Inspiration is the factor common to all composers throughout musical history - yet this is the first book to examine its source. Jonathan Harvey, one of Britain's foremost composers, here brings a specialist's insight to the relationship between the source of inspiration and the act of composition.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Postmodernism may seem a particularly inappropriate term when used in conjunction with a region that is usually thought of as having only recently, and then unevenly, acceded to modernity. Yet in the last several years the concept has risen to the top of the agenda of cultural and political debate in Latin America. This collection explores the Latin American engagement with postmodernism, less to present a regional variant of the concept than to situate it in a transnational framework. Recognizing that (...) postmodernism in Latin America can only inaccurately be thought of as having traveled from an advanced capitalist "center" to arrive at a still dependent neocolonial "periphery," the contributors share the assumption that postmodernism is itself about the dynamics of interaction between local and metropolitan cultures in a global system in which the center-periphery model has begun to break down. These essays examine the ways in which postmodernism not only designates the effects of this transnationalism in Latin America, but also registers the cultural and political impact on an increasingly simultaneous global culture of a Latin America struggling with its own set of postcolonial contingencies, particularly the crisis of its political left, the dominance of neoliberal economic models, and the new challenges and possibilities opened by democratization. With new essays on the dynamics of Brazilian culture, the relationship between postmodernism and Latin American feminism, postmodernism and imperialism, and the implications of postmodernist theory for social policy, as well as the text of the Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle of the Zapatatista National Liberation Army, this expanded edition of boundary 2 will interest not only Latin Americanists, but scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern. Contributors. Xavier Albó, José Joaquín Brunner, Fernando Calderón, Enrique Dussel, Néstor García Canclini, Martín Hopenhayn, Neil Larsen, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, Norbert Lechner, María Milagros López, Raquel Olea, Aníbal Quijano, Nelly Richard, Carlos Rincón, Silviano Santiago, Beatriz Sarlo, Roberto Schwarz, and Hernán Vidal. (shrink)

This paper is the report of a meetingthat gathered many of the UK's most senioranimal scientists with representatives of thefarming industry, consumer groups, animalwelfare groups, and environmentalists. Therewas strong consensus that the current economicstructure of agriculture cannot adequatelyaddress major issues of concern to society:farm incomes, food security and safety, theneeds of developing countries, animal welfare,and the environment. This economic structure isbased primarily on competition betweenproducers and between retailers, driving foodprices down, combined with externalization ofmany costs. These issues must be addressed (...) by acombination of legislation, restructuring ofthe market, and use of public funds. Themeeting included workshops that made otherrecommendations for research and education. Themost urgent requirement is recognition thatchange is needed and development of a visionfor what that change must achieve. (shrink)

The increased recognition and reported prevalence of autism spectrum disorders combined with the associated societal and clinical impact call for a broad grassroots community-based dialogue on treatment related ethical and social issues. In these Stony Brook Guidelines, which were developed during a full year of community dialogue with affected individuals, families, and professionals in the field, we identify and discuss topics of paramount concern to the ASD constituency: treatment goals and happiness, distributive justice, managing the desperate hopes for a cure, (...) sibling responsibilities, intimacy and sex, diagnostic ethics, and research ethics. The members of the dialogue core committee included doctors, ethicists, administrators, social workers, ministers, disability experts, and many family members of individuals with autism who were especially engaged in community activities on behalf of their constituency, including siblings, parents, and grandparents. Our guidelines are not based on “top-down” imposition of professional expertise, but rather on a “bottom-up” grass roots attention to the voices of affected individuals and families speaking from experience. These guidelines can inform clinical practice, but they also are meaningful for the wider social conversation emerging over the treatment of individuals with ASD. (shrink)

