The theory of taste faces a neglected epistemological problem. The cultivation of taste is functionally dependent upon self-knowledge of aesthetic satisfaction and its causes, in other words, knowing what we like and why. However, reservations about the reliability of our knowledge of our responses, commonplace in social psychology and the philosophy of mind, pose serious obstacles to the theory of taste. I argue for a weak fallibilism with respect to introspective beliefs about aesthetic experience. I call for a naturalistic approach (...) to the theory of taste that accounts for the unreliability of aesthetic self-knowledge. (shrink)

Conversations about art often include broad statements about the stature of artists. Such statements raise questions about the best way to look at the bodies of work of artists. Like individual works of art, bodies of work are artistic objects worthy of appreciation. Through the body of work, we are better able to engage the aspects of creativity that require a long-term perspective. This long-term perspective allows us to look for a range of aesthetic qualities not readily evident in individual (...) works of art. Looking at bodies of work also helps us to appreciate artistic accomplishments unfolding over a lifetime. (shrink)

Our lives are filled with aesthetic choices, that is, choices of objects for aesthetic experience. Choice is crucial to having a fulfilling aesthetic life. Our immediate satisfaction and long term flourishing require the ability to generate rewarding aesthetic opportunities. A good aesthetic life is one of good aesthetic choices. Given the centrality of choice to a good aesthetic life, aesthetic theory is in need of an account of choice. However, aesthetic choice has gone unexamined. This paper considers how choice helps (...) to make us who we are as aesthetic persons. I situate aesthetic choice within debates in contemporary choice theory. The paper also examines whether the recommenders on websites like Amazon or Netflix pose a risk to our aesthetic flourishing. Aesthetic choice is mostly constructive and conditional, in other words, ad hoc and easily influenced. Aesthetic choices tend to be small choices, with low stakes and relaxed deliberation. The effect of our choices is cumulative, and the import of individual choices is best judged by seeing them in the context of other choices, especially the plans to which they belong. (shrink)

In this paper I identify a new group of aesthetic norms, which I call norms of cultivation. Judgments of taste are often accompanied by forecasts or expectations about future aesthetic satisfaction. When we find something beautiful, we expect to find it beautiful in the future. Forecasting is at play in all sorts of aesthetically motivated behavior. Yet psychologists have observed an unreliability in such forecasts. As a result of forecasting error, what we take as our taste can be an unreliable (...) guide in our aesthetic lives. Compensating for the unreliability of taste are norms of cultivation, implicit rules for engaging objects, such as avoiding overexposure to favored objects or exposure under unfavorable conditions. Norms of cultivation help to regularize aesthetic experience, mitigating unreliability in forecasts, and fostering the ongoing stability and coherence of taste. (shrink)

The essay introduces the problem of aesthetic unreliability, the variety of ways in which it is difficult to grasp our aesthetic experience and the consequent confusion and unreliability of what we take as our taste.

Acquired taste is an integral part of the cultivation of taste. In this essay, I identify acquired taste as a form of intentional belief acquisition or adaptive preference formation, distinguishing it from ordinary or discovered taste. This account of acquired taste allows for the role of self-deception in the development of taste. I discuss the value of acquired taste in the overall development of taste as well as the ways that an over-reliance on acquired taste can distort overall taste.

Art is commonly thought to promote well-being. Aestheticians, however, have not considered how art plays this role. Over the past quarter century, there has been considerable research in positive psychology, the empirical study of subjective well-being. This research has resulted in robust findings on the factors promoting well-being. In this paper, I consider the findings for SWB in contemporary psychology in order to identify how art supports well-being. I also explore the implications of SWB theory for aesthetic theory and arts (...) policy. (shrink)

