ABSTRACTThe recognition of emotional facial expressions is often subject to contextual influence, particularly when the face and the context convey similar emotions. We investigated whether spontaneous, incidental affective theory of mind inferences made while reading vignettes describing social situations would produce context effects on the identification of same-valenced emotions as well as differently-valenced emotions conveyed by subsequently presented faces. Crucially, we found an effect of context on reaction times in both experiments while, in line with previous work, we found evidence (...) for a context effect on accuracy only in Experiment 1. This demonstrates that affective theory of mind inferences made at the pragmatic level of a text can automatically, contextually influence the perceptual processing of emotional facial expressions in a separate task even when those emotions are of a distinctive valence. Thus, our novel findings suggest that language acts as a contex... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 33.1 (2003) 60-79 [Access article in PDF] The Secret Power of Suggestion Scipio Sighele and the Postliberal Subject Suzanne R. Stewart-Steinberg He experiments one by one with about thirty young men. [...] Almost all of them respond immediately to his power of fascination by turning stiff throughout their bodies; their faces become contracted, terrified, sometimes cadaverous; they are at the mercy of the fascinator and follow (...) his movements like a magnet. [...] There is something pitiful, spasmodic in their features, something macabre in their gestures. [...] Donato has them all in his power, he attracts them in threes, in sixes, ten at a time, simply by rapidly staring into their eyes, even against their firm will and their obstinate efforts to resist his suggestion. [...] Donato, in the process, never speaks: he thinks, he wants and points. [...] —an eyewitness account, L'Italia (1886) Young male bodies that turn stiff despite their efforts to do otherwise—such were the events to be seen on the stage of the Teatro Scribe in Turin in 1886, events performed under the direction of "Donato" (the Belgian-born Alfred d'Hont), the new theatrical magnetizer of crowds. Enrico Morselli, one of Italy's leading psychiatrists of the period,1 assisted and himself succumbed to the fascination of Donato. In his important 1886 study on animal magnetism and hypnotic states, Morelli provided a rather positive portrait of the man. Donato, in his opinion, was not a vulgar man. First soldier, then state employee, journalist, novelist, poet, and finally student and apostle of animal magnetism, Donato had revolutionized hypnotic practice through his discovery of a phenomenon called "fascination." Donato was blessed with uncommon physical strength, quick and insistent eyes, a great agility of movement and much spirit. He had exchanged the magician's cap for the more sober tuxedo—quite appropriately, for he [End Page 60]rejects fluids, rejects the power and transmission of will; nor does he trade in somnambulist lucidity, in sight without eyes, in divination. He does not claim to have special secrets or gifts. Instead he claims that it is his quick and insistent "gaze" that produces a rapid and sudden shock to the nervous system of sensitive individuals. Where there is no "orgasm," he told me—but more accurately he should have said "predisposition"—his method does not work. [Morselli, Il magnetismo animale 281] What was then so revolutionary about Donato's method? Why were the spectacles at the Teatro Scribe perceived to be so radically new? And above all, why, as Morselli claims, did these shows come close to producing a political crisis right at the center of Europe [Magnetismo 271]?James Braid's discovery in 1842 that hypnotic sleep could be induced by the simple fixation on a luminous object had revolutionized magnetic theory and practice. Braid's was to prove an important discovery, for it made possible the shift from the putative supernatural powers of the hypnotist—based on the theory of the transmission of magnetic fluids or electric currents—to an analysis of characteristics thought to inhere in the hypnotized subject him- or herself. The real cause of hypnosis, its very effectivity, was to be found, as Morselli remarks, not in the magnetizer but in his subject [Magnetismo 32]. A rethinking, within the late-nineteenth-century literature on hypnotism, of what drives the subject, of what makes him act appears predicated then on a very peculiar form of interiority, of self-causation within the subject himself. At the end of its historical trajectory this rethinking would first result in the idea of auto-hypnosis or auto-suggestion, and then, by the beginning of the new century, it would found the psychoanalytic subject, traversed as he is by conflicting desires and topographically split between ego and superego. In both instances, however, obedience is exacted as a result of an internalized command and—and here lies the peculiarity and utter novelty of this subject—for that reason the subject ceases to be master of his own house.In the remarks that follow, I will leave aside Freud's own contributions... (shrink)

