According to the perceptual theory of emotions, emotions are perceptions of evaluative properties. The account has recently faced a barrage of criticism recently by critics who point out varies disanalogies between emotion and paradigmatic perceptual experiences. What many theorists fail to note however, is that many of the disanalogies that have been raised to exclude emotions from being perceptual states that represent evaluative properties have also been used to exclude high-level properties from appearing in the content of perception. This suggests (...) that emotions are perceptions of high level properties and perceptual theorists can marshal the arguments used by proponents of high-level perception to defend the perceptual theory. This paper therefore defends an account of emotion as high-level perception. (shrink)

According to the perceptual theory of emotion, emotions are evaluative perceptions. However, emotions involve us in a way that regular perception does not and this has led to two influential objections to the perceptual theory have emerged. According to the first objection, the perceptual theory is false because the phenomenology of emotion is the phenomenology of response. According to the second objection, the perceptual theory is false because emotions are susceptible to evaluations of rationality and reason-responsiveness. In this essay, I (...) defend the perceptual theory by disarming these two objections. In response to the first objection, I suggest that emotional phenomenology bears a striking resemblance to the phenomenology of touch. Both are non-transparent forms of experience whereby it is through our experience of being affected in a certain way that reveals to us some property of the world. I disarm the second objection by providing a developmental account as to how adult emotion acquires the features of rational and reason-responsive evaluability. In the process of childhood, we gain the ability to construe the world in certain ways and regulate our emotions in concert with the moral community, thus transforming emotions and bringing them into the space of normative evaluability. (shrink)

Contextualists and Subject Sensitive Invariantists often cite the knowledge norm of assertion as part of their argument. They claim that the knowledge norms in conjunction with our intuitions about when a subject is properly asserting in low or high stakes contexts provides strong evidence that what counts as knowledge depends on practical factors. In this paper, I present new data to suggest they are mistaken in the way they think about cases involving high and low stakes and I show how (...) insensitive invariantists can explain the data. I exploit recent work done on the distinction between flouting a norm and being blamed for that violation to formulate a rigorous theory of rational expected blameworthiness that allows insensitive invariantists to explain the data cited. (shrink)

Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy, and Freedom collects twenty-five of Hook's most incisive essays in political philosophy, written throughout his lengthy career. Clustered into five main sections, the essays discuss pragmatism and naturalism, Marx and Marxism, democratic theory, democratic practice, and the defense of a free society.

We commonly appeal to emotions to explain human behaviour: we seek comfort out of grief, we threaten someone in anger and we hide in fear. According to the standard Humean analysis, intentional action is always explained with reference to a belief-desire pair. According to recent consensus, however, emotions have independent motivating force apart from beliefs and desires, and supplant them when explaining emotional action. In this paper I provide a systematic framework for thinking about the motivational structure of emotion and (...) show how it is consistent with the Humean analysis. On this picture, emotions are not reducible to beliefs and desires, instead their primary motivational force comes from their role as modulators of desires—they control the strength of our occurrent desires. Emotions therefore motivate actions through the belief-desire system instead of overriding it. (shrink)

The New Transnational Activism shows how even the most prosaic activities can assume broader political meanings when they provide ordinary people with the experience of crossing transnational space. This means that we cannot be satisfied with defining transnational activists through the ways they think. The defining feature of transnationalism in this book is relational, and not cognitive. This emphasis on activism's relational structure means that even as they make transnational claims, transnational activists draw on the resources, the networks, and the (...) opportunities in which they are embedded, and only then - if at all - on more distant transnational links. But we can no more sharply draw a line between domestic and international politics in studying transnational activism than we could ignore local politics in studying its national equivalent. Understanding the processes that link the local, the national and the international is the major undertaking of the book. (shrink)

I seek to vindicate heteronomous shame: shame that one experiences in response to a judgment from another that one does not accept. I suggest that such experiences are instances of interpersonal shame. This is shame that involves a sensitivity to interpersonal ideals, whose instantiation depends partly on the attitudes of others. I defend the importance of such shame by showing how vulnerability to others is a constitutive part of rich interpersonal relationships. The account both casts light on and vindicates the (...) heteronomous shame that is pervasive among marginalised and oppressed groups. Such shame is not irrational but involves an accurate apprehension that misrecognition on the part of others has paralysed their ability to act and so degraded an important part of their identity. (shrink)

This book is a German-to-Chinese translation of 'Augustine', by Christoph Horn.