In face of the multiple controversies surrounding the DSM process in general and the development of DSM-5 in particular, we have organized a discussion around what we consider six essential questions in further work on the DSM. The six questions involve: 1) the nature of a mental disorder; 2) the definition of mental disorder; 3) the issue of whether, in the current state of psychiatric science, DSM-5 should assume a cautious, conservative posture or an assertive, transformative posture; 4) the role (...) of pragmatic considerations in the construction of DSM-5; 5) the issue of utility of the DSM - whether DSM-III and IV have been designed more for clinicians or researchers, and how this conflict should be dealt with in the new manual; and 6) the possibility and advisability, given all the problems with DSM-III and IV, of designing a different diagnostic system. Part I of this article took up the first two questions. Part II will take up the second two questions. Question 3 deals with the question as to whether DSM-V should assume a conservative or assertive posture in making changes from DSM-IV. That question in turn breaks down into discussion of diagnoses that depend on, and aim toward, empirical, scientific validation, and diagnoses that are more value-laden and less amenable to scientific validation. Question 4 takes up the role of pragmatic consideration in a psychiatric nosology, whether the purely empirical considerations need to be tempered by considerations of practical consequence. As in Part 1 of this article, the general introduction, as well as the introductions and conclusions for the specific questions, are written by James Phillips, and the responses to commentaries are written by Allen Frances. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:JOHN COURTNEY MURRAY'S PROBLEMATIC INTERPRETATIONS OF LEO XIII AND THE AMERICAN FOUNDERS MICHAEL J. SCHUCK Loyola University Chicago, Illinois "Useful falsehoods are dangerous things, often costing something down the road." Garry Wills IN THE PROLOGUE to his provocative study of ithe Declaration of Independence, Garry Wills claims Abraham Lincoh1 distorted Thomas Je:fferson's document for po1it~caJ purposes. Amid the tumult of civil war, L,incoln encouraged Amer1cans to "dedicate" (...) themsely;es to the "proposition that all men are created equal," because on this basis their "fathe11s" had originalJy "conceiV'ed" the nation "four scoil.'e and seven years" earlier. In fact, says Wins, the signers employed the word ' equal~ty ' not to denote,an a:titribute of indiviJdual persons but rather ito descnibe the severed colonies' political standing vis-a-vis the motiheT country. Nor did the Dedar:ation 1conceive a nation: "if anything, July 4, 1776, produced twieily;e new nations." 1 Lincoln's 1oreatiy;e use of the Dedaration of Independence at Gettysburg bore both benefits and costs. It emboldened Union cresolve dur:ing the war and inspired a new nation in the 1aftermath. Yet it aJ.so, thinks W,i. (shrink)

The paper I gave at the Dublin conference celebrating Hilary Putnam’s 80th birthday was “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism” (2008). This was suitable for a celebratory event because it defended Putnam’s position on biological essentialism (1975) from the consensus in the philosophy of biology. This consensus has led to some severe criticisms of Putnam. Michael Ruse, for example, places Putnam, along with Saul Kripke and David Wiggins, “somewhere to the right of Aristotle” on essentialism and talks of them showing “an almost (...) proud ignorance of the organic world” (1987, 358n). John Dupré argues that the views of Putnam and Kripke are fatally divergent from “some actual biological facts and theories” (1981, 66). I argue that the consensus is quite wrong about essentialism and hence that these criticisms are misplaced. (shrink)

This essay is a reply to Martha Nussbaum's “Capabilities and Disabilities.” It endorses Nussbaum's critique of the social‐contract tradition and proposes that it might be productively contrasted with Michael Walzer's critique of John Rawls in Spheres of Justice. It notes that Nussbaum's emphasis on surrogacy and guardianship with regard to people with severe and profound cognitive disabilities poses a challenge to disability studies, insofar as the field tends to emphasize the self‐representation of people with disabilities and to concentrate (...) primarily on the aesthetic and political representation of physical disability. The essay concludes with an account of a recent exchange with Peter Singer on the question of our social expectations of people with Down syndrome. (shrink)

It was difficult to avoid the amiability of [Shaw's] impersonal embrace. Everything he seemed to say was what it was—and another thing. Women were the same as men: but different. But of the two, he calculated, women were fractionally less idiotic than men. "The only decent government is government by a body of men and women," he said in 1906; "but if only one sex must govern, then I should say, let it be women—put the men out! Such an enormous (...) amount of work is done of the nature of national housekeeping, that obviously women should have a hand in it." Shaw favored women over men in much of the same spirit as he advertised Roman Catholics being a trifle superior to Protestants. Both preferences were the product of a Protestant gentleman who delighted in perverse exhibitions of fairness. Certain consequences followed from the fact that only women became pregnant. Had Shaw had the making of the world in the first place, and not merely the remaking of it, things might have been ordered more sensibly. However, the rules had been laid down and the worst thing you could do was to complain of them. Every grievance was an asset in the womb of time. The advantage to women came in the form of greater natural wisdom about sex. They could hardly help themselves. Shaw maintained that the instinct of women acted as a sophisticated compass in steering our course for the future. His disenchantment with the human experiment expanded during and after the First World War. In Heartbreak House—"my Lear" he called it—he shows us what he supposed to be a "Bloomsburgian" culture where the feminine instinct has been trivialized in such a way that it no longer gives us our true bearings, and we drift towards the rocks. We had defaulted in our contract with the Life Force and would probably be superseded by another partner. Michael Holroyd is the author of Lytton Strachey and Augustus John and the authorized biography of George Bernard Shaw. The present essay appears in The Genius of Shaw, edited by Holroyd, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. (shrink)

