walker presents (...) a unified and detailed philosophical account of hope, trust, resentment, forgiveness, and making amends - the emotions and practices that sustain moral relations. Moral Repair joins a multidisciplinary literature concerned with transitional and restorative justice, reparations, and restoring individual dignity and mutual trust in the wake of serious wrongs. (shrink)

The impact of gender on assessments of leadership performance and leadership potential was examined through two clusters of leadership behaviors, one set related to traditional constructions of leadership labeled directing others and another associated with contemporary constructions of leadership labeled engaging others. Based on data collected from a sample of 91 senior leaders in one US financial services organization over a 3-year period prior to Covid-19, the results showed a negative relationship between directing others behaviors and leadership potential ratings for (...) females and a positive relationship between these variables for males. A negative relationship between engaging others behaviors and performance assessments was also found for females. This study highlights the continuing bias in leadership assessments of women and explores the contradictions between the perception and the reality of women's leadership. (shrink)

This article explores the psychological logics underpinning key perspectives in the ‘turn to affect’. Research on affect raises questions about the categorization of affective states, affective meaning-making, and the processes involved in the transmission of affect. I argue that current approaches risk depopulating affecting scenes, mystifying affective contagion, and authorizing questionable psychobiological arguments. I engage with the work of Sedgwick and Frank, Thrift, and Ahmed to explore these points and suggest that the concept of affective practice offers a more promising (...) social psychological grounding. Notions of affective practice are more commensurate with trends in contemporary psychobiology, explain the limits on affective contagion, and emphasize relationality and negotiation, attentive to the flow of affecting episodes. A practice approach positions affect as a dynamic process, emergent from a polyphony of intersections and feedbacks, working across body states, registrations and categorizations, entangled with cultural meaning-making, and integrated with material and natural processes, social situations and social relationships. (shrink)

Developing a boundary-crossing ethics by paying attention to our stories, myths, and moral intuition.

Many contexts shape and limit moral thinking in philosophy and life. Human conditions of vulnerability and interdependency, of limited awareness and control, of imperfect insight into ourselves and others are inevitable contexts that neither moral thought nor theory should forget. To be truly reflective, moral thinking and moral philosophy must become aware of the contexts that bind our thinking about how to live. This collection of essays by Margaret Urban Walker seek to show how to do this, and why (...) it makes a difference. Contingent and changeable contexts that shape moral thinking include our individual histories, our social positions, and institutional roles, relationships, cultural settings, and social arrangements, and the specific moral idioms we pick up along the way. The paradigms and specialized language of ethical theory are contexts, too; they shape how moral theory looks and what or whom it looks at. Ethical theory and practice are meaningless without these Moral Contexts. (shrink)

Intrigued by Robinson and Southgate's 2010 work on “entering a semiotic matrix,” we expand their model to include the juxtaposition of all signs, symbols, and mental categories, and to explore the underpinnings of creativity in science, religion, and art. We rely on an interdisciplinary review of human sentience in archaeology, evolutionary biology, the cognitive science of religion, and literature, and speculate on the development of sentience in response to strong selection pressure on the hominin evolutionary line, leaving us the “lone (...) survivors” of complex, multiple lines of physical and cultural evolution. What we call Matrix Thinking—the creative driver of human sentience—has important cognitive and intellectual features, but also equally important characteristics traced to our intense sociability and use of emotionality in vetting rational models. Scientist, theologian, and artist create new cultural knowledge within a social context even if alone. They are rewarded by emotional validation from group members, and guided by the ever present question, “Does it feel right?”. (shrink)

In this paper, the practice of chemistry is viewed in terms of the interaction of three elements – the physical world (at the molecular level), the conceptual world (the canon of chemistry) and the social world (the community of chemists). This interaction, which is based on critical realist ideas such as, for example, the transitive and intransitive dimensions of reality, affords a clear distinction between the practice of chemistry as science and the practice of chemistry as technology. It also shows (...) the significance of the particularity of the chemist in the practice of chemistry. Finally, it allows a coherent philosophical foundation for chemistry research and chemistry education. (shrink)

Making a show of conceding by using a three-part structure of proposition, concession and reassertion has the effect - in contrast to other ways of conceding - of strengthening one's own position at the expense of a counter-argument. This three-part structure can be also exploited so as to carry the battle to the enemy, as it were, and make the concession do more offensive work. We detail three such ways: Trojan Horses where the speaker imports a caricature of the opposition (...) into the conceded material; stings in the tail, where the speaker specifically overturns the concession they have just made in the original claim; and cheapeners, where the speaker works pragmatically to devalue even a positive endorsement of the opposition's case. In all their variety, what marks the concession as being hearably in the speaker's own interest is the robust, normative three-part proposition - concession - reprise structure. It is available for use in supporting or demeaning any position, whether mundane or explicitly ideological. (shrink)

In this third and last article on the evolution of religious capacity, the authors focus on compassion, one of religious expression's common companions. They explore the various meanings of compassion, using Biblical and early related documents, and derive general cognitive components before an evolutionary analysis of compassion using their model. Then, in taking on neural reuse theory, they adapt a model from linguistics theory to understand how neural reuse could have operated to fix religious capacity in the human genome. They (...) present a teaching tool on “Religious Capacity in Action,” and develop an example of compassionate decision making in very early Homo sapiens in North Africa. They round out their analysis of compassion by exploring theory in neuroscience on a standard decision-making model, and investigate what goes on in the human brain when a values-based decision is made. (shrink)

Intrigued by the possible paths that the evolution of religious capacity may have taken, the authors identify a series of six major building blocks that form a foundation for religious capacity in genus Homo. Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens idaltu are examined for early signs of religious capacity. Then, after an exploration of human plasticity and why it is so important, the analysis leads to a final building block that characterizes only Homo sapiens sapiens, beginning 200,000–400,000 years ago, when all (...) the other cognitive and neurological underpinnings gradually came together. Because the timing of cognitive evolution has become an issue, the authors identify the time periods for these building blocks based on findings from modern cognitive science, neuroscience, genomic science, the new cognitive archaeology, and traditional stones-and-bones archaeology. The result is a logical, and even a likely story 55–65 million years long, which leads to the evolution of religious capacity in modern human beings. (shrink)

Discourse in EuroAmerica in connection with menopause is selectively naturalized, with specific consequences for practice, deflecting attention away from non-biological aspects of ageing. The medicalized discourse of North America is compared with that of contemporary Japan, where emphasis is focused predominantly on social rather than biological change. Following Latour and Haraway, it is argued that culture and nature are not dichotomous. Further, both biology and culture are contingent. `Local biologies', that is, subjective experience constituted from culturally informed knowledge, expectations and (...) practices, are in part shaped by physical sensations and symptoms, that differ quantitatively in Japan and North America. This difference influences - but does not determine - the production of discourse and medical responses to this stage of the life cycle. Situated cultural practices of creating culture/nature boundaries are sites for moral and political disputes, which in turn influence subjective experience, the discourse of medicalization and the politics of ageing. (shrink)