A brief self-report scale was developed to assess everyday performance failures arising directly or primarily from brief failures of sustained attention . The ARCES was found to be associated with a more direct measure of propensity to attention lapses and to errors on an existing behavioral measure of sustained attention . Although the ARCES and MAAS were highly correlated, structural modelling revealed the ARCES was more directly related to SART errors and the MAAS to SART RTs, which have been hypothesized (...) to directly reflect the lapses of attention that lead to SART errors. Thus, the MAAS and SART RTs appear to directly reflect attention lapses, whereas the ARCES and SART errors reflect the mistakes these lapses are thought to cause. Boredom proneness was also assessed by the BPS, as a separate consequence of a propensity to attention lapses. Although the ARCES was significantly associated with the BPS, this association was entirely accounted for by the MAAS, suggesting that performance errors and boredom are separate consequences of lapses in attention. A tendency to even extraordinarily brief attention lapses on the order of milliseconds may have far-reaching consequences not only for safe and efficient task performance but also for sustaining the motivation to persist in and enjoy these tasks. (shrink)

We report a novel task designed to elicit transient attention-lapse induced alienation of agency experiences in normal participants. When attention-related action slips occur during the task, participants reported substantially decreased self control as well as a high degree of perceived agency attributed to the errant hand. In addition, participants reported being surprised by, and annoyed with, the actions of the errant hand. We argue that ALIA experiences occur because of constraints imposed by the close and precise temporal relations between intention (...) formation and a contrary action employed in this paradigm. We note similarities between ALIA experiences and anarchic hand sign and argue that, despite important differences, both ALIA experiences and AHS phenomenology reflect failures of executive control to intervene and cancel contrary affordance-driven habitual motor plans. (shrink)

An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving. We assess the hypothesis that an analytic cognitive style is associated with a history of questioning, altering, and rejecting supernatural claims, both religious and paranormal. In two studies, we examined associations of God beliefs, religious engagement, conventional religious beliefs and paranormal beliefs with performance measures of cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style. An analytic cognitive style negatively predicted both religious and paranormal beliefs (...) when controlling for cognitive ability as well as religious engagement, sex, age, political ideology, and education. Participants more willing to engage in analytic reasoning were less likely to endorse supernatural beliefs. Further, an association between analytic cognitive style and religious engagement was mediated by religious beliefs, suggesting that an analytic cognitive style negatively affects religious engagement via lower acceptance of conventional religious beliefs. Results for types of God belief indicate that the association between an analytic cognitive style and God beliefs is more nuanced than mere acceptance and rejection, but also includes adopting less conventional God beliefs, such as Pantheism or Deism. Our data are consistent with the idea that two people who share the same cognitive ability, education, political ideology, sex, age and level of religious engagement can acquire very different sets of beliefs about the world if they differ in their propensity to think analytically. (shrink)

While individual differences in the willingness and ability to engage analytic processing have long informed research in reasoning and decision making, the implications of such differences have not yet had a strong influence in other domains of psychological research. We claim that analytic thinking is not limited to problems that have a normative basis and, as an extension of this, predict that individual differences in analytic thinking will be influential in determining beliefs and values. Along with assessments of cognitive ability (...) and style, religious beliefs, and moral values, participants judged the wrongness of acts considered disgusting and conventionally immoral, but that do not violate care- or fairness-based moral principles. Differences in willingness to engage analytic thinking predicted reduced judgements of wrongness, independent of demographics, political ideology, religiosity, and moral values. Further, we show that those who were higher in cognitive ability were less likely to indicate that purity, patriotism, and respect for traditions and authority are important to their moral thinking. These findings are consistent with a “Reflectionist” view that assumes a role for analytic thought in determining substantive, deeply-held human beliefs and values. (shrink)

In two studies of a GO–NOGO task assessing sustained attention, we examined the effects of altering speed–accuracy trade-offs through instructions and auditory alerts distributed throughout the task. Instructions emphasizing accuracy reduced errors and changed the distribution of GO trial RTs. Additionally, correlations between errors and increasing RTs produced a U-function; excessively fast and slow RTs accounted for much of the variance of errors. Contrary to previous reports, alerts increased errors and RT variability. The results suggest that standard instructions for sustained (...) attention tasks, emphasizing speed and accuracy equally, produce errors arising from attempts to conform to the misleading requirement for speed, which become conflated with attention-lapse produced errors and auditory alerts have complex, and sometimes deleterious, effects on attention. We argue that instructions emphasizing accuracy provide a more precise assessment of attention lapses in sustained attention tasks. (shrink)

