Based on the life history theory and broadening construction theory, the study aimed to investigate the influence of Machiavellianism on the learning-related subjective well-being and the underlying mechanism, 582 Chinese senior high school students including 289 girls and 310 boys were recruited to participate in this study, and they anonymously filled out questionnaires regarding Machiavellianism, learning-related subjective well-being, gratitude, and subjective family economic level. The results showed that: a higher level of Machiavellianism was associated with a lower level of learning-related (...) subjective well-being; gratitude partially mediated the relationship between Machiavellianism and learning-related subjective well-being; subjective family economic level moderated the links between Machiavellianism and learning-related subjective well-being, and between gratitude and learning-related subjective well-being. This study explained how and when Machiavellianism affected Chinese senior high school students’ learning-related subjective well-being and provided a deeper understanding of the relationship between Machiavellianism and learning-related subjective well-being. (shrink)

Why. I. Am. Not. a. Christian. This lecture was delivered on March 6,1927, at Battersea Town Hall under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society. AS YOUR Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am ...

From some years now, the social sciences have been highlighting the existence of a type of goods that are neither material things, nor ideas, nor functional performances but consist, instead, of social relations and, for this reason, are called relational goods. This contribution proposes to clarify this concept from the viewpoint of relational sociology, which avoids both methodological individualism and holism. Subsequently, it argues that such goods can be produced only by specific social subjects, which the Author calls (...) ‘relational subjects’. Relying upon many theoretical and empirical researches, the paper explains in which sense and in which way relational subjects, and the goods they generate, can contribute to making civil society more robust: that is, no longer the typically capitalist society of the market, but an ‘associational’ society able to sustain a mature democracy. (shrink)

포스트휴머니즘은 인간의 위상과 의미에 대해 새롭게 고찰하면서 전통적 휴머니즘에서의 인간관과는 전적으로 구별되는 현대의 기술시대에 적합한 새로운 포스트휴먼 개념을 정립하고자 한다. 기존의 휴머니즘에 대해 비판적인 태도를 취하면서 포스트휴먼의 존재의미를 인간과 비인간과의 혼합적 관계 속에서 찾고자 하는 브라이도티의 포스트휴머니즘 이론은 인간과 세계와의 관계 속에서 인간의 의미를 새롭게 정립하고자 한다는 점에서 현상학적 관점에서 의미를 지닌다. 현상학은 주체와 세계와의 긴밀한 관계성에 기반해 이 세계의 의미를 밝히고자 한다는 점에서 브라이도티의 이론과 그 구조와 형식면에서 공통성을 보이며, 브라이도티 이론과의 긴밀한 연관성을 드러낸다. 특히 후설의 모나드공동체 이론은 모나드 (...) 개념을 통해 모든 존재 간의 긴밀한 연관성과 공동체성을 다양한 각도에서 드러내고 있다는 점에서 브라이도티 이론과의 근접성을 드러냄과 동시에, 그녀의 이론을 방법론적으로 보완하면서 이를 보다 구체화하고 심화, 확장시킬 수 있는 하나의 발판으로 해석할 수 있다. 이러한 점에서 후설과 브라이도티는 방법론적 관점과 태도의 면에서 공감대를 지니며 향후 생산적인 논의를 위한 공통의 토대를 공유할 수 있다. (shrink)

Arguing that religion is both false and harmful, Russell asserts the prerogative of the scientific intelligence over dogma, faith and custom. The editor has written and appended an account of how Russell was excluded from teaching at the City College of New York.--C. L.

The paper is devoted to the development of Emmanuel Lévinas’ philosophy of the subject as expounded in his Autrement qu’être ou au-délà de l’essence. Levinas claims that the subject is good but emerges from a formless substrate; for this reason it belongs to something which can described as anonymous, dark, ignorant, sensual — the otherness. An attempt to define the structure of the subject as an abstract entity is only possible in virtue of the fact that its form has been (...) separated from something that is difficult not only to describe but also to understand, even by intuition. In this sense one may say that the subject discovers itself as the Other. The subject discovers its own belonging to the Otherness which precedes the process of becoming its own. Finally, the subject knows that the only way to be Itself is to take responsibility for the otherness through which it establishes its subjectivity as such. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 3, June 2019, Page 3-18.

