The laugh- and/or smile-evoking potency of laughter was evaluated by observing responses of 128 subjects in three undergraduate psychology classes to laugh stimuli produced by a “laugh box.” Subjects recorded whether they laughed and/or smiled during each of 10 trials, each of which consisted of an 18-sec sample of laughter, followed by 42 sec of silence. Most subjects laughed and smiled in response to the first presentation of laughter. However, the polarity of the response changed quickly. By the 10th trial, (...) few subjects laughed and/or smiled, and most found the stimulus “obnoxious.” Although other research has described canned-laughter effects, it did not consider the hypothesis confirmed here, that laughter itself evokes laughter, perhaps by activating a laughter-specific auditory-feature detector. This result is relevant to the neurological basis of social communication, human ethology, and theories of speech production and perception. (shrink)

The sclera, the eye’s tough outer layer, is, among primates, white only in humans, providing the ground necessary for the display of colors that vary in health and disease. The current study evaluates scleral color as a cue of socially significant information about health, attractiveness, and age by contrasting the perception of eyes with normal whites with copies of those eyes whose whites were reddened, yellowed, or further whitened by digital editing. Individuals with red and yellow sclera were rated to (...) be less healthy, less attractive, and older than individuals with untinted control sclera. Individuals with whitened, “super-white” sclera were rated as younger, although not more healthy or attractive, than controls. In humans, clear, white sclera may join such traits as smooth skin and long, lustrous hair as signs of health, beauty, and reproductive fitness. The evolution of a white sclera may have contributed to the emergence of humans as a social species. (shrink)

Intention, shared or unshared, is based on the presumption of unknowable and unnecessary motives and mental states in ourselves and others.

Crying and laughter are innate, preverbal, species-typical vocalizations that have similarities and differences which are mutually illuminating.

The emotional expression of laughter in opera scores and performance was evaluated by converting notation to temporal data and contrasting it with the conversational laughter it emulates. The potency of scored and sung laughter was assayed by its ability to trigger contagion in audiences.

Laughing, humor, and tickling, but not tearing and crying, involve the give-and-take that provides value and a basis for exchange in the psychosexual marketplace.

A converging pattern of evidence from laughter, tickling, and motherese suggests that bipedal locomotion plays a critical and unanticipated role in vocal evolution. Bipedalism frees the thorax of its support role during quadrupedal locomotion, which permits the uncoupling of breathing and striding necessary for the subsequent selection for vocal virtuosity and speech.

Infectious yawning and laughing offer a convenient, noninvasive approach to the evolution, development, production, and control of imitation-like and mirror-like phenomena in normal, behaving humans.

This paper considers recent heated debates led by Jerry A. Coyne andMichael J. Wade on issues stemming from the 1929–1962 R.A. Fisher-Sewall Wrightcontroversy in population genetics. William B. Provine once remarked that theFisher-Wright controversy is central, fundamental, and very influential.Indeed,it is also persistent. The argumentative structure of therecent (1997–2000) debates is analyzed with the aim of eliminating a logicalconflict in them, viz., that the two sides in the debates havedifferent aims and that, as such, they are talking past each (...) other. Given aphilosophical analysis of the argumentative structure of the debates,suggestions supportive of Wade's work on the debate are made that areaimed, modestly, at putting the persistent Fisher-Wright controversy on thecourse to resolution. (shrink)

I en række afhandlinger beskrives den hollandske ISAF styrkes indsats i Afghanisatn fra 2001-2010. I en fireårig periode fra 2006-2010 var det hollandske kontingent indsat i den afghanske provins Uruzgan og opnåede bemærkelsesværdige resultater. Sikkerhedssituationen blev forbedret, den økonomiske udvikling blev stabiliseret ligesom den offentlige administration, uddannelsen af børn og sundhedsplejen m.v. blev forbedret. Efter 2010 er provinsen overtaget af amerikanske og australske tropper.

