Online research in philosophy

In his early writings, Kant says that the solution to the puzzle of how morality can serve as a motivating force in human life is nothing less than the “philosophers’ stone.” In this dissertation I show that for years Kant searched for the philosophers’ stone in the concept of “respect” (Achtung), which he understood as the complex effect practical reason has on feeling. I sketch the history of that search in Chapters 1-2. In Chapter 3 I show that Kant’s analysis (...) in Groundwork I is incomplete because it does not explain how respect functions as a feeling in motivating choice. In Chapter 4 I argue that Kant’s subsequent attempt to sidestep this explanation in Groundwork III is unsuccessful, and that his position remains open to a skeptical threat. The argument in the second Critique, which I reconstruct in Chapters 5-6, overcomes this threat, and in doing so explains how the feeling of respect is both painful and pleasurable. -/- In the course of defending these claims, I provide an alternative reading of the shift in Kant’s ethical project from the Groundwork of 1785 to the second Critique of 1788 Against a common view in the literature, I argue that the shift does not concern the direction of Kant’s deduction (from freedom to morality, or morality to freedom); rather, it concerns his view of human sensibility and the resources he thinks we have to make our practical self-understanding intelligible. In the second Critique, I argue, Kant develops a novel approach to moral feeling from the perspective of the human agent; and this in turn clears room in his ethics for a new kind of a priori knowledge—namely, knowledge of what the activity of practical reason must feel like. By way of conclusion, I offer a few reasons for why the form of Kant’s argument in the second Critique is still relevant today, as it shows why we can only address moral skepticism from a first-personal perspective. (shrink)

Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, (...) sensibility is here playing the role of a ‘booster’: it enables materialism to provide a full and rich account of the phenomena of conscious, sentient life, contrary to what its opponents hold: for if matter can sense, and sensibility is not a merely mechanical process, then the loftiest cognitive plateaus are accessible to materialist analysis, or at least belong to one and the same world as the rest of matter. This was noted by the astute anti-materialist critic, the Abbé Lelarge de Lignac, who, in his 1751 Lettres à un Amériquain, criticized Buffon for “granting to the body [la machine, a common term for the body at the time] a quality which is essential to minds, namely sensibility.” This view, here attributed to Buffon and definitely held by Diderot, was comparatively rare. If we look for the sources of this concept, the most notable ones are physiological and medical treatises by prominent figures such as Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller and the Montpellier vitalist Théophile de Bordeu. We then have, or so I shall try to sketch out, an intellectual landscape in which new – or newly articulated – properties such as irritability and sensibility are presented either as an experimental property of muscle fibers, that can be understood mechanistically (Hallerian irritability, as studied recently by Hubert Steinke and Dominique Boury) or a property of matter itself (whether specifically living matter as in Bordeu and his fellow montpelliérains Ménuret and Fouquet, or matter in general, as in Diderot). I am by no means convinced that it is one and the same ‘sensibility’ that is at issue in debates between these figures (as when Bordeu attacks Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility and claims that ‘his own’ property of sensibility is both more correct and more fundamental in organic beings), but I am interested in mapping out a topography of the problem of sensibility as property of matter or as vital force in mid-eighteenth-century debates – not an exhaustive cartography of all possible positions or theories, but an attempt to understand the ‘triangulation’ of three views: a vitalist view in which sensibility is fundamental, matching up with a conception of the organism as the sum of parts conceived as little lives (Bordeu et al.); a mechanist, or ‘enhanced mechanist’ view in which one can work upwards, step by step from the basic property of irritability to the higher-level property of sensibility (Haller); and, more eclectic, a materialist view which seeks to combine the mechanistic, componential rigour and explanatory power of the Hallerian approach, with the monistic and metaphysically explosive potential of the vitalist approach (Diderot). It is my hope that examining Diderot in the context of this triangulated topography of sensibility as property sheds light on his famous proclamation regarding sensibility as a universal property of matter. (shrink)

Despite Kant's lasting influence on philosophical accounts of moral motivation, many details of his own position remain elusive. In the Critique of Practical Reason, for example, Kant argues that our recognition of the moral law’s authority must elicit both painful and pleasurable feelings in us. On reflection, however, it is unclear how these effects could motivate us to act from duty. As a result, Kant’s theory of moral sensibility comes under a skeptical threat: the possibility of a morally motivating (...) feeling seems incoherent. My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Kant’s theory in a way that overcomes this threat. By way of conclusion, I show how my reconstruction brings a new perspective to a long-standing dispute over intellectualist and affectivist views of moral motivation. (shrink)

