Suffering, alongside the feeling of sanctity of life, pervades human experience, generating primal anxiety, which humans learn to shore up with social solidarity and with the practice of communication in religious rituals. The roots of social belonging spring from the primordial sentiments toward ethnicity, race, language, religion, customs and traditions, and region. Self–identity, mediated by mental formations derived from social relations, is composed of thinking and values. Daily experience reveals that cultural differences produce blind spots in thinking and (...) barriers in values—‐governing areas of activity, social relations, the world, and identity of being—‐that impedes cross—‐cultural understanding. (shrink)

De acuerdo con la fenomenología husserliana la experiencia primordial del valor descansa en vivencias emotivas. Para sostener esta idea Husserl sugiere el paralelismo entre la percepción externa y la percepción de los valores. El objetivo de este trabajo es clarificar tal paralelismo enfatizando un problema particular del análisis husserliano: la tonalidad afectiva del objeto de valor y su relación con la apercepción sentimental involucrada en la experiencia de los valores.According to husserlian phenomenology the primordial experience of value lays (...) in emotive lived-experiences. In order to sustain his Idea Husserl suggest a parallelism between the external perception and the perception of values. The aim of this work is to clarify such parallelism stressing a particular problem of husserlian analysis: the affective tonality of the object of value and its relation to the feeling apperception involved in the experience of values. (shrink)

Resumen El liberalismo de Ortega no se ha estudiado atendiendo a sus fundamentos filosóficos y en lo que serían las diferentes etapas del pensamiento del filósofo español. Desde el neokantismo de mocedad, Ortega entiende el liberalismo como “ideal” o ley de la moralidad. Posteriormente, desde la “fenomenología” y en la génesis del raciovitalismo, a la altura de 1914, la libertad no responderá ya a la idea del deber moral, sino del tener que ser personal en un “mundo vital”. En un (...) tercer periodo de su obra, desde 1929 en adelante, Ortega concibe la libertad como un sentimiento o idea radical sobre la vida en el contexto de su metafísica de la vida humana como realidad radical, primera y primordial.Ortega’s liberalism has not been studied taking into consideration its philosophical foundations and in the different phases of Ortega´s thought. From neokantism, Ortega thinks about liberalism as an ideal or law of morality. Later on, from “phenomenology” and in the origins of ratiovitalisms, in the period of 1914, Ortega did not conceive of freedom as a moral duty but as something related to the idea of having to be a person in a vital world. In a third period, from 1929 on, Ortega thinks about freedom as a sentiment or radical idea about life in the context of his metaphysics of human life as radical reality, the first one and essential. (shrink)

Historians of religion and adherents of new religious movements in the twentieth century have frequently had intersecting agendas. This article discusses the interactions between scholarship on Germanic myth and culture and the protagonists and belief systems of Germanic neo-Pagan movements. It covers the era from the inception of Germanic neo-Paganism in the nationalist, anti-Semitic völkisch movement in Germany in the early 20th century until today. The article traces the appeal of reconstructionist approaches within the study of Germanic myth and culture, (...) and the desire to access a primordial pre-Christian culture back to European National Romanticism. It uncovers the latent anti-Jewish sentiments that often pervade parts of both Germanic neo-Paganism and Germanic and Indo-European studies. At the same time, it accounts for the significant changes in these ideologically tainted patterns of thought within the last two decades, highlighting Germanic neo-Paganism’s development toward respectability and mainstream thought with the help of references to recent scholarship. (shrink)

Cet entretien réalisé avec une personne transsexuelle Male to Female témoigne de l’impact que la transformation physique du corps peut avoir sur la perception de Soi. Si les catégories de sexe et de genre paraissent, aux observateurs que nous sommes, bien distinctes, naturalisées et, de ce fait, « allant de soi », l’itinéraire d’un androgyne montre, au contraire, qu’elles s’imposent à un certain moment de la vie – ici après la trentaine – après avoir été tenues pour insignifiantes. Il montre (...) aussi combien leurs chevauchements sont complexes et s’articulent, souvent mal, avec des pratiques sexuelles présumées féminines ou masculines. Avec sa dimension intimiste, le témoignage proposé pose directement la question du rapport à l’autre : pour qui change-t-on de sexe? Le poids du regard d’autrui parait primordial, davantage que le sentiment de Soi qui, semble-t-il, s’accommode très facilement des discordances entre genre, sexe et sexualité. Le témoignage de Sandrine montre également comment une construction identitaire subjective de « femme », y compris en termes de sexualité, peut entièrement s’appuyer sur une expérience de vie en tant qu’« homme », fût-il androgyne. (shrink)

