This paper goes beyond — transcends — “pedagogy as justice,” recognizing that justice, particularly in these present times, may not be enough. Its wager is with pedagogies of and for life; pedagogies that plant and cultivate, that push and enable other modes of living, despite the capitalist-modern-colonial-racist system, beyond the system, and in the system's margins, borders, fissures, and cracks. These pedagogies, as Catherine Walsh argues here, are necessarily tied to and constitutive of decolonial(izing) praxis, a praxis that, while (...) not negating justice, takes us beyond it. The argument here is for the pedagogical-praxistical work being done now, and yet to be done; the actional thought, thoughtful action, and ongoing creation and construction of an otherwise for existence, for dignity, and for life in these times of multiple entwined pandemic-viruses, including capitalist greed, systemic racism, heteropatriarchy, and existential-territorial dispossession in which COVID is/was one more thread of the entwine. (shrink)

We begin this article by delineating the explanatory gaps left by prevailing gene‐focused approaches in our understanding of phenotype determination, inheritance, and the origin of novel traits. We aim not to diminish the value of these approaches but to highlight where their implementation, despite best efforts, has encountered persistent limitations. We then discuss how each of these explanatory gaps can be addressed by expanding research foci to take into accountbiological agency—the capacity of living systems at various levels to participate in (...) their own development, maintenance, and function by regulating their structures and activities in response to conditions they encounter. Here we aim to define formally what agency and agents are and—just as importantly—what they are not, emphasizing that agency is an empirical property connoting neither intention nor consciousness. Lastly, we discuss how incorporating agency helps to bridge explanatory gaps left by conventional approaches, highlight scientific fields in which implicit agency approaches are already proving valuable, and assess the opportunities and challenges of more systematically incorporating biological agency into research programs. (shrink)

Food images are useful stimuli for the study of cognitive processes as well as eating behavior. To enhance rigor and reproducibility in task-based research, it is advantageous to have stimulus sets that are publicly available and well characterized. Food Folio by Columbia Center for Eating Disorders is a publicly available set of 138 images of Western food items. The set was developed for the study of eating disorders, particularly for use in tasks that capture eating behavior characteristic of these illnesses. (...) It contains foods that are typically eaten, as well as those typically avoided, by individuals with eating disorders. Each image has now been rated across 17 different attributes by a large general United States population sample via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Ratings included subjective attributes as well as estimates of nutrient content. Each participant rated a subset of stimulus set food items on all 17 dimensions. Additional description of the image set is provided in terms of physical image information and accurate nutritional information. Correlations between subjective ratings were calculated and an exploratory factor analysis and exploratory cluster analysis completed. Outcomes of the factor analysis suggested foods may be described along three latent factors of healthiness, tastiness, and umami taste; the cluster analysis highlighted five distinct clusters of foods varying on these same dimensions. Descriptive outcomes indicated that the stimulus set includes a range of foods that vary along multiple dimensions and thus is likely to be useful in addressing various research questions surrounding eating behavior and cognition in healthy populations, as well as in those with eating disorders. The provision of comprehensive descriptive information allows for stimulus selection that is optimized for a given research question and promotes strong inference. (shrink)

When faced with adverse circumstances, there may be a tendency for individuals, agencies, and governments to search for a target to assign blame. Our focus will be on the novel coronavirus outbreak, where racial groups, political parties, countries, and minorities have been blamed for spreading, producing or creating the virus. Blame—here defined as attributing causality, responsibility, intent, or foresight to someone/something for a fault or wrong—has already begun to damage modern society and medical practice in the context of the COVID-19 (...) outbreak. Evidence from past and current pandemics suggest that this tendency to seek blame affects international relations, promotes unwarranted devaluation of health professionals, and prompts a spike of racism and discrimination. By drawing on social and cognitive psychology theories, we provide a framework that helps to understand the effect of blame in pandemics, when people blame, whom they blame, and how blame detrimentally affects the COVID-19 response. Ultimately, we provide a path to inform health messaging to reduce blaming tendencies, based on social psychological principles for health communication. (shrink)

State Medical Boards (SMBs) can take severe disciplinary actions (e.g., license revocation or suspension) against physicians who commit egregious wrongdoing in order to protect the public. However, there is noteworthy variability in the extent to which SMBs impose severe disciplinary action. In this manuscript, we present and synthesize a subset of 11 recommendations based on findings from our team’s larger consensus-building project that identified a list of 56 policies and legal provisions SMBs can use to better protect patients from egregious (...) wrongdoing by physicians. (shrink)