Gratitude has been promoted as a beneficial emotional experience. However, gratitude is not universally experienced as positive. The current work examines whether an autonomous interpersonal style is associated with differential experience of gratitude. Study 1 found an inverse relationship between trait autonomy and both trait gratitude and positivity of response to receiving a hypothetical benefit from a friend. Study 2 replicated the finding that those higher in autonomy report less trait gratitude, and also demonstrated an inverse relationship between autonomy and (...) valuing gratitude. Study 3 found that those higher in autonomy had more self-image goals and reduced compassionate goals in relationships, and that valuing gratitude mediated the relationship between autonomy and relationship goals. These results show a consistent inverse relationship between autonomy and the experience and valuing of gratitude, suggesting that degree of autonomy is one determinant of whether gratitude is experienced as positive. (shrink)

A wider social stage -- Girls will be boys : gender, envy, and the Freudian social contract -- Anna-Antigone : experiments in group upbringing -- The defense of psychoanalysis/the anxiety of politics -- Conclusion : ego politics.

Research involving and impacting Indigenous Peoples is often of little or no benefit to the communities involved and, in many cases, causes harm. Ensuring that Indigenous research is not only ethical but also of benefit to the communities involved is a long-standing problem that requires fundamental changes in higher education. To address this necessity for change, the authors of this paper, with the help of graduate and Indigenous community research assistants, undertook community consultation across their university to identify the local (...) and national ethical needs of Indigenous researchers, communities, and Elders. This paper provides an overview of the consultation process, the themes that emerged from the consultations, and a model of the Wholistic Indigenous Research Framework that emerged. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.2 (2002) 194-196 [Access article in PDF] The Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir by Suzanne Antonetta. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001. Pp. 242. Hardback $26; paper $15.00. ISBN 1-5824-3209-0. Memoirs rely on the power of recollection to reproduce the inward texture of experience. Autobiographies cast their authors as historians of the self, combing through documents and old letters, checking facts. In her first prose work, (...) the accomplished poet Suzanne Antonetta crosses the boundary between memoir and autobiography. Interweaving the rough textures of memory with slick surfaces of corporate data, she gives us a lyric meditation on the struggle to become undeceived. Recounting both the facts of corporate malfeasance and our fantastic capacity to filter our reality, she captures the relation between failures of understanding and failures of responsibility. She shows us how difficult it is to accept an unofficial truth. The Body Toxic is a thoughtful and obsessively readable contribution to environmental ethics.Antonetta tells us of childhood exposure to toxic wastes in a penurious and neglected corner of Barnegat Bay. She writes in retrospect, with painfully acquired knowledge of cancer clusters and disease-ridden families. [End Page 194] Her own body's malformed reproductive organs, riddled with tumors, prove spectacularly and tragically infertile when quadruplets spontaneously abort. Sharp backward glances at childhood pleasures; crabbing, berrying, and running through the sweet-smelling spray of DDT, twist us around. Children of the 1960s trail through pesticide as if the weekly truck brought some poisonous ice cream. The mosquitoes thrived: what happened to the children? We revisit these scenes obliquely. Denzer-Schaefer empties its effluent into the bay, cost-efficient Ciba-Geigy rids their chemical wastes through a pipe running straight into the woods, the local farm has become an illegal toxic dump for an unscrupulous contractor. Fire at a nearby nuclear weapons silo has hapless firemen spraying radioactive water into the air. The government responds: they build a chain link fence around the site. A nuclear power plant of the 'old-school' emanates levels of radioactivity to rival Chernobyl. The plant managers assiduously cover it up. This is not some national catalogue of Superfund sites: all take place within a dozen or so miles of a childhood summer house in New Jersey. These shards of a case study are scattered throughout Antonetta's non-linear narrative, piecing together experience, cause and effect.But this work is more ethically and artistically ambitious than the artificial clarity of case studies. Powerfully, Antonetta shows us the inner tangle of toxic mental life: the depression, listlessness, confusion, and self-medication of barely cognized symptoms. Self-clouding toxicity affects both the body and the mind. She fears that she and other family members are not right in the head. How far can she trust herself, and how far can she trace the causes? Is it heredity? Is it toxicity? Has toxic exposure potentiated some family trait? She reads out strings of hazardous chemicals like a rosary, overdetermining all of her symptoms. The distance between cause and effect shields the guilty. Strong toxicity undermines the ability of its victims to understand and act. The Body Toxic is part case study, part phenomenology of altered consciousness, and all too human. A course in environmental ethics could make imaginative use of its insights into a wide range of anthropocentric concerns. Antonetta considers questions of environmental justice, religious beliefs about the natural order, environmental responsibility and property rights, nuclear risk, and cost-benefit analysis in multi-dimensional form, an entry point for philosophical reflection. The Body Toxic is stimulating, controversial, and beautifully written.Many great works of literature signal their ethical intent by fostering a sense of identification with their subjects or protagonists. Antonetta's deft [End Page 195] blunt portraiture expands our moral sensibility by showing us how to be concerned for people with whom we are not meant to identify. The story begins before the beginning, with Antonetta's immigrant family. They are strangely familiar and not entirely sympathetic people, isolated between first generation immigrant cultures and fantasies of prosperous America, clinging to islands of... (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to delimit what can and cannot be claimed on behalf of second-order logic. The starting point is some of the discussions surrounding my Foundations without Foundationalism: A Case for Secondorder Logic.

