In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist" philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract" analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On (...) one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if" people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer" of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality. (shrink)

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the (...) psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework. (shrink)

Copyright ©2005–2010 All rights reserved. Jonathan Bennett [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. (...) Larger omissions are reported, between brackets, in normal-sized type. The numbering of the segments of each dialogue is Malebranche’s. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a morally good person? It can be tempting to think that it is simply a matter of performing certain actions and avoiding others. And yet there is much more to moral character than our outward actions. We expect a good person to not only behave in certain ways but also to experience the world in certain ways within.

This book is the first extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for (...) other phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In the historical context of a crisis in biological psychiatry, psychedelic drugs paired with psychotherapy are globally re-emerging in research clinics as a potential transdiagnostic therapy for treating mood disorders, addictions, and other forms of psychological distress. The treatments are poised to soon shift from clinical trials to widespread service delivery in places like Australia, North America, and Europe, which has prompted ethical questions by social scientists and bioethicists. Taking a broader view, we argue that the ethics of psychedelic therapy (...) concerns not simply how psychotherapies are different when paired with psychedelic drugs, but how psychedelic therapies shape and are shaped by different values, norms, and metaphysical commitments. Drawing from the published literature and interviews with seven psychedelic therapists working in clinical trials in the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia, this article opens the black box of the treatments to consider the values and informal debates currently animating the therapies. Considering questions of patient autonomy, mechanisms of therapeutic action, and which therapies are best suited to pair with psychedelic substances, we examine the ethics of psychedelic therapy as an emergent form of life. To bring this form of life out in fuller relief, we conclude by comparing and contrasting it with ayahuasca use in Amazonian shamanism. (shrink)

Syllogisms (e.g. “All A are B; All B are C; What is true about A and C?”) are a long‐studied area of human reasoning. Riesterer, Brand, and Ragni compare a variety of models to human performance and show that not only do current models have a lot of room for improvement, but more importantly a large part of this improvement must come from examining individual differences in performance.

In the past decade, experiments on altruistic punishment have played a central role in the study of the evolution of cooperation. By showing that people are ready to incur a cost to punish cheaters and that punishment help to stabilise cooperation, these experiments have greatly contributed to the rise of group selection theory. However, despite its experimental robustness, it is not clear whether altruistic punishment really exists. Here, I review the anthropological literature and show that hunter-gatherers rarely punish cheaters. Instead, (...) they avoid dealing with them and switch to other partners. I suggest that these data are better explained by individual selection, and in particular by partner choice models, in which individuals are in competition to be recruited by cooperative partners. I discuss two apparent problems for partner choice theories: large-scale cooperation and punishments in economic games. I suggest that rather than favouring group selection theory, these two phenomena provide evidence in favour of individual selection: (1) people produce large-scale cooperation through institutions in which punishment is not altruistic but rewarded on an individual basis; (2) punishment in experimental games can be explained without altruism and is indeed often better explained by individual interests. (shrink)

How do humans manage to keep track of a gradually changing object or person as the same persisting individual despite the fact that the extraction of information about this individual must often rely on heterogeneous information sources and heterogeneous tracking methods? The article introduces the Empirical Tracking of Individuals theory to address this problem. This theory proposes an analysis of the concept of integrated tracking, which refers to the capacity to acquire, store, and update information about the identity and location (...) of individuals in our environment. It hypothesizes that certain functions of attention are a key to explaining how the cognitive flexibility of the human mind overcomes the heterogeneity of sources and methods in integrated tracking. At least two premises lend support to this hypothesis. First, heterogeneity of tracking sources is overcome by the combination of information from multiple perceptual modalities and a phenomenon of multisensory 'transparency'. Second, heterogeneity of tracking sources and methods may also be overcome by inferences that combine information across domains to acquire reasons to believe propositions about the target's location and identity. (shrink)

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the (...) relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties. (shrink)