Recent research in the educational context has focused not only on academic achievement but also on subjective well-being (SWB) as both play a major role in students’ lives. Whereas the determinants of academic achievement have been extensively investigated, little research has been conducted on school-related determinants of SWB in comparison with other students’ characteristics. In the present cross-sectional study, we set out to investigate whether perceived school climate predicts school grades and SWB above and beyond other variables that are important (...) for SWB and academic achievement. A sample of 767 8th and 9th grade students (n = 361 female adolescents; age: M = 14.07 years, SD = 0.92) completed measures of SWB, perceived school climate, test anxiety, self-efficacy, and interest. Grade point average (GPA) indicated students’ academic achievement. Data were analyzed with latent structural equation models in which GPA and SWB were regressed on the school climate variables and students’ characteristics. Results indicated that a positive school climate as well as self-efficacy and the worry component of test anxiety predicted SWB and/or GPA after all other variables were controlled for. Directions for future research and the importance of school climate variables on adolescents’ SWB and academic achievement are discussed. (shrink)

Amid the wide variety of interpretations of quantum mechanics, the notion of a fully coherent ontological interpretation has seen a promising evolution over the last few decades. Despite this progress, however, the old dualistic categorical constraints of subjectivity and objectivity, correlate with the metrically restricted definition of local and global, have remained largely in place – a reflection of the broader, persistent inheritance of these comfortable strictures throughout the evolution of modern science. If one traces this inheritance back to (...) its ancient roots in Plato and Aristotle, it is clear that the coherence, scientific utility, and historical durability of the various natural philosophies that followed have been directly proportional to their commitment, tacit or explicit, to object-oriented realism. As Simondon might put it, it is a commitment to the primacy of individuated substance over the process of individuation. For Whitehead, it is the misplaced assimilation of becoming to being, of potentiality to actuality. Quantum mechanics has challenged this commitment with a combined breadth and depth of force that far exceeds any other theory in the history of science. The theory’s objectively demonstrable empirical application is manifest only by way of a fundamentally subjective, context-dependent mechanism of measurement. More compelling still, actual system states are always actualizations of locally contextualized yet globally conditioned potential system states, such that “globally objective” reality is no longer merely the object of local measurement, but also its product. Thus, any coherent, ontological interpretation of quantum theory must include a conceptual framework by which objectivity and subjectivity, actuality and potentiality, global and local, being and becoming, individuated fact and process of individuation, are no longer understood as merely epistemic, mutually exclusive category pairs descriptive of an already extant, closed reality – but rather as mutually implicative ontological categories explicative of an ontogenetic, open reality-in-process. (shrink)

One of the most poorly understood features of consciousness is the relation between an experience and the subject of the experience. In this paper, I develop an ontology of consciousness on which experiences are events constituted by substances having properties at times. I use this to explain the relation between a subject and her experience.

The present study is the first to measure event-related potentials associated with the processing of the emotional Stroop task (EST) with the use of an orthogonal factorial manipulation for emotional valence, arousal, and subjective significance (the importance of the current experience for goals and plans for the future). The current study aimed to investigate concurrently the role of the three dimensions describing the emotion-laden words for interference control measured in the classical version of the EST paradigm. The results showed that (...) reaction times were affected by the emotional valence of presented words and the interactive effect of valence and arousal. The expected emotional arousal effect was only found in behavioral results for neutrally valenced words. Electrophysiological results showed valence and subjective significance correlated with the amplitude differences in the P2 component. Moreover, the amplitude of the N450 component varied with the level of subjective significance. This study also demonstrated that exploratory event-related potential analysis provides additional information beyond the classical component-based analysis. The obtained results show that cognitive control effects in the EST may be altered by manipulation in the subjective significance dimension. (shrink)