Merging of opinions results underwrite Bayesian rejoinders to complaints about the subjective nature of personal probability. Such results establish that sufficiently similar priors achieve consensus in the long run when fed the same increasing stream of evidence. Initial subjectivity, the line goes, is of mere transient significance, giving way to intersubjective agreement eventually. Here, we establish a merging result for sets of probability measures that are updated by Jeffrey conditioning. This generalizes a number of different merging results in the literature. (...) We also show that such sets converge to a shared, maximally informed opinion. Convergence to a maximally informed opinion is a (weak) Jeffrey conditioning analogue of Bayesian “convergence to the truth” for conditional probabilities. Finally, we demonstrate the philosophical significance of our study by detailing applications to the topics of dynamic coherence, imprecise probabilities, and probabilistic opinion pooling. (shrink)

The questions raised by Māori identity are not static, but complex and changing over time. The ethnicity known as “Māori” came into existence in colonial New Zealand as a new, pan-tribal identity concept, in response to the trauma of invasion and dispossession by large numbers of mainly British settlers. Ideas of Māori identity have changed over the course of succeeding generations in response to wider social and economic changes. While inter-ethnic marriages and other sexual liaisons have been common throughout the (...) Māori-Pākehā relationship, the nature of such unions, and the identity choices available to their descendants, have varied according to era and social locus. In colonial families, the memory of a Māori ancestor was often deliberately suppressed, and children were encouraged to deny that part of their history and “become” European New Zealanders: a classic form of what we call “trans-ethnicity.” From a Māori perspective, the relationship with Pākehā has been marked by a series of losses: loss of land, language, social cohesion, even loss of knowledge of whakapapa. This article explores this last form of loss, which leads to “suppressed” Māori identities, and possible effects of attempting to recover such lost Māori identity rights. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Enaction as a Lived Experience: Towards a Radical Neurophenomenology” by Claire Petitmengin. Upshot: Mild” neurophenomenology does not solve the “hard problem” of consciousness; in a way it actually aggravates it. “Radical” neurophenomenology “dissolves” the hard problem. However, I suggest that it may be premature to give up on actually solving the hard problem; and indicate several lines of research that are still open.

After a brief account of the problem of higher-order vagueness, and its seeming intractability, I explore what comes of the issue on a linguistic, contextualist account of vagueness. On the view in question, predicates like 'borderline red' and 'determinately red' are, or at least can be, vague, but they are different in kind from 'red'. In particular, 'borderline red' and 'determinately red' are not colours. These predicates have linguistic components, and invoke notions like 'competent user of the language'. On my (...) view, so-called 'higher-order vagueness' is actually ordinary, first-order vagueness in different predicates. I explore the possibility that, nevertheless, a pernicious regress ensues. (shrink)

David Widerker has forcefully argued that a libertarian is on firm ground in believing that the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) is true. Eleonore Stump has argued that not all libertarians need accept PAP, and that its acceptance is not required for a rejection of compatibilism.This paper is a defense of Widerker against Stump. I argue that it is not at all clear that Stump’s view of freedom is libertarian in nature, and that she has not provided a good reason (...) for thinking that a libertarian can abandon PAP. (shrink)