Cultivation: Art and Aesthetics in Everyday Life is an inquiry into everyday practices with an aesthetic dimension such as collecting, walking and domestic life. I examine the implications of a critical engagement with these practices for philosophical aesthetics and cultural studies. Traditional aesthetic theory has been informed by a fine arts model of creativity and aesthetic experience and, thus, has not adequately treated everyday aesthetic life. The rapidly expanding field of contemporary cultural studies, on the other hand, has been marked (...) by a dramatic shift in attention toward non-fine art objects like film and television. However, the attention of cultural studies remains, for the most part, limited to mass produced commodities, thereby presenting a narrow picture of aesthetic life outside the fine arts. Cultivation presents an alternative to both approaches. Following John Dewey, I develop a model of cultivation that allows me to locate and describe creativity and aesthetic experience in everyday life. Seen within the framework of everyday life, cultivation becomes more than the development of aesthetic sensibility, as in traditional connoisseurship. Instead, it includes as well the ongoing development of the capacity to satisfy this sensibility through the creative manipulation of one's actions and the world. This Pragmatist version of cultivation emphasizes the importance of creating occasions for aesthetic experience, that is, of refining and developing experience through the design of aesthetically motivated endeavors like walking, interior decoration and collecting. Cultivation is essentially a process: we do or make things in order to have experiences which then, internalized through habit and re-organized and redirected upon reflection, serve as the basis for further doing or making and still more refined experiences. This model of cultivation is then deployed in extended analyses of everyday practices. In these analyses, I develop a critical approach that seeks to understand practice as a creative process whose possibilities are intrinsically open to development. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Artists StarveKevin MelchionneAlthough cultural types may fear being branded as philistines for saying so, a remarkable amount of contemporary art is so awful that the very fact and regularity of this awfulness is in want of an explanation. Outside the art world, this observation is jejune. Inside, it makes for immediate disqualification. Is there something about the most common artistic motivations and attitudes that make this awfulness bound (...) to happen yet hard for insiders to sniff out?There are probably many factors in need of elaboration. One reason is widespread self-deception about the motivations for pursuing art. We often hear artists explain their commitment to art by a desire to express themselves or develop their gifts. We hear of a love of beauty or the challenges of craft or the chance for insight into self and world. Frequently, artists describe being called to art, a feeling of being chosen by art rather than choosing it. These are familiar accounts of what makes a life or career in art worth pursuing. But the piety of these high sounding explanations is strikingly incongruent with so much—though by no means all—contemporary art and suggests that, among artists, self-deception about motivations looms large.Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" is a parable of artistic motivation and a case study in the self-deception of the artist. In the brief story, Kafka unwinds an account of artistic motivation that begins with the familiar explanations but gives way eventually to less flattering admissions about artistic ambition. Professional fasting ultimately becomes a path to truth for the hunger artist. But the truth that it yields reduces [End Page 142] art from a source of intrinsic value to a somewhat desperate form of attention seeking. In the figure of the hunger artist, Kafka captures one self-delusion common among artists.IIn "A Hunger Artist," Kafka charts the decline of an accomplished artist.1 Kafka tells us that the artist, a practitioner of what the author describes as a now forgotten genre of performance art known as professional fasting, garners a degree of notoriety for his ability to sustain fasts of death-defying lengths. Half-art, half-sport, Kafka's professional fasting amounts to sitting in a contained but public space such as a cage, where the fast is observable round-the-clock by watchers whose job is to verify its authenticity. The fast is also subject to the attention of paying spectators. Presumably, it is this commercial element as well as the secular hubbub surrounding the fast that most distinguishes it from religious fasting (out of which artistic fasting must have emerged sometime in previous centuries, had Kafka also bothered to concoct a history of the practice). A professional fast typically lasts for periods of up to the biblically resonant forty days, after which the artist is carried from his cage with great fanfare to a modest, performance ending breakfast. Through the practice of fasting, the hunger artist lifts self-denial and by implication, self-control, to the level of virtuosity. The grace of the fast and even a sense of moderate contentment in it are part of what is on display for the audience.Notwithstanding a light routine of bonhomie, Kafka's hunger artist remains distant from his audience. He