Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 295-310, April 2022.

ABSTRACTInspired by the discovery of positive age trends in emotional well-being across adulthood, lifespan researchers have uncovered fascinating age differences in cognition–emotion interactions in healthy adult samples, for example in emotion processing, memory, reactivity, perception, and regulation. Taking stock of this body of research, I identify four trends and five remaining gaps in our understanding of emotional functioning in adulthood. In particular, I suggest that the field should pay stronger attention to the prediction of real-world behaviour. Using the sample (...) case of work functioning, I outline gaps in current knowledge, including the lack of data on middle-aged adults, the neglect of relevant cognitive-emotional mechanisms, and the unclear role of life experience. Filling these gaps will enable progress in research on emotional aging in and beyond the work setting and enhance its practical utility for individuals, organisations, and society. (shrink)

Schizophrenia patients exhibit impairments across multiple clinical, cognitive, and functional domains. A fundamental abnormality of the timing and/or efficiency of neural processes across disparate brain regions (i.e., cortico-cortical communications) may underlie many of the deficits in schizophrenia. Because gamma synchrony is temporally correlated with many cognitive processes, probing patterns of gamma activation may shed light on the functional integrity of neural circuits in schizophrenia and related disorders.

Background: There are few standardized measures available to assess executive function in a naturalistic setting for children. The Children’s Cooking Task is a complex test that has been specifically developed to assess EF in a standardized open-ended environment. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the internal consistency, inter-rater reliability, sensitivity and specificity, and also convergent and divergent validity of the Norwegian version of CCT among children with pediatric Acquired Brain Injury and healthy controls.Methods: The present study has (...) a cross-sectional design, based on baseline data derived from a multicenter RCT. Seventy-five children with pABI from two university hospitals with parent-reported executive dysfunction and minimum of 12 months since injury/completed cancer therapy, as well as 59 HCs aged 10–17 years, were assessed with CCT using total errors as the main outcome measure. The pABI group completed tests assessing EF on the impairment level within the ICF framework, and on the participation level. In addition, they completed tests of intellectual ability, processing speed, attention, learning, and memory. Finally, overall functional outcome was evaluated for the children with pABI.Results: Acceptable internal consistency and good inter-rater reliability were found for the CCT. Children with pABI performed significantly worse on the CCT than the HCs. The CCT identified group membership, but the sensitivity and specificity were overall classified as poor. Convergent validity was demonstrated by associations between the CCT and performance-based tests assessing inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory, as well as teacher-reported executive dysfunction. Divergent validity was supported by the lack of association with performance-based measures of learning and memory, attention, and verbal intellectual ability. However, there was a moderate association between the CCT and performance-based tests of processing speed. Lastly, better performance on the CCT was associated with a better functional outcome.Conclusion: Our study with a relatively large sample of children with pABI and HC’s demonstrated good psychometric properties of the CCT. CCT performance was associated with the overall level of disability and function, suggesting that CCT is related to the level of activity in everyday life and participation in society. Hence, our study suggests that the CCT has the potential to advance the assessment of EF by providing a valid analysis of real-world performance. Nevertheless, further research is needed on larger samples, focusing on predictors of task performance, and evaluating the ability of CCT to detect improvement in EF over time. The patterns of error and problem-solving strategies evaluated by the CCT could be used to inform neuropsychological rehabilitation treatmentand represent a more valid outcome measure of rehabilitation interventions. (shrink)

“Everyday ethics” is a term that has been used in the clinical and ethics literature for decades to designate normatively important and pervasive issues in healthcare. In spite of its importance, the term has not been reviewed and analyzed carefully. We undertook a literature review to understand how the term has been employed and defined, finding that it is often contrasted to “dramatic ethics.” We identified the core attributes most commonly associated with everyday ethics. We then propose an (...) integrative model of everyday ethics that builds on the contribution of different ethical theories. This model proposes that the function of everyday ethics is to serve as an integrative concept that (1) helps to detect current blind spots in bioethics (that is, shifts the focus from dramatic ethics) and (2) mobilizes moral agents to address these shortcomings of ethical insight. This novel integrative model has theoretical, methodological, practical, and pedagogical implications, which we explore. Because of the pivotal role that moral experience plays in this integrative model, the model could help to bridge empirical ethics research with more conceptual and normative work. (shrink)