Nielsen [Nielsen, T. . Felt presence: Paranoid delusion or hallucinatory social imagery? Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 975–983.] raises a number of issues and presents several provocative arguments worthy of discussion regarding the experience of the felt presence during sleep paralysis . We consider these issues beginning with the nature of FP and its relation to affective-motivational systems and provide an alternative to Nielsen’s reduction of FP to a purely spatial hallucination. We then consider implications of the “normal social imagery” model. (...) We can find only one specific empirical hypothesis articulated within this framework and it turns out to be one that we explicitly addressed in our original paper. We also review our position regarding the possible relation of FP during SP to a number of related anomalous experiences and contrast FP to anomalous vestibular-motor phenomena. We review our position that the neuromatrix concept, in the light of available evidence, is more appropriately applied to V-M experiences than FP. Finally, we pursue speculations, raised in Nielsen’s commentary, on the wider implications of FP. (shrink)

This study demonstrates that Dewey did not reject Hegelianism during the 1890s, as scholars maintain, but developed a humanistic/historicist reading that was indebted to an American Hegelian tradition. Scholars have misunderstood the "permanent Hegelian deposit" in Dewey's thought because they have not fully appreciated this American Hegelian tradition and have assumed that his Hegelianism was based primarily on British neo-Hegelianism. ;The study examines the American reception of Hegel in the nineteenth-century by intellectuals as diverse as James Marsh and Frederic (...) Henry Hedge and how it flowered in late nineteenth-century St. Louis. The St. Louis Hegelians read Hegel as a particularly practical and politically liberal philosopher whose social philosophy promoted both social diversity and unity. Led by W. T. Harris, they studied Hegel in German and published their own scholarship, as well as translations of German scholarship, in their Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Their efforts to make "Hegel talk English" and to base the St. Louis public schools on Hegel's philosophy of education won them national, and even, international attention. The St. Louis Hegelians sought to adapt Hegel's thought to their American context by assuaging elitist elements within it; Dewey's intellectual development was profoundly shaped by their appropriation of his philosophy. ;Dewey drew upon Hegel's argument that humans form societies because of their differences, not in spite of them. Hegel's rejection of the self-sufficient, atomistic individual entailed that the individual is dependent upon others for the satisfaction of material needs. Moreover, like Hegel, Dewey rejected the hedonistic basis of the British political tradition by arguing that humans seek recognition from their equals as well as satisfaction of material needs. Dewey believed Hegel's emphasis upon equality and diversity provided a model of society in which there was fertile ground for the individual to conceive and articulate cultural criticism. The study ends by comparing recent Hegel scholarship to Dewey's, demonstrating that American Hegelianism has returned, in important ways, to a Deweyan reading of Hegel. (shrink)

This is a study of the attributes problem in the metaphysics of Spinoza, using the recent literature ascribing an absolute idealism to Spinoza as a point of departure.

From 1882 to 1903, Dewey explicitly espoused a Hegelian philosophy. Until recently, scholars agreed that he broke from Hegel no later than 1903, but never adequately accounted for what he called the "permanent deposit" that Hegel left in his mature thought. I argue that Dewey never made a clean break from Hegel. Instead, he drew on the work of the St. Louis Hegelians to fashion a non-metaphysical reading of Hegel, similar to that championed by Klaus Hartmann and other Hegel scholars (...) since the 1970s. This reading of Hegel is remarkably consistent with Dewey's mature philosophy. Although Dewey abruptly repudiated Hegel during World War I, I contend this reflected the exigencies of war rather than philosophical concerns. (shrink)