In vivo explore des questions fondamentales et des moments cruciaux de l’existence humaine – l’entrée en interaction avec une culture étrangère, la décision de se sortir d’une condition de vie routinière ou malheureuse, une action généreuse posée dans un contexte quotidien ordinaire – en fonction de leur potentiel de transformation de l’existence. En recourant à des illustrations tirées de la vie réelle et d’œuvres de fiction, Gabor Csepregi révèle le rôle primordial des sentiments personnels dans le façonnement de (...) la vie humaine et démontre le pouvoir formateur de la spontanéité en dehors du contexte traditionnel de l’éducation formelle. Ces moments, et notamment la façon dont ils perturbent l’ordre temporel ordinaire constituent des expériences vécues de notre vitalité. « Recourant à un langage clair et précis, In vivo captivera les philosophes et les intellectuels. Csepregi engage un dialogue entre diverses traditions, faisant appel aux meilleurs courants de plusieurs philosophies pour développer un point de vue unique ». - Gaëlle Fiasse, Université McGill. (shrink)

I discuss the intuitive distinction between emotions and sentiments, and argue that sentiments cannot be reduced to emotions (and hence constitute their own category of affective state). ​.

This book presents an accessible and groundbreaking new look at the evolution of consciousness. It traces its origins back to early man's primordial emotions - those elicited from basic needs such as hunger and thirst.

During the period from Descartes to Rousseau, the mind changed. Its domain was redefined; its activities were redescribed; and its various powers were redistributed. Once a part of cosmic Nous, its various functions delimited by its embodied condition, the individual mind now becomes a field of forces with desires impinging on one another, their forces resolved according to their strengths and directions. Of course since there is no such thing as The Mind Itself, it was not the mind that changed. (...) Conceptions of the mind changed. Yet even to say this is misleading, because it suggests that somewhere out there in nowhere there is Nous, Psyche, Soul or Mind, the true but opaque object of all these conceptions. But of course there is no Mind in the realm of things in themselves, waiting for us to see it truly, like a China of the noumenal world, amused that our various conceptions reveal as much about ourselves as about it. (shrink)

Sentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules' enjoy an advantage in cultural evolution, (...) which partly explains the success of certain moral norms. This has sweeping and exciting implications for philosophical ethics. Nichols builds on an explosion of recent intriguing experimental work in psychology on our capacity for moral judgment and shows how this empirical work has broad import for enduring philosophical problems. The result is an account that illuminates fundamental questions about the character of moral emotions and the role of sentiment and reason in how we make our moral judgments. This work should appeal widely across philosophy and the other disciplines that comprise cognitive science. (shrink)

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that improving democratic politics requires keeping emotion out of it. Marcus advances the provocative claim that the tradition in democratic theory of treating emotion and reason as hostile opposites is misguided and leads contemporary theorists to misdiagnose the current state of American democracy. Instead of viewing the presence of emotion in politics as a failure of rationality and therefore as a failure of citizenship, Marcus argues, democratic theorists need to understand that emotions are in (...) fact a prerequisite for the exercise of reason and thus essential for rational democratic deliberation and political judgment. Attempts to purge emotion from public life not only are destined to fail, but ultimately would rob democracies of a key source of revitalization and change. Drawing on recent research in neuroscience, Marcus shows how emotion functions generally and what role it plays in politics. In contrast to the traditional view of emotion as a form of agitation associated with belief, neuroscience reveals it to be generated by brain systems that operate largely outside of awareness. Two of these systems, "disposition" and "surveillance," are especially important in enabling emotions to produce habits, which often serve a positive function in democratic societies. But anxiety, also a preconscious emotion, is crucial to democratic politics as well because it can inhibit or disable habits and thus clear a space for the conscious use of reason and deliberation. If we acknowledge how emotion facilitates reason and is "cooperatively entangled" with it, Marcus concludes, then we should recognize sentimental citizens as the only citizens really capable of exercising political judgment and of putting their decisions into action. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This book<I> argues that a silent axis of the unconscious world rests largely undiscovered. It recasts foundational concepts in the psychology of Freud, Jung, Carol Gilligan and R.D. Laing, as well as in cognitive science, to highlight this hidden unconscious axis: primordial spaces of diametric and concentric structures. The author generates fresh approaches to understanding the philosophy of early Heidegger and Derrida, with the idea of cross-cultural diametric and concentric spaces fuelling a radical reinterpretation of early Heidegger's transcendental project, (...) and challenging a postmodern consensus that reduces truths and experiences to mere socially constructed playthings of culture. <BR> The book, which also examines projected structures in modernist art, suggests a systematic refashioning of many Western assumptions, but it is more than a deconstruction. It also attempts to offer a new interplay between structures and meaning, as a spatial phenomenology. This significant expansion of the boundaries of human subjectivity opens alternative pathways for imagining what it means to be human, in order to challenge the reduction of experience to instrumental reason. (shrink)