Punitive behaviours are often assumed to be the result of an instinct for punishment. This instinct would have evolved to punish wrongdoers and it would be the evidence that cooperation has evolved by group selection. Here, I propose an alternative theory according to which punishment is a not an adaptation and that there was no specific selective pressure to inflict costs on wrongdoers in the ancestral environment. In this theory, cooperation evolved through partner choice for mutual advantage. In the ancestral (...) environment, individuals were in competition to be recruited in cooperative ventures and it was vital to share the benefits of cooperation in a mutually advantageous manner. If individuals took a bigger share of the benefits, their partners would leave them for more interesting partners. If they took a smaller share, they would be exploited by their partners who would receive more than what they had contributed to produce. This competition led to the selection of a sense of fairness, a cognitive adaptation aiming to share equally the benefits of cooperation in order to attract partners. In this theory, punishment is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. Punitive behaviours are only a way to restore fairness by compensating the victim or penalizing the culprit. Drawing on behavioural economics, legal anthropology, and cognitive psychology, I show that empirical data fit better with this framework than with the theory of group selection. When people punish, they do so to restore fairness rather than to help the group. (shrink)

After 100+ years of studying syllogistic reasoning, what have we learned? Well, Riesterer and colleagues suggest that we have learned to throw away most of the data! If that seems like a bad idea to you then, be assured, that the authors agree with you. The sad fact is that the conclusion of “No Valid Conclusion” (NVC) is one of the most frequently selected responses in syllogistic reasoning but these “majority data” have been ignored by most researchers. Riesterer and colleagues (...) introduce heuristic rules for predicting NVC and provide directions to modelers on how to up their game. (shrink)

Recent models of the conceptual system hold that concepts are grounded in simulations of actual experiences with instances of those concepts in sensory-motor systems (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, 2003; Solomon & Barsalou, 2001). Studies supportive of such a viewhave shown that verifying a property of a concept in one modality, and then switching to verify a property of a different concept in a different modality generates temporal processing costs similar to the cost of switching modalities in perception. In addition to non-emotional (...) concepts, the present experiment investigated switching costs in verifying properties of positive and negative (emotional) concepts. Properties of emotional concepts were taken from vision, audition, and the affective system. Parallel to switching costs in neutral concepts, the study showed that for positive and negative concepts, verifying properties from different modalities produced processing costs such that reaction times were longer and error rates were higher. Importantly, this effect was observed when switching from the affective system to sensory modalities, and vice-versa. These results support the embodied cognition view of emotion in humans. (shrink)

In Time Deposits, Dimension, and Fraud (2009), William Barnett and Walter Block argue that by borrowing short and lending long there is an over issuance of property rights. Their article, however, does not fully extend the consequences of their contribution. Once this is done, it becomes clearer that their argument suits a great impediment to banking, becoming a possible reason to support rather than to oppose fractional reserve banking. Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 90(3):399–406, 2009) comment on Barnett and (...) Block (J Bus Ethics 88(4):711–716, 2009), the authors claim that while maintaining the illegitimacy of fractional reserve deposits, borrowing short and lending long it is actually not illegitimate. An extension on Bagus and Howden (2009) will show that their line of argumentation can be applied as a defense of fractional reserve banking as well. (shrink)

The belief in immanent justice is the expectation that the universe is designed to ensure that evil is punished and virtue rewarded. What makes this belief so ‘natural’? Here, we suggest that this intuition of immanent justice derives from our evolved sense of fairness. In cases where a misdeed is followed by a misfortune, our sense of fairness construes the misfortune as a way to compensate for the misdeed. To test this hypothesis, we designed a set of studies in which (...) we show that people who do not believe in immanent justice are nonetheless implicitly influenced by intuitions of immanent justice. Strikingly, this effect disappears when the misfortune is disproportionate compared to the misdeed: In this case, justice is not restored and participants lose the intuition of immanent justice. Following recent theories of religion, we suggest that this intuition contributes to the cultural success of beliefs in immanent justice. (shrink)

Methexiology is not a particular theory, but rather a general philosophical orientation. Therefore, in Methexiology: Philosophical Theology and Theological Philosophy for the Deification of Humanity, Nicolas Laos elucidates the significance of methexiology for the study of ontology, epistemology, ethics, philosophical psychology, theory of justice, philosophy of history, and philosophy of religion. Laos argues that, faced with the modern and the postmodern crises of meaning, we need a new myth, a new spiritual formula, for the resacralization of humanity and the (...) cosmos, without restoring defunct totems, without using tales as "cheap" substitutes for the lack of a life-giving myth, and without negating history. In his Methexiology, Laos studies the "genealogy" of the modern and the postmodern crises of meaning, and, based on his new interpretation of classical Greek philosophy and Hesychasm, proposes methexiology as a way of overcoming the crises of meaning and as a way of resacralizing humanity and the cosmos through a new metaphysically grounded humanism. (shrink)