is neither buoyed by their adoration nor deflated by their vulgarity. Instead, the hunger artist seems entirely sustained by his practice. In his self-possession, we glimpse a familiar ideal of the authentic artist devoted to his practice for the sake of its intrinsic rewards. Indeed, doubts about the authenticity of his performance only fuel the hunger artist's determination. Far from insulted by the zeal of official observers, the hunger artist welcomes their vigilance. In their distrust of the hunger artist, the most severe of watchers convey a respect for the practice of professional fasting. Their desire to scrupulously ratify the authenticity of his effort is also an endorsement of its value. The earnestness of the referees pleases the hunger artist, though we are assured that their presence hardly matters. As in any authentic art, the bystanding critics are hardly necessary to ensure the integrity of the performance... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological PerspectivesKevin MelchionneCollecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives, by Werner Muensterberger; 295 pp. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1994, $29.95 cloth, $13.00 paper.Due to the growth of museum studies, collecting practices are receiving more attention these days. Muensterberger’s book is one of the more ambitious of recent studies in this area. He applies classical psychoanalytic concepts to collecting. Cultural theorists often say that (...) collecting is dominated by neurotic, fetishistic, compulsive, or obsessional desires. Muensterberger is firmly in this camp, and his performance confirms rather than dispels the misgivings that nonpsychoanalytic students of culture have often expressed about the psychoanalytic approach.The first two parts of the book are an exposition of the psychoanalytic view. The third treats several “case studies” of lunatic barons and desperate social climbers whose unbridled accumulation drove their families to ruin. The tales make for good reading. The final part of the book aims at a cultural history of [End Page 524] collecting. This section strays farthest from Muensterberger’s theoretical turf and suffers from a certain confusion of purpose. Much of it reads like a selection of case studies taken from the past rather than a history of collecting. In all, Muensterberger’s cultural history of collecting does not compare favorably with the extensive work in art history on the origins of the museum. I will limit my discussion to his psychoanalytic account of collecting.Muensterberger’s psychoanalysis is starkly classical: collecting is essentially a compensation for prior disappointment and an illusory comfort in the face of an uncertain future. Collecting serves this role particularly well, it seems, because its repetitive structure allows the individual to repeat the tension-reducing act of acquisition when the satisfaction induced by the previous act fades. The meaning of the process of collecting resides in the “momentary undoing of frustrating neediness but is felt as an experience of omnipotence. Like hunger, which must be sated, the obtainment of one more object does not bring an end to the longing. Instead, it is the recurrence of the experience that explains the collector’s mental attitude. The compelling concern to go in search, to discover, to add to one’s store, or holding, or harem, is not generated by conscious planning. Rather, every new addition, whether found, given, bought, discovered, or even stolen, bears the stamp of promise and magical compensation” (p. 13). In a similar vein, Muensterberger locates the origins of the urge to collect in the child’s reliance upon objects as “symbolic substitutes” for the parent. The acquisitive bent of the collector is derivative of the “grasping and clinging” of the infant (p. 18–19).If this sounds like your generic caricature of psychoanalysis, then you have the picture. Muensterberger makes an effort to distinguish his own perspective from a facile reductionism, whereby collecting is no more than the sign of a pathological state of mind. But this is exactly what he is doing. According to the author, collectibles are simply “narcissistic supplies” (p. 234). Speaking of the noted Italian collector, Mario Praz, Muensterberger writes: “the inanimate objects’ function is essentially compensatory... they are being used not only as an attempt to disguise old wounds but at the same time to serve as reminders of past injuries and humiliations” (p. 43).The idea that cultural practices like collecting serve in some way to compensate for the frailty of the human spirit is deeply attractive. If only through repetition, Muensterberger’s insistence upon the essentially compensatory nature of collecting (and for that matter, all culture) begins to make one wonder if the compensatory view of culture has not, through an excess of intellectual scruple, received too little recognition. Unfortunately, he pursues standard Freudian explanations with a relentlessness that sinks to self-caricature. In this respect, the book is a missed opportunity. It is plausible to suggest that collecting temporarily eases all sorts of psychological and existential tensions in adults though I doubt that it does this better than eating, sex, or yoga. [End Page 525]But it is not just his brand of psychoanalysis that is simplistic. Muensterberger defines collecting as the “selecting, gathering, and keeping of... (shrink)