Our sense of self includes awareness of our thoughts and movements, and our control over them. This feeling can be altered or lost in neuropsychiatric disorders as well as in phenomena such as “automatic writing” whereby writing is attributed to an external source. Here, we employed suggestion in highly hypnotically suggestible participants to model various experiences of automatic writing during a sentence completion task. Results showed that the induction of hypnosis, without additional suggestion, was associated with a small but significant (...) reduction of control, ownership, and awareness for writing. Targeted suggestions produced a double dissociation between thought and movement components of writing, for both feelings of control and ownership, and additionally, reduced awareness of writing. Overall, suggestion produced selective alterations in the control, ownership, and awareness of thought and motor components of writing, thus enabling key aspects of automatic writing, observed across different clinical and cultural settings, to be modelled. (shrink)

Serious ethical violations in medicine, such as sexual abuse, criminal prescribing of opioids, and unnecessary surgeries, directly harm patients and undermine trust in the profession of medicine. We review the literature on violations in medicine and present an analysis of 280 cases. Nearly all cases involved repeated instances of intentional wrongdoing, by males in nonacademic medical settings, with oversight problems and a selfish motive such as financial gain or sex. More than half of cases involved a wrongdoer with a suspected (...) personality disorder or substance use disorder. Despite clear patterns, no factors provide readily observable red flags, making prevention difficult. Early identification and intervention in cases requires significant policy shifts that prioritize the safety of patients over physician interests in privacy, fair processes, and proportionate disciplinary actions. We explore a series of 10 questions regarding policy, oversight, discipline, and education options. Satisfactory answers to these questions will require input from diverse stakeholders to help society negotiate effective and ethically balanced solutions. (shrink)

Between the Psyche and the Social is the first collection that specifically features the field of psychoanalytic social theory emerging in and between psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and across the disciplines of philosophy, literary, film, and cultural studies. This collection of essays takes the psychoanalytic study of social oppression in some new directions by engaging—indeed, stirring up—unconscious fantasies and ethical tensions at the heart of social subjectivity.

Book Information Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge. By Jacques Bruschwig and Geoffrey, E. R. Lloyd. MA, Belnap Press. Cambridge. 2000. Pp. xv + 1024. Hardback, US$49.00.

The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano is widely considered to be a foundational figure of the decolonial perspective grounded on three basic concepts: coloniality, coloniality of power, and colonial matrix of power. His decolonial theorizations of these three concepts have transformed the principles and assumptions of the very idea of knowledge, impacted the social sciences and humanities, and questioned the myth of rationality in natural sciences. The essays in this volume encompass nearly thirty years of Quijano’s work, bringing them to an (...) English reading audience for the first time. This volume is not simply an introduction to Quijano’s work; it achieves one of his unfulfilled goals: to write a book that contains his main hypotheses, concepts, and arguments. In this regard, the collection encourages a fuller understanding and broader implementation of the analyses and concepts that he developed over the course of his long career. Moreover, it demonstrates that the tools for reading and dismantling coloniality originated outside the academy in Latin America and the former Third World. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to discuss a problem which, though it has not in the recent past attracted the attention of many philosophers, nevertheless, in my opinion, belongs quite clearly to that branch of the subject which should rightly be called “philosophy of history”: the problem, namely, of history's intelligibility. Two main questions can be asked about this which it is important that philosophers should answer. The first is that of whether history is intelligible in the sense that we (...) can find intelligible connections bètween all or any of its parts. The significance of this question is apparent enough; for has not one of the philosopher's most pressing problems since Hume's time been that of whether any such connections are traceable in the world of fact? It is true that almost every theory on this subject has been put forward after a consideration of the sphere of physical nature only; but because this procedure has been universally followed, it is not therefore to be accepted as right. For history too offers us facts, and it is at least possible that these differ in important ways from those to be met with in nature, with the result that we can discover other sorts of connection between them than those which the physical sciences recognize. The possibility would seem to be worth investigation, and it is with it that I shall be concerned in the first part of my paper. In the other half I deal with the second main question about historical intelligibility. Supposing that we can find some cases of historical events being intrinsically, i.e. intelligibly related, we can go on to ask whether history is intelligible in a more ultimate sense. Is history, we can now inquire, a thing which is essentially rational, or is the rationality we can find in it of a merely superficial character? To put the problem somewhat more fully, is the historian able to do more than see intrinsic connections between the events which he investigates: can he go further and understand the course of history as a whole, so that he is able to say, in the popular phrases, that history “makes sense,” is “meaningful” and “has rhyme and reason” in it? It seems to me that this is a matter which certainly ought to be discussed by philosophers, if only for the assertion of history's rationality which some philosophers have made. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic study of the prehistory of the traditional subsystems of second-order arithmetic that feature prominently in the reverse mathematics program of Friedman and Simpson. We look in particular at: (i) the long arc from Poincar\'e to Feferman as concerns arithmetic definability and provability, (ii) the interplay between finitism and the formalization of analysis in the lecture notes and publications of Hilbert and Bernays, (iii) the uncertainty as to the constructive status of principles equivalent to Weak K\"onig's (...) Lemma, and (iv) the large-scale intellectual backdrop to arithmetical transfinite recursion in descriptive set theory and its effectivization by Borel, Lusin, Addison, and others. (shrink)