Se aborda la polémica entre Leibniz y Malebranche en torno a la relación entre las sustancias. Se plantean cuatro hipótesis para explicar esta interacción: la influencia física, la asistencia divina inmediata, la identidad y la armonía previa. Se explica la posición crítica de Leibniz respecto a las otras tres. En relación con la primera hipótesis Leibniz y Malebranche están de acuerdo en que no es viable. Se explican la crítica de Leibniz al ocasionalismo de Malebranche y al monismo sustancialista de (...) Spinoza. Y finalmente se analiza, desde la hipótesis de la armonía previa, el modo en que Leibniz aprovecha la disputa con el ocasionalismo, tanto en la versión de Malebranche como en la de Pierre Bayle, para reivindicar la autonomía de la razón en el ámbito de las causas segundas. En ello juegan un papel fundamental la noción de naturaleza de las cosas, el principio de diversidad y el principio de razón suficiente. (shrink)

In his famous text the Bodhicaryāvatāra, the 8th century Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva argues that anger towards people who harm us is never justified. The usual reading of this argument rests on drawing similarities between harms caused by persons and those caused by non-persons. After laying out my own interpretation of Śāntideva's reasoning, I offer some objections to Śāntideva's claim about the similarity between animate and inanimate causes of harm inspired by contemporary philosophical literature in the West. Following this, I argue (...) that by reading Śāntideva's argument as practical advice rather than as a philosophical claim about rational coherence, his argument can still have important insights even for those who reject his philosophical reasoning. (shrink)

Christians, Allison, Benoît-Guay, Nicolas.

The Bayesian brain hypothesis, as formalized by the free-energy principle, is ascendant in cognitive science. But, how does the Bayesian brain obtain prior beliefs? Veissière and colleagues argue that sociocultural interaction is one important source. We offer a complementary model in which “interoceptive self-inference” guides the estimation of expected uncertainty both in ourselves and in our social conspecifics.

Modern mathematical sciences are hard to imagine without appeal to efficient computational algorithms. We address several conceptual problems arising from this interaction by outlining rival but complementary perspectives on mathematical tractability. More specifically, we articulate three alternative characterizations of the complexity hierarchy of mathematical problems that are themselves based on different understandings of computational constraints. These distinctions resolve the tension between epistemic contexts in which exact solutions can be found and the ones in which they cannot; however, contrary to a (...) persistent myth, we conclude that having an exact solution is not generally more epistemologically beneficial than lacking one. (shrink)

Third World Citizens and the Information Technology Revolution Content Type Journal Article Category Review Pages 515-522 DOI 10.1558/jcr.v11i4.515 Authors Nicolas Adam, Centre d’études sur l’intégration et la mondialisation, Université du Québec à Montréal, 400, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, Pavillon Hubert-Aquin, 1er étage, bureau A-1560, Montréal H2L 2C5 Canada Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 11 Journal Issue Volume 11, Number 4 / 2012.

In Nietzsche's "mature" texts, we are witnessing a complete dissolution of the subject. At first glance, however, this appears highly paradoxical (Wotling 2015), leading some commentators to suggest that there is a real contradiction in Nietzsche's work (Gardner 2009), insofar as the author never ceases to speak of himself and at the same time invites his reader to become who he is. Are we to understand, then, that any self is illusory and constitutes a metaphysical illusion, i.e., that the becoming (...) in which we are always caught according to Nietzsche must make any position of a self impossible, and at the very least diminishing? Following in the footsteps of Alexander Nehamas (1985), we believe that we can overcome the contradiction identified by S. Gardner by showing that Nietzsche's conception of the self is not "realistic", but precisely also fictional and dynamically positive at the same time. (shrink)

This article aims at understanding how "ethical public issues" are created, and dealt within a public arena. Here, we view ethical public issues as social constructs, which are the results of issue framing contests. Such an approach will enable us to understand how ethical public issues emerge and are shaped by strategizing actors (including firms, NGOs, the media, and governments), in an attempt to impose their own definition and preferred solution to the issue. We also propose key factors which explain (...) the success of a framing attempt, and evidence of such success. The empirical case of the labor conditions in West Africa's cocoa industry is used to illustrate this theoretical framework and methodological approach. (shrink)

