or Browse over 3500 reviews in " by Valerie Hardcastle, Ph.D. " _Metapsychology_.

What is well-being? This is one of humanity's oldest and deepest questions; Valerie Tiberius offers a fresh answer. She argues that our lives go well to the extent that we succeed in what matters to us emotionally, reflectively, and over the long term. So when we want to help others achieve well-being, we should pay attention to their values.

English summary: This collection offers an epistemological and historic approach to psychoanalysis centered on the fundamental concepts and debates that characterized the field during the first half of the twentieth century. The collected texts demonstrate how Freud developed his theories and how new approaches emerged in response, from infantile sexuality to the pathogenic character of certain structures of society. French description: Ce recueil aborde la psychanalyse d'un point de vue epistemologique et historique. Il est centre sur l'elaboration des concepts fondamentaux (...) de la psychanalyse tels que Freud les a definis et sur les debats qu'ils ont suscites a l'interieur du mouvement psychanalytique au cours de la premiere moitie du siecle dernier. La reunion de ces textes vise a montrer comment ces debats ont pu conduire Freud a reformer certains concepts de sa theorie mais aussi a en creer de nouveaux. Ces textes montrent egalement comment de nouvelles approches (qui ont parfois fait ecole) ont pu emerger des desaccords avec Freud: comment la question de la libido et celle de la sexualite infantile ont-elles declenche les dissidences d'Adler puis de Jung et comment Freud y a-t-il repondu? Pourquoi Rank a-t-il considere le traumatisme de la naissance comme plus fondamental pour le psychisme que le complexe d'OEdipe? Comment Freud a-t-il reagi aux theses deReich sur la pulsion de mort et le caractere pathogene de certaines structures de la societe? Ce recueil se termine en 1937 avec le dernier grand texte de Freud sur l'analyse interminable, qui souleve l'un des enjeux majeurs de la clinique aujourd'hui. (shrink)

This essay examines the contradictions often found in third wave feminist texts that function as strategic choices that may shape, foster, and enhance an individual's sense of agency. Many third wave feminists utilize contradiction as a way to understand emergent identities, to develop new ways of thinking, and to imagine new forms of social action. Agency, then, stems from the use of contradiction as a means of self-determination and identity, of transcendence of seemingly forced or dichotomous choices, and counter-imaginations of (...) a better future. (shrink)

While the research programs in early cognitive science and artificial intelligence aimed to articulate what cognition was in ideal terms, much research in contemporary computational neuroscience looks at how and why brains fail to function as they should ideally. This focus on impairment affects how we understand David Marr's hypothesized three levels of understanding. In this essay, we suggest some refinements to Marr's distinctions using a population activity model of cortico-striatal circuitry exploring impulsivity and behavioral inhibition as a case study. (...) In particular, we urge that Marr's computational level should be redefined to include a description of how systems break down. We also underscore that feed-forward processing, cognition disconnected from behavioral context, and representations do not always drive cognition in the way that Marr originally assumed. (shrink)

This is the first philosophy textbook in moral psychology, introducing students to a range of philosophical topics and debates such as: What is moral motivation? Do reasons for action always depend on desires? Is emotion or reason at the heart of moral judgment? Under what conditions are people morally responsible? Are there self-interested reasons for people to be moral? Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction presents research by philosophers and psychologists on these topics, and addresses the overarching question of how empirical (...) research is relevant to philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Social problems such as racism, sexism, and inequality are often cited as structural rather than individual in nature. What does it mean to invoke a social structural explanation, and how do such explanations relate to individualistic ones? This article explores recent philosophical debates concerning the nature and usages of social structural explanation. I distinguish between two central kinds of social structural explanation: those that are autonomous from psychology, and those that are not. This distinction will help clarify the explanatory power (...) that each type of SSE has, points of convergence with methodological traditions such as critical theory and rational choice theory, and the difficulties that each type of SSE faces. (shrink)

Although widely studied in other domains, relatively little is known about the metacognitive processes that monitor and control behaviour during reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we examined the conditions under which two fluency cues are used to monitor initial reasoning: answer fluency, or the speed with which the initial, intuitive answer is produced, and perceptual fluency, or the ease with which problems can be read. The first two experiments demonstrated that answer fluency reliably predicted Feeling of Rightness judgments to (...) conditional inferences and base rate problems, which subsequently predicted the amount of deliberate processing as measured by thinking time and answer changes; answer fluency also predicted retrospective confidence judgments. Moreover, the effect of answer fluency on reasoning was independent from the effect of perceptual fluency, establishing that these are empirically independent constructs. In five experiments with a variety of reasoning problems similar to those of Alter et al., we found no effect of perceptual fluency on FOR, retrospective confidence or accuracy; however, we did observe that participants spent more time thinking about hard to read stimuli, although this additional time did not result in answer changes. In our final two experiments, we found that perceptual disfluency increased accuracy on the CRT, but only amongst participants of high cognitive ability. As Alter et al.’s samples were gathered from prestigious universities, collectively, the data to this point suggest that perceptual fluency prompts additional processing in general, but this processing may results in higher accuracy only for the most cognitively able. (shrink)

