Drawing on ideas presented in the Bible, Jewish teachings, and his experience as a psychotherapist, Lerner examines the roots of the vague discontent felt by so many Americans about our political system and explains how values can be put back into these broken politics.

Berel Dov Lerner argues for inconsistency. ‘Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.’ Stephen Vizinczey.

Peter Winch and Ludwig Wittgenstein have opposed the idea that traditional religion and magic are practiced in order to gain practical, instrumental ends. Their argument rests on interpretive charity: other cultures would have to be unbelievably irrational to believe in magic's practical effectiveness. In this paper, I show that Winch's own philosopical doctrine makes room for the possibility of instrumental pluralism, the notion that different societies may possess different criteria of instrumental rationality. Judged in terms of a native criterion, the (...) instrumental use of magic and religion may be rationaL. (shrink)

Volume 44 & 45 of Advances in Child Development and Behavior includes chapters that highlight some the most recent research in the area of embodiment and epigenesis. A wide array of topics are discussed in detail, including multiple trajectories in the developmental psychobiology of human handedness and the integration of culture and biology in human development. Each chapter provides in-depth discussions, and this volume serves as an invaluable resource for developmental or educational psychology researchers, scholars, and students. Chapters that highlight (...) some of the most recent research in the area. A wide array of topics are discussed in detail. (shrink)

Cognitive science poses a variety of philosophical questions. In this forthcoming volume, leading researchers debate five core questions in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science: Is Universal Grammar required to explain our linguistic capacities? Are some of our concepts innate or are they all learned? What role do our bodies play in cognition? Can neuroscience help us understand the mind? Can cognitive science help us understand human morality? The volume contains two accessible essays on each topic, each advocating for an opposing (...) approach. (shrink)

Este trabajo intenta iluminar desde un punto de vista fenomenológico las crisis ecológicas que han afectado a nuestro planeta y al mundo circundante de la vida en el siglo veintiuno, y en particular, la devastadora pandemia global que se desató el año 2020. Primero abordo ciertos aspectos histórico-críticos que preceden a la pandemia del 2020, y que se relacionan a la visión mecanicista moderna en las ciencias y la cultura. Luego, situada en la actitud natural, parto de esta ecocrisis actual (...) como un “hilo conductor” para la interrogación retrospectiva que conduce a las raíces experienciales de todo sentido y validez objetiva, asumiendo la perspectiva de la primera persona y contratastándola con aspectos de una nueva y unificada visión sistémica de la vida. A continuación, destacando la paradoja del sujeto-en-el-mundo y el sujeto-para-el-mundo, examino la estructura del mundo de la vida como un camino o vía hacia el campo de la experiencia trascendental—aquel de la correlación entre la vida humana (encarnada, intersubjetiva e histórico-temoral) y el mundo, es decir, la estructura noético-noemática, con el objeto de mostrar cómo no es reductible a una auto-afección pasiva, sino que es la fuente originaria de una virtud espiritual y capacidad transformativa: la de la responsabilidad. (shrink)

The intentionality is a key concept in Husserl’s phenomenology, by means of which comes out to the light the proverbial tension between the modern tradition and the ‘thing self’. Conscious of the risk of reexaminating a topic that it has already been object of innumerables interpretations, the au..

This book contains new essays in honor of Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in the psychological study of justice. The contributors to this volume are internationally renowned scholars from psychology, business, and law. They examine the role of justice motivation in a wide variety of contexts, including workplace violence, affirmative action programs, helping or harming innocent victims and how people react to their own fate. Contributors explore fundamental issues such as whether people's interest in justice is motivated by self-interest (...) or a genuine concern for the welfare of others, when and why people feel a need to punish transgressors, how a concern for justice emerges during the development of societies and individuals, and the relation of justice motivation to moral motivation. How an understanding of justice motivation can contribute to the amelioration of major social problems is also examined. (shrink)