In the field of psychology, it has been well established that there are two types of motor imagery such as kinesthetic motor imagery (KMI) and visual motor imagery (VMI), and the subjective evaluation for vividness of motor imagery each differs across individuals. This study aimed to examine how the motor imagery ability assessed by the psychological scores is associated with the physiological measure using electroencephalogram (EEG) sensorimotor rhythm during KMI task. First, 20 healthy young individuals evaluated subjectively how vividly they (...) can perform each of KMI and VMI by using the Kinesthetic and Visual Imagery Questionnaire (KVIQ). We assessed their motor imagery abilities by summing each of KMI and VMI scores in KVIQ (KMI total and VMI total ). Second, in physiological experiments, they repeated two strengths (10 and 40% of maximal effort) of isometric voluntary wrist-dorsiflexion. Right after each contraction, they also performed its KMI. The scalp EEGs over the sensorimotor cortex were recorded during the tasks. The EEG power is known to decrease in the alpha-and-beta band (7–35 Hz) from resting state to performing state of voluntary contraction (VC) or motor imagery. This phenomenon is referred to as event-related desynchronization (ERD). For each strength of the tasks, we calculated the maximal peak of ERD during VC, and that during its KMI, and measured the degree of similarity (ERD sim ) between them. The results showed significant negative correlations between KMI total and ERD sim for both strengths ( p total, the smaller the ERD sim ). These findings suggest that in healthy individuals with higher motor imagery ability from a first-person perspective, KMI efficiently engages the shared cortical circuits corresponding with motor execution, including the sensorimotor cortex, with high compliance. (shrink)

Critical social theory has long been marked by a deep, creative, and productive relationship with psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud and Fromm were important cornerstones for the early Frankfurt School, recent thinkers have drawn on the object-relations school of psychoanalysis. Transitional Subjects is the first book-length collection devoted to the engagement of critical theory with the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and other members of this school. Featuring contributions from some of the leading figures working in both of these fields, including (...) Axel Honneth, Joel Whitebook, Noëlle McAfee, Sara Beardsworth, and C. Fred Alford, it provides a synoptic overview of current research at the intersection of these two theoretical traditions while also opening up space for further innovations. Transitional Subjects offers a range of perspectives on the critical potential of object-relations psychoanalysis, including feminist and Marxist views, to offer valuable insight into such fraught social issues as aggression, narcissism, “progress,” and torture. The productive dialogue that emerges augments our understanding of the self as intersubjectively and socially constituted and of contemporary “social pathologies.” Transitional Subjects shows how critical theory and object-relations psychoanalysis, considered together, have not only enriched critical theory but also invigorated psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Responding to the Special Issue's call for “new thinking” on gender and governance in developing societies, we introduce our research on the social organization of development knowledge and its ethical implications. Our feminist‐based approach, institutional ethnography, analyses the ruling relations of development and the standpoints represented in knowledge about development and its governance. Our paper offers an alternative to what we see as “the institutional standpoint” prevailing, but taken for granted, in business and society scholarship addressing development. Instead of theorizing (...) development relationships between institutions and their “stakeholders,” we illustrate what can be learned about the social relations of development beginning from the experiences of local subjects. Our analysis of an environmental research and development project in Uzbekistan shows that being missed is knowledge about development subjects that could have revealed what is locally relevant and needed. Instead, we discover gender inequality being constituted, unknowingly, within this project's institutionally generated knowledge and the activities it authorizes. (shrink)

In order to explore the relationship of social support, self-efficacy, and subjective well-being of special education teachers in China, 496 teachers from 67 special education schools were surveyed by questionnaire. We found that (1) the subjective well-being of special education teachers in China was in the medial level. (2) There were significant differences in subjective well-being level among teachers of different genders, teacher position, education background, and teaching age. Male teachers were of higher subjective well-being; subjective well-being of head teachers (...) was lower than those were not head teachers; teachers with the educational background of postgraduate were of higher relaxation and tension than those with junior college educational background; the control scores of emotion and behavior of teachers with teaching age of 3 years and below were significantly lower than those of teachers with teaching age of more than 10 years. (3) Self-efficacy played a partially mediating role in the relationship between social support and subjective well-being of special education teachers. Suggestions to improve the subjective well-being of special education teachers were discussed in the article. (shrink)

Although it is well accepted that working memory is intimately related to consciousness, little research has illuminated the liaison between the two phenomena. To investigate this under-explored nexus, we used an imagery monitoring task to investigate the subjective aspects of WM performance. Specifically, in two experiments, we examined the effects on consciousness of holding in mind information having a low versus high memory load, and holding memoranda in mind during the presentation of distractors . Higher rates of rehearsal occurred in (...) the high load and distractor conditions than in comparable control conditions. Examination of the temporal properties of the rehearsal-based imagery revealed that, across subjects, imagery events occurred evenly throughout the delay. We hope that future variants of this new imagery monitoring task will reveal additional insights about WM, consciousness, and action control. (shrink)