¿Es posible que el arte progrese al mismo ritmo que la filosofía racional? ¿No existe algún tipo de incompatibilidad constitutiva entre ambos modos de interpretar la realidad, de manera tal que, siempre, la mayor precisión de la última implica una menor intensidad del primero? Tales preguntas constituyeron un vital eje de preocupación para los pensadores de la Ilustración francesa. En este artículo, nos concentramos en la respuesta que Denis Diderot intenta dar al dilema. Mostramos, en primer lugar, cómo el editor (...) de la Encyclopédie diferencia ambas áreas de la producción humana a la hora de trazar su historia: si bien es necesario destacar el progreso de la razón, lo es también el reconocer la decadencia de las artes como una de sus consecuencias. En segundo lugar, mostramos cómo, elaborado este diagnóstico, Diderot procura, a través de propuestas pictóricas, poetológicas y dramatúrgicas, salvar la potencia estética del arte para un siglo ilustrado. (shrink)

Dans le cadre d’une recherche-action conduite dans une cité populaire de l’agglomération de Dunkerque, un habitant très actif dans la vie du quartier, en réaction contre les démarches participatives souvent très artificielles, a écrit : « Ils veulent la parole des habitants. Venez dans les quartiers, vous l’aurez », « Viens, on discute. Le conseil citoyen, c’est ici qu’il se tient. Pas là-bas », « Ils veulent nous parler, alors qu’ils acceptent qu’on leur dise… ». Cet article restitue une expérience (...) de démocratie située, vécue au beau milieu du quartier, à l’initiative des habitant·es, une « démocratie éprouvée », à entendre dans la double acception du terme : à l’épreuve des situations (une « preuve » par l’expérience vécue) et à l’écoute des émotions. (shrink)

Ce livre apporte un nouvel eclairage sur ce qu'il conviendrait d'appeler les commencements de la phenomenologie en France et donc, plus particulierement, sur la ...

The contention of this paper is that the current ethical debate over embryonic stem cell research is polarised to an extent that is not warranted by the underlying ethical conflict. It is argued that the ethical debate can be rendered more nuanced, and less polarised, by introducing non-binary notions of moral rightness and wrongness. According to the view proposed, embryonic stem cell research—and possibly other controversial activities too—can be considered ‘a little bit right and a little bit wrong’. If this (...) idea were to become widely accepted, the ethical debate would, for conceptual reasons, become less polarised. (shrink)

Nicolas Pujol | : L’auteur montre, à partir d’une analyse critique de la catégorie de « sacré », que le modèle d’intégration de la spiritualité à l’hôpital proposé par Kenneth I. Pargament véhicule des normativités qui peuvent générer des tensions éthiques sur le plan de la clinique. Cet article rappelle qu’une catégorie comme celle de « spiritualité » doit demeurer un outil opérationnel qui participe à la connaissance du monde, et que, pour cela, elle doit sans cesse faire l’objet (...) de questions et d’évaluation de la part de ceux et celles qui l’utilisent. | : The author of the article proposes a critical analysis of the way in which Kenneth I. Pargament approaches the concept of “sacred” to define “spirituality” in the medical context. It shows how his definition of “spirituality” using the concept of “sacred” potentially creates ethical tensions in the hospital. “Spirituality” has to remain an “operational tool” and must always be examined before being used by care professionals. (shrink)

Synaesthesia is a heterogeneous phenomenon, even when considering one particular sub-type. The purpose of this study was to design a reliable and valid questionnaire for grapheme-colour synaesthesia that captures this heterogeneity. By the means of a large sample of 628 synaesthetes and a factor analysis, we created the Coloured Letters and Numbers questionnaire with 16 items loading on 4 different factors . These factors were externally validated with tests which are widely used in the field of synaesthesia research. The questionnaire (...) showed good test–retest reliability and construct validity . Our findings are discussed in the light of current theories and new ideas in synaesthesia research. More generally, the questionnaire is a useful tool which can be widely used in synaesthesia research to reveal the influence of individual differences on various performance measures and will be useful in generating new hypotheses. (shrink)

El presente artículo busca describir la crítica de F. H. Jacobi a la filosofía trascendental en torno al problema de la afección y la cosa en sí. Esta crítica atribuye al pensamiento de Kant un idealismo incompatible con toda noción de realismo. La interpretación de Jacobi, sin embargo, se apoya sobre un desconocimiento de la naturaleza metodológico-trascendental no solo de la terminología involucrada en el problema de la afección, sino de toda la reflexión kantiana acerca del conocimiento. El modelo exegético (...) de la two aspects view ha proporcionado instrumentos que nos permiten una reconstrucción hermenéutica del problema de la afección y ponen en evidencia el extravío metodológico en la crítica de Jacobi. (shrink)