Kant holds that the human cognitive power is divided into two "stems", understanding and sensibility. This doctrine has seemed objectionably dualistic to many critics, who see these stems as distinct parts, each able on its own to produce representations, which must somehow interact, determining or constraining one another, in order to secure the fit, requisite for cognition, between concept and intuition. This reading cannot be squared, however, with what Kant actually says about theoretical cognition and the way understanding and (...) sensibility cooperate in it. Such cognition, as Kant conceives of it, satisfies two conditions: it has unity, and it depends on the existence of its object. The first of these conditions entails that the cognitive power must lie in spontaneity, or understanding, while the second implies that this spontaneity depends on receptivity, or sensibility, to be the cognitive power that it is. Consideration of how these capacities must be conceived as cooperating in cognition reveals them to be related, not as interacting parts, but as form and matter. Such a conception of their relation may at first glance seem to be merely another version of dualistic thinking; in fact, however, a proper appreciation of it eliminates the appearance of dualism and helps allay an associated concern that Kant's distinction would taint our cognition with an unacceptable subjectivism. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to Simon Blackburn's 'Is Objective Moral Justification Possible on a Quasi-realist Foundation?' Inquiry 42 (1999), pp. 213-28. Blackburn attempts to show how his version of non-cognitivism - quasi-realist projectivism - can evade the threat of ethical relativism, the thought that all ways of living are as ethically good as each other and every ethical judgment is as ethically true as any other. He further attempts to show that his position is superior in this respect (...) to, amongst other accounts, sensibility theory (or 'secondary quality' theory). According to Blackburn, sensibility theory succumbs easily to the relativistic challenge because it depends on some 'substantive' notion of truth. It is agreed with Blackburn that the threat of relativism is less of a threat to him than at first appears, although I think that it retains some menace, but not agreed that sensibility theorists cannot also counter the threat of relativism (although, again, ethical relativism retains some menace in the face of the sensibility theorist's reply). The point is that the threat of ethical relativism depends less on truth than Blackburn supposes. Thus sensibility theorists can counter ethical relativism in much the same way that quasi-realist projectivists can. (shrink)

: Drawing on a wide range of Kant's recorded thought beyond his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, this essay presents an overview of Kant's account of practical agency as embodied practical agency and argues against the intellectualized interpretations of Kant's account of practical agency presented by Christine Korsgaard and Henry Sidgwick. In both Kant's empirical-psychological and metaphysical descriptions of practical agency, he presents a recognizably human practical agent that is broader and deeper than the faculty of reason alone. This (...) agent chooses action from a reflective distance, but not from the complete affective distance of reason. We choose neither as reason alone, nor even as the sum of all of our ‘higher’ faculties, of cognition (including reason), feeling, and desire, in Kant's view. Instead, we choose as an agent that also has ‘lower’, ‘sensible’ faculties, of cognition (including sense), feeling, and desire, which together comprise our ‘sensibility’. These mental states of sensibility are not merely confused versions of our higher cognitions, feelings, or desires, and so different from them in degree only, but are instead distinct from our higher states in kind also; and these distinct sensible states are not dependent on our higher states and so on a commitment to the value of humanity, for example. For this reason, a choice in favour of sensible states and in opposition to the moral law need in no way undermine its own foundations and thus be incoherent, as Korsgaard and Sidgwick argue, but instead only immoral. Because Kant does not reduce the problem of immoral choice to one of insufficient reflection and ensuing confusion, he does not view moral progress in cognitive terms alone, whether in the form of a clearer understanding of the moral law, improved judgment in applying it, or deeper insight into our own nature as practical agents. Kant instead recognizes the crucial importance of cultivating our feelings and desires over the course of a lifetime both as a way to make ourselves worthy of the humanity within us directly and also as a way to facilitate future moral choices. (shrink)

It is one of Jacques Derrida’s later texts, Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy , wherein one finds his most sustained commentary on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I argue that Derrida’s criticisms of Merleau-Ponty in this text conceal a significant proximity between his own elaboration of sensibility and that of Merleau-Ponty. Their respective accounts of sensibility are similar in two respects. Firstly, for them both, sensibility is born of a parsing of the self in a hiatus or interval that (...) disrupts the movement of auto-affection. The self can only be known as such through this exposure to alterity. Secondly, this exposure and opening is in no way normative for either thinker, which is to say that their accounts of sensibility are similar not only in structure but also insofar as sensibility for them both is a non-normative opening to ethics; it is an elaboration of embodiment that provokes the question of response but no definitive or prescriptive answer. Hence the structure of sensibility begs the question of ethics, and the problem of response, but can provide little by way of a normative ethics. (shrink)

