Rumination is a maladaptive form of emotion regulation associated with psychopathology. Research with adults suggests that rumination covaries with diurnal cortisol rhythms, yet this has not been examined among adolescents. Here, we examine the day-to-day covariation between rumination and cortisol, and explore whether trait rumination is associated with alterations in diurnal cortisol rhythms among adolescent girls. Participants provided saliva samples 3 times per day over 3 days, along with daily reports of stress and rumination, questionnaires assessing trait rumination related to (...) peer stress, and diagnostic interviews assessing depression and anxiety. Greater rumination than usual during the day was associated with lower cortisol awakening responses the following morning, but this effect was not significant after accounting for wake time and an objective measure of adherence to the saliva sampling protocol. Trait rumination was associated with lower average cortisol levels at waking and flatter diurnal slopes, accounting for wake time, protocol compliance, and other factors. These patterns may help to explain why rumination is related to the development of psychopathology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Dewey and the Question of Artful CommunicationScott R. StroudThe American pragmatist John Dewey included tantalizing sections of praise of the power of communication in his important work on community, experience, and their improvement, noting in 1925 that "of all aff airs, communication is the most wonderful" (1988a, LW 1:132) and in 1927 that communication plays an important part in the individual's attempt "to learn to become human" (1984, (...) LW 2:332).1 Some in the field of communication have sensed the important, but undeveloped, role that communication plays in his thought and have attempted to use Dewey's work in analyzing rhetorical practice, cultural studies, and the role of journalism in society.2 While such studies strive to clarify the value and process of communication in Dewey's thought, they fall short of explaining one seemingly simple thing that is implied in these passages—that communication can be experienced as aesthetic or artful. Nathan Crick identifies such a lacuna in the literature and notes that "beyond its utility as an argument against elite forms of academic criticism, the value of Dewey's aesthetic theory for communication studies remained underdeveloped" (2004, 303). Although he does an admirable job of tracing the relation of aesthetics to communication in Dewey's evolving thought, Crick comes no closer than others in answering the fundamental question of how communication can be artful or aesthetic—he merely argues for the general point that " communication, [End Page 153] whether it occurs in an oration, a conversation, or a television, is best understood as a form of art that has the potential to bring about aesthetic experience in its participants and open their eyes to the world of possibility embodied within each of us" (2004, 314). How exactly does this aesthetization of communication occur? Crick ends his article with the interesting claim that "in its aesthetic form communication becomes rhetorical. It turns communication into an art whose goal is a presentation that unites form and rhythm in a manner that can reach down into the experiences of the audience and literally transform them into something new" (2004, 317). How exactly does communication meet such standards? Does such a "high" art of communication as rhetoric fit everyday communication, the vast majority of human communicative practices?3 Although Crick's study is an important inquiry into the overall role of communication in Dewey's aesthetics, it still leaves open the fundamental question—How exactly can any given act of communication (beyond the eloquent and poetic oration) be rendered aesthetic or artful?This question was vitally important for Dewey, as he places artistic and aesthetic aspects of communicative practice at the very heart of his social and political philosophy. In describing the "Great Community," he announces that it will take place when two conditions hold: "The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it.... Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion.... It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication" (1984, LW 2:350). This is a vital passage for understanding Dewey's aims, as it clearly links a scientific method of thinking (his preferred method of "inquiry") with a form of communication that can be taken as an art.Yet scholars of communication systematically miss this part of the Deweyan equation. For instance, take Lary Belman's early study of Dewey's view of communication. He concludes by analyzing this same passage from Dewey on the two conditions of the Great Community and states, "The basic conditions for the creation of a Great Community... were, Dewey postulated, the presence of (a) vigorous, systematic, and continuous social inquiry to reveal the influential agencies at work in society and their mode of operation, and (b) widespread and rapid distribution of the findings of this inquiry in a form readily understood by those for whom these findings [End Page 154] have significance" (1977, 36–37). It is remarkable that the... (shrink)