This book is a German-to-Mandarin translation of 'Luther, Calvin und die anderen – Die Reformation und ihre Folgen', by Armin Kohnle.

-/- CONCLUSION “The experience in California is clear. Affirmative action has helped to dismantle barriers such as "old boys' networks" that have excluded not only women and individuals of racial or ethnic minorities, but also white American men who did not belong to networks of privilege. Affirmative action has also worked to ensure that our schools, workplaces, and other social institutions fully use our diverse talents, thereby helping our government and social institutions to better serve their communities. -/- In short, (...) affirmative action has helped to bring out the best in us as a society. It challenges us to have the courage of our convictions that: (1) we do want a truly equal opportunity society; and (2) we believe that all Americans, including women and minorities, are competent individuals who have talents to contribute. Passing the CCRI would completely eliminate affirmative action, and thus have the same effect as "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." The "baby" —active and affirmative commitment to equal opportunity— is barely out of its infancy. We must not now abandon our commitment, just when we have taken our first steps towards creating a truly equal opportunity society.” -/- (This essay was written against the backdrop of legislative efforts in the mid 1990s, to overturn “affirmative action” policies at educational institutions, which had given more equal access to higher education for students from previously under-represented communities, particularly white women but also racialized communities. By mischaracterizing affirmative action programs as “gender or racial preferences”, opponents were able to pass the 1996 ballot measure, Proposition 209, the so-called “California Civil Rights Initiative” (CCRI). The ban on “preferences” gained the support of 54.6% of all California voters, including 58% of white women and 66% of white men voters. Use of language was key, as a slight majority of Americans approved of some affirmative actions but opposed racial preferences. The CCRI has had a huge toll on Latino and African American enrollment at UC Berkeley and UCLA, which has never recovered. State contracts for firms owned by women and minorities also dropped sharply. Similar initiatives failed in some states but succeeded elsewhere. See online Encyclopedia). (shrink)

Pedagogy of power, oppression and empowerment: a Western theoretical underpinnings -- A Chinese confucian articulation of power, oppression and empowerment -- A Chinese legalistic articulation of power, oppression and empowerment -- A Chinese taoistic articulation of power, oppression and empowerment -- A Chinese maohistic articulation of power, oppression and empowerment -- Conclusion: a dynamic and holistic Chinese cultural articulation of power, oppression and empowerment.

We create value for ourselves by making sacrifices. In Sacrifice and Value, Sidney Axinn presents the role of sacrifice in the work of many figures in the history of Philosophy. A novel feature is the attention given to Kant's use of sacrifice, and the way this changes the usual view of the Categorical Imperative, and Kant's concept of value.

In this paper, I provide a characterisation of a neglected form of humility: magnanimous humility. Unlike most contemporary analyses of humility, magnanimous humility is not about limitations but instead presupposes that one possesses some entitlement in a context. I suggest that magnanimous intellectual humility (IH) consists in a disposition to appropriately refrain from exercising one’s legitimate epistemic entitlements because one is appropriately motivated to pursue some epistemic good. I then shown that Magnanimous IH has an important role to play in (...) contexts of disagreement and oppression. It calls on knowing parties to refrain from pressing their epistemic entitlements to facilitate mutual understanding. And it is a virtue that oppressed persons have good reason to cultivate to develop meta-lucidity in themselves and others. (shrink)

Development projects in Sub-Saharan Africa propose to alleviate hunger in rural areas by introducing new agricultural practices and technologies, yet there is limited empirical evidence of how an agricultural intervention can lead farming households to transition to food security. Research on food security pathways considers agricultural interventions that increase farmers’ income to be particularly effective for reducing food insecurity. Consistent with this stance, Malawian agricultural policy aims to address hunger by encouraging smallholder farmers to intensify and commercialize maize production. This (...) paper explores if smallholders’ market and livelihood orientations do indeed lead them to favor an income pathway to food security. Qualitative analysis of 60 smallholder farmer interviews in Malawi found that, upon achieving improvements in production yields and diversity, rather than commercialize, many farmers re-organized their production and consumption to reduce market dependency. Farmers deployed this strategy to increase their food security, explaining that the choice to self-provision food and farming inputs was both an expression of farming identity and a lived understanding of their marginal position in commodity markets. The author finds that, in failing to consider how production relations affect food access, scholarship inadequately theorizes farm-level food security transitions and reproduces discursive framings of hunger. Food sovereignty narratives more accurately captured what mattered for Malawian smallholders’ food security, suggesting that engagement with this concept could improve scientific understandings of food security transitions. (shrink)