A definition of emotion common to the affective sciences is an urgent desideratum. Lack of such a definition is a constant source of numerous misunderstandings and a series of mostly fruitless debates. There is little hope that there ever will be agreement on a common definition of emotion, given the sacred traditions of the disciplines involved and the egos of the scholars working in these disciplines. Our aim here is more modest. We propose a list of elements for a working (...) definition of emotion and discuss the justification for the inclusion of elements from our respective perspectives (philosophy and psychology). This working partial definition may at least serve as a litmus test to examine theories of emotion, old and new, across disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

We argue that explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), specifically reason-giving XAI, often constitutes the most suitable way of ensuring that someone can properly be held responsible for decisions that are based on the outputs of artificial intelligent (AI) systems. We first show that, to close moral responsibility gaps (Matthias 2004), often a human in the loop is needed who is directly responsible for particular AI-supported decisions. Second, we appeal to the epistemic condition on moral responsibility to argue that, in order to (...) be responsible for her decision, the human in the loop has to have an explanation available of the system’s recommendation. Reason explanations are especially well-suited to this end and we examine whether – and how – it might be possible to make such explanations fit with AI systems. We support our claims by focusing on a case of disagreement between human in the loop and AI system. (shrink)

An important and engaging book on a key argument in contemporary debates about free will and moral responsibility.

Introduction -- Organization, society and politics -- An Aristotelian perspective -- The politics -- The public good -- The rhetoric -- Talk and texts -- The Nichomachean ethics -- Decision making and ethics -- The Poetics -- Bolshevism to ballet in three steps -- What is "public interest"?: a case study -- Where do we go from here?

There is growing interest in understanding and eliciting division of labor within groups of scientists. This paper illustrates the need for this division of labor through a historical example, and a formal model is presented to better analyze situations of this type. Analysis of this model reveals that a division of labor can be maintained in two different ways: by limiting information or by endowing the scientists with extreme beliefs. If both features are present however, cognitive diversity is maintained indefinitely, (...) and as a result agents fail to converge to the truth. Beyond the mechanisms for creating diversity suggested here, this shows that the real epistemic goal is not diversity but transient diversity. (shrink)

In _Marx at the Margins_, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the _New York Tribune_, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers (...) a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. _Marx at the Margins _ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi-layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. (shrink)

This paper advances the conception of social entrepreneurs as caring entrepreneurs. We argue that the care ethics of social entrepreneurs, implying the pursuit of caring goals through caring processes, can be challenged when they engage in the process of scaling up their ventures. We propose that social entrepreneurs can sustain their care ethics as the essential dimension of their venture only if they are able to build a caring enterprise. Organizational care designates the set of organizing principles that facilitate the (...) embedding of care ethics at an organizational level, beyond the imprinting induced by social entrepreneurs’ personal ethics. (shrink)

Existentialism claims that there is no human reality except in action: pragmatism argues that meaning and truth are given only in practice. Wittgenstein calls for attention to forms of life, Marxism calls for attention to doing, and feminism calls for attention to the body. What do these tell us about ritual acts and their connection to spirit and to truth in Christianity and other world religions? Religious rituals have a special status as virtually pure forms of belief in action. Thinking (...) Through Rituals asks how philosophical tools like existentialism and Marxism can help us to understand the thought behind actions such as tasting the Christian host, joining in ceremony and speaking sacred words. Thinking Through Rituals proposes a new philosophical understanding of rituals as mental strategies giving access to knowledge of the world, in opposition to traditional approaches which see rituals as forms of social organization and control. Covering areas including the body, pilgrimage,initiation, sacrifice and art, this is an exciting look at the relationship between doing and meaning which is implied by ritual practice, but most fully explained by philosophical theory. (shrink)

_Challenges conventional understandings of Heidegger’s account of the body._.