This essay examines three tendencies nurtured in the practices of reproductive technology – tendencies with profoundly disturbing implications for us as individuals and as social beings. They are: 1) the increasing subjectification of the fetus (that is, the increasing tendency to posit a fetal subject), 2) the increasing objectification of the gestating woman, leading to her representation as interchangeable object rather than unique subject, and 3) the increasing tendency to conceive of the fetus and the mother as social, medical, and (...) legal antagonists. Considering the construction of fetus, mother, and the fetal/maternal relation in earlier (Western) historical periods, a contemporary work of literature, a government report, and the popular press, I argue that as the fetus is increasingly being understood as a subject, the mother is increasingly being reduced to an antagonist, an obstacle to fetal health, and an object. The essay concludes by offering some tentative conclusions about the general process of fetal subjectification in the United States and Europe. (shrink)

In this volume, Karl Ameriks explores 'Kantian subjects' in three senses. In Part I, he first clarifies the most distinctive features-such as freedom and autonomy-of Kant's notion of what it is for us to be a subject. Other chapters then consider related 'subjects' that are basic topics in other parts of Kant's philosophy, such as his notions of necessity and history. Part II examines the ways in which many of us, as 'late modern,' have been highly influenced by Kant's philosophy (...) and its indirect effect on our self-conception through successive generations of post-Kantians, such as Hegel and Schelling, and early Romantic writers such as Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis, thus making us 'Kantian subjects' in a new historical sense. By defending the fundamentals of Kant's ethics in reaction to some of the latest scholarship in the opening chapters, Ameriks offers an extensive argument that Hölderlin expresses a valuable philosophical position that is much closer to Kant than has generally been recognized. He also argues that it was necessary for Kant's position to be supplemented by the new conception, introduced by the post-Kantians, of philosophy as fundamentally historical, and that this conception has had a growing influence on the most interesting strands of Anglophone as well as Continental philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

Introduction: contemporary conditions and diagrammatic trajectory -- From joy to the gap: the accessing of the infinite by the finite (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson) -- The care of the self versus the ethics of desire: two diagrams of the production of subjectivity (and of the subject's relation to truth) (Foucault versus Lacan) -- The aesthetic paradigm: from the folding of the finite-infinite relation to schizoanalytic metamodelisation (to biopolitics) (Guattari) -- The strange temporality of the subject: life in-between the infinite and (...) the finite (Deleuze contra Badiou) -- Desiring-machines, chaoids, probeheads: towards a speculative production of subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari) -- Conclusion: composite diagram and relations of adjacency. (shrink)

Taking seriously Linda Martín Alcoff's suggestion that we reevaluate the extent to which poststructuralist articulations of the subject are truly socially constituted, as well as the centrality of Latina identity to her own account of such constitution, I argue that the discussion Alcoff and other Latina feminists offer of the experience of being Latina in North America is illustrative of the extent to which the relational and globally situated constitution of subjects needs further development in many social-constructionist accounts of (...) selfhood. I argue, however—contra Alcoff—that Michel Foucault's mode of investigating subjectivation, particularly as it is articulated in his later work, has room for just such an account, especially when it is supplemented by postcolonial theory. With this end in mind, I take as a case study the public discourse surrounding Sonia Sotomayor prior to her confirmation as the first Latina woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court, suggesting that an analysis of this discourse (including its position within and contribution to wider discourses of ethnicity, race, gender, and class) shows why the accounts of relational subject-constitution offered by both Foucault and Alcoff are indispensable. (shrink)

This version of this paper has been superseded by a substantially revised version in G. Strawson, Real Materialism and Other Essays (OUP 2008) I take 'content' in a natural internalist way to refer to occurrent mental content. I introduce a 'thin' or ‘live’ notion of the subject according to which a subject of experience cannot exist unless there is an experience for it to be the subject of. I then argue, first, that in the case of a particular experience E, (...) its content C, and its (thin) subject S, [C ↔ E ↔ S]; and, second, that the metaphysical fact that underlies this (strong modal) equivalence is in fact identity: [E = S = C]. I suggest that the effort of thought required to grasp this is deeply revealing of the nature of reality. On the way I raise a doubt about the viability of the traditional object/property distinction. -/- . (shrink)