This example, like the others, demands further discussion. My conclusion must therefore remain modest: an agent-neutral theory of our moral competence is not biologically implausible. Agent-centered rules like tit-for-tat, prerogatives, special obligations, and duties not to harm others might be best regarded as belonging to the theory of moral performance rather than the theory of moral competence. For biologists who may think otherwise, the general argument of this essay is that any claims to the contrary must be based on more (...) empirically well-developed theories of our moral competence and moral performance.More adequate theories of both kinds are worth developing, even if by themselves they determine nothing about how we ought to live our lives. Biology may help us understand the broad taxonomical categories of moral performance. It may also explain why, at the deepest levels of our moral thinking, we so easily slide into agent-neutral ways of reasoning. But how we ought to live our lives is something that must be determined by social experiment and moral argumentation. Discoveries regarding the empirical nature of morality cannot be made independently of the actual workings of our moral competence, which is itself only one factor in broader social and psychological processes that are capable of leading human beings down any number of more or less morally laudable paths. For a similar conclusion, see John Collier and Michael Stingl, “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Objectivity of Morality,” Biology and Philosophy, 8 (1993), pp. 47~0. The current essay owes much to discussions with John Collier, as well as to comments from several anonymous referees. (shrink)

This essay is a return to the scene of a crime. In my recent book on Hitchcock I made an outrageously general argument for the affinity between Hitch’s narrativesand David Hume’s reasoning about human nature. For something so speculative, youexpect cracks to appear pretty soon. But my impulse since the book’s appearance has notbeen to feel I exaggerated – which I’m sure I did – but to sense that I did not go far enough.There was more to be said about (...) this oblique, long distance liaison down the centuries andI now feel it best said through a film which I had not discussed at all, partly because I sharedthe general feeling that this was not one of Hitch’s most auspicious films. The acting wasuneven, the tone whimsical, the plot often cluttered and it suffered, or so I thought, fromthat general uncertainty of touch that sometimes characterised Hitchcock’s return toEngland. But then again his short wartime film Bon Voyage has beenunderestimated, as were in different ways Under Capricorn , the remade The ManWho Knew Too Much and later Frenzy . As Michael Walker has pointed out, Stage Fright has a structural complexity, a narrative coherence anda textual density missing from his 1930s films like Young And Innocent . In otherwords, it brings back to London in 1950 the innovating aspects of Hitchcock’s Hollywoodaesthetic of the 1940s. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editorial changes at PPPWelcomes and ThanksJohn Z. Sadler, MDAfter 30 years of co-editing (with Bill Fulford) and editing Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, I thought it was time for me to step down, and last fall the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry Executive Council assembled an international search team to select a new Editor-in-Chief. This thoughtful and efficient group, led by Robyn Bluhm, completed the search and (...) selection in a matter of a few months! All of us in the field are grateful to the search committee members for their congenial, disciplined, and fruitful work: Derek Bolton, David Crepaz-Keay, Anthony Fernandez, Brent Kious, Guilherme Messas, and Michael Wong. We are excited about the future of the journal with our new Editor-in-Chief, Professor Werdie van Staden. Briefly, Werdie is the Nelson Mandela Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry and Director of the Centre for Ethics and Philosophy of the Health Sciences, the University of Pretoria, South Africa.Students, trainees, and early career scholars in our field often ask about how senior scholars found their way to, and through, the field of philosophy/psychiatry. The reading of Werdie's biography, in chronological order, would befuddle a reader trying to predict where he would end up by 2024. In the youth of his adulthood, Werdie was heading toward a career in music, collecting several degrees in music theory, composition, and performance. Indeed, music would occupy a big piece of his life over the decades. Dr. van Staden has continued his musical career as a composer of two symphonies, a concerto, as well as multiple choral and chamber works. He has performed as a flautist for the Pretoria Symphony Orchestra since 2006, and was the Principal for 8 years.However, he was also an individual directed toward service to his fellow human beings. He completed his MBChB medical degree in 1990 and went on to several degree qualifications in medicine, psychiatry, and philosophy. Most significant for us was his early experience with Bill Fulford's master's degree program in the Philosophy of Mental Health at the University of Warwick, later completing a doctoral degree. His Mandela Professorship at Pretoria was the first endowed Professorship in our philosophy/psychiatry multidisciplinary field. Since then his intellectual work has ranged over clinical and research ethics, philosophy of language and psychopathology, Ubuntu virtue theory, person-centered medicine, medical education, and many more areas, making him a most versatile scholar. Over the past three [End Page 91] decades he has functioned as a practicing clinician, a department chair, a clinical trialist, a partner to Bill Fulford in developing and disseminating the Values-Based Practice approach to clinical medicine, a leader in many professional organizations, an editor of the South African Journal of Psychiatry, not to overlook serving as an author, reviewer, and Senior Editor at PPP at various points since the journal's inception. His professional and intellectual activities and accomplishments are too numerous to recount; suffice to say we are delighted to have him bring his vision, creativity, and vigor to us by adding PPP to his to-do list!We congratulate and thank Professor Nancy Potter on her retirement from academia as well as one of our first Senior Editors of PPP. Nancy's path to philosophy/psychiatry was by way of work in the correctional system in her youth, followed by philosophical field work in the emergency psychiatry department at the University of Louisville Hospital, with her psychiatrist colleague Rafi El-Mallakh, MD. However, philosophy has been her first priority, with work in feminist theory, philosophy of peace, virtue theory, and standpoint/social epistemology over her career. Never satisfied with armchair philosophy, Dr. Potter has immersed herself in settings, traditions, and practices to understand them from inside as well as out. As a PPP Senior Editor, Nancy was instrumental in developing the service-user voice, as well as diversifying our authorship in many other ways. I will miss her even-tempered, yet rigorous editorial voice in the journal.My last appointment of a Senior Editor turned out to be one of Dr. van Staden's students. I welcome Dr. Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed as our newest... (shrink)