The culturally pervasive tendency to identify aspects of the body as aesthetically imperfect harms individuals and scaffolds injustice related to disability, race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities, and fatness. But abandoning the notion of imperfection may not respect people’s reasonable understandings of their own bodies. I examine the prospects for a practice of aesthetic assessment grounded in a notion of the body’s function. I argue that functional aesthetic assessment, to be respectful, requires understanding the body’s functions as complex, malleable, and determined by (...) the projects and interests of the person whose body it is. Aesthetically relevant functions, on this account, are determined neither by the body’s status as organism nor by cultural assumptions about how bodies should function or be used. (shrink)

I argue that our everyday evaluations of architecture are primarily evaluations of spaces and, in particular, of their inhabitability— that is, whether they serve or can serve to the realization of our individual ideal of life. Inhabitability is not only a functional criterion but an aesthetic one as well. It is aesthetic insofar as the evaluations about inhabitability include evaluations about the quality of the experience of actually doing something in —or simply occupying—a particular space. This aesthetic aspect of (...) our everyday evaluations explains, on one hand, the distinctive features of our everyday preferences for some architectonic spaces over others—namely, their very personal nature; their noticeable value in our daily lives; their inseparability from the activities we plan to realize in those spaces; and the importance of the spaces which are contiguous to the one we are evaluating. And on the other, it both reveals architecture’s significance for the quality of our daily life and serves as a guide for us to choose spaces that improve that quality. (shrink)

The target article interprets current psychological research on everyday memory in terms of a correspondence metaphor. This metaphor is based on a reduction of everyday memory to autobiographical and eyewitness memory. This commentary focuses on everyday memory as it functions in activity. Viewed from this perspective, the joining of everyday memory to a correspondence metaphor is problematic. A more natural way to frame the processes of everyday memory is in terms of context, practice, and pragmatics.

Functional beauty in the aesthetic tradition -- Functional beauty in contemporary aesthetic theory -- Indeterminacy and the concept of function -- Function and form -- Nature and environment -- Architecture and the built environment -- Artefacts and everyday aesthetics -- The functions of art.

In Functional Beauty, Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson defend the importance of Functional Beauty—that is, the view that an item's fitness (or otherwise) for its proper function is a source of positive (or negative) aesthetic value—within a unified comprehensive aesthetic theory that encompasses art, the everyday, animals and organic nature, natural environments and inorganic nature, and artifacts. In the following section, I outline the main lines of argument presented in the book. I then criticize some of these arguments. I (...) do so, however, from the perspective of someone who shares the authors' commitment to the importance of Functional Beauty and their dismay at its neglect in contemporary aesthetic theory. .. (shrink)

This book applies the formal discipline of logic to everyday discourse. It offers a new analysis of the notion of individual, suggesting that this notion is linguistic, not ontological, and that anything denoted by a proper name in a well-functioning language game is an individual. It further posits that everyday discourse is non-compositional, i.e., its complex expressions are not just the result of putting simpler ones together but react on the latter, modifying their meaning through feedback. The (...) book theorizes that in everyday discourse, there is no algebra of truth values, but the latter can be both input and output of something which has no truth value at all. It suggests that an elementary proposition of everyday discourse can, in principle, be indefinitely expanded by adding new components, belonging neither to subject nor to predicate, but remain elementary. This book is of interest to logicians and philosophers of language. (shrink)