Sex and sensibility: The role of social selection Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9464-6 Authors Erika L. Milam, Department of History, University of Maryland, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA Roberta L. Millstein, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA Angela Potochnik, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Joan E. Roughgarden, Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020, USA Journal Metascience (...) Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

In Ruling Passions, Simon Blackburn contends that we should reject sensibility theory because it serves to support a conservative complacency. Blackburn's strategy is attractive in that it seeks to win this metaethical dispute – which ultimately stems from a deep disagreement over antireductionism – on the basis of an uncontroversial normative consideration. Therefore, Blackburn seems to offer an easy solution to an apparently intractable debate. We will show, however, that Blackburn's argument against sensibility theory does not succeed; it (...) is no more supportive of conservative complacency than Blackburn's noncognitivism. A victory for noncognitivism cannot be so easily won. (shrink)

For Habermas, a moral point of view is based in the procedural requirements of our linguistic competence. For Levinas, it is the way in which we find ourselves related in speech to the face of the other that we find ourselves obliged to the other. But these differing conceptions of the moral significance of language need not be seen as opposed to each other. Rather, they can be conceptualized as complimentary accounts of the ways in which a moral point of (...) view onto life is inextricably bound up for us with our capacities as linguistic creatures. While Habermas enables us to see the importance of language as a rule-governed social practice for the constitution of a moral point of view, Levinas draws our attention to the way in which the moral significance of language so conceived lies in a form of sensibility, a sensible “exposure” or “vulnerability” to the other person, older than language itself. Appropriately coordinated, these two perspectives give us a more adequate understanding than either can on its own of the central place of language in our lives as moral agents. (shrink)

Sight and Sensibility will be essential reading for anyone working in aesthetics and art theory, and for all those intrigued by the power of images to affect ...

The current interest in bioregionalism, stimulated in part by Kirkpatrick Sale’s Dwellers in the Land, shows that people are looking for a form of political praxis which addresses the importance of region. In this paper, I argue that much of the bioregional literature written to date mystifies the concept of region, discounting the role of subjectivity and culture in shaping regional boundaries and veers toward asimplistic view of “nature knows best.” Bioregionalism can be rehabilitated, provided we treat it not as (...) a “revealed wisdom” for the reconstruction of human society, but as a sensibility and environmental ethic that can infuse our work even as we make use of the functional regionalisms that increasingly shape people’s consciousness. I conclude by citing Lewis Mumford’s concept of a region as capturing the dialectical interplay of natural and cultural elements. (shrink)

The field of moral psychology would benefit from an integrative model of what develops in moral development, contextualized within the larger scope of social science research. Moral sensibility is proposed as the best concept to embody stated aims, but the content of this concept must be more finely articulated and conceptualized as a dynamic system. Moral sensibility is defined here as a developing dynamic interaction of (1) a host of developing capacities for morally relevant knowing (e.g. moral reasoning, (...) self-awareness and means to other-awareness?compassionate caring, empathy, perspective taking); (2) one?s socio-cultural moral assumptions and expressions; (3) one?s idiodynamic ideology (the developing set of consciously chosen values and value-laden understandings gleaned from experiencing one?s unique life history); (4) one?s morally relevant identities and self-understandings; (5) all embodied in one?s moral being in-the-moment, the ability to enact one?s moral sensibility in each new instance of moral engagement. (shrink)

Sensibility theory claims that, for any object x, x is good/right if and only if x is such as to make a certain sentiment appropriate. A realist position, sensibility theory claims conceptual and explanatory advantages over alternative metaethical theories. Sensibility theory, while revealing, presents a problem of its own: its central thesis involves an explanatory circularity. Here, a Mencius-Hume solution to that problem is offered.