This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of Heidegger’s account of “the uncanny” as it relates to the coronavirus pandemic. It explores how the pandemic has disrupted Dasein’s sense of “homelike” familiarity and how this disruption has undermined our ability to be, that is, to understand or make sense of things. By examining our experience of temporality, lived-space, and intersubjectivity, the paper illuminates different ways in which the pandemic has left us confused and anxious about our self-interpretations and future projects. The (...) paper concludes by showing how the uncanny is not simply something we feel in times of crisis; it is, for Heidegger, who we are. This means the secure feeling of familiarity that we embodied prior to the pandemic was an illusion all along, that we are not and never have been at-home in the world. (shrink)

Increasingly, epistemologists are becoming interested in social structures and their effect on epistemic enterprises, but little attention has been paid to the proper distribution of experimental results among scientists. This paper will analyze a model first suggested by two economists, which nicely captures one type of learning situation faced by scientists. The results of a computer simulation study of this model provide two interesting conclusions. First, in some contexts, a community of scientists is, as a whole, more reliable when its (...) members are less aware of their colleagues' experimental results. Second, there is a robust tradeoff between the reliability of a community and the speed with which it reaches a correct conclusion. ‡The author would like to thank Brian Skyrms, Kyle Stanford, Jeffrey Barrett, Bruce Glymour, and the participants in the Social Dynamics Seminar at University of California–Irvine for their helpful comments. Generous financial support was provided by the School of Social Science and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at UCI. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Baker Hall 135, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Kevin Scharp proposes an original theory of the nature and logic of truth on which truth is an inconsistent concept that should be replaced for certain theoretical purposes. He argues that truth is best understood as an inconsistent concept, and proposes a detailed theory of inconsistent concepts that can be applied to the case of truth. Truth also happens to be a useful concept, but its inconsistency inhibits its utility; as such, it should be replaced with consistent concepts that (...) can do truth's job without giving rise to paradoxes. To this end, Scharp offers a pair of replacements, which he dubs ascending truth and descending truth, along with an axiomatic theory of them and a new kind of possible-worlds semantics for this theory. He goes to develop Davidson's idea that truth is best understood as the core of a measurement system for rational phenomena, and offers a semantic theory that treats truth predicates as assessment-sensitive and solves the problems posed by the liar and other paradoxes. (shrink)

This book offers cutting edge research on the modifications and disruptions of bodily experience in the context of anxiety, depression, trauma, chronic illness, pain, and aging. It presents original contributions in applied phenomenology, biomedical ethics, and the use of medical technologies.

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger introduces a unique interpretation of death as a kind of world-collapse or breakdown of meaning that strips away our ability to understand and make sense of who we are. This is an ‘ontological death’ in the sense that we cannot be anything because the intelligible world that we draw on to fashion our identities and sustain our sense of self has lost all significance. On this account, death is not only an event that we (...) can physiologically live through; it can happen numerous times throughout the finite span of our lives. This paper draws on Arthur Frank’s (At the will of the body: reflections on illness. Houghton, Boston, 1991) narrative of critical illness to concretize the experience of ‘ontological death’ and illuminate the unique challenges it poses for health care professionals. I turn to Heidegger’s conception of ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit) to address these challenges, arguing for the need of health care professionals to help establish a discursive context whereby the critically ill can begin to meaningfully express and interpret their experience of self-loss in a way that acknowledges the structural vulnerability of their own identities and is flexible enough to let go of those that have lost their significance or viability. (shrink)

Colonial encounters in the 1850s: the European impact on India, Indonesia, and China -- Russia and Poland: the relationship of national emancipation to revolution -- Race, class, and slavery: the Civil War as a second American revolution -- Ireland: nationalism, class, and the labor movement -- From the Grundrisse to Capital: multilinear themes -- Late writings on non-western and precapitalist societies -- Conclusion -- Appendix: the vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to today.