On some occasions of self-reference there can be two equally viable forms available to speakers: individual self-reference and collective self-reference. This means that selection of one or the other in talk-in-interaction can — akin to the selection of terms for reference to non-present persons — be guided by such considerations as recipient design and action formation. As a strategy for investigating the selection of self-reference terms, this article examines repairs to self-reference that change the form of reference from individual to (...) collective and vice versa. We first identify two repair operations found in the domain of self-reference: aggregation and extraction and then we track the use of both operations across a range of positions in the repair initiation opportunity space. Finally we consider some of the interactional uses of aggregation and extraction repairs in resolving sources of troubles associated with speaker epistemic authority and responsibility for described actions. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic and critical discussion of Peter Winch's writings on the philosophy of the social sciences. The author points to Winch's tendency to over-emphasize the importance of language and communication, and his insufficient attention to the role of practical, technological activites in human life and society. It also offers an appendix devoted to the controversy between the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere regarding Captain James Cook's Hawaiian adventures. Essential reading for those studying the development of philosophy (...) in the twentieth century, this book will also be of great interest to anthropologists, sociologists, scholars of religion, and all those with an interest in the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic and critical discussion of Peter Winch's writings on the philosophy of the social sciences. The author points to Winch's tendency to over-emphasize the importance of language and communication, and his insufficient attention to the role of practical, technological activites in human life and society. It also offers an appendix devoted to the controversy between the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere regarding Captain James Cook's Hawaiian adventures. Essential reading for those studying the development of philosophy (...) in the twentieth century, this book will also be of great interest to anthropologists, sociologists, scholars of religion, and all those with an interest in the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic and critical discussion of Peter Winch's writings on the philosophy of the social sciences. The author points to Winch's tendency to over-emphasize the importance of language and communication, and his insufficient attention to the role of practical, technological activites in human life and society. It also offers an appendix devoted to the controversy between the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere regarding Captain James Cook's Hawaiian adventures. Essential reading for those studying the development of philosophy (...) in the twentieth century, this book will also be of great interest to anthropologists, sociologists, scholars of religion, and all those with an interest in the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. (shrink)

Most theories of affective influences on judgement and choice take a valence-based approach, contrasting the effects of positive versus negative feeling states. These approaches have not specified if and when distinct emotions of the same valence have different effects on judgement. In this article, we propose a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. We posit that each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive new events and objects in ways that are consistent with the original cognitive-appraisal dimensions (...) of the emotion. To pit the valence and appraisal-tendency approaches against one another, we present a study that addresses whether two emotions of the same valence but differing appraisals—anger and fear—relate in different ways to risk perception. Consistent with the appraisal-tendency hypothesis, fearful people made pessimistic judgements of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgements. In the Discussion we expand the proposed model and review evidence supporting two social moderators of appraisal-tendency processes. (shrink)

In this introduction to the special issue of Discourse Studies on `Referring to Self and Others in Conversation' we briefly survey the history of conversation analytic work on reference to persons from Sacks and Schegloff's pioneering seven-page paper to the most recently published work. We then introduce the contributions to the special issue.

The self-ownership thesis asserts, roughly, that agents own their minds and bodies in the same way that they can own extra-personal property. One common strategy for defending the self-ownership thesis is to show that it accords with our intuitions about the wrongness of various acts involving the expropriation of body parts. We challenge this line of defense. We argue that disgust explains our resistance to these sorts of cases and present results from an original psychological experiment in support of this (...) hypothesis. We argue further that learning that disgust is responsible for pro-self-ownership intuitions should reduce our confidence in those intuitions. After considering and rejecting some prominent “debunking” arguments predicated on disgust’s evolutionary history, we provide alternative reasons for thinking that disgust is not a reliable source of moral judgments. Rejecting the reliability of disgust as a mechanism for producing moral beliefs coheres with our considered judgments about the general kinds of considerations that are morally relevant and a range of particular moral problems. (shrink)

The article presents a novel normative model of shared responsibility for remedying unjust labor conditions and protecting workers’ rights in global supply chains. While existing literature on labor governance in the globalized economy tends to focus on empirical and conceptual investigations, the article contributes to the emerging scholarship by proposing moral justifications for labor governance schemes that go beyond voluntary private regulations and include public enforcement mechanisms. Drawing on normative theories of justice and on empirical-legal research, our Labor Model of (...) Shared Responsibility introduces three main claims: First, that responsibility for protecting and promoting labor standards in global supply chains should be shared by all private and institutional actors involved (whether directly or indirectly) in the production and distribution processes. Second, we offer a normative model for allocating responsibility among the various actors, based on five principles: connectedness, contribution, benefit, capacity, and power. Last, we demonstrate how the normative model could be implemented through various national and international institutional mechanisms. (shrink)

Should the law recognize an elephant’s right to be released from solitary confinement? The New York State Court of Appeals—the highest court in the State of New York—will consider this question on May 18. At issue is an Asian elephant named Happy. But happy she is not. Every human being has a right to bodily liberty because they have strong interests that this right protects. Since Happy has the same strong interests, the Court should recognize Happy’s right to be freed (...) from solitary confinement. (shrink)

We present ethical reasons that the court should grant the Nonhuman Rights Project’s (NhRP) request for habeas corpus relief for Happy, an elephant. Happy has a basic interest in not being confined, an interest that should be legally protected just as the human interest in not being confined is legally protected. Since the decision in The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v Breheny failed to weigh Happy’s interests properly, we ask this body to correct the error.