Of all the traditional sciences it is alchemy based as it is in metallurgy that is directly concerned with the coming of the industrial order. In alchemical terms modern man lives in the Ferric Age and his state is best analogized to the properties of the metal iron, hard, cold, unbending but quick to succumb to corrosion and rust. The great ancient wisdom traditions of the world all anticipated this present age for it was already implicit in the technological and (...) other changes that brought on the dawn of history. These ancient traditions - dismissed as childish superstitions by the scientist contain ideas essential to the self-understanding that contemporary man so desperately needs. This is the central contention of the writings brought together in Primordial Alchemy & Modern Religion. Drawing upon many unexpected sources especially Plato and the ancient Greeks these wide-ranging, generous essays provide timely reiterations of ancient alchemical traditions and trace some pivotal themes that have continued in the theology and symbolism of the modern religions. This work restores some important keys for the recovery of a lost heritage of primordial wisdom, offering fresh perspectives on aspects of the Western and Islamic alchemical traditions in particular, and at the same time exploring the most distant roots of the modern impasse. (shrink)

Primordial emotions are the subjective element of the instincts which are the genetically programmed behaviour patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain and hunger for specific minerals etc.There are two constituents of a primordial emotion—the specific sensation which when severe may be imperious, and the compelling intention for gratification by a consummatory act. They may dominate the stream of consciousness, and can have plenipotentiary power over behaviour.It is hypothesized that early in (...) animal evolution complex reflex mechanisms in the basal brain subserving homeostatic responses, in concert with elements of the reticular activating system subserving arousal, melded functionally with regions embodied in the progressive rostral development of the telencephalon. This included the emergent limbic and paralimbic areas, and the insula. This phylogenetically ancient organization subserved the origin of consciousness as the primordial emotion, which signalled that the organisms existence was immediately threatened. Neuroimaging confirms major activations in regions of the basal brain during primordial emotions in humans. The behaviour of decorticate humans and animals is discussed in relation to the possible existence of primitive awareness.Neuroimaging of the primordial emotions reveals that rapid gratification of intention by a consummatory act such as ingestion causes precipitate decline of both the initiating sensation and the intention. There is contemporaneous rapid disappearance of particular regions of brain activation which suggests they may be part of the jointly sufficient and severally necessary activations and deactivations which correlate with consciousness [Crick, F. & Koch, C. . A framework for consciousness. NatureNeuroscience,6, 119–126]. (shrink)

Central to the debate on the moral relevance of shame is whether we take others’ assessments of our moral shortcomings seriously. Some argue that viewing shame as a social emotion undermines the moral standing of shame; for a moral agent, what is authoritative are his own moral values, not the mere disapproval of others. Adam Smith's framework sheds some light on the contemporary debates in philosophy on the moral value of shame. Shame is mostly a social emotion but has moral (...) value for Smith. This is because we desire sympathy and share an ongoing social practice of morality with others. Smith developed the underpinnings of an account for a sympathetic basis of shame. An agent is evaluated through the sympathetic process to determine whether he/she has lived up to shared norms and morality. Shame emerges from the understanding that we ought not to be favorably thought of by others, the impartial spectator, or by our own conscience. We want to avoid shame for two reasons: first, we want to receive praise which gives pleasure, blame and blameworthiness operate by giving pain. Secondly, we are pleased with the sympathy of others. According to Smith, shame is a very painful emotion. Given our dread of pain and love of pleasure, we are motivated to be not blamed or blameworthy. We want to be favorably thought of so as not to be, or feel, shamed. Our dread of blameworthiness and our desire for sympathy motivates us to be a person who acts according to the norms and morality of society. Shame has a moral value both as a social emotion and when it arises from our conscience; however, Smith was also aware that there are limits to shame as a moral value, which arises from misjudgments of spectators. (shrink)