Though the claims they make about temporality are markedly different, Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger agree that time is a philosophically foundational phenomenon; indeed, they agree that time is, in certain respects, the basis for all discursively representable beings. This paper focuses not so much on their theories of temporality (i.e., their respective answers to the question what is time? and their justifications for these answers) but rather on the challenges involved in talking about this phenomenon at all. Both thinkers (...) are highly sensitive to these challenges and to the problems involved in any attempt to represent time in a discursively straightforward manner. I will show that: (1) Bergson’s and Heidegger’s respective claims about time can be fully understood only if we keep this sensitivity in view and carefully note what they are—and aren’t—doing in talking about time ; and (2) what is ultimately at stake in their analyses is not just the phenomenon of time but what it means to engage in rigorous philosophical praxis. (shrink)

This is an open access book which explores phenomenology as both an exceptionally diverse movement in philosophy as well as an active research method that crosses disciplinary boundaries. The volume brings together lively overviews of major areas and schools of phenomenology, as well as the most recent applications across a range of fields. The first part reviews the state-of-the-art in various areas of contemporary phenomenology, including several distinct schools of Husserl and Heidegger scholarship, as well as approaches derived from Merleau-Ponty, (...) de Beauvoir, Fanon, and others. An innovative quantitative analysis of citation networks provides rich visualizations of the field as a whole. The second part showcases phenomenology as a living discipline that can advance research in other areas. While some areas of interaction between phenomenology and other disciplines are by now well established (e.g. cognitive science), this volume sheds light on newer areas of application. The goal is to move beyond discussions of philosophical method and highlight scholars who are actually doing phenomenology in a variety of areas, including: Embodiment and questions of gender, race, and identity, The arts (visual art, literature, architecture), and Archaeology and anthropology. This volume offers a concise introduction to cutting edge phenomenological research and is suitable for both students and specialists. (shrink)

Over the past fifteen years there has been a considerable amount of debate concerning what theoretical population dynamic models tell us about the nature of natural selection and drift. On the causal interpretation, these models describe the causes of population change. On the statistical interpretation, the models of population dynamics models specify statistical parameters that explain, predict, and quantify changes in population structure, without identifying the causes of those changes. Selection and drift are part of a statistical description of population (...) change; they are not discrete, apportionable causes. Our objective here is to provide a definitive statement of the statistical position, so as to allay some confusions in the current literature. We outline four commitments that are central to statisticalism. They are: 1. Natural Selection is a higher order effect; 2. Trait fitness is primitive; 3. Modern Synthesis (MS)-models are substrate neutral; 4. MS-selection and drift are model-relative. (shrink)

In evolutionary biology changes in population structure are explained by citing trait fitness distribution. I distinguish three interpretations of fitness explanations—the Two‐Factor Model, the Single‐Factor Model, and the Statistical Interpretation—and argue for the last of these. These interpretations differ in their degrees of causal commitment. The first two hold that trait fitness distribution causes population change. Trait fitness explanations, according to these interpretations, are causal explanations. The last maintains that trait fitness distribution correlates with population change but does not cause (...) it. My defense of the Statistical Interpretation relies on a distinctive feature of causation. Causes conform to the Sure Thing Principle. Trait fitness distributions, I argue, do not. *Received July 2009; revised October 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy/Institute for the History, Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1K7, Canada; e‐mail: denis.walsh@utoronto.ca. (shrink)