Humans are able to construct mental representations and models of possible interactions with their environment. They can use these mental models to identify actions that will enable them to achieve their adaptive goals. But humans do not use this capacity to identify and implement the actions that would contribute most to the evolutionary success of humanity. In general, humans do not find motivation or satisfaction in doing so, no matter how effective such actions might be in evolutionary terms. From an (...) evolutionary perspective, this is a significant limitation in the psychological adaptability of humans. This paper sets out to identify the new psychological capacity that would be needed to overcome this limitation and how the new capacity might be acquired. Humans that develop this capacity will become self-evolving organisms - organisms that are able to adapt in whatever ways are necessary for future evolutionary success, largely unfettered by their biological and social past. (shrink)

Just about every theorist holds that vague terms are context-sensitive to some extent. What counts as ?tall?, ?rich?, and ?bald? depends on the ambient comparison class, paradigm cases, and/or the like. To take a stock example, a given person might be tall with respect to European entrepreneurs and downright short with respect to professional basketball players. It is also generally agreed that vagueness remains even after comparison class, paradigm cases, etc. are fixed, and so this context sensitivity does not solve (...) the problems with vague terms. In this paper, I briefly sketch the main features of my broadly contextualist account of vagueness, that of the late Ruth Manor, and that of Agustín Rayo, showing how the three accounts relate to, and reinforce, each other, noting a seeming difference. A key item used to articulate my own view is David Lewis's notion of conversational score. This is used to track which borderline cases have been called in the course of a conversation. Manor alludes to Lewis's notion of accommodation, a key aspect of the kinematics of conversation, and Rayo invokes Stalnaker's notion of common ground. I'll show how the conversational score could be employed to develop and extend their views, showing how vague terms, as they construe them, are (or can be) deployed in conversation, consistent with both the underlying indeterminacy of the terms and normal communicative goals. To help develop all three views further, I invoke Craige Roberts's notion of Retrievability, a tool developed to show how definites, such as definite descriptions, singular pronouns, and proper names, are deployed in conversation, in a Lewis-style scorekeeping framework. This, I think, is exactly the right way to understand conversations in what Manor calls non-sorities situations and, to invoke my own view, in sorites situations as well. (shrink)

A biographical overview introduces the work and provides a context for the theoretical issues taken up in the articles, and an extensive bibliography suggests ...

Though the invocation to be “reflexive” is widespread in feminist sociology, many questions remain about what it means to “turn back” and resituate our work—about how to engage with research subjects’ visions of the world and with our own theoretical models. Rather than a superficial rehearsal of researcher and interlocutor standpoints, I argue that “reflexivity” should help researchers theorize the social world in relational ways. To make this claim, I draw together the insights of feminist standpoint theory and Bourdieu’s reflexive (...) sociology to lay the foundation for a renewed reflexive project that centers epistemic privilege, the idea that positions of structural exclusion provide the best resources for theorizing social power. Reflexive sociology should consider interlocutors’ experiences of exclusion and contradiction, engaging with sites of alternative knowledge and incorporating them into the object of study. This type of reflexivity provides improved resources for relational theory building. I offer support for these theoretical arguments with a historical analysis of knowledge production in the feminist anti-violence movement. (shrink)

Some version of the will theory and the interest theory of rights attempt to provide a precise and normatively neutral definition of a right that would be useful in substantive normative debates and that corresponds reasonably well with usage in our political and legal culture. But there is an irresolvable tension in this project. Consistent application of a definition of a right cannot plausible track ordinary usage without invoking underlying normative propositions about the justifications for granting rights. Thus, definitional approaches (...) to rights are too demanding to serve either the descriptive purpose of providing a neutral vocabulary or the normative purpose of usefully discussing the rights we ought to have. For descriptive purposes, it would be better to retreat, if necessary, to the Hohfeldian idea that a right is nothing more than the correlate of a duty; for normative purposes, it would be better to address directly the political justification for characterizing a particular legal as creating a right. (shrink)

This chapter presents the major figures of British idealism who wrote on religion, identifies and discusses some of the dominant themes in their work, and discusses how they engaged in, or contributed to, a philosophy of religion. It is argued that there is a development in reflection on religion in idealist thought in Britain in the 19th century: from a first generation, including J.F. Ferrier J.H. Stirling, and Benjamin Jowett, through a second generation, to a final phase: a metaphysics of (...) the Absolute found in the absolute idealists F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet and an ethical theism in the personal idealist Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison. While acknowledging the differences among these authors, the chapter concludes by identifying some common characteristics in British idealist thought on religion. (shrink)