Identifying what is wrong with the demise of wildlife requires prior identification of the human sentiment which is offended by that demise. Attempts to understand this in terms of animal rights (individual or species) and the benefits of wildlife to human beings or the wider environment are rejected. A diagnosis of this sentiment is attempted in terms of our increasing admiration, in the conditions of modernity and postmodernity, for the 'harmony' or 'at homeness' of wild animals with their environments. The (...) diagnosis is defended against certain misunderstandings, and implications are tentatively drawn from it for environmental education and the management of wildlife. (shrink)

This article traces the institutional context for the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith in the 1960s and 1970s. It explores the origins of the stoicization thesis advanced by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie in their introductory essay to the TMS. Using the correspondence between the editors held at Glasgow University Special Collections, this article presents the development of editorial positions that would shape the twentieth-century reception of Smith's works.

The beliefs both that sentimental education is a vital part of moral education and that habituation is a vital part of sentimental education can be counted as being at the ‘hard core’ of the Aristotelian tradition of moral thought and action. On the basis of an explanation of the defining characteristics of Aristotelian habituation, this paper explores how and why habituation may be an effective way of cultivating the sentimental dispositions that are constitutive of the moral virtues. Taking Aristotle’s explicit (...) remarks on ethismos as a starting point, we present habituation as essentially involving (i) acting as virtue requires, (ii) both frequently and consistently, and (iii) under the supervision of a virtuous tutor. If the focus is on the first two characteristics, habituation seems to be a proper method for acquiring skills or inculcating habits, rather than an effective way of cultivating virtuous sentimental dispositions. It will be argued, however, that even if only the first two characteristics are taken into account, habituation may be an efficacious means of moderating, reducing or restricting the child’s affective dispositions where these are somehow excessive. But contrary to Aristotle’s view, the effectiveness of processes of habituation that are directed at strengthening, deepening or broadening the child’s sentimental dispositions where these are somehow deficient seems to be a function of the third characteristic, especially of the affective responses of the virtuous tutor to the child’s behaviour. At the end of the paper, this predominantly non-cognitive account of the workings of Aristotelian habituation will be compared with Nancy Sherman’s primarily cognitive view. (shrink)

Mit Carlo Ginzburgs Einführung des Begriffs Spurensicherung für das Arbeiten des Historikers im Jahr 1979 bildet sich eine neue kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektive. Daniel Spoerri und Marie Louise von Plessen initiieren in Köln das zweite Musée Sentimental, eine Ausstellung, die sich auf die Rekonstruktion vergangener Geschichten anhand von angeordneten Objekten stützt. Der Artikel richtet sein Augenmerk auf eine Ausstellungspraxis, die sich der Kulturtechnik des Spurenlesens verschreibt und aus der Hervorhebung des Alltäglichen erzeugt wird. The year 1979 marks a turning point for cultural (...) studies: Carlo Ginzburg introduces the term »securing of traces« to historiography. In Cologne, Daniel Spoerri und Marie Louise von Plessen initiate the second, an exposition that explores the reconstruction of past stories via arranged objects. The paper focuses on an exhibition strategy that dedicates itself to the cultural technique of »reading traces«, produced by an emphasis on the trivialities of everyday. (shrink)

According to a historically popular view, emotions are normative experiences that ground moral knowledge much as perceptual experiences ground empirical knowledge. Given the analogy it draws between emotion and perception, sentimental perceptualism constitutes a promising, naturalist-friendly alternative to classical rationalist accounts of moral knowledge. In this paper, we consider an important but underappreciated objection to the view, namely that in contrast with perception, emotions depend for their occurrence on prior representational states, with the result that emotions cannot give perceptual-like access (...) to normative properties. We argue that underlying this objection are several specific problems, rooted in the different types of mental states to which emotions may respond, that the sentimental perceptualist must tackle for her view to be successful. We argue, moreover, that the problems can be answered by filling out the theory with several independently motivated yet highly controversial commitments, which we carefully catalogue. The plausibility of sentimental perceptualism, as a result, hinges on further claims sentimental perceptualists should not ignore. (shrink)