In this book Robert R. Clewis shows how certain crucial concepts in Kant's aesthetics and practical philosophy - the sublime, enthusiasm, freedom, empirical and intellectual interests, the idea of a republic - fit together and deepen our understanding of Kant's philosophy. He examines the ways in which different kinds of sublimity reveal freedom and indirectly contribute to morality, and discusses how Kant's account of natural sublimity suggests that we have an indirect duty with regard to nature. Unlike many other (...) studies of these themes, this book examines both the pre-critical Observations and the remarks that Kant wrote in his copy of the Observations. Finally, Clewis takes seriously Kant's claim that enthusiasm is aesthetically sublime, and shows how this clarifies Kant's views of the French Revolution. His book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant's philosophy. (shrink)

In this significant contribution to Hegel scholarship, Robert Williams develops the most comprehensive account to date of Hegel's concept of recognition. Fichte introduced the concept of recognition as a presupposition of both Rousseau's social contract and Kant's ethics. Williams shows that Hegel appropriated the concept of recognition as the general pattern of his concept of ethical life, breaking with natural law theory yet incorporating the Aristotelian view that rights and virtues are possible only within a certain kind of community. (...) He explores Hegel's intersubjective concept of spirit as the product of affirmative mutual recognition and his conception of recognition as the right to have rights. Examining Hegel's Jena manuscripts, his _Philosophy of Right_, the _Phenomenology of Spirit_, and other works, Williams shows how the concept of recognition shapes and illumines Hegel's understandings of crime and punishment, morality, the family, the state, sovereignty, international relations, and war. A concluding chapter on the reception and reworking of the concept of recognition by contemporary thinkers including Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze demonstrates Hegel's continuing centrality to the philosophical concerns of our age. (shrink)

Since the publication of Edmund Gettier's challenge to the traditional epistemological doctrine of knowledge as justified true belief, Roberts and Wood claim that epistemologists lapsed into despondency and are currently open to novel approaches. One such approach is virtue epistemology, which can be divided into virtues as proper functions or epistemic character traits. The authors propose a notion of regulative epistemology, as opposed to a strict analytic epistemology, based on intellectual virtues that function not as rules or even as skills (...) but as habits of the heart. To that end, they divide the task of clarifying and expounding their notion in the book's two parts.In the first part, Roberts and Wood examine various components that constitute their notion of regulative epistemology. The first are the epistemic goods or goals that drive the epistemic process. What is needed, claim Roberts and Wood, is an enriched notion of these goods rather than the restricted notion of justified true belief. Epistemic agents are more than calculating devices in that …. (shrink)

Investigates the concept of recognition (anerkennen) under which term the German idealists discussed the Other, intersubjectivity, the interhuman.

Commonly regarded as one of the most serious philosophers of all time (this is a man who took his daily walk at precisely the same time each day), Kant's Humorous Writings explores a dimension of Kant's work that has hitherto been almost entirely ignored but which casts his philosophy into a new light. With entirely new translations of Kant's bon mots, quips, and anecdotes, supplemented by historical commentary and numerous illustrations, this guide outlines just why these pieces were important to (...) both the man and his work. (shrink)

Robert R. Williams offers a bold new account of divergences and convergences in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche. He explores four themes - the philosophy of tragedy; recognition and community; critique of Kant; and the death of God - and explicates both thinkers' critiques of traditional theology and metaphysics.

"Magliola's exposition of Derrida has been acclaimed as the best in English.

The first English-language anthology to provide a compendium of primary source material on the sublime. The book takes a chronological approach, covering the earliest ancient traditions up through the early and late modern periods and into contemporary theory. It takes an inclusive, interdisciplinary approach to this key concept in aesthetics and criticism, representing voices and traditions that have often been overlooked. As such, it will be of use and interest across the humanities and allied disciplines.

Offers a collection of writings by analytic philosophers who have made lasting contributions to contemporary philosophical debate.

This text by an established specialist in French deconstruction, written after his many years in Asia and in the West, celebrates both Buddhist and Christian cultures and the negative but fertile differences between them.