This paper presents research on the moral sensibility of six pre-service teachers in an undergraduate teacher education program. Using their reflective writing across their first two semesters of coursework as well as focus group interviews in their third semester as sources of data, the paper identifies and describes three distinctive types of moral sensibility and examines ways in which moral sensibility interacts with experiences in teacher education. Suggestions for explicitly incorporating the moral in pre-service teacher education are (...) presented. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that sensibility-invariantism about ‘funny’ is defensible, not just as a descriptive hypothesis, but, as a normative position as well. What I aim to do is to make the realist commitments of the sensibility-invariantist out to be much more tenable than one might initially think them to be. I do so by addressing the two major sources of discontent with sensibility-invariantism: the observation that discourse about comedy exhibits significant divergence in judgment, and the (...) fact that disagreements about comedy, unlike disagreements about, say, geography, often strike us as fundamentally intractable. (shrink)

Looking at pictures, we see in them the scenes they depict, and any value they have springs from these experiences of seeing-in. Sight and Sensibility presents the first detailed and comprehensive theory of evaluating pictures. Dominic Lopes confronts the puzzle of how the value of seeing anything in a picture can exceed that of seeing it face to face - his solution pinpoints how seeing-in is like and unlike ordinary seeing. Moreover, since part of what we see in pictures (...) is emotional expressions, his book also develops a theory of expression especially tailored to pictures. -/- Not all evaluations of pictures as opportunities for seeing-in are aesthetic - others are cognitive or moral. Lopes argues that these evaluations interact, for some imply others. His argument entails novel conceptions of aesthetic and cognitive evaluation, such that aesthetic evaluation is distinguished from art evaluation as essentially tied to experience, and that cognitive evaluations assess cognitive capacities, including perceptual ones. Ultimately, Lopes defends images against the widespread criticism that they thwart serious thought, especially moral thought, because they merely replicate ordinary experience. He concludes by presenting detailed case studies of the contribution pictures can make to moral reflection. -/- Sight and Sensibility will be essential reading for anyone working in aesthetics and art theory, and for all those intrigued by the power of images to affect our lives. (shrink)

This paper develops insights from Foucault and Lyotard to examine the Darfur crisis and the transformative potential of spaces of alterity. We show that Foucault’s quest for an aesthetics of existence is an attempt to found an alternative form of ethics based on wakefulness, sensibility, and suspicion on the part of the subject. In the final part of the paper we link this idea to Lyotard’s sensibility of the sublime. We show how aesthetic sensibility can be transformed (...) in a political sensibility which bears witness to political injustices that result from the incommensurability of different genres of discourse. We illustrate this point using aesthetic representations of Darfur. (shrink)

The emerging contours of global philosophy are being shaped by worldwide exchanges, diverse methods and approaches, the diminution of cultural hegemony, and expanded access to philosophical discussion. But globally intentioned scholars whose formative intellectual preparation is Anglo-European may be unaware of the role played by the imaginary in suppressing ideas and values that differ from one's root tradition. This essay uses a model of the Western philosophical imaginary taken from French researcher Michèle Le Doeuff, and draws connections between Le Doeuff's (...) attempts to expose and interrupt the Western imaginary and the efforts of philosophers who wish to cross geographical and cultural boundaries. It is argued that Le Doeuff's critical approach has much to offer those who wish to cultivate a more receptive and supple philosophical sensibility—a global sensibility—and that this approach can be complemented by a horizontal practice adapted from Mahāyāna Buddhist sources. The purpose of this essay is to promote continuing dialogue about how best to realize the promise of globalization in philosophical practice. (shrink)

This paper explored the linkages among moral imagination, systems understanding, and aesthetic sensibility as related to the emergence (eventually) of wisdom. I develop a conceptual framework that links these capacities to wisdom through the capacity to “see” moral and ethical issues, which I argue is related to “the good”, to see a realistic understanding of systems in which the observer is embedded, or “the true”, and to appreciate the aesthetic qualities associated with a system or situation, or “the beautiful”. (...) The relationship between the good, the true, and the beautiful is used to argue that all three types of seeing are building blocks for achievement of wisdom. The paper then briefly explores some of the ways that these capacities can potentially be incorporated into the classroom. (shrink)

The paper considers T.S. Eliot's 'dissociation of sensibility' thesis, considering its philosophical value and attempting to defend it against published objections. While accepting some of the criticisms, it is argued that Eliot's argument is sound to a significant extent. Eliot's account retains explanatory power with regard to an enduring arts-science divide in schooling and, more broadly, in environmental ethics. In both these areas, educators can, and should, find greater synergies between arts and science, and theoria and praxis , despite (...) continuing pressures on the school curriculum to move in the opposite direction. It is suggested that an acknowledgement of living as semiosis can be helpful in this respect. (shrink)