The integration of modern Western philosophy with the study of Sufism tradition wasn’t quite familiar. So far, philosophical Sufism is often studied from the perspective of neo-platonic philosophy which is famous for its emanation doctrine. Through this research, the author proposes a new integration by using the philosophical concept of Heidegger’s hermeneutics and Roland Barthes’s semiotics as perspectives in studying the phenomena of the philosophical Sufism tradition. The hermeneutic theory of Martin Heidegger used in this research is existential primordial (...) verstehen and the theory of facticity. Whereas Semiotic theory used in this research is Roland Barthes’s theory of order of signification which is used to analyze Sufi’s connotative interpretation of the Qur’an verse. The method used in this research is analysis descriptive by a combined table of hermeneutic and semiotic theories through library research on several primary sources concerning Sufi’s interpretation such as Miftahus Sufi, al-Luma‘, Shaṭaḥāt al-Sūfiyyah, etc. As a result, in the perspective of Sufism Primordial Verstehen, the doctrines of Sufism such as ittiḥād, ḥulūl, and waḥdah al-wujūd could be understood as existential primordial understanding in contemplating Sufi’s existence in the world and his arrival at the understanding of Allah as the only existing Being. (shrink)

This article builds on a developing interdisciplinary discussion of home. It studies two 20th-century texts in counterpoint: political philosopher Agnes Heller's essay, `Where Are We at Home,' and novelist Melpo Axioti's My Home, a nostalgic recollection of life on Mykonos. Heller contrasts the elusive, self-appointed geography of postmodern living with a traditional view of primordial dwelling, a non-transient way of dwelling that gave to Earth a commitment stretching from ancestral past to a distant future. That experience is all but (...) lost today, Heller muses as she surveys the horizon for space-bound alternatives to today's geographic promiscuity. The closing paragraph of her essay, which settles inconclusively on a Mediterranean landscape, opens a portal to My Home, the work of another political exile deprived of nationality and citizenship during the Cold War. Axioti's postmodern novel juxtaposes native stories of a transient life on Mykonos with the modern developer's efforts to discover firm foundations for building and an exile's wish to recover solid memories of home. Between those perspectives, Mykonos comes alive as a different type of home, in which obligation forms a bridge between presence and absence. The article closes by inquiring whether a thoughtful look at fragile Mediterranean worlds might reintroduce the idea of obligation to postmodern conceptions of home. (shrink)

The ontological implications of the Peircean Categories, as set forth most clearly in Peirce’s summative architectonic statement, “New Elements,” and referenced elsewhere in Peirce’s body of writings, are examined with reference to the existent or physical universe. The Peircean universal ontological Categories Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are shown to give rise to a cosmos that is triadic and representational in essence. This immanently representational cosmos, denominated the “Book Universe,” is shown to be evidenced by the representational contours of both the (...) mathematical and of the conceptual framing of the three broad domains of theoretical physics, the quantum, classical, and relativistic domains. This triadic “Book Universe” model is both characterized and also contrasted with the “Block Universe” model, and is seen to incorporate both time and space as emergent representational characteristics, and to be manifest, qua triadic Representamen, in terms of a “foliated eternalism” that requires both antecedent and parallel cosmoi. (shrink)