This article focuses on the conceptual relationship between awe and the experience of the sublime. I argue that the experience of the sublime is best conceived as a species of awe, namely, as aesthetic awe. I support this conclusion by considering the prominent conceptual relations between awe and the experience of the sublime, showing that all of the options except the proposed one suffer from serious shortcomings. In maintaining that the experience of the sublime is best conceived as aesthetic awe, (...) I draw from historical theories of the sublime as well as recent work in empirical psychology. (shrink)

THE CARTESIAN IDEA that a self is a private consciousness has been subject to criticisms from many points of view. The most basic of these criticisms are that once we admit that the self is private, we cannot be certain of a common world, cannot conceive of outward actions of the self, and cannot have reasonable assurance of the existence of other selves. Those who hold fast to the private self might be willing to admit these criticisms and to hold (...) that the private self is indeed the only immediate object of experience and to regard the common world and other selves as objects of problematic hypotheses to explain the contents of the private self; on the other side, those who find these criticisms decisive might be willing on this account to deny private consciousness altogether and to regard the self as a form of behavior of the human organism. The one side seems to lose the world to save the self; the other side seems to lose the self to save the world. My aim in this article is to show that we can maintain that a self is a private consciousness without giving up the immediate certainty of a common world, outward action of the self, or assurance of the existence of other selves and that we are therefore not faced with the alternatives that the critics of Descartes suppose. (shrink)

The dispute in fact turns on two opposed conceptions of the self. The first is that shared by Leibniz, Hume, and contemporary empiricists according to which the self is nothing more than its determinate nature; the second conception is that shared by Hegel, Kierkegaard, and contemporary existentialists according, to which the self transcends its determinate nature. On the first conception, the self is an individual system of determinate conative, emotional, and cognitive dispositions, both innate and acquired. Its action is the (...) actualization of these dispositions in accordance with the laws that define them. On the second conception, on the other hand, the self is an individual, indeterminate, unconditioned power of self-determination. Its action is the actualization of that power. The self on this second conception is indeterminate prior to the action by which it makes itself determinate. For this reason, the determinate nature, with which the self is immediately identical on the first conception, is on the second a datum to which the self relates itself and which becomes its own possession only when it has made it its own. Hence, while the action of the self on the first conception is a predictable actualization of a determinate potentiality, its action on the second is an unpredictable original act of self-determination. (shrink)

I PROPOSE IN THIS PAPER to take up the question as to whether there must be something or other, or could there conceivably be nothing at all. How we answer will depend in large part on whether we hold that being is nothing but the totality of beings or hold that being is a distinguishable property of beings. On the first of these alternatives, to conceive of the being of a thing is simply to conceive of the thing itself; on (...) the second alternative, to conceive of being is to conceive of a property that adds to our conception of a thing. This second alternative does not imply that being itself is really separate from beings; it implies only that it can be conceptually distinguished from them. Only if being itself is a being will it be separate from beings. In this case, the being of other beings will consist in their share in that being. (shrink)

This paradox raises the problem of reconciling the existence of moral evil with the rationality of the moral good. There seem to be two forms of moral evil, that which we commit and that which is committed against us. But there is in fact only one. For the second form is moral evil in the agent but not in the patient. The fact that we suffer from the moral failure of others indeed contradicts the demands of the good. But this (...) contradiction consists in the moral failure of the agent, not in the pain of the patient. Hence, there is no special problem of reconciling the evil committed against us with the demands of the good. For that reduces to the problem of reconciling the moral failure of the agent with those demands. (shrink)

BY SUBJECTIVITY, we commonly mean the "inward" or "private" side of our experience and actions; and in this sense, feelings, emotions, desires, wishes, thoughts, and imaginings as we live through them constitute its content. From this perspective, the problem of revealing others is to show how we move from outward behavior and bodily expressions to inward feelings and thoughts. The problem arises from the fact that these do not appear in the same manner as the "hidden sides" of ordinary physical (...) objects. Physical objects have hidden sides from any given point of view, but we can move around the object and bring the hidden sides to intuitive presence. However, we cannot "live through" the feelings, emotions, and thoughts of another "from the inside" as he himself does. They are accessible to him in a manner in which they will never be accessible to us; and for this reason, the question haunts us as to whether the subjectivity of the other is really the same as our own. Perhaps the other is devoid of subjectivity or perhaps he lives through things in a manner altogether different from us. (shrink)

It is also to be distinguished from sexual desire, in which we appreciate another for his or her potential for satisfying our own sexual urges, regardless of any value apart from the sexual context.