"Over many centuries, philosophers, theologians, and poets have been fascinated by the interplay of will and desire in the human psyche. Does will follow or precede desire? How can we bond them and thus unite body, soul, and spirit in harmonic concord? For fresh insights to these age-old questions, Dr. Joanne Stroud enlists the tools of modern psychology. Her eclectic probe of basic human drives moves from the awesome power of Eros, the great liberator of antiquity, through the impact of (...) the monotheistic faiths on will and desire, and finally to the discordant views of the great philosophers and psychologists of the modern era, among them Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and the little known but magnetic Frenchman, Gaston Bachelard." "Love and will, human aspirations and desires, are caught - the author concludes - in a whirlwind of change, with impersonal scientific data supplanting the myths, the ancient lore, the stories rich in imagery, that previously contoured human behavior. As a result we live, in W.B. Yeat's famous phrase, in "the age of disordered will."" "In the twentieth century will became recognized only in its more conscious applications, as almost synonymous with ego. With this increasing reverence for the strong ego, will was elevated (by psychologists, among many others) to new egotistical summits as a potent tool of power. The more subtle aspects of will, such as the way it delineates identity, have been neglected, the author contends, and can only be recaptured by an understanding of how will becomes bonded to desire."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is the annual publication of lectures given at Clare Hall, Cambridge University; Brasenose College, Oxford University; Harvard University; Yale University; the University of California; Stanford University; the University of Michigan; and the University of Utah as well as other locations. Established to reflect upon the scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values, the lectureships are international and intercultural, and transcend ethnic, national, religious, and ideological distinctions. This Volume X, first published in 1989, includes: (...) ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN 'Two Hundred Years of Reactionary Rhetoric: The Case of the Perverse Effect'; ROBERT A. DAHL 'The Pseudodemocratization of the American Presidency'; JAVIER MUGUERZA 'The Alternative of Dissent'; WILLIAM THEODORE DE BARY 'The Trouble with Confucianism'; ANTHONY QUINTON 'The Varieties of Value'; BARRY STROUD 'The Study of Human Nature and the Subjectivity of Value'. (shrink)

In The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour [Stroud, 2000], Barry Stroud carries out an ambitious attack on various forms of irrealism and subjectivism about color. The views he targets - those that would deny a place in objective reality to the colors - have a venerable history in philosophy. Versions of them have been defended by Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Locke, and Hume; more recently, forms of these positions have been articulated by Williams, Smart, Mackie, Ryle, and (...) Hardin, among others. Stroud's aim is to argue not only that these writers fail to make their cases, but that no conceivable argument could ever convince us that colors are not a part of objective reality. (shrink)

Bottom line on top: this is a wonderful book.

Any brief comment on Barry Stroud’s fine book risks bringing some of its virtues into relief precisely by lacking them. The book’s epigraph is a passage from Wittgenstein advising philosophers to take their time. Stroud never papers over difficulties, and he allows himself to be sketchy only when it does not matter for the main line of his argument. Anyone without space constraints should take him as a model. Pleading space constraints, I shall sketch two reservations.

Barry Stroud begins his investigation into the metaphysics of colour with a discussion of the elusiveness of the genuinely philosophical quest for reality. He insists upon a distinction between two ways in which the idea of a correspondence between perceptions or beliefs and the facts may be understood: first, as equivalent to the plain truth of the perceptions/beliefs in question; second, as conveying the metaphysical reality of the corresponding features of the world. I begin by voicing some suspicion about this (...) distinction. Then I go on to consider various aspects of his central argument against the likelihood of any successful unmasking explanation in connection with colour. The final moves of this argument seem to me to be unstable. Either his conclusion that the unmasker’s overall strategy is self-defeating is stronger than is warranted, or his insistence that no conclusive result is established in connection with the fundamental quest for reality is unduly cautious, depending on how precisely the dependence, which he rightly insists upon, of the identification of perceptions of colour upon some identification of colour properties themselves, is to be taken. (shrink)

The following rather unexpected passage occurs toward the end of Barry Stroud’s The Quest for Reality: Once the metaphysical project’s failure to reveal the unreality or subjectivity of color is admitted, I think there is a temptation to conclude that objects really are colored after all. If the austere conception of an objectively colorless world cannot be reached, and the colors of things cannot be shown to be unreal or subjective, we are inclined to think that they must be real (...) and objective. (shrink)