In his Ideas I (1913), with his thought experiment of world-annihilation, Husserl becomes persuaded that the beings of which we are conscious do not simply lie ‘out there’ in themselves, enjoying an independent (realistic) existence. Our experience of beings in a world, qua total horizon of beings, is the achievement of our intentional consciousness, which unfolds its overall constitutive possibilities. It is because of this that in our everyday meaningful comportments, we are always intentionally correlated with what is “Vorhanden” for (...) us. In what we know as Ideas II, Husserl sought to offer concrete analyses of such intentional constitutions. He distinguished three fundamental spheres of intentional objectities: inanimate material nature, animate or psychic nature, and spirit or culturality. These constitute, as Husserl puts it, three different regions of Being, comprising beings that are meaningfully given in the three corresponding kinds of intentional correlation. Thus, he divided the problem of intentional constitution into three corresponding sub-problems. Now, according to Husserl’s Phenomenology, some intentional interdependence holds between these three regions of Being. In the way the matter was approached in Chap. 5 of the present book, the region of inanimate material nature, which comprises the nature-things (Naturdinge), is presented as being the most fundamental. The constitution of animate-psychic nature is, in its turn, thought of as presupposing inanimate nature-thinghood as its intentional foundation. Spirit and culturality, finally, presupposes the first and, somehow, the second region. It is generally thought that Husserl was of the view that, for us, primordial consciousness is the perceptual experience of nature-things; simple sensory perceptual things. That is, on the lowest level of our conscious life, we are intentionally correlated with simple perceptually appearing things. Our experience of cultural beings or, more broadly speaking, things of value (goods) like tools, books, etc., is intentionally derivative and founded upon the former. In his Being and Time (1927), Heidegger, who had already been influenced by Husserl’s discussion of the aforementioned ontological regions, claimed that primordially, intentional experience presents us with a world where equipment and other beings like us appear. Moreover, the givenness of beings as nature-things, or simply as sensory perceptual beings, is the result of a theoretical construction. In what I would like to call “standard” or “received” Heideggerian criticism of Husserl’s Phenomenology, it is held that Husserl starts his analysis at a high level of theoretical intentionality. What Husserl takes as primordial intentionality, the story goes, is an experience that is possible only as attentive-observational and thematic givenness of beings; nature-things can appear only in ‘elaborate’ derivative experience of such a kind. In addition, in this judgmental constitution of nature-things, the properties attributed to them appear to belong to science. This thesis, Heidegger maintains, makes Phenomenology unfaithful to its very dictum that calls us to remain close “to the things themselves.” If Phenomenology were to stay close to how things indeed are, it would discover that primordially, we are not correlated with theoretically constituted vorhanden nature-things, but with zuhanden equipment of different kinds. Positing nature-things or perceptual things as the ultimate fundament of intentional givenness moves us away from the original sense of Phenomenology and accepts phenomenologically unjustified prejudices. (shrink)

There is a long and tortuous history of misinterpreting Smithian social theory. After rehearsing that history we offer here a way of understanding Smith that, unlike much of recent revisionist Smith scholarship, does not further add to this confusion. Our proposal is to understand the relation between moral and economic behaviour in Smith as analogous to the way in which Habermas makes strategic (and normatively oriented) behaviour parasitic on a more basic communicative competence. Given this analogy, it is ironic that (...) Habermas's own understanding of Smith's theory also leaves much to be desired. (shrink)

Le livre La Volonté de puissance, faussement attribué à Friedrich Nietzsche, ainsi que la longue tradition de commentaires qui en découle ont passé sous silence le concept de "sentiment de puissance" qui précède et accompagne celui de "volonté de puissance", source de tant de méprises. Le "sentiment de puissance" est pourtant omniprésent sous la plume du philosophe, qui l'a peaufiné au fil des années, sans jamais y renoncer. Cet ouvrage, le premier consacré à ce concept central, en expose les principaux (...) enjeux et retrace ses évolutions. Il permet en outre de jeter une nouvelle lumière sur le concept de "volonté de puissance" et de réévaluer l'ensemble de la compréhension nietzschéenne du monde conçu comme rapports de forces, ainsi que les idées clés de sa philosophie."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This thesis defends a naturalistic interpretation, and offers a critical analysis, of the views of David Hume on the subject of free will and moral responsibility. A central theme is that Hume's views should be understood and assessed in relation to P.F. Strawson's influential paper "Freedom and Resentment" (1962). -/- The work in this thesis lays the foundation for "Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility" (Oxford University Press: 1995).