A functional theory of memory has already been developed as part of a general functional theory of cognition. The traditional conception of memory as “reproductive” touches on only a minor function. The primary function of memory is in constructing values for goal-directedness of everyday thought and action. This functional approach to memory rests on a solid empirical foundation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seeking the Everyday Meaning of Autonomy in Neurologic DisordersGeorge J. Agich (bio)The Socratic aphorism that the unexamined life is not worth living and dictums like "Know thyself" remind us of the centrality of self-understanding in the history of philosophical reflections on autonomy. These traditional concerns with autonomy may seem far removed from the neurologic impairments to which Joel Anderson and Warren Lux draw our attention. Nonetheless, Anderson and (...) Lux have provided an important discussion that links the traditional philosophical commitment to self-knowledge with an account that parses these concepts in the context of neurologic disorders. Theirs is a potentially productive approach for improving our understanding of autonomy, one that Emilio Mordini and I advocated in a paper entitled, "Autonomy and the Ethics of Neurosurgery" (Agich and Mordini 1998, 54). We argued that the focus of bioethics on issues such as informed consent misses the more challenging and potentially fruitful collaboration that neurosurgery and neurology affords for advancing the philosophical understanding of the conditions of autonomy. The challenge is in the integration of concepts used in one context of meaning with other domains of discourse. A good example of the challenges embedded in pursuing this kind of project can be found in Anderson and Lux's discussion of the concept of accurate self-assessment.Anderson and Lux argue that accurate self-assessment is a requirement for one to act autonomously. On first hearing, this phrase sounds unsurprising and consistent with standard approaches that assume a higher degree of awareness of one's capacities. Their characterization, however, derives from their observations of cases involving severe neurologic impairments, which point to more basic processes than the reflective awareness or knowledge that is often assumed. Paradoxically, the language of accurate self-assessment sounds remarkably like an intellectual function. It appears to fall squarely within the traditional philosophical tendency to define autonomy in terms of ego-centered, intellectual functions involving relatively high-level reflective capacities. Despite their terminology, Anderson and Lux stress that their account requires a type of reflexivity that is not the same as self-conscious reflection understood in the highest degree. They stress this in a number of places. For example, they see the neurologic concept of executive function as involving basic feedback mechanisms that are "broadly isomorphic with capacities associated [End Page 295] with autonomy;" these include anticipation, goal seeking, planning, initiation, sequencing, monitoring, error detection, self-correction, as well as initiation of novel responses, a clearly heterogenous set of capacities (Anderson and Lux 2004, 285). These capacities are not capacities of the "mind," but basic neurologic functions of the intact embodied agent who is actively engaged in the world. Thus, these concepts capture or express a practical (or clinical) as opposed to a theoretical understanding of the basic conditions or capacities defining autonomy. Similarly, their talk of "self-assessment" does not need to be understood as explicit or conscious; rather, it typically operates in the background (Anderson and Lux 2004). They term this character of self-assessment "mundane" (Anderson and Lux 2004, 289), which strikes me as exactly the right way to characterize this key feature of autonomy (Agich 1995). Their phenomenological and clinically based insights are quite sound, but the reader struggles with a terminology that seems to run in a different direction. To be sure, they stress that they intend their language of "autonomy" and "accurate self-assessment" to involve ordinary, background, and everyday functions that do not require high levels or significant capacities for reflective self-assessment, but their very insistence underscores the problem inherent in this terminology.Anderson and Lux argue that the capacity for self-assessment has a task-relative dimension that requires a degree of "accuracy." They characterize accuracy in a way that may promote rather than forestall misunderstanding. They state that "an adequate degree of precision" (281) is required in such assessment. For example, in assessing whether one is able to jump a hurdle, they say "one must accurately estimate not only the strength of one's legs but also the height of the hurdle" (Anderson and Lux 2004, 281). They further characterize their account of "accuracy" as involving an epistemological externalism, which might lead some readers to assume... (shrink)

The treatment-enhancement distinction draws a line between services or interventions meant to prevent or cure conditions that we view as diseases or disabilities and interventions that improve a condition that we view as a normal function or feature of members of our species. The line drawn here is widely appealed to in medical practice and medical insurance contexts, as well as in our everyday thinking about the medical services we do and should assist people in obtaining.

Social functions and functional explanations play a prominent role not only in our everyday reasoning but also in classical as well as contemporary social theory and empirical social research. This volume explores metaphysical, normative, and methodological perspectives on social functions and functional explanations in the social sciences. It aims to push the philosophical debate on social functions forward along new investigative lines by including up-to-date discussions of the metaphysics of social functions, questions concerning the nature of functional explanations within (...) the social domain, and various applications of functionalist theorising. As such, this is one of the first collections to exclusively address a variety of philosophical questions concerning the nature and relevance of social functions. (shrink)