A philosophical treatment of irrationality should at the same time leave space for irrational forms of thought and action and illuminate what is defective about them. While Davidson's analysis of weakness of the will is justly famous, some of Davidson's general philosophical commitments in fact conspire to make it especially difficult for him to account for irrationality. Davidson's conviction that irrationality must involve inconsistency, together with his rather circumscribed understanding of inconsistency, make it questionable whether he can leave the right (...) kind of space for irrational phenomena that seem nonetheless to exist. (shrink)

First published in 1986, Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft remains the only analysis of indigenous discourse about an African belief system undertaken from within the framework of Anglo-American analytical philosophy. Taking as its point of departure W. V. O. Quine's thesis about the indeterminacy of translation, the book investigates questions of Yoruba epistemology and of how knowledge is conceived in an oral culture.

Disagreement and the implications thereof have emerged as a central preoccupation of recent analytic philosophy. In epistemology, articles on so-called peer disagreement and its implications have burgeoned and now constitute an especially rich subject of discussion in the field. In moral and political philosophy, moral disagreement has of course traditionally been a crucial argumentative lever in meta-ethical debates, and disagreement over conceptions of the good has been the spark for central controversies in political philosophy, such as the limits of legitimate (...) state authority and public reason. Philosophers of language have also been keen to take up disagreement as a tool, for instance in motivating or exploring the merits of contextualist or relativist semantics for certain areas of discourse, such as matters of taste, aesthetic evaluation, and epistemic discourse. (shrink)

Can you disagree with someone without thinking that what they say is false? As we shall see, this is not only possible but quite frequent. Starting with the type of disagreement most familiar from the philosophical literature, we will progressively expand the circle of genuine disagreement until it encompasses even conceptual disagreement, which might sound like a contradiction in terms. For conceptual disagreement necessarily involves the parties' using different concepts, which one might think would preclude genuine disagreement. We shall argue (...) otherwise, adducing three different types of case in order to demonstrate the scope of this phenomenon. (shrink)

The New Evil Demon problem has been hotly debated since the case was introduced in the early 1980’s (e.g. Lehrer and Cohen 1983; Cohen 1984), and there seems to be recent increased interest in the topic. In a forthcoming collection of papers on the New Evil Demon problem (Dutant and Dorsch, forthcoming), at least two of the papers, both by prominent epistemologists, attempt to resist the problem by appealing to the distinction between justification and excuses. My primary aim here is (...) to critically evaluate this new excuse maneuver as a response to the New Evil Demon problem. -/- Their response attempts to give us reason to reject the idea that victims of the New Evil Demon have justification for believing as they do. I shall argue that this approach is ultimately unsuccessful, however much of value can be learned from these attempts. In particular, progress in the debate can be made by following those who advance the excuse maneuver and make explicit the connection between epistemic justification and epistemic norms. By doing so, the questions being debated are clarified, as is the methodology being used to attempt to answer them. (shrink)

There are various equivalent formulations of the Church-Turing thesis. A common one is that every effective computation can be carried out by a Turing machine. The Church-Turing thesis is often misunderstood, particularly in recent writing in the philosophy of mind.

While Immanuel Kant is an epochal figure in a variety of fields, he has not figured prominently in the study of rhetoric and communication. This book represents the most detailed examination available into Kant's uneasy but often misunderstood relationship with rhetoric. By explicating Kant's complex understanding of rhetoric, this book advances the thesis that communicative practices play an important role in Kant's account of how we become better humans and how we create morally cultivating communities.

Among the many practical failures that threaten us, weakness of will or akrasia is often considered to be a paradigm of irrationality. The eleven new essays in this collection, written by an excellent international team of philosophers, some well-established, some younger scholars, give a rich overview of the current debate over weakness of will and practical irrationality more generally. Issues covered include classical questions such as the distinction between weakness and compulsion, the connection between evaluative judgement and motivation, the role (...) of emotions in akrasia, rational agency, and the existence of the will. The also include new topics, such as group akrasia, strength of will, the nature of correct choice, the structure of decision theory, the temporality of prudential reasons, and emotional rationality. Because these questions cut across philosophy of mind and ethics, the collection will be essential reading for scholars, postgraduates, and upper-level undergraduates in both these fields. (shrink)

I begin by proposing and explicating a plausible articulation of the view that morality is overriding. I then argue that it would be desirable for this thesis to be sustained. However, the prospects for its vindication will depend crucially on which moral theory we adopt. I examine some schematic moral theories in order to bring out which are friendly and which unfriendly to moral overridingness. In light of the reasons to hope that the overridingness thesis can be sustained, theories apparently (...) incompatible with it – I argue that consequentialism is one – have a count against them. (shrink)

Self-control is normally, if only tacitly, viewed as an inherently practical capacity or achievement: as exercised only in the domain of action. Questioning this assumption, we wish to motivate the...