In this paper, I draw on Heidegger’s phenomenology of “moods” (_Stimmungen_) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizing the (...) experience has been for residents. Making use of Heidegger’s account of the affective “collapse” or “breakdown” (_Zusammenbruch_) of meaning, I argue that when older adults are functionally locked in their rooms for months at a time and cut off from the orienting routines and rhythms of the relational world, the result is a crumbling of the fundamental meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The global sense of abandonment and disconnection strips away the possibility for self-understanding, and residents are often left confused and abandoned to an existence that has been drained of meaning and significance. (shrink)

Theories of scientific rationality typically pertain to belief. In this paper, the author argues that we should expand our focus to include motivations as well as belief. An economic model is used to evaluate whether science is best served by scientists motivated only by truth, only by credit, or by both truth and credit. In many, but not all, situations, scientists motivated by both truth and credit should be judged as the most rational scientists.

Introduction -- Theory before theory, 1915-1960 -- French theory, 1949-1968 -- Screen theory, 1969-1996 -- Post-theory, 1996-2015 -- Summary.

Increasingly, frontiers between business and philanthropy seem to be blurred. Reward-Based Crowdfunding platforms contribute to this blurring of lines since they propose funders to support both for-profit and philanthropic projects. Our empirical paper explores the case of Ulule, the leading crowdfunding platform in Europe. Our results, based on a statistical analysis of more than 3000 projects, show that crowdfunding platforms foster specific kinds of relationships relying on reciprocal giving, beyond the usual opposition between altruistic and selfish motivations. We use the (...) work of Marcel Mauss to account for this process of reciprocal giving, and we argue that Maussian theory of gift can be used more generally to describe funding activities in the context of early stage entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Work on a computer program called SMILE + IBP (SMart Index Learner Plus Issue-Based Prediction) bridges case-based reasoning and extracting information from texts. The program addresses a technologically challenging task that is also very relevant from a legal viewpoint: to extract information from textual descriptions of the facts of decided cases and apply that information to predict the outcomes of new cases. The program attempts to automatically classify textual descriptions of the facts of legal problems in terms of Factors, a (...) set of classification concepts that capture stereotypical fact patterns that effect the strength of a legal claim, here trade secret misappropriation. Using these classifications, the program can evaluate and explain predictions about a problem’s outcome given a database of previously classified cases. This paper provides an extended example illustrating both functions, prediction by IBP and text classification by SMILE, and reports empirical evaluations of each. While IBP’s results are quite strong, and SMILE’s much weaker, SMILE + IBP still has some success predicting and explaining the outcomes of case scenarios input as texts. It marks the first time to our knowledge that a program can reason automatically about legal case texts. (shrink)

This paper integrates personal narratives with the methods of phenomenology in order to draw some general conclusions about ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to be depressed. The analysis has three parts. First, it explores the ways in which depression disrupts everyday experiences of spatial orientation and motility. This disruption makes it difficult for the person to move and perform basic functional tasks, resulting in a collapse or contraction of the life-world. Second, it illustrates how depression creates a (...) situational atmosphere of emotional indifference that reduces the person’s ability to qualitatively distinguish what matters in his or her life because nothing stands out as significant or important anymore. In this regard, depression is distinct from other feelings because it is not directed towards particular objects or situations but to the world as a whole. Finally, the paper examines how depression diminishes the possibility for ‘self-creation’ or ‘self-making’. Restricted by the illness, depression becomes something of a destiny, preventing the person from being open and free to access a range of alternative self-interpretations, identities, and possible ways of being-in-the-world. (shrink)

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

Much of contemporary knowledge is generated by groups not single individuals. A natural question to ask is, what features make groups better or worse at generating knowledge? This paper surveys research that spans several disciplines which focuses on one aspect of epistemic communities: the way they communicate internally. This research has revealed that a wide number of different communication structures are best, but what is best in a given situation depends on particular details of the problem being confronted by the (...) group. (shrink)