The theme of this paper is that people in Northeast Brazil refuse to let a good person who helped them during his (or her) lifetime die. They do this through several of the religious traditions practiced in the region. Beings, human and other, now in another plane of reality established in modern thinking, cross the conceptual divide and return through mediums or other intermediaries to heal the living. We examine two religious traditions, “folk” or “popular” Catholicism and Kardecist‐Spiritism, focusing on (...) the spirit of Argeu Hebster, a medical doctor who lived in the municipality of Marangaupe in the state of Ceará until his death in 1977. The return of the doctor is told in stories told to the authors while doing ethnography that provide the data used in analyzing the enchanted worlds of the two religions. (shrink)

Philosophy and human conduct.--Moral freedom in a determined world.--The ethical theory of John Dewey.--The new failure of nerve.--Religion and the intellectuals.--An open letter to Sidney Hook: a defense of religious faith, by E. van den Haag.--Modern knowledge and the concept of God.--Two types of existentialist religion and ethics.--The quest for "being."--Naturalism and first principles.--Nature and the human spirit.--Scientific knowledge and philosophical "knowledge."--Materialism and idealism.--Are religious dogmas cognitive?

Health care reform that includes universal coverage could lower a major barrier to care for people of color and ethnic minorities—the inability to pay for care. But universal coverage alone, even with comparable fee-for-service payment or appropriately risk-adjusted capitated reimbursement, will not eradicate the racial and ethnic inequities in health care delivery. Restrictive admissions practices, geographic inaccessibility, culture, racial stereotypes, and the failure to employ minority health care professionals will still create barriers to minority health care. In addition to universal (...) financing, health care reform should include new civil rights legislation to address and reduce these noneconomic barriers to minority health care. (shrink)

Shun argues that the distinction made between emotions experienced from the first-person perspective and those from the third-person perspective does not capture our everyday emotional experience. My proposal is that even if we accept this claim, first- and third-person perspective taking is still crucial in the development of our emotional psychology. This is so in two respects. First, the features of intimacy and impartiality that mark adult emotional response are a product of a developmental process that involves perspective taking. Second, (...) perspective taking is a crucial part of refining and developing virtuous emotional responses. (shrink)

Plato, as a poet, employs muthos extensively to express his philosophical dialectical development, so the majority of his dialogues are comprised of muthoi. We cannot separate his muthos from his philosophical thought, since the former has great influence in the latter. So the methodology of this paper is first to discuss the dialogue "Theaetetus" to find out why he compares Socrates to the Greek goddess Artemis; then his concept of Maieutikē will be investigated. At the beginning of Plato’s "Theaetetus", Socrates (...) first likens himself to the goddess Artemis, who, though unmarried, has a duty to assist women in labour. Socrates’ role, as Plato portrays, is the same as that of Artemis; and the technē he possesses is Maieutikē, which is to assist his students in giving birth to their mental offspring. This paper will focus on discussion on the Socratic mythological role in Platonic interpretation and dialectics so as to reveal the philosophical meaning of Socratic ignorance. (shrink)

This study examined the time-course of context effects on spoken word recognition during Chinese sentence processing. We recruited 60 native Mandarin listeners to participate in an eye-tracking experiment. In this eye-tracking experiment, listeners were told to listen to a sentence carefully, which ended with a Chinese homophone, and look at different visual probes presented concurrently on the computer screen naturally. Different types of context and probe types were manipulated in the experiment. The results showed that preceding sentence context had an (...) early effect on spoken word recognition processes and phonological information of the distracters had only a negligible effect on the spoken word recognition processes. Finally, the patterns of eye-tracking results seemed to favor an interactive approach in spoken word recognition. (shrink)

Recent events demonstrated to the world a growing sense of interconnection and interdependence that will call for universal values and ethical behaviors on the part of journalists. In this article I look at journalism, likening this profession of inquiry to that of scientists, and I look at journalism ethics as a body of knowledge before identifying universal characteristics and suggesting that because of the many universal values that bond humans at whatever location, journalists should be able to agree on common (...) ethical principles. (shrink)

This book is an English-to-Chinese translation of 'Origen Against Plato', by Mark Julian Edwards.