There are two general approaches to characterising biological functions. One originates with Cummins. According to this approach, the function of a part of a system is just its causal contribution to some specified activity of the system. Call this the ‘C-function’ concept. The other approach ties the function of a trait to some aspect of its evolutionary significance. Call this the ‘E-function’ concept. According to the latter view, a trait's function is determined by the forces of natural selection. The C-function (...) and E-function concepts are clearly quite different, but there is an important relation between them which heretofore has gone unnoticed. The purpose of this paper is to outline that relation.This is not the first paper to discuss the relation of C-function and E-function. Previous attempts all follow either one of two strategies. The first proposes that the two concepts are ‘unified.’ The other proposes that they are radically distinct and apply to wholly different fields within biology. (shrink)

How do people understand questions about cause and prevent? Some theories propose that people affirm that A causes B if A's occurrence makes a difference to B's occurrence in one way or another. Other theories propose that A causes B if some quantity or symbol gets passed in some way from A to B. The aim of our studies is to compare these theories' ability to explain judgements of causation and prevention. We describe six experiments that compare judgements for causal (...) paths that involve a mechanism, i.e. a continuous process of transmission or exchange from cause to effect, against paths that involve no mechanism yet a change in the cause nevertheless brings about a change in the effect. Our results show that people prefer to attribute cause when a mechanism links cause to effect. In contrast, prevention is sensitive both to the presence of an interruption to a causal mechanism and to a change in the outcome in the absence of a mechanism. In this sense, ‘prevent’ means something different than ‘cause not'. We discuss the implications of our results for existing theories of causation. (shrink)

Although very young children have unprecedented access to touchscreen devices, there is limited research on how successfully they operate these devices for play and learning. For infants and toddlers, whose cognitive, fine motor, and executive functions are immature, several basic questions are significant: Can they operate a tablet purposefully to achieve a goal? Can they acquire operating skills and learn new information from commercially available apps? Do individual differences in executive functioning predict success in using and learning from the apps? (...) Accordingly, 31 2-year-olds were compared with 29 3-year-olds using two commercially available apps with different task and skill requirements: a shape matching app performed across 3 days, and a storybook app with performance compared to that on a matched paper storybook. Children also completed the Minnesota Executive Functioning Scale. An adult provided minimal scaffolding throughout. The results showed: toddlers could provide simple goal-directed touch gestures and the manual interactions needed to operate the tablet after controlling for prior experience with shape matching, toddlers’ increased success and efficiency, made fewer errors, decreased completion times, and required less scaffolding across trials, they recognized more story content from the e-book and were less distracted than from the paper book, executive functioning contributed unique variance to the outcome measures on both apps, and 3-year-olds outperformed 2-year-olds on all measures. The results are discussed in terms of the potential of interactive devices to support toddlers’ learning. (shrink)

In line with the British Psychological Society's recent recommendations for teaching the history of psychology, this comprehensive undergraduate textbook emphasizes the philosophical, cultural and social elements that influenced psychology's development. The authors demonstrate that psychology is both a human (e.g. psychoanalytic or phenomenological) and natural (e.g. cognitive) science, exploring broad social-historical and philosophical themes such as the role of diverse cultures and women in psychology and the complex relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in the development of psychological knowledge. The result (...) is a fresh and balanced perspective on what has traditionally been viewed as the collected achievements of a few 'great men'. With a variety of learning features, including case studies, study questions, thought experiments and a glossary, this new textbook encourages students to critically engage with chapter material and analyze themes and topics within a social, historical and philosophical framework. (shrink)

1. Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, called one of the “most significant Kantians” (Rosenkranz, Geschichte der Kant’schen Philosophie, 307) of his time, was an influential interpreter of the Critical p...

The study examines a model proposing relationships between personal values, positive (i.e., benefits) and negative (i.e., threats) appraisal of immigrants, and social contact. Based on a values-attitudes-behavior paradigm, the study extends previous work on personal values and attitudes to immigrants by examining not only negative but also positive appraisal and their connection with social contact with immigrants. Using a representative sample of 1,600 adults in the majority population in Israel, results showed that higher preference for anxiety-avoidance values (self-enhancement and conservation) (...) was related to higher levels of perceived threat and lower levels of benefit, while higher preference for anxiety-free values (self-transcendence and openness to change) was related to higher levels of perceived benefits and lower levels of threat. Greater opportunities for contact and perceived benefits and lower levels of threats were related to more social contact. The model showed good fit across the total sample, and across four diverse immigrant groups in Israel (diaspora immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, Ethiopia and Western countries, and asylum seekers). In line with a Stereotype Content Model, which suggests that group-specific stereotypes are related to social structural characteristics of the group, associations between variables differed by group. Results strengthen a theoretical conceptualization that posits an indirect relationship between personal value preferences and behavior through group appraisal. They highlight the importance of comprehensive conceptualizations including both positive and negative appraisal of immigrants, which take into account the way different groups may be appraised by the majority population. (shrink)