"Examines the relationship between art and morality discussed in the writings of American pragmatist John Dewey.

In most states in the U.S. it is legal to carry a concealed handgun in public, but little is known about why people want to do this. While the existing literature argues that guns symbolize masculinity, most research on the actual use of guns has focused on marginalized men. The issue of concealed handguns is interesting because they must remain concealed and because relatively privileged men are most likely to have a license to carry one. Using in-depth interviews with 20 (...) men, this article explores how they draw on discourses of masculinity to explain their use of concealed handguns. These men claim that they are motivated by a desire to protect their wives and children, to compensate for lost strength as they age, and to defend themselves against people and places they perceive as dangerous, especially those involving racial/ethnic minority men. These findings suggest that part of the appeal of carrying a concealed firearm is that it allows men to identify with hegemonic masculinity through fantasies of violence and self-defense. (shrink)

This chapter considers whether our moral entitlement to manifest certain kinds of partiality stems from a morally basic permission to be partial, or whether it can be accounted for in some other way. In particular, it explores the possibility of justifying partial conduct via a general moral prerogative to pursue our own projects. On this approach, in contexts of plural agency, where two or more people together pursue a joint project, we would have permission to favour our co-agents — but (...) only in ways that relate to our joint project. While this approach might limit the scope of morally permissible partiality, it seems more faithful to the concerns that animate the partiality debates than the alternative of claiming an unrestricted basic right to be partial to whomsoever we wish. (shrink)

Bhimrao Ambedkar is well known as the architect of independent India’s constitution, the document that created the world’s largest democracy on January 26, 1950. Ambedkar is also famous for his vigorous advocacy on behalf of India’s so-called “untouchables,” those groups of people that reside beneath and outside of the ancient system of hereditary castes in Hinduism. His activism and political efforts secured rights and respect for millions of lower-caste Indians before his death in 1956. Even though Ambedkar was an untouchable, (...) forbidden from learning the ancient language of Sanskrit, he managed to learn English in his early education... (shrink)

In this article, I argue that speech act theory can be altered to accommodate art objects as evocative illocutionary speech acts that areaimed toward reaching understanding. To do this, I discuss the example of Zen Buddhism’s use of the koan, an aesthetic object that can be seen as evoking a given experience from its auditors for the purpose of reaching understanding on a point that the teacher wishes to make. I argue that such a reading of art as evocative can (...) be merged with hypothetical intentionalism insofar as it recognizes a certain orientation on the part of the auditor to approach art in a certain way. In the case of koans and other artworks, the approach is one of considering what claim an author may want to convey through the auditor’s experience of the artwork. (shrink)

American democracy, while no stranger to internal conflict, has seemingly reached a boiling point regarding political partisanship. Things have gotten so bad that parties rarely talk to each other on important issues, and shutting down the government over ideological disagreements has become a more or less accepted move. Tom Allen, a former U.S. representative from Maine, paints this provocative picture of how the warring political parties in the U.S. government see each other: “Democrats see Republicans as inattentive to evidence and (...) expertise, unconcerned about Americans struggling to get by, and reflexively opposed to government action to deal with our collective challenges. On the other hand, Republicans see.. (shrink)

Defining “criticism” is a simple—but bedeviling—task. No less a critic and theorist than Edwin Black begins with the simple statement that “criticism is what critics do.” While he admits that this seems like an empty definition, Black does note that it has one redeeming feature—“It compels us to focus on the critic” (1978, 4). Criticism and those who engage in it are integrally connected, and any account of critical activity must deal with both the activity and its actor. In this (...) way, it is much like art—one could easily utter that “art is what artists do.” Criticism is often tied to art and its products, so this appears to be a fair way to proceed in an investigation of criticism. Yet I would argue .. (shrink)