Previously we reported a three-factor structure for hallucinations accompanying sleep paralysis . These earlier analyses were, however, based on retrospective accounts. In a prospective study, 383 individuals reported individual episodes online providing further evidence for the three-factor structure as well as clearer conceptually meaningful relations among factors than retrospective studies. In addition, reports of individual episodes permitted a more fine-grained analysis of the internal structure of factors to assess predictions based on the hypothesis that a sensed or felt presence is (...) a core experience affecting other SP hallucinations. Results were generally consistent with this hypothesis. In particular, associations among, and temporal stability of, sensory hallucinations were largely explained by their common association with FP. The findings are consistent with REM initiation of a threat activated vigilance system with pervasive effects on the SP experience and suggest a potential model for the thematic organization of nightmares and dreams more generally. (shrink)

A 'sensed presence' often accompanies hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations associated with sleep paralysis. Qualitative descriptions of the sensed presence during sleep paralysis are consistent with the experience of a monitoring, stalking predator. It is argued that the sensed presence during sleep paralysis arises because of REM-related endogenous activation of a hypervigilant and biased attentive state, the normal function of which is to resolve ambiguities inherent in biologically relevant threat cues. Given the lack of disambiguating environmental cues, however, the feeling of (...) presence persists as a protracted experience that is both numinous and ominous. This experience, in turn, shapes the elaboration and integration of the concurrent hallucinations that often take on supernatural and daemonic qualities. The sense of presence considered here is an 'other' that is radically different from, and hence more than a mere projection of, the self. Such a numinous sense of otherness may constitute a primordial core consciousness of the animate and sentient in the world around us. (shrink)

Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences (HHEs) accompanying sleep paralysis (SP) are often cited as sources of accounts of supernatural nocturnal assaults and paranormal experiences. Descriptions of such experiences are remarkably consistent across time and cultures and consistent also with known mechanisms of REM states. A three-factor structural model of HHEs based on their relations both to cultural narratives and REM neurophysiology is developed and tested with several large samples. One factor, labeled Intruder, consisting of sensed presence, fear, and auditory and visual (...) hallucinations, is conjectured to originate in a hypervigilant state initiated in the midbrain. Another factor, Incubus, comprising pressure on the chest, breathing difficulties, and pain, is attributed to effects of hyperpolarization of motoneurons on perceptions of respiration. These two factors have in common an implied alien ''other'' consistent with occult narratives identified in numerous contemporary and historical cultures. A third factor, labeled Unusual Bodily Experiences, consisting of floating/flying sensations, out-of-body experiences, and feelings of bliss, is related to physically impossible experiences generated by conflicts of endogenous and exogenous activation related to body position, orientation, and movement. Implications of this last factor for understanding of orientational primacy in self-consciousness are considered. Central features of the model developed here are consistent with recent work on hallucinations associated with hypnosis and schizophrenia. (shrink)

We examined the affective consequences of everyday attention lapses and memory failures. Significant associations were found between self-report measures of attention lapses , attention-related cognitive errors , and memory failures , on the one hand, and boredom and depression , on the other. Regression analyses confirmed previous findings that the ARCES partially mediates the relation between the MAAS-LO and MFS. Further regression analyses also indicated that the association between the ARCES and BPS was entirely accounted for by the MAAS-LO and (...) MFS, as was that between the ARCES and BDI-II. Structural modeling revealed the associations to be optimally explained by the MAAS-LO and MFS influencing the BPS and BDI-II, contrary to current conceptions of attention and memory problems as consequences of affective dysfunction. A lack of conscious awareness of one’s actions, signaled by the propensity to experience brief lapses of attention and related memory failures, is thus seen as having significant consequences in terms of long-term affective well-being. (shrink)

Aristotle's biological works - constituting over 25% of his surviving corpus and for centuries largely unstudied by philosophically oriented scholars - have been the subject of an increasing amount of attention of late. This collection brings together some of the best work that has been done in this area, with the aim of exhibiting the contribution that close study of these treatises can make to the understanding of Aristotle's philosophy. The book is divided into four parts, each with an introduction (...) which places its essays in relation to each other and to the wider issues of the book as a whole. The first part is an overview of the relationship of Aristotle's biology to his philosophy; the other three each concentrate on a set of issues central to Aristotelian study - definition and demonstration; teleology and necessity in nature; and metaph themes such as the unity of matter and form and the nature of substance. (shrink)

The philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand is a cultural phenomenon. Her books have sold more than twenty-eight million copies, and countless individuals speak of her writings as having significantly influenced their lives. Despite her popularity, Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism has received little serious attention from academic philosophers. _Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge_ offers scholarly analysis of key elements of Ayn Rand’s radically new approach to epistemology. The four essays, by contributors intimately familiar with this area of her work, discuss (...) Rand’s theory of concepts—including its new account of abstraction and essence—and its central role in her epistemology; how that view leads to a distinctive conception of the justification of knowledge; her realist account of perceptual awareness and its role in the acquisition of knowledge; and finally, the implications of that theory for understanding the growth of scientific knowledge. The volume concludes with critical commentary on the essays by distinguished philosophers with differing philosophical viewpoints and the author’s responses to those commentaries. This is the second book published in Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, which was developed in conjunction with the Ayn Rand Society to offer a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker. The Ayn Rand Society, an affiliated group of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, seeks to foster scholarly study by philosophers of the philosophical thought and writings of Ayn Rand. (shrink)

This paper synthesises a collaborative review of social capital theory, with particular regard for its relevance to the changing educational landscape within Scotland. The review considers the common and distinctive elements of social capital, developed by the founding fathers-Putnam, Bourdieu and Coleman-and explores how these might help to understand the changing contexts and pursue opportunities for growth.

Philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand is a cultural phenomenon. Her books have sold more than 25 million copies, and countless individuals speak of her writings as having significantly influenced their lives. In spite of the popular interest in her ideas, or perhaps because of it, Rand’s work has until recently received little serious attention from academics. Though best known among philosophers for her strong support of egoism in ethics and capitalism in politics, there is an increasingly widespread awareness of both the range (...) and the systematic character of Rand’s philosophic thought. This new series, developed in conjunction with the Ayn Rand Society, an affiliated group of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, seeks a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker. The first volume starts not with the metaphysical and epistemological fundamentals of Rand’s thought, but with central aspects of her ethical theory. Though her endorsement of ethical egoism is well-known—one of her most familiar essay collections is _The Virtue of Selfishness—_the character of her egoism is not. The chapters in this volume address the basis of her egoism in a virtue-centered normative ethics; her account of how moral norms in general are themselves based on a fundamental choice by an agent to value his own life; and how her own approach to the foundations of ethics is to be compared and contrasted with familiar approaches in the analytic ethical tradition. Philosophers interested in the objectivity of value, in the way ethical theory is virtue-based, and in acquiring a serious understanding of an egoistic moral theory worthy of attention will find much to consider in this volume, which includes critical responses to several of its main essays. (shrink)

Afghanistan. In the heat and dust, young British army medic Elinor Nielson watches an Afghan girl walk into a hail of bullets. But when she runs to help, Ellie finds her gone. Who is she? And what's happened to her? What Ellie discovers makes her question everything she believes in - even her feelings for the American lieutenant who takes her side.