In this study, we extended a model of the relations among ADHD symptoms, anxiety, and academic performance. Undergraduates (N = 515) completed self-report measures of anxiety (i.e. trait, test, math, and literacy) and ADHD symptoms. During the study, they completed math and literacy measures and reported their current (i.e. state) anxiety three times. There were significant correlations among ADHD symptoms and all measures of anxiety. However, neither ADHD symptoms nor trait anxiety were correlated with math or literacy performance. Test-anxious students (...) reported increasing state anxiety as the study progressed. In contrast, math-anxious students reported increased state anxiety following the math tasks but not the literacy tasks and literacy-anxious students reported increased state anxiety following the literacy tasks but not the math tasks. With respect to performance, math-anxious students had worse math performance and literacy-anxious students had worse literacy performance whereas test anxiety was not directly related to performance on either math or literacy tasks. Patterns of relations did not differ for men and women, but, except for literacy anxiety, women reported higher levels of all types of anxiety. These results could help educators understand how affective responses are related to university students’ academic performance. (shrink)

Of late, probability subjectivism was resuscitated by the development of statistical decision theory. In the decision model, which is briefly described in the paper, the knowledge of a probability distribution over the states of nature plays a decisive role. What sources of probability knowledge are legitimate, or at all possible, is the main point at issue. Different definitions, evaluations, and foundations of probability are narrated, discussed, and weighed against each other. The typical research strategy of the statistician is set against (...) axiomatics of subjective or mathematical probability. Finally, the epistemological roots of the probability concept are located by the author in what he calls the “etiality principle”. (shrink)

The present study explores the underlying mechanism of the relationship between college students’ social anxiety and mobile phone addiction. Adopting college students’ social anxiety scale, regulatory emotional self-efficacy scale, subjective well-being scale and mobile phone addiction scale, this research tested valid samples of 680 Chinese college students. The results indicated that social anxiety exerted a significant and positive impact on mobile phone addiction. Regulatory emotional self-efficacy played a partial mediating role between social anxiety and mobile phone addiction. Subjective well-being also (...) played a partial mediating role between social anxiety and mobile phone addiction. Moreover, both regulatory emotional self-efficacy and subjective well-being were found to play a chain mediating role between social anxiety and mobile phone addiction. The study provides valuable insights into the impact of college students’ social anxiety on mobile phone addiction. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to provide a relational explanation of the sources of moral normativity, within a Neo-Kantian framework. To this purpose, the key notions employed are those of we-society and stance-taking, developed by Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert. Specifically, by resorting to such notions, the paper attempts to overcome two limits ascribed to the theory of moral normativity of Ch. Korsgaard: namely W. Smith’s objection of solipsism and S. Crowell’s problem of non-deliberate action, whereby Ch. Korsgaard’s identification (...) of the source of normativity in reflection would lead her theory to a form of solipsism and to failing to explain actions based on so-called ‘mindless coping’. In tackling these objections, the paper outlines a Rickertian inspired theory, according to which the sources of moral normativity can be explained on the basis of the heterological I-You relationship, which is the foundation of the we-society intended as a set of values, patterns of expectations, tacit consents, and procedural knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper we propose the notion of “subjective reference” as a conceptual tool that explains how and why human-robot sexual interactions could reframe users approach to human-human sexual interactions. First, we introduce the current debate about Sexual Robotics, situated in the wider discussion about Social Robots, stating the urgency of a regulative framework. We underline the importance of a social-relational approach, mostly concerned about Social Robots impact in human social structures. Then, we point out the absence of a (...) precise framework conceptualizing why Social Robots, and Sexual Robots in particular, may modify users’ sociality and relationality. Within a psychological framework, we propose to consider Sexual Robots as “subjective references”, namely objects symbolically referring to human subjects: we claim that, for the user experience, every action performed upon a Sexual Robot is symbolically directed toward a human subject, including degrading and violent practices. This shifting mechanism may transfer the user relational setting from human-robot interactions to human-human interactions. (shrink)