In his two first-rate books, ’Consciousness and the Existence of God: A Theistic Argument’ and ’The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism’, J. P. Moreland argues that our existence as conscious beings presents insurmountable problems for naturalism and evidence for theism. In this review, I summarize Moreland’s treatment of three issues in scientific theory acceptance, which he claims are relevant to determining which worldview, theism or naturalism, is better able to explain the existence of conscious mental (...) entities. I then raise some questions about their supposed relevance and conclude with some thoughts about the simplicity and immateriality of the soul. (shrink)

The hope is that this collection will encourage students and scholars to further explore the different dimensions of Heiberg's thought, both on its own terms ...

Would Aquinas hold the view that a patient in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) is something other than a human being? Some recent interpreters have argued for this position. I contend that this reading is grounded in a false symmetry between the three stages of Aquinas’s embryology and the (alleged) three-stage process of death. Instead, I show that there are textual grounds for rejecting the view that the absence of higher brain activity in a patient would lead Aquinas to say (...) that the patient no longer has a rational soul. On my reading of Aquinas, the patient in PVS has a rational soul and is unequivocally a human being. (shrink)

The 21st century has witnessed an urgent need to digitise, learn, manage, preserve and exchange oral history in South Africa. This forms the background of the demonisation of indigenous knowledge systems that has impacted negatively and eroded the African values, norms, purpose, growth, sustainability and improvement of indigenous communities. In light of this realisation, this article explores the challenges offered by digitisation of VhaVenda oral history. It is well known that the digitisation of oral tradition carries both the good and (...) the bad. Journalists, academics and archivists of oral history cannot become spectators and allow challenges to stop them from collecting, recording and managing valuable heritages. The article is premised upon the Sankofa and critical theory frameworks. An Afrocentric participatory and exploratory qualitative research design was employed to investigate the data. VhaVenda knowledge holders, journalists, academics, and archivists’ views were solicited using semistructured interviews. Participants were selected using purposive sampling. The article’s findings unveiled that the digitisation of VhaVenda oral tradition has been an acute daily agony because of the following thorny issues: language issues, methodological challenges, sponsorship and the politics of preferring. Because the country faces the danger of losing out on gaining the benefits of VhaVenda oral history, the authors encourage and promote a holistic approach embracing multiple stakeholders to overcome the challenges faced in digitising the VhaVenda oral tradition.Contribution: The study advocates for the balancing of ancient traditional forms and relating them to present technology so that oral history trajectories march into the future, grounded in Afrocentric expressions whilst maintaining flexibility to accommodate the versatile nature of culture by embracing technology. (shrink)

Taking seriously the notion that diversifying our philosophical pedagogy is of both intrinsic and instrumental importance, this paper offers a defense of, and model for, a pedagogical approach aimed at making canonical philosophical texts more appealing—and more useful—for diverse students. Specifically, taking Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as a case study, this paper considers how we might make this text more engaging for students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. It does so by offering a five-step model, which involves: situating the text in its (...) historical context; acknowledging and addressing problematic content in the text; drawing out novel or underexplored themes and questions from the text; bringing the text into dialogue with diverse and contemporary philosophical approaches and issues (e.g., feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and non-Western philosophies); and applying issues, themes, and concepts from the text to contemporary matters or current events as much as possible. Specific examples are offered regarding how to achieve each of these steps when teaching the Nicomachean Ethics. (shrink)

The Buddhist Art of Nagarjunakonda. Elizabeth Rosen Stone. Buddhist Tradition Series 25, ed. Alex Wayman. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1994. 143 pp. Rs.600. ISBN 81-208-0828-2.

I am extremely grateful to Daniel Farrell, Hamish Stewart, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Suzanne Uniacke for their careful, imaginative and probing responses to The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law in this special issue of Criminal Law and Philosophy. It is especially gratifying that philosophers of this calibre, not all of whom have worked directly on the philosophy of punishment and the philosophy of criminal law, have engaged with Ends in this way.One of my ambitions in (...) writing Ends was to connect the philosophy of punishment more directly with a set of broader issues in normative ethics than is common in the philosophy of punishment. I hoped this would encourage others to see the justification of punishment as a small part of a more general normative theory of permissible harm. This special issue has further confirmed to me that this way of developing the philosophy of punishment is fruitful.I will not attempt to respond to all of the arguments i .. (shrink)