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm's, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different (...) sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways. In this methodologically diverse and unusually personal account, Gerry Simpson brings to the surface international law's hidden literary prose and offers a critical and redemptive account of the field. He does so in a series of chapters on international law's bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners. Finally, the book closes with a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this is put forward as a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times. (shrink)

Duties to address global poverty face a motivation gap. We have good reasons for acting yet we do not, at least consistently. A ‘sentimental education’, featuring literature and journalism detailing the lives of distant others has been suggested as a promising means by which to close this gap. Although sympathetic to this project, I argue that it is too heavily wed to a charitable model of our duties to address global poverty—understood as requiring we sacrifice a certain portion of our (...) income. However, political action, aimed at altering institutions at both a global and a local level is likely to be necessary in order to provide effective long-term solutions to poverty globally. To rectify this, the article develops an alternative dialogical account of sentimental education, suitable for motivating support for political action to address global poverty. (shrink)

This article considers the ongoing difficulties for mainstream political theory of actualizing human rights, with particular reference to Rorty’s attempt to transcend their liberal foundations. It argues that there is a problematic disjuncture between his articulation of exclusion and his hope for inclusion via the expansion of the liberal human rights culture. More specifically, it shows that Rorty’s description of victimhood is based on premises unavailable to him, with the consequence that stateless persons are rendered inhuman, and, further, that his (...) accounts of sentimentality and solidarity have limited potential for the inclusion of such victims within the liberal ‘community of justification’. In the final analysis, the article argues that there is a substantial mismatch between Rorty’s dependence on both liberal norms and international political practice, and his hopes for the human rights culture to include those stripped of human dignity. (shrink)

Sentiment analysis is the field of natural language processing to analyze opinionated data, for the purpose of decision making. An opinion is a statement about a subject which expresses the sentiments as well as the emotions of the opinion makers on the topic. In this paper, we develop a sentiment analysis tool namely SENTI-METER. This tool estimates the success rate of social campaigns based on the algorithms we developed that analyze the sentiment of word as well as blog. Social (...) campaigns have a huge impact on the mindset of people. One such campaign was launched in India on October 2, 2014, named Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Our tool computes an elaborated analysis of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which examines the success rate of this social campaign. Here, we performed the location-wise analysis of the campaign and predict the degree of polarity of tweets along with the monthly and weekly analysis of the tweets. The experiments were conducted in five phases namely extraction and preprocessing of tweets, tokenization, sentiment evaluation of a line, sentiment evaluation of a blog and analysis. Our tool is also capable of handling transliterated words. Unbiased tweets were extracted from Twitter related to this specific campaign, and on comparing with manual tagging we were able to achieve 84.47 % accuracy using unigram machine learning approach. This approach helps the government to implement the social campaigns effectively for the betterment of the society. (shrink)

In a reply to Mizrahi (2019), Bryant (2020) raises several methodological concerns regarding my attempt to test hypotheses about the observation that academic philosophers tend to find “scientism” threatening empirically using quantitative, corpus based methods. Chief among her methodological concerns is that numbers of philosophical publications that mention “scientism” are a “poor proxy for scholarly sentiment” (Bryant 2020, 31). In reply, I conduct a sentiment analysis that is designed to find out whether academic philosophers have negative, positive, or neutral (...) class='Hi'>sentiments toward “scientism.” The results of this analysis suggest that, for the most part, articles on “scientism” written by academic philosophers tend to contain mostly negative rather than positive (or neutral) sentiments about “scientism.”. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the notion of the ‘psychological dynamics’ that Professor Shun uses for explicating Confucian moral anger, based on David Hume’s (1711–76) psychological account of mind, to reconsider the role that object-based distinctions of emotions play in the Confucian moral tradition. First, by appealing to Hume’s investigation of the mental processes involved in feeling moral sentiments, I suggest that imagination, as a component in the ‘psychological dynamics’, explains how ‘dust’ settles on the mind to yield inappropriate (...) emotional responses. Second, by re-examining Confucius’s approval of Yan Hui’s moral anger, that he ‘never misdirects his anger’, I argue that though Confucians would not characterize the difference in emotional responses by distinguishing the first- and third-person perspectives, their goal of moral self-cultivation would encourage them to recognize the practical significance of distinguishing objects in situations, along with perceiving situations as a whole. While our minds as mental mirrors can reflect the whole situation, they are unique mirrors that resonate more vigorously with specific objects such as others’ minds. (shrink)

A large amount of data is maintained in every Social networking sites.The total data constantly gathered on these sites make it difficult for methods like use of field agents, clipping services and ad-hoc research to maintain social media data. This paper discusses the previous research on sentiment analysis.