This paper presents research on the moral sensibility of six pre-service teachers in an undergraduate teacher education program. Using their reflective writing across their first two semesters of coursework as well as focus group interviews in their third semester as sources of data, the paper identifies and describes three distinctive types of moral sensibility and examines ways in which moral sensibility interacts with experiences in teacher education. Suggestions for explicitly incorporating the moral in pre-service teacher education are (...) presented. (shrink)

Understanding the emergence of a scientific culture - one in which cognitive values generally are modelled on, or subordinated to, scientific ones - is one of the foremost historical and philosophical problems with which we are now confronted. The significance of the emergence of such scientific values lies above all in their ability to provide the criteria by which we come to appraise cognitive enquiry, and which shape our understanding of what it can achieve. -/- The period between the 1680s (...) and the middle of the eighteenth century is a very distinctive one in this development. It is then that we witness the emergence of the idea that scientific values form a model for all cognitive claims. It is also at this time that science explicitly goes beyond technical expertise and begins to articulate a world-view designed to displace others, whether humanist or Christian. But what occurred took place in a peculiar and overdetermined fashion, and the outcome in the mid-eighteenth century was not the triumph of 'reason', as has commonly been supposed, but rather a simultaneous elevation of the standing of science and the beginnings of a serious questioning of whether science offers a comprehensive form of understanding. -/- The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility is the sequel to Stephen Gaukroger's acclaimed 2006 book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. It offers a rich and fascinating picture of the development of intellectual culture in a period where understandings of the natural realm began to fragment. (shrink)

People have shared funds of sense that operate in every aspect of their lives. These complex sensibilities constitute a range of often contradictory dispositions and attunements that we can describe as sensible disorders. Further, sensibilities are available for multiple differential determinations from which the ability for self-reflection and intervention derives. 'Democratic space' is an appropriate name for the region of sensibilities. Rather than naming a grounding identity, 'democratic space' names a region without imperative, voice, or intention. Nothing that happens defines (...) the region of determination. The paper describes a sense of democratic space that is distinguishable from other senses and points to dispositional and political aspects of that sense. (shrink)

Examine it in all lights and see if you can find that matter of fact…which you call vice…The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You can never find it until you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, toward that action. (Hume, 1978, pp. 468-9).

These claims strike some philosophers as obviously false. “Hume’s confident assertions about the unobservability of beauty are breathtakingly counter-intuitive,” David McNaughton writes. “We see the beauty of a sunset; we hear the melodiousness of a tune; we taste and smell the delicate nuances of a vintage wine. Hume’s denial that we can detect beauty by the senses flies in the face of common experience” (McNaughton, 1988, p. 55). Understood as a phenomenological claim, this seems obviously correct—so obviously that one should (...) doubt whether Hume meant to be denying it. Surely when we find something beautiful, delicious, or even virtuous, we experience this as a matter of sensitivity to the observed object: the sunset, the wine, the person. But what kind of sensitivity is this? McNaughton intends to make a theoretical as well as a phenomenological objection to Hume; he claims that there is no difference in kind between the perception of value and other, more straightforward forms of perception. (shrink)

In this penetrating book, Nuzzo enters new terrain and takes on questions Kant struggled with: How does a body that feels pleasure and pain, desire, anger, and ...

Sensibility theorists such as John McDowell have argued that once we appreciate certain similarities between moral values and secondary qualities, a new meta-ethical position might emerge, one that avoids the alleged difficulties with moral intuitionism and non-cognitivism. The aim of this paper is to examine the meta-ethical prospects of this secondary-quality analogy. Of particular concern will be the extent to which McDowell’s comparison of values to secondary qualities supports a viewpoint unique from that of the moral intuitionist. Once we (...) disentangle the various metaphysical and epistemological strands of McDowell’s analogy, McDowell’s position might appear closer to moral intuitionism than initially supposed. This discussion will also help clarify the intended meaning of the secondary-quality analogy, as well as its significance for ethics more generally. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

It is standard in feminist commentaries to argue that Wollstonecraft's feminism is vitiated by her commitment to a liberal philosophical framework, relying on a valuation of reason over passion and on the notion of a sex-neutral self. I challenge this interpretation of Wollstonecraft's feminism and argue that her attempt to articulate an ideal of self-governance for women was an attempt to diagnose and resolve some of the tensions and inadequacies within traditional liberal thought.