Historical Cognitive Science I am lucky to strike three reviewers who extract so clearly my book's spirit as well as its substance. They all both accept and act on my central methodological assumption; that detailed historical research, and consideration of difficult contemporary questions about cognition and culture, can be mutually illuminating. It's gratifying to find many themes which recur in different contexts throughout _Philosophy and Memory_ _Traces_ so well articulated here. The reviews catch my desires to interweave discussion of cognitive (...) theories of memory with moral questions of psychological control and self-mastery, to evoke the virtues and the pleasures of strange, baroque beliefs about fickle 'animal spirits' coursing through the nerves and the brain, to demonstrate that mechanistic explanation (even in its blunt old Cartesian form) can acknowledge complexity, and to develop scientific conceptions of dynamic memory traces and representations which can survive uncharitable philosophical criticism. The book's insistent interdisciplinarity is just an inchoate quest to acknowledge the daunting variety of the phenomena: remembering is both natural and cultural, and is studied by narrative theorists as well as neurobiologists, by physicists as well as psychologists. By fusing the rangy detail of a history of early modern neurophysiology with the committed, even gullible fervor of a defence of 'new connectionist' cognitive science, I wanted to pull out the carpet from all those who are happy to let 'scientific' and 'cultural' approaches to the mind run along independently. Once this general project is given space, as it is by all three reviewers, we can get down to specifics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Crushing Pressures and Radical IdeasJohn Z. Sadler, MD (bio)Back in 2011, I wrote a paper for the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, an Australian journal, for a special issue dedicated to ethical issues associated with psychiatric genetics research. The editor was particularly excited by the recent findings of the 5-HTT allele in psychiatric illness. I had different ideas about what I wanted to write about, and the editor, Michael (...) Robertson, graciously considered them and ultimately published the paper. At the time I was interested in the colossal investment of National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) research dollars in psychiatric genetic research; at the time I was troubled at the lack of on-the-ground clinical implications of this research investment, and figured an Australian journal and referees would be more generous to a critical paper on U.S. funding priorities. I dug into the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIMH, and National Science Foundation websites and found some crude dollar evidence of respective expenditures for research funding in various disorders and focus areas, and compared these investments to psychiatric genetic research funding commitments. I will not go into details (Sadler, 2011), but the gist was that the psychiatric genetics research enterprise was and had been an extraordinarily expensive enterprise, when other research questions that could be immediately implementable into clinical care improvements remained marginally funded at best. The paper was not read widely and other than a couple of annoyed responses from psychiatric genetic researchers, not much came of it.This concern about funding priorities was one of the reasons why I was pleased to see this paper by Turkheimer and Greer which explores the long term results of the Spit for Science (S4S) initiative, which was launched grandly the same year as my paper’s whisper from down under. I hope this Philosophical Case Conference explores the many dimensions of interest for this paper, which is extraordinarily careful and even handed in its attitude, while at the same time being incisive in its analysis.My focus here is not in the science per se, which is beyond my competence. I’m interested in Turkheimer and Greer’s (T&G) conceptual overview of this research program. More specifically, I focus on T&G’s highlighting of the extraordinary willingness of the S4S authors to interpret prevailingly negative results in the most generous, even misleading, degree possible. I try to provide some possible ways of understanding this kind of research rhetoric exhibited by a cohort of highly respected, very successful scientists.I acknowledge the well-described varieties of interpretive bias that all of us are subject to. First on the list must be confirmation bias, our tendency to interpret situations in terms consistent [End Page 447] with our preconceived notions—in this case, the idea that genetics has something important to do with addictive disorders. Another might be epistemic overconfidence—the tendency to fail at interpretive skepticism in favor of one’s preferred conclusion. Related to this may also be interpretive momentum, the tendency to maintain a conviction about the correctness of one’s expectations and disregard inconsistent findings over the course of a research program—in this case, the multiple S4S studies (O’Sullivan & Schofeld, 2018). However, these kinds of biases tend to “blame” the individual authors’ thinking styles. I opine, though, that other vectors shaping the declaring-success rhetoric are more important.These sources have to do with the state of practice in doing biomedical science research in universities and particularly academic medical centers (AMCs) today. I identify several causal vectors that compel, however subtly, researchers to declare success in the face of failure. I have only picked three, and in no order of importance: 1) funding caps for NIH grants, 2) the overleveraging of university budgets and ballooning dependence on soft money, and 3) the incentivizing of intellectual property development within AMCs.Funding Caps for NIH GrantsIf you are a university or AMC, one way you hold onto your most productive scientists (e.g., grants, publications, discoveries, and status) is by paying them well. Single NIH grants today commonly amount to millions of dollars, and often tens of millions. These bring... (shrink)