: In Section I, I provide a brief historical sketch of tragedy and its relationship to Socratic philosophy and comedy. II focuses on one aspect of tragedy, namely, its view that morality transcends natural limitations. This understanding of morality is with us still. III presents the central concerns of the world religions as evidence of a widespread feeling of alienation from the sacred and the wild, and contrasts world religions with indigenous spirituality. IV moves us away from the understanding of (...) philosophy as argument and counterargument and toward an ecosystemic, or wild, conception of philosophy as story in the mode of comedy. V offers a Buddhist understanding of tragic alienation that sees it as expressive of something deeply problematic about humans. This something is actualized throughout Western culture but seems to exist only as a potentiality in indigenous cultures. This is reason enough to take indigenous cultures and comedy seriously. VI brings us back to earth with a sketch of comedy in the lives of dear friends. VII sketches some of the attributes of functional communities that give support to comedy. I also point out a number of features of indigenous so-called worldviews that would greatly enhance the ability of comedy to displace tragedy in the West. VIII portrays picaresque comedy as exemplifying the lessons of comedy taught by wilderness. Examples from indigenous cultures of Africa and Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild underscore the importance of picaresque strategies and understandings of comedy. A look at Tom Birch's enigmatic statement, "wilderness treats us like human beings," setting it alongside some lines from Thoreau's Walden, rounds out my discussion of comedy. IX poses a challenge: Can we survive "The News" that pours in upon us from tragic seats of power? (shrink)

In Section I, I provide a brief historical sketch of tragedy and its relationship to Socratic philosophy and comedy. II focuses on one aspect of tragedy, namely, its view that morality transcends natural limitations. This understanding of morality is with us still. III presents the central concerns of the world religions as evidence of a widespread feeling of alienation from the sacred and the wild, and contrasts world religions with indigenous spirituality. IV moves us away from the understanding of philosophy (...) as argument and counterargument and toward an ecosystemic, or wild, conception of philosophy as story in the mode of comedy. V offers a Buddhist understanding of tragic alienation that sees it as expressive of something deeply problematic about humans. This something is actualized throughout Western culture but seems to exist only as a potentiality in indigenous cultures. This is reason enough to take indigenous cultures and comedy seriously. VI brings us back to earth with a sketch of comedy in the lives of dear friends. VII sketches some of the attributes of functional communities that give support to comedy. I also point out a number of features of indigenous so-called worldviews that would greatly enhance the ability of comedy to displace tragedy in the West. VIII portrays picaresque comedy as exemplifying the lessons of comedy taught by wilderness. Examples from indigenous cultures of Africa and Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild underscore the importance of picaresque strategies and understandings of comedy. A look at Tom Birch's enigmatic statement, "wilderness treats us like human beings," setting it alongside some lines from Thoreau's Walden, rounds out my discussion of comedy. IX poses a challenge: Can we survive "The News" that pours in upon us from tragic seats of power? (shrink)

In this paper, after a brief historical overview, we will make a programmatic and paradigmatic comparison through analogy, between cartography and design. These two subjects both share three fundamental characteristics: a captivating appearance, usefulness, and also are ubiquitous in everyday life. This is particularly evident nowadays in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets that are featured with a touchscreen technology. The paradigmaticity of such a comparison stands in the planning, and organizational quality, common to the two above mentioned (...) subject areas. We will maintain that such a quality creates new aesthetics horizons, made possible as a result of great usability, functionality and interactivity. These features are achieved through the interdisciplinary cooperation between a careful design activity and a formal organization of symbols. These materialize into what we claim to be the «pass key» to this new kind of aesthetic experience rooted in the everyday and marked by immediacy: the interface. (shrink)

Joint attention is an everyday phenomenon in which two or more individuals attend to an object, event process or property in the presence of each other, such that their attention to that object is to some degree intertwined with the other’s attention to it. This paper argues that joint attention has the normative role of enabling subjects to coordinate their actions in a way that would contribute to the rational execution of a joint action in accordance with a prior (...) shared plan or shared intention. This understanding of the normative function of joint attention underpins a particular understanding of the nature of joint attention: what I shall call Rich Relationalism. Rich Relationalism argues for the view that joint attention acts as an epistemically significant interface between the world, other people, and their background plans and concepts. It understands joint attention as an object-dependent, conceptually structured, token experiential state that is shared by two (or more) people. It can be contrasted with non-relational (i.e., Representational or Enactivist) accounts of joint attention on the one hand, and Lean Relationalist accounts on the other (such as John Campbell’s influential account). (shrink)