We argue on consequentialist grounds for the transfer of Sandai, an orangutan, to an orangutan sanctuary. First, we show that satisfying his interest in being transferred brings far greater value than the value achieved by keeping him confined. Second, we show that he has the capacities sufficient for personhood. Third, we show that all persons have a right to relative liberty insofar as they have interests they can exercise only under conditions of relative liberty. Fourth, we show that individuals need (...) not be able to assume social obligations and duties in order to be rights holders. -/- Our argument reflects commitments, as we say, to consequentialist reasoning about moral problems. However, we note that influential representatives of the other dominant ethical traditions—the deontological and Aristotelian traditions—reach our conclusion, too. It makes no difference, in this instance, which ethical theory one adopts. Under all of them, Sandai is a person with an interest in relative liberty entitled to habeas corpus protection. (shrink)

Typical philosophical discussions of physician-assisted death have focused on whether the practice can be permissible. We address a different question: assuming that pad can be morally permissible, how far does that permission extend? We will argue that granting requests for pad may be permissible even when the pad recipient can no longer speak for themselves. In particular, we argue against the ‘competency requirement’ that constrains pad-eligibility to presently-competent patients in most countries that have legalized pad. We think pad on terminally (...) ill, incapacitated patients can be morally permissible in cases where advance directives or suitable surrogate decision-makers are available, and should be legally permissible in such cases as well. We argue that this view should be accepted on pain of inconsistency: by allowing surrogate decision-makers to request withdrawal of life-sustaining care on behalf of patients and by allowing patients to request pad, we rule out any plausible justification for imposing a competency requirement on pad. (shrink)

This paper investigates the characteristics of firms which have underrepresented groups in top management positions and those which do not. It is argued that profiles of these characteristics will be different for firms with minorities vs. women and that these profiles will be different depending on whether representation is by board membership or through officerships. A discriminant analysis found both similarities and differences in variables that were associated with these different forms of representation. It was found, for example, that size (...) is associated with representation for both minorities and women, whereas high advertising intensity is associated with firms with women on board, but not as officers. Other findings and the implications of the study are discussed. (shrink)

Suppose that, for reasons of animal welfare, it would be better if everyone stopped eating chicken. Does it follow that you should stop eating chicken? Proponents of the “inefficacy objection” argue that, due to the scale and complexity of markets, the expected effects of your chicken purchases are negligible. So the expected effects of eating chicken do not make it wrong. -/- We argue that this objection does not succeed, in two steps. First, empirical data about chicken production tells us (...) that the expected effects of consuming *many* chickens are not negligible. Second, this implies that the expected effect of consuming one chicken is ordinarily not negligible. *Parity* between your purchase and other counterfactual purchases and *uncertainty* about others’ consumption behavior each tend to pull the expected effect of a single purchase toward the average large scale effect. While some purchases do have negligible expected effects, many do not. (shrink)

Spirituality is a universal human experience. Within the process of development, the role of spirituality as a developmental asset is understudied in general and especially within majority world contexts. In this article, we frame advances in spirituality research and practice with youth around three pillars: (a) theory, (b) measurement, and (c) research about and evaluations of positive youth development (PYD) programs in low- and middle-income countries. We place PYD programs as associated with dynamic, relational developmental systems (RDS)-based models of human (...) development, describe spirituality and the “Big Three” features of effective PYD programs as aligning to promote thriving, and discuss spirituality as a strength, as a key asset, in the lives of youth. We discuss advances in developmental methods and measures for describing, explaining, and promoting spirituality and PYD and offer a case study that responds to a United States Agency for International Development call for action and evaluations of spirituality within the context of a PYD program in the majority world. Considerations for future research about spirituality and youth development are discussed. (shrink)