In recent years, Early Modern Philosophy has seen frequent and urgent calls for more diverse, equitable, and inclusive teaching and research. These are calls fo.

Inductively defined structures are ubiquitous in mathematics; their specification is unambiguous and their properties are powerful. All fields of mathematical logic feature these structures prominently: the formula of a language, the set of theorems, the natural numbers, the primitive recursive functions, the constructive number classes and segments of the cumulative hierarchy of sets. -/- This dissertation gives a mathematical characterization of a species of inductively defined structures, called accessible domains, which include all of the above examples except the set of (...) theorems. The concept of an accessible domain comes from Wilfried Sieg's analysis of proof-theoretic practices, starting with his dissertation. In particular, he noticed the special epistemological character of elements of an accessible domain: they can always be uniquely identified with their build-up. Generally, the unique build-up of elements justifies the principles of induction and recursion. -/- I use category theory to give an abstract characterization of accessible domains. I claim that accessible domains are all instances of initial algebras for endofunctors. Grounded in the historical roots of Sieg's discussions, this dissertation shows how the properties of initial algebras for endofunctors and accessible domains coincide in a satisfying and natural way. -/- Filling out this characterization, I show how important examples of accessible domains fit into this broad characterization. I first characterize some accessible domains by relatively simple functors (e.g. finite, polynomial, those that preserve certain colimits) where we can see how iterating the functor can produce the accessible domain. Then I describe accessible domains that result from more involved specifications (e.g. ordinals and segments of the cumulative hierarchies associated with CZF, IZF, and ZF) by relying heavily on algebraic set theory. I end with a discussion of some of the methodological features of category theory in particular that helped characterize accessible domains. (shrink)

In a letter to William Molyneux John Locke states that in reviewing his chapter 'Of Power' for the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding he noticed that he had made one mistake which, now corrected, has put him "into a new view of things" which will clarify his account of human freedom. Locke says the mistake was putting “things for actions” on p.123 of the first edition, a page on which the word 'things' does not appear (The Correspondence (...) of John Locke. E.S. de Beer, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), Vol.4, no.1643, 15 July, 1693.) It is the aim of this paper to (1) elucidate where the correction occurs, (2) give an analysis of why the correction is needed, and (3) give an explanation of why Locke believed replacing 'things' with 'actions' was an important change. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an argument for the thesis that ‘maximality is extrinsic’, on which a whole physical object is not a whole of its kind in virtue of its intrinsic properties. Theodore Sider has a number of arguments that depend on his own simple argument that maximality is extrinsic. However, Peter van Inwagen has an argument in defence of his Duplication Principle that, I will argue, can be extended to show that Sider's simple argument fails. However, van Inwagen's (...) argument fails against a more complex, sophisticated argument that maximality is extrinsic. I use van Inwagen's own commitments to various forms of causation and metaphysical possibility to argue that maximality is indeed extrinsic, although not for the mundane reasons that Sider suggests. I then argue that moral properties are extrinsic properties. Two physically identical things can have different moral properties in a physical world. This argument is a counterexample to a classical ethical supervenience idea (often attributed to G.E. Moore) that if there is identity of physical properties in a physical world, then there is identity in moral properties as well. I argue moral value is ‘border sensitive’ and extrinsic for Kantians, utilitarians, and Aristotelians. (shrink)

On the nature of Aristotle's Ethics, by R. A. Gauthier.--Reason, happiness, and goodness, by F. Siegler.--The nature of aims, by J. Dewey.--Thought and action in Aristotle, by G. E. M. Anscombe.--On forgetting the difference between right and wrong, by G. Ryle.--Aristotle and the punishment of psychopaths, by V. Haksar.--Suggested further readings (p. 121-123).