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

An earlier version of this paper was presented in Sydney, Australia at the 2005 Australian Society of Legal Philosophy annual conference. The author wishes to thank all those who commented upon and criticized the paper. The author also wishes to thank two anonymous referees from this journal for their helpful suggestions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Justice, Language and Hume: A Reply to Matthew Kramer James Allan How much reliance, in David Hume's convention-based picture ofthe origins ofjustice, needstobe placed on apre-existingcommon language amongst the various participants? Matthew Kramer has argued that Hume's story of the passage "from the hostilities of nature to the serenity of civilized Ufe"1 is, in effect, incoherent. It is incoherent, Kramer asserts, because "language must be in place (...) already" (Kramer, 148) in order for family groups tojoin together into larger social units by means of Humean convention. In other words, Kramer takes the view that a commonlanguage is needed amongst all the players for thé gradual establishment ofjustice by human conventions to be possible. But it is just this very thing, a relatively sophisticated common language, that can only be achieved after the establishment of the larger societal unit. Kramer therefore sees Hume's account of the origins of justice as, at best, paradoxical because "the founding of a societal unit can take place only if such a unit has already been founded" (Kramer, 149). This article shall be concerned to defend, against the thrust of Kramer's attack, the broad outlines2 of Hume's story of the origins of justice in book 3 of the Treatise. At any rate, I will argue that Hume's explicitlyahistorical accountis coherent? Butinmakingthis argument I shall be careful to place Hume's account of justice in its proper perspective. It must be recalled that Hume was attempting to explain all ofhuman morals, aesthetics and virtues in a scientific way. In this scheme,justice—for him, the stability ofpossessions or the basic rules of property—was the pre-eminent "artificial" virtue. As we shall see, no interpretation ofHume's account ofthe escape tojustice can ignore his wider concern, to explain empirically human nature and conduct. Let us start, however, with a bare summary of Kramer's thesis. Firstly, Kramer sets out Hume's core position. Justice (basic rules of property) and thus society result from the re-directing ofself-love. The process does not rely on agreement and is thus immune from one ofthe main criticisms of social contract theories (that is, how to explain the bindingness of a first ever contract).4 Rather, Hume's account is of justice emerging ever so gradually from reciprocal conventions. Where small family living is "natural"—some original or inherent Volume XVII Number 2 81 JAMES ALLAN principle—life in society is created by convention. In this sensejustice is "artificial." Secondly, two critiques of Hume's position are considered and found, by Kramer, ultimately to be unsuccessful. The first is the weakness noted above and common toall social contract analyses: from where does the bindingness of a first contract come? But Hume explicitly rejected contractarian theories as Kramer allows. Hume's conventional theory "is not of the nature of a promise:... it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it."5 The second critique which Kramer finds abortive, and to which I shall return below, involves the role of reason in the creation of justice. Primitive reflection based on already experienced events, impressions or ideas would not be sufficient to overcome avid self-interest.6 But in response to this attack Kramer retorts that it is at most inconclusive whether the experiences of family life combined with reason could overcome self-interest on Hume's model. Thirdly, Krameroffers his own critique in the hope ofshowing that "Hume's story disrupts itself when it narrates certain events that cannot possiblymaterialize until theyhave already occurred" (Kramer, 143). Kramer's attack on the Humean conventional move tojustice, as indicated above, concentrates on language. But it is well to note carefully Kramer's interpretation of Hume's account of the building of stable, society-wide property rules. Kramer takes this to be that, "[a]s a result ofcrude reflection and the restraints offamily life, most people come to realize that a persistent demand for goods can be better filled within society than without it" (Kramer, 147; emphasis mine). Thus, says Kramer, the first step, temporally, is a rational deduction. After reason has alerted us to... (shrink)

I. ONCE, SAID AN AUTHOR, WHERE I NEED NOT SAY . .

Investigation of “out-of-body experiences” has implications for understanding both normal bodily-self integration and its vulnerabilities. Beyond reported associations between OBEs and specific brain regions, however, there have been few investigations of neurochemical systems relevant to OBEs. Ketamine, a drug used recreationally to achieve dissociative experiences, provides a real-world paradigm for investigating neurochemical effects. We investigate the strength of the association of OBEs and ketamine use relative to other common drugs of abuse. Self-report data from an online survey indicate that both (...) lifetime frequency of ketamine use and OBEs during ketamine intoxication were more strongly related to the frequency of OBEs and related phenomena than other drugs. Moreover, the apparent effects of other drugs could largely be explained by associated ketamine use. The present results, consistent with the role of NMDA receptors in OBEs, should encourage future studies of the role of neurochemical systems in OBEs. (shrink)

Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — three eminent thinkers, having little or no need for more money in their purses, and nothing particular to interest them in the law reviews and philosophy journals, set out to meet and discuss legal philosophy in a literary part of the world. It is a way these three have of driving off ennui and formulating the next publication. Whenever they find themselves growing stale about the pen; whenever it is adamp, (...) drizzly November in London; whenever they find themselves involuntarily churning out conference papers and bringing up the rear of every symposium on offer; and especially whenever they find their critics getting such an upper hand on them, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent them from deliberately sitting down and methodically knocking off a paper excoriating every stranger they have met — then, they account it high time to gettogether as soon as they can. (shrink)

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick Ferré. These essays, informed by the insights of Ferré and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick FerrZ. These essays, informed by the insights of FerrZ and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 658-676, September 2021.