Arnold Berleant has produced once again a stimulating set of reflections on “vitally important topics” in the aesthetic field. The present book is more a collection than a treatise. This characteristic is the source both of the book’s very real value and of its shortcomings, minor as they may be from the substantive point of view. Berleant’s prior books and articles make up a most impressive scholarly and intellectual achievement, and they clearly inform the discussions and arguments brought forth in (...) this latest installment of his philosophical project. This book continues, recapitulates, reformulates, and extends the analyses of his earlier work. It exemplifies the prime characteristics of all of Berleant’s work: .. (shrink)

In a remarkable series of Critical-period Reflexionen (5611-4, 5616-9), Kant sketches a defense of the possibility of freedom that differs radically from his usual compatibilism by incorporating an indeterministic account of the phenomena. Anticipating Łukasiewicz, Kant reconciles universal causal determination with an open future by positing a lower temporal bound for the infinite regress of prior determining causes issuing in a contingent action. On this account, Kant however concedes, the unity of experience "cannot fully obtain in the case of free (...) beings." The fact that Kant even contemplated the indeterministic theory may carry implications for interpreting the Second Analogy. (shrink)

Body representations traverse the whole of the brain. They provide vital sources of information for every facet of an animal’s behavior, and such direct neural connectivity of visceral input throughout the nervous system demonstrates just how strongly cognitive systems are linked to bodily representations. At each level of the neural axis there are visceral appraisal systems that are integral in the organization of action. Cognition is not one side of a divide and viscera the other, with action merely a reflexive (...) outcome. There is no divide between cognition and bodily functions once the brain is involved. Cognitive mechanisms that permeate neural function are a cardinal piece of biological function and adaptation. (shrink)

I suggest that ubiquitous references made by Confucius to poetic songs in the Analects reveal an important aspect of his philosophy. This aspect involves the assumption that things in the world “resonate” with one another. Using elements of Alfred North Whitehead's thought, as well as metaphysical insights from the Han Dynasty text, Huainanzi, I first present an aesthetic theory along with a supporting cosmological vision that enhances our appreciation of this trait in the Confucian world. With these preliminaries in mind, (...) I approach the Analects itself. I will isolate the term xing, or “stimulation “, and demonstrate how this term allows us to understand the function of poetry for the early Confucians. I conclude that poetry was thought to behave much like what Whitehead called “propositions”, and that this function assumes a world with certain basic tendencies normally associated with Daoist cosmology. (shrink)

From the myths of the ancient world to the Middle Ages to Darwin and beyond, Preece captures the most telling and fascinating accounts of humankind's ...

The moral sentiments adumbrated by Adam Smith and Charles Darwin reflect some of our basic social appraisals of each other. One set of moral appraisals reflects disgust and withdrawal, a form of contempt. Another set of moral appraisals reflects active concern responses, an appreciation of the experiences (sympathy for some- one)of other individuals and approach related behaviors. While no one set of neural structures is designed for only moral appraisals, a diverse set of neural regions that include the gustatory/visceral neural (...) axis, basal ganglia and iverse neocortical sites underlie moral judgment. (shrink)

This paper responds to Rancière’s reading of Lyotard’s analysis of the sublime by attempting to articulate what Lyotard would call a “differend” between the two. Sketching out Rancière’s criticisms, I show that Lyotard’s analysis of the Kantian sublime is more defensible than Rancière claims. I then provide an alternative reading, one that frees Lyotard’s sublime from Rancière’s central accusation that it signals nothing more than the mind’s perpetual enslavement to the lawof the Other. Reading the sublime through the figure of (...) the “event,” I end by suggesting that it may have certain affinities with what Rancière calls “politics.”. (shrink)

Abstract McDowell?s minimal empiricism holds that experience, understood as providing conceptually articulated contents, plays a role in the justification of our beliefs. We question this idea by contrasting the role of perceptual experience in moral and non-moral judgments and conclude that experience per se is irrelevant in the former case and should also be so in the latter one: only with the help of adequate beliefs experience can provide a connection with the world. We conclude with some remarks concerning the (...) importance of experience. (shrink)

The current article characterizes three types of emotional experiences: purposefulness, sentimentalism, and sensitivity. By characterizing these types of emotions, we will show that the concept ‘emotional intelligence’ combines purposefulness and efficiency together with sensitivity and spontaneity—an unlikely combination. Moreover, we will present the difficulties related to coping and emotional regulating, which are also part of emotional intelligence. The need to control our emotions stems from the fact that we are social beings who are supposed to behave and feel according to (...) accepted social norms, and from the need to cope with problems that are not emotional in nature. (shrink)