Localist models of spreading activation (SA) and models assuming distributed representations offer very different takes on semantic priming, a widely investigated paradigm in word recognition and semantic memory research. In this study, we implemented SA in an attractor neural network model with distributed representations and created a unified framework for the two approaches. Our models assume a synaptic depression mechanism leading to autonomous transitions between encoded memory patterns (latching dynamics), which account for the major characteristics of automatic semantic priming in (...) humans. Using computer simulations, we demonstrated how findings that challenged attractor‐based networks in the past, such as mediated and asymmetric priming, are a natural consequence of our present model’s dynamics. Puzzling results regarding backward priming were also given a straightforward explanation. In addition, the current model addresses some of the differences between semantic and associative relatedness and explains how these differences interact with stimulus onset asynchrony in priming experiments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mourning and SubjectivityFrom Bersani to Proust, Klein, and FreudL. Scott Lerner (bio)Near the end of his recent essay “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” Leo Bersani makes an unexpected conceptual turn, briefly adopting a vocabulary of “human destiny” [174]. Jacques Derrida made a similar move in 2003 when he dropped his guard, abandoning the language of critical exposition to point out, with uncharacteristic bluntness (“de façon plus crue” [18]), (...) the relevance of autobiography—his experience as a Jewish boy in Algeria—to the development of deconstruction.1 In both instances, one senses a desire for intellectual self-exposure,2 to discover the relation of real-world experience and intellectual—critical, aesthetic, psychic—practices. For Bersani, not only the phrase but the essay as a whole signals the culmination of a decades-long inquiry into the relation of human subjectivity and a “solidarity of being” both among subjects and with the world [“Psychoanalysis” 161].If there is an affirmation of a universal human condition in Bersani’s work—and his reference to human destiny indicates that there is—then it is perhaps best defined as the inclination of human subjects to seek the annihilation of others as a prerequisite for subjectivity. In this state of affairs, where subjectivity encounters the external realm of human and nonhuman objects, Bersani has long been concerned with two chief protagonists: psychoanalysis and art. He has repeatedly shown, ever by new means, that both can be complicitous with the worst inclinations of human subjectivity, just as both can also uniquely provide the means by which human subjects may exceed their own subjectivity [161]. Psychoanalysis, in Bersani’s view, provides the language and conceptual framework to describe how and why subjects go about appropriating and annihilating objects. Psychoanalysis has been misdirected, however, toward two areas of relatively limited value: depth psychology and object relations [“Psychoanalysis” 161, 163; “Sociality” 647], while the main contribution of psychoanalysis, the discovery of the unconscious, has not been adequately exploited as a means of reconceptualizing subjects in solidarity, rather than antagonism, with objects [“Psychoanalysis” 161–64].By the same token, much of great art, literature especially, has served what Bersani calls the “culture of redemption,” promoting the misconception that experience is damaged or worthless and must be repaired via the work of art [Culture of Redemption 1]. [End Page 41] In psychoanalysis, the counterpart of the culture of redemption is located not, in fact, in the areas that Bersani devalorizes (depth psychology, object relations), but rather with the core exploration of unconscious subjectivity. The literary achievement that is paradigmatic of the culture of redemption is Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), whose theorizing narrator depicts experience, history, the real, as lost to us, damaged, fallen, and in need of repair—redemption—through art.3 The best illustration of the counterpart in psychoanalysis is the work of Melanie Klein. By portraying our relations with others as repetitions of dynamics already played out in unconscious fantasy, Kleinian theory, in Bersani’s view, similarly casts real relations as subordinate to and determined by the (unconscious) imagination. No sooner has Bersani exposed these dominant tendencies in Proust and Klein, however, than he redeems both from the sins of redemptiveness. At the periphery of each writer’s work he uncovers a radically alternative—and, implicitly, ethically superior—representation of the subject in the world. Bersani devoted a seminal essay to these two writers: “The Culture of Redemption: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein,” reprinted as the first chapter of The Culture of Redemption (1990). In subsequent essays in this volume, he applied this same bifocal approach—consisting in condemnation of a dominant tendency and affirmation of a seemingly marginal one—to Freud, Flaubert, Melville, and others.If The Culture of Redemption thus aimed not only to expose the distortions created by the culture of redemption but also to promote an alternative vision, then the title assigned to the collection told only half the story. Three years later, Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit set out, as it were, to tell the other half. They brought together the work of three artists—a novelist and playwright, a painter, and a filmmaker... (shrink)