Although, in the literature, Principle C of Binding Theory is taken not to apply to copular sentences on the basis of English data alone, this study aims to show that this Principle applies to French copular sentences. French displays a dichotomy between predicational copular sentences and other subtypes of copular sentences : while the former use the verb est alone, the latter need an additional form, namely the neuter demonstrative pronoun ce. Evidence is given that, in French, the two terms (...) flanking the copula est cannot be referential because the post-copula term would be bound by the pre-copula one, in accordance with Principle C of Binding Theory. Thus, adding the pronoun ce modifies the structure of the sentence and gives rise to a Topic c’est Focus structure, which escapes Principle C. (shrink)

Avec cet ouvrage désormais disponible en français, Sönke Neitzel et Harald Welzer nous présentent les résultats d’un projet de recherche ambitieux, dont l’originalité réside avant tout dans l’exploitation de sources inédites : les auteurs, un historien et un psychosociologue, y analysent des procès-verbaux d’écoute de soldats de la Wehrmacht en captivité pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. En pleine guerre, l’enregistrement secret et la retranscription par écrit de conversations de soldats, i...

(2014). Tin Men: Ethics, Cybernetics and the Importance of Soul. Journal of Military Ethics: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 3-19. doi: 10.1080/15027570.2014.908011.

In this paper, I discuss the view defended by Manuel Rebuschi, Maxime Amblard, and Michel Musiol that schizophrenia is not entirely irrational but that the rationality of disordered discourse can be accounted for from the first-person point of view—which, by their account, is not wholly introspective but is rather defined by a certain use of the charity principle, by contrast with what they call third-person approaches. I argue in favor of the idea of continuity between the two points of view: (...) ordinary and schizophrenic. On the basis of this claim, I propose a hypothesis for understanding what Rebuschi et al. call the interactional deficiency of schizophrenic conversations, and I make further exploratory suggestions of ways of understanding the so-called rationality of schizophrenic discourse, notably in relation to the complex notions of “context” and “meaning”. (shrink)

Gold & Stoljar's “trivial” neuron doctrine is neither a truism in cognitive science nor trivial; it has serious consequences for the future direction of the mind/brain sciences. Not everyone would agree that these consequences are desirable. The authors' “radical” doctrine is not so radical; their division between cognitive neuroscience and neurobiology is largely artificial. Indeed, there is no sharp distinction between cognitive neuroscience and other areas of the brain sciences.

In dit essay uit 1932 zet Valéry uiteen dat belangrijke waarden als tolerantie, vrijheid van godsdienst en van meningsuiting slechts kunnen bestaan in perioden waarin de menselijke geest een hoge ontwikkeling heeft doorgemaakt.

How should you live? Should you devote yourself to perfecting a single talent or try to live a balanced life? Should you lighten up and have more fun, or buckle down and try to achieve greatness? Should you try to be a better friend? Should you be self-critical or self-accepting? And how should you decide among the possibilities open to you? Should you consult experts, listen to your parents, or should you do lots of research? Should you make lists of (...) pros and cons, or go with your gut? These are not questions that can be answered in general or in the abstract. Rather, these questions are addressed to the first person point of view, to the perspective each of us occupies when we reflect on how to live without knowing exactly what we're aiming for. To answer them, this book focuses on the process of living one's life from the inside, rather than on defining goals from the outside. Drawing on traditional philosophical sources as well as literature and recent work in social psychology, this book argues that to live well, we need to develop reflective wisdom: to care about things that will sustain us and give us good experiences, to have perspective on our successes and failures, and to be moderately self-aware and cautiously optimistic about human nature. Further, we need to know when to think about our values, character, and choices, and when not to. A crucial part of wisdom, the book maintains, is being able to shift perspectives: to be self-critical; to be realistic; to examine life when reflection is appropriate, but not when we should lose ourselves in experience. (shrink)

Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals. Edited by Michal Biran, Jonathan Brack, and Francesca Fiaschetti. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020. Pp. xv + 335. $85, £70 (cloth); $29.95, £25 (paper, ebook).

Regardless of formalization used, one on-going challenge for AI systems that model legal proceedings is accounting for contextual issues, particularly where judicial decisions are made in criminal cases. The law assumes a rational approach to rule application in deciding a defendant’s guilt; however, judges and juries can behave irrationally. What should a model prize: efficiency, accuracy, or fairness? Exactly whether and how to incorporate the psychology of courtroom interactions into formal models or expert systems has only just begun to be (...) examined in a serious fashion. Here, I outline data from the United States which suggest that trying to incorporate psychological biases into formal models of legal decision-making will be challenging. I focus on the use of neuroscience data in criminal trials, homing in on so-called group-to-individual inferences. I argue that data which should be the most effective at swaying judicial decisions are in fact those most likely not to make a difference in the disposition of the case. I conclude that judges often assign culpability by ignoring what our best science regarding how human decision-making occurs. (shrink)