Michael Lynch’s Truth as One and Many is a contribution to the large body of philosophical literature on the nature of truth. Within that genre, advocates of truth-as-correspondence, advocates of truth-as-coherence, and the like, all hold that truth has a single underlying metaphysical nature, but they sharply disagree as to what this nature is. Lynch argues that many of these views make good sense of truth attributions for a limited stretch of discourse, but he adds that each of the contenders (...) also faces a ‘scope problem’, in that none of them makes sense of all legitimate truth attributions. Some deflationists make similar observations – usually less concessive – and conclude that truth simply has no substantial, underlying nature. There is nothing for the philosopher to articulate and defend. Lynch agrees with deflationists that the realm of discourse is too diverse for any single ‘first-level’ property, such as correspondence or coherence, to fully characterize it, but against deflationism, he holds that truth does have a nature. He presents a functionalist theory. The definition is this: x is true if, and only if, x has a property that plays the truth-role. According to Lynch, the truth-role is given in terms of what he calls the ‘core truisms’ of the folk concept of truth. These are platitudes that hold of the everyday notion, and are such that anyone who denies all of them can be accused of changing the subject – of not talking about truth. A given property T plays the truth-role for a batch of propositions, just in case, for any proposition P in the batch: P is T if, and only if, where P is believed, things are as they are believed to be; other things being equal, it is a worthy goal …. (shrink)

Traditional memory strategy training interventions improve older adults’ performance on tests of episodic memory, but have limited transfer to episodic memory tasks, let alone to everyday memory. We argue that an alternative approach is needed to assist older adults to compensate for age-related cognitive declines and to maintain functional capacity in their own natural ecologies. We outline a set of principles regarding how interventions can successfully train older adults to increase successful goal pursuit to reduce risks of everyday (...) memory failures. We argue that training individuals to use metacognitive self-regulatory strategies to proactively manage formulation and pursuit of daily goals can compensate for age-related cognitive changes and increase the likelihood of goal attainment. We then describe an intervention approach that instantiates these principles in a multi-modal intervention that is unique in its three-phase approach: individualized assessment of an individual’s current approaches to self-regulation; training memory strategies, self-management skills, and new habits of mind in a group training context; and a behavioral shaping period in which individuals receive coaching and feedback on their efforts to use trained procedures to improve everyday cognition. A recently completed study conducted an initial test of the intervention, with highly encouraging results. We advocate further efforts to replicate, extend, and fine-tune this type of intervention. The ultimate goal is to be able to deliver the intervention in a way that increases its potential reach, including to subpopulations of older adults at risk for everyday cognitive impairments. (shrink)

A generally ignored feature of Aristotle’s famous function argument is its reliance on the claim that practitioners of the crafts (technai) have functions: but this claim does important work. Aristotle is pointing to the fact that we judge everyday rational agency and agents by norms which are independent of their contingent desires: a good doctor is not just one who happens to achieve his personal goals through his work. But, Aristotle argues, such norms can only be binding on individuals (...) if human rational agency as such is governed by objective teleological norms.
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Deaf or hard-of-hearing children who use auditory-oral communication display considerable variability in spoken language and executive functioning outcomes. Furthermore, language and executive functioning skills are strongly associated with each other in DHH children, which may be relevant for explaining this variability in outcomes. However, longitudinal investigations of language and executive functioning during the important preschool period of development in DHH children are rare. This study examined the predictive, reciprocal associations between executive functioning and spoken language over (...) a 1-year period in samples of 53 DHH and 59 typically hearing children between ages 3–8 years at baseline. Participants were assessed on measures of receptive spoken language and caregiver-completed executive functioning child behavior checklists during two in-person home visits separated by 1 year. In the sample of DHH children, better executive functioning at baseline was associated with better performance on the higher-order language measures 1 year later. In contrast, none of the Time 1 language measures were associated with better executive functioning in Time 2 in the DHH sample. TH children showed no significant language-executive functioning correlations over the 1-year study period. In regression analyses controlling for Time 1 language scores, Time 1 executive functioning predicted Time 2 language outcomes in the combined DHH and TH samples, and for vocabulary, that association was stronger in the DHH than in the TH sample. In contrast, after controlling for Time 1 executive functioning, none of the regression analyses predicting Time 2 executive functioning from Time 1 language were statistically significant. These results are the first findings to demonstrate that everyday parent-rated executive functioning behaviors predict basic and higher-order spoken language development 1 year later in young DHH children, even after accounting for initial baseline language skills. (shrink)