ABSTRACT In what sense is commitment essential to joint action, and do the participants in a joint action themselves perceive commitment as essential? Attempts to answer this question have so far been hampered by clashes of intuition. Perhaps this is because the intuitions in question have mostly been investigated using informal methods only. To explore this possibility, we adopted a more formal approach to testing intuitions about joint action, sampling naïve participants’ intuitions about experimentally controlled scenarios. This approach did reveal (...) patterns in participants’ responses which may hint at potential conceptual links between commitment and joint action. It did not however provide evidence to support the view that commitment is essential to joint action, at least not from the agents’ own perspective. We conclude that intuitions alone, even when drawn systematically from a large sample, may be a poor basis for theorizing about joint action. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess the thesis that the discovery of mirror neuron systems provides empirical support for the simulation theory of social cognition. This thesis can be analyzed into two claims: that MNSs are involved in understanding others’ intentions or emotions; and that the way in which they do so supports a simulationist viewpoint. I will be giving qualified support to both claims. Starting with, I will present theoretical and empirical points in support of the view that MNSs (...) play a substantial role and are perhaps neces¬sary although not sufficient for understanding at least some intentions or emo¬tions. Turning to, I will argue that the work on MNSs best supports a fairly weak version of ST, according to which social cognition involves simulation simply because conceptual thought in gen¬eral has a simulationist component. In elucidating this idea, I appeal to Law¬rence Barsalou’s embodied theory of concepts. Crucially, the term “simula¬tion” here refers not to simulations of a target agent’s experience, nor even spe¬cifically to one’s own experience in a similar counterfactual situation, but to simulations of experience in general - activating sensory, motor, proprioceptive, affective, and introspective representations that match representations one would have when perceiving, carrying out actions, experiencing emotions, etc. I then sketch an expanded simulationist framework for understanding the contribution of MNSs to social cognition. The ap¬peal to empirical work on MNSs in support of ST is therefore a two-edged sword; making this appeal persuasive requires us to modify our understanding of simulation to make it line up with the empirical work. (shrink)

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach has been called ‘The Father of Physical Anthropology’ because of his pioneering publications describing human racial variation. He proposed a racial typology consisting of five ‘major varieties/races’ of humanity. Since the 1990s, Londa Schiebinger and other Anglophone scholars have argued that Blumenbach’s writings on race show evidence that he was significantly influenced by nineteenth-century race supremacist beliefs which held Europeans/caucasians to be the highest ranked and most beautiful race. However, these modern authors relied largely on Thomas Bendyshe’s (...) 1865 English translations of Blumenbach’s Latin and German texts. As documented herein, Bendyshe’s publication includes numerous translation errors which form a pattern indicating that he employed two translators. The first translator was consistent with five earlier English translations. The second translator was not consistent with the earlier translators. This second translator also used English terms that denigrated extra-Europeans while adulating Europeans. Furthermore, Bendyshe’s1865 translation regularly used the term ‘beauty’ to translate different Latin words that Blumenbach used to express his nuanced view of aesthetics and structural symmetry. Given the inconsistency and errors in Bendyshe’s 1865 translations, they should not be unquestionably accepted as an accurate reflection of Blumenbach’s views. (shrink)

How do social media affect interpersonal relationships? Adopting a Strawsonian framework, I argue that social media make us more likely to adopt the objective attitude towards persons. Technologically mediated communication tends to inhibit interpersonal emotions and other reactive attitudes. This is due to a relative lack of the social cues that typically enable us to read minds and react to them. Adopting the objective attitude can be harmful for two reasons. First, it tends to undermine the basis of interpersonal relationships. (...) In particular, I argue that friendship is a relationship between persons that requires the participant stance. Second, it is a morally risky attitude that makes us more likely to treat persons in problematic, thing-like ways. Some philosophers have rightly urged that social media are compatible with virtuous, Aristotelian friendship. Notwithstanding, I argue that the harms associated with the objective attitude are more pressing than they might appear if we restrict our focus to relatively virtuous people with the social competence to flourish in morally risky online environments. (shrink)

In recent years, several minimalist accounts of joint action have been offered (e.g. Tollefsen Philosophy of the Social Sciences 35:75–97, 2005; Sebanz et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31(6): 234–1246, 2006; Vesper et al. Neural Networks 23 (8/9): 998–1003, 2010), which seek to address some of the shortcomings of classical accounts. Minimalist accounts seek to reduce the cognitive complexity demanded by classical accounts either by leaving out shared intentions or by characterizing them in a way that (...) does not demand common knowledge of complex, interconnected structures of intentions. Moreover, they propose models of the actual factors facilitating online coordination of movements. The present proposal aims to enrich a minimalist framework by showing how shared emotions can facilitate coordination without presupposing common knowledge of complex, interconnected structures of intentions. Shared emotions are defined for the purposes of this paper as affective states that fulfill two minimal criteria: (a) they are expressed (verbally or otherwise) by one person; and (b) the expression is perceived (consciously or unconsciously) by another person. Various ways in which the fulfillment of (a) and (b) can lead to effects that function as coordinating factors in joint action are distinguished and discussed. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a great deal of controversy in the philosophy of mind, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience both about how to conceptualize empathy and about the connections between empathy and interpersonal understanding. Ideally, we would first establish a consensus about how to conceptualize empathy, and then analyze the potential contribution of empathy to interpersonal understanding. However, it is not at all clear that such a consensus will soon be forthcoming, given that different people have fundamentally conflicting (...) intuitions about the concept of empathy. Thus, instead of trying to resolve this controversy, I will try to show that a fair amount of consensus is within reach about how empathy can be a source of interpersonal understanding even in the absence of a consensus about how to conceptualize empathy. As we shall see, the main controversy concerns a few phenomena that some researchers view as necessary conditions of empathy, but which others view either as merely characteristic features or as consequences of empathy. My strategy will be to try to show how empathy can generate interpersonal understanding by virtue of these phenomena—regardless of whether one chooses to conceptualize them as necessary conditions of empathy. (shrink)

Interest in philosophy of management continues to grow. Growth of the philosophy of management might result from the consideration of man's potential as viewed by two different men, an industrialist and a philosopher. James Finney Lincoln was president and board chairman of The Lincoln Electric Company for 37 years. During that time, and for 14 previous years when he was the firm's general manager, he developed a philosophy basic to a practice of business management that gained national and international attention. (...) Wilhelm von Humboldt was a very gifted person with many accomplishments including those as a Prussian statesman, a humanist, and a linguistics scholar. A comparison of both men's philosophies reveals the following: In each view man's potentiality was approached by the dynamic, on-going process of developing his latent abilities or powers. Both views stressed freedom as being critical to the development of man's latent abilities or powers. For Lincoln the individual must gain satisfaction from the recognition of developing his latent abilities. For Humboldt the individual must enjoy the 'freedom of developing himself.' Lincoln warned against custom as being a barrier to development since it places man in situations which are without variation, forcing him merely to follow precedent. Humboldt, in addition to freedom, stated that "a variety of situations" is essential for development. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In the exploratory study reported here, we tested the efficacy of an intervention designed to train teenagers with Möbius syndrome (MS) to increase the use of alternative communication strategies (e.g., gestures) to compensate for their lack of facial expressivity. Specifically, we expected the intervention to increase the level of rapport experienced in social interactions by our participants. In addition, we aimed to identify the mechanisms responsible for any such increase in rapport. In the study, five teenagers with MS interacted with (...) three naïve participants without MS before the intervention, and with three different naïve participants without MS after the intervention. Rapport was assessed by self-report and by behavioral coders who rated videos of the interactions. Individual non-verbal behavior was assessed via behavioral coders, whereas verbal behavior was automatically extracted from the sound files. Alignment was assessed using cross recurrence quantification analysis and mixed-effects models. The results showed that observer-coded rapport was greater after the intervention, whereas self-reported rapport did not change significantly. Observer-coded gesture and expressivity increased in participants with and without MS, whereas overall linguistic alignment decreased. Fidgeting and repetitiveness of verbal behavior also decreased in both groups. In sum, the intervention may impact non-verbal and verbal behavior in participants with and without MS, increasing rapport as well as overall gesturing, while decreasing alignment. (shrink)

Other people in our culture actively transform our behavioral dispositions and mental states by shaping them in various ways. In the following, we highlight three points which Veissière et al. may consider in leveraging their account to illuminate the dynamics by which this occurs, and in particular, to shed light on how social cognition supports, and is supported by, enculturation.

Rivka Weinberg advances an error theory of ultimate meaning with three parts: (1) a conceptual analysis, (2) the claim that the extension of the concept is empty, and (3) a proposed fitting response, namely being very, very sad. Weinberg’s conceptual analysis of ultimate meaning involves two features that jointly make it metaphysically impossible, namely (i) the separateness of activities and valued ends, and (ii) the bounded nature of human lives. Both are open to serious challenges. We offer an internalist alternative (...) to (i) and a relational alternative to (ii). We then draw out implications for (2) and conclude with reasons to be cheerful about the prospects of a meaningful life. (shrink)

In recent years, developmental psychologists have increasingly been interested in various forms of prosocial behavior observed in infants and young children—in particular comforting, sharing, pointing to provide information, and spontaneous instrumental helping. We briefly review several models that have been proposed to explain the psychological mechanisms underpinning these behaviors. Focusing on spontaneous instrumental helping, we home in on models based upon what Paulus :77–81, 2014) has dubbed ‘goal-alignment’, i.e. the idea that the identification of an agent’s goal leads infants to (...) take up that goal as their own. We identify a problem with the most well-known model based upon this idea, namely the ‘goal contagion’ model. The problem arises from the way in which the model specifies the content of the goal which is identified and taken up. We then propose an alternative way of specifying the content of the goal, and use this as a starting point for articulating an alternative model based upon the idea of alignment, namely the ‘goal slippage’ model. By elucidating the difference between goal contagion and goal slippage, we contribute to the articulation of experimental criteria for assessing whether and when the mechanisms specified by these two models are at work. (shrink)

In this brief discussion, we explicate and evaluate Heyes and colleagues’ deflationary approach to interpreting apparent evidence of domain-specific processes for social percep- tion. We argue that the deflationary approach sheds important light on how functionally specific processes in social perception can be subserved at least in part by domain-general processes. On the other hand, we also argue that the fruitfulness of this approach has been unnecessarily hampered by a contrastive conception of the relationship between domain- general and domain-specific processes. (...) As an alternative, we propose a complementary conception: the identification of domain-general processes that are engaged in instances of social perception can play a positive, structuring role by adding additional constraints to be accounted for in modelling the domain-specific processes that are also involved in such instances. (shrink)

In the current paper, we present and discuss a series of experiments in which we investigated people’s willingness to ascribe intentions, as well as blame and praise, to groups. The experiments draw upon the so-called “Knobe Effect”. Knobe [2003. “Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language.” Analysis 63: 190–194] found that the positiveness or negativeness of side-effects of actions influences people’s assessment of whether those side-effects were brought about intentionally, and also that people are more willing to assign blame (...) for negative side-effects of actions than they are to assign praise for positive side-effect of actions. Building upon this research, we found evidence that the positiveness or negativeness of side-effects of group actions influences people’s willingness to attribute intentions to groups, and that people are more willing to assign blame to groups for negative side-effects of actions than they are to assign praise to groups for positive side-effects of... (shrink)

In recent years, a number of approaches to social cognition research have emerged that highlight the importance of embodied interaction for social cognition (Reddy, How infants know minds, 2008; Gallagher, J Conscious Stud 8:83–108, 2001; Fuchs and Jaegher, Phenom Cogn Sci 8:465–486, 2009; Hutto, in Seemans (ed.) Joint attention: new developments in psychology, philosophy of mind and social neuroscience, 2012). Proponents of such ‘interactionist’ approaches emphasize the importance of embodied responses that are engaged in online social interaction, and which, according (...) to interactionists, present an alternative to mindreading as a source of social understanding. We agree that it is important to take embodied interaction seriously, but do not agree that this presents a fundamental challenge to mainstream mindreading approaches. Drawing upon an analogy between embodied interaction and the exercise of expert skills, we advocate a hierarchical view which claims that embodied social responses generally operate in close conjunction with higher-level cognitive processes that play a coordinative role, and which are often sensitive to mental states. Thus, investigation of embodied responses should inform rather than conflict with research on mindreading. (shrink)

Ever since the heyday of British Emergentism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discussions of emergence have been a fairly constant source of titillation as well as controversy and confusion. Different authors have used the terms “emergence” and “emergentism” to characterize a myriad related but distinct conceptions, spanning fields as various as physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, robotics and philosophy.

Michael-John Turp | : There is little consensus concerning the truth or reference conditions for evaluative terms such as “good” and “bad.” In his paper “Good and Evil,” Geach proposed that we distinguish between attributive and predicative uses of “good.” Foot, Thomson, Kraut, and others have put this distinction to use when discussing basic questions of value theory. In §§1-2, I outline Geach’s proposal and argue that attributive evaluation depends on a prior grasp of the kind of thing (...) that is evaluated, which is another way of saying a prior grasp of a thing’s nature. In §§3-4, I discuss the evaluation of artifacts, which provide the clearest examples of attributive evaluation. This allows me to address a series of problems apparently facing the idea of attributive goodness. In §5, I consider the neo-Aristotelian idea that we can extend attributive accounts of goodness to human lives, and I pay attention to Foot’s account of natural goodness. This leads me to consider the goodness of human life as a whole in §6. At this point. I depart from Geach’s approach and argue that questions of attributive goodness finally give rise to questions of predicative or absolute goodness. | : Il y a peu de consensus sur la vérité ou les conditions de référence pour les termes évaluatifs tels que « bon » et « mauvais ». Dans son article « Good and Evil », Geach a proposé de distinguer les usages attributif et prédicatif du « bon ». Foot, Thomson, Kraut et d’autres considèrent qu’il faut utiliser cette distinction lorsqu’il s’agit des questions fondamentales de la théorie de la valeur. Dans les parties 1-2, je décris ici la proposition de Geach et je prétends que l’évaluation attributive dépend d’une compréhension préalable du genre de chose qui est évaluée, ce qui est une autre façon de dire une compréhension préalable de la nature d’une chose. Dans les parties 3-4, je discute de l’évaluation des artefacts, qui fournissent les exemples les plus clairs d’évaluation attributive. Cela me permet d’illustrer une série de problèmes apparemment liés à l’idée de la bonté attributive. Dans la partie 5, je considère l’idée néo-aristotélicienne voulant que nous puissions étendre notre compréhension de la bonté attributive aux vies humaines, et je me penche sur l’idée de bonté naturelle selon Foot. Cela me conduit à considérer la bonté de la vie humaine comme un tout, dans la partie 6. De là, je m’éloigne de l’approche de Geach pour affirmer que les questions de bonté attributive suscitent finalement des questions de bonté prédicative ou absolue. (shrink)