David Lewis insists that restrictivist composition must be motivated by and occur due to some intuitive desiderata for a relation R among parts that compose wholes, and insists that a restrictivist’s relation R must be vague. Peter van Inwagen agrees. In this paper, I argue that restrictivists need not use such examples of relation R as a criterion for composition, and any restrictivist should reject a number of related mereological theses. This paper critiques Lewis and van Inwagen (and others) on (...) their respective mereological metaphysics, and offers a Golden Mean between their two opposite extremes. I argue for a novel account of mereology I call Modal Mereology that is an alternative to Classical Mereology. A modal mereologist can be a universalist about the possible composition of wholes from parts and a restrictivist about the actual composition of wholes from parts. I argue that puzzles facing Modal Mereology (e.g., puzzles concerning Cambridge changes and the Problem of the Many, and how to demarcate the actual from the possible) are also faced in similar forms by classical universalists. On my account, restricted composition is rather motivated by and occurs due to a possible whole’s instantiating an actual type. Universalists commonly believe in such types and defend their existence from objections and puzzles. The Modal Mereological restrictivist can similarly defend the existence of such types (adding that such types are the only wholes) from similar objections and puzzles. (shrink)

La entrevista recorre conceptos como “las geopolíticas del conocimiento” aplicada a América Latina y postula que la región es un producto geopolítico fabricado e impuesto por la “modernidad”, donde “América Latina” se fue fabricando como algo desplazado de la modernidad; o a la filosofía, que se narra de Grecia a Europa, quedando todo el resto del planeta fuera de la historia de la filosofía. Invita el entrevistado a dejar de pensar que lo que vale como conocimiento está en ciertas lenguas (...) y viene de ciertos lugares. Recorre desde este enfoque temas como la infección recíproca entre cosmología indígena y cosmología marxista; la distinción entre "interculturalidad" y "multiculturalidad.", y la re-articulación del poder en la "cuarta guerra mundial.". (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW X-NONE It is commonly believed that impartial utilitarian moral theories have significant demands that we help the global poor, and that the partial virtue ethics of Mencius and Aristotle do not. This ethical partiality found in these virtue ethicists has been criticized, and some have suggested that the partialistic virtue ethics of Mencius and Aristotle are parochial (i.e., overly narrow in their scope of concern). I (...) believe, however, that the ethics of Mencius and Aristotle are both more cosmopolitan than many presume and also are very demanding. In this paper, I argue that the ethical requirements to help the poor and starving are very demanding for the quintessentially virtuous person in Mencius and Aristotle. The ethical demands to help even the global poor are demanding for Mencius’ jun-zi ( 君子 chün-tzu / junzi ) and Aristotle’s megalopsuchos . I argue that both the jun-zi and megalopsuchos have a wide scope of concern for the suffering of poor people. I argue that the relevant virtues of the jun-zi and megalopsuchos are also achievable for many people. The moral views of Mencius and Aristotle come with strong demands for many of us to work harder to alleviate global poverty. . (shrink)

K.L. Reinhold defende uma teoria da vontade livre como a capacidade de escolher por e contra a lei moral. A teoria de Reinhold tem sido frequentemente acusada de ser psicologista devido a seu suposto apelo a fatos empíricos da consciência. Este artigo argumenta que, em vez de meramente considerar a vontade livre como um fato da consciência, Reinhold oferece um argumento em favor da vontade livre como uma condição necessária para a responsabilidade moral. Isso joga nova luz ao desenvolvimento do (...) conceito de vontade no despertar da filosofia prática de Kant. (shrink)

Though predictive processing approaches to the mind were originally applied to exteroceptive perception, i.e., vision and action, recent work has started to explore the role of interoceptive perception, i.e., emotion and affect. This article builds on this work by extending PP beyond emotion to the construction of emotional dispositions. I employ principles from dynamical systems theory and PP to provide a model of how dispositional anger can develop in response to early experiences of psychosocial stress. The model is then deployed (...) to explain the established link between psychosocial stress in early life and the appearance of certain organic disease phenotypes in later life. This phenomenon can appear mysterious when viewed through the standard biomedical explanatory lens, which has difficulty accounting for the causal influence of subjective perceptions and evaluations of the social and material environment on the development of organic disease processes. The model provided presents such cases as instances of developmental mismatch. They occur when an organism develops an emotional disposition that leads them to make habitually-biased appraisals of what the social environment affords. The model provides a novel explanation of certain organic disease phenotypes with top-down and developmental causes, and demystifies one class of cases involving apparently spooky ‘mind-to-matter’ causation. (shrink)