ObjectivesTo investigate the external and ecological validity of a standardized test of children’s executive functioning, the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome for Children.BackgroundThere are few standardized measures for assessing executive functions in children, and the evidence for the validity of most measures is currently limited.MethodA normative sample of 256 children and adolescents from age 8–16 years completed the BADS-C, and a parent or teacher completed rating scales of the child’s everyday problems related to EF and Strengths and (...) Difficulties Questionnaire, a commonly used measure of emotional, social, cognitive, and behavioral problems.ResultsExploratory factor analyses yielded a two-factor structure to the BADS-C, indicative of monitoring and abstract reasoning processes, and a three-factor structure to the DEX-C, reflecting behavioral, and cognitive components of the dysexecutive syndrome as well as emotional responsiveness. Regression analyses showed significant relationships between BADS-C scores and everyday functioning as reported on the DEX and SDQ. Furthermore, there were significant differences in BADS-C scores between those children in the upper and lower quartiles on the SDQ.ConclusionResults provide tentative evidence of BADS-C and DEX-C construct, convergent and predictive validity. (shrink)

This article clarifies my current and seemingly ever-changing position on issues relating to emotions. The position derives from my differential emotions theory and it changes with new empirical findings and with insights from my own and others’ thinking and writing. The theory distinguishes between first-order emotions and emotion schemas. For example, it proposes that first-order negative emotions are attributable mainly to infants and young children in distress and to older individuals in emergency or highly challenging situations. Emotion schemas are defined (...) as emotion feelings interacting with cognition in motivating the decision making and actions of everyday life. (shrink)

Robert Stecker investigates the universal human need for aesthetic experience of the world around us. He examines three contexts where aesthetic value plays a central role: art, nature, and the everyday. He explores how the aesthetic interacts with moral, cognitive, and functional values, and considers the place of the aesthetic in a good life.

What makes for a good education? What does one need to count as well-educated? Knowledge, to be sure. But knowledge is easily forgotten, and today's knowledge may be obsolete tomorrow. Skills, particularly in critical thinking, are crucial as well. But absent the right motivation, graduates may fail to put their skills to good use. In this book, Nathan King argues that intellectual virtues-traits like curiosity, intellectual humility, honesty, intellectual courage, and open-mindedness-are central to any education worthy of the name. Further, (...) such virtues are crucial to our functioning well in everyday life, in areas as diverse as personal relationships, responsible citizenship, civil discourse, and personal success. Our struggles in these areas often result from a failure to think virtuously. Drawing upon recent work in philosophy and psychology, King paints a portrait of virtuous intellectual character-and of the vices such a character opposes. Filled with examples and applications, this book introduces readers to the intellectual virtues: what they are, why they matter, and how we can grow in them. (shrink)

Epidemics are situations that ruin the functioning of the social due to their characteristics concerning the disruption of the usual pace of daily life and reshaping of human actions and social encounters. In terms of its impact, the Covid-19 global epidemic has brought about changes in a series of daily life practices, from business and working life to public encounters, from education and health services to human relations, public encounters and the organization of the society on a time-space scale, (...) based on repetition. Everyday life is directly related to the establishment of the society depending on the repeatability of day-to-day activities as a routine of social relations and public encounters on a certain time-space scale. This study discusses how the society, which became possible as a result of the repetitive structuring of human actions with the Covid-19 epidemic, has transformed through new routines, new habits, new time-space practices and new public encounters. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between the discourse of death, or thanatology, and self-fashioning, in John Chrysostom’s thirteenth homily In epistulam ad Romanos. The study argues that thanatology became a very important feature in the care of the self in Chrysostom’s thought. The central aim here is to demonstrate the multi-directional flow of death, as a corporeal discourse, between the realms of theology, ethics, and physiology. Firstly, the article investigates the link between the theological concepts (...) of sin and death. Secondly, the study argues that death also becomes a highly paradoxical discourse when it enters the realm of Chrysostomic virtue-ethics, where the mortification of excessive passion leads to life, while ‘living’ in passion only results in death on every level of existence – death as a discourse therefore becomes interiorised, a process functioning as a subset of a more extensive biologisation of the spiritual life-cycle. Finally, Chrysostom also utilises death in a very physiological way, especially in his comments on the relationship between sin and the passions, and one’s physical health and appearance. (shrink)

Purpose of the study is to find out the interdependence of the event as a factor of transformations in the established areas of human life and everyday routine as a way of existence of social being, which cover various types of human activity. Theoretical basis of the research is based on understanding of everyday routine as a form of social reality, a complex and multidimensional object that is constantly evolving, includes new forms of reality, and is influenced by (...) various social changes. The main function of everyday routine is the survival of individual and society, therefore the stable foundations of human existence play a dominant role in every life. In turn the event serves as a way of being existence, has a singular character, an individual expression, identifies elements that do not fit into the usual framework of everyday life. Originality of the obtained results lies in understanding event as the opposition of the phenomena world to the out of experience world of being, unexpected innovation that leads to the emergence of behaviours and structures that are new and unusual for everyday life. Event is not identical to empirical facticity, does not correspond to the usual understanding of phenomena and processes, and leads to a break from the everyday life, as it causes significant changes in human life on the individual and social levels. Unexpected change in everyday life caused by event is a traumatic collision with another dimension of being for an individual, as a result of it new meanings may open. Conclusions. On the background of everyday life, which is able to be in different states, function in a variety of relationships, to be manifested in numerous structures, junctions and connections, the event assumes the prospect of a new reality, contrary to previous representations. From existential point of view, event is always an interruption of everyday life, as for example, love or religious conversion. A large-scale event causes shocks that affect most or all individuals and communities that use multiple ways to react to an event – interpretation, selection, glorification, silence, valuations adjustment, phenomena, facts, celebration of holidays, rituals that are periodically repeated. (shrink)

Monroe Beardsley wrote that there would be no aesthetics if everyone was silent about works of art.1 Similarly, there would be no philosophical aesthetics of design if no one ever talked critically about, but instead quietly enjoyed or put up with, our built environment and things of everyday use. But whereas Beardsley could draw on an established and distinct body of art, music, and literary criticism to set the aims and scope of aesthetics, a similar metacritical approach to the (...) aesthetics of design has no directly equivalent body of critical work. That's not to say designed things aren't objects of critical appraisal raising judgments of a distinctively aesthetic character. Charles Rennie Mackintosh's... (shrink)

This study looks at the emerging branch of everyday aesthetics from the perspective of the fracture which exists in its core, as a result of the double reading of the everyday: the first, which elevates it to the realm of the extraordinary and the second, in which it remains strictly ordinary. Our purpose here is to repair this fracture by turning to David Hume’s functionalist aesthetics, where disinterest and utility are reconciled through sympathy and the affective experience of (...) otherness that it provides. Once transferred to the everyday sphere, sympathy facilitates understanding between these two versions, since the aesthetic appreciation of everyday objects or common activities requires, like the second version, that they remain in the practical environment and, like the first, to see something special in them, which is the possibility of one’s own or another’s well-being. (shrink)

This study looks at the emerging branch of everyday aesthetics from the perspective of the fracture which exists in its core, as a result of the double reading of the everyday: the first, which elevates it to the realm of the extraordinary and the second, in which it remains strictly ordinary. Our purpose here is to repair this fracture by turning to David Hume’s functionalist aesthetics, where disinterest and utility are reconciled through sympathy and the affective experience of (...) otherness that it provides. Once transferred to the everyday sphere, sympathy facilitates understanding between these two versions, since the aesthetic appreciation of everyday objects or common activities requires, like the second version, that they remain in the practical environment and, like the first, to see something special in them, which is the possibility of one’s own or another’s well-being. (shrink)

One of the central pedagogical strategies employed in the "Analects" consists in the suggestion of models worthy of emulation. The text's most robust models, the dramatic personae of the text, emerge as colorful figures with distinctive personal styles of action and behavior. This is especially so in the case of Confucius himself. In this essay, two particularly notable features of Confucius' style are considered. The first, what is termed "everyday" style, consists in Confucius' unusual command of conventional norms in (...) ordinary circumstances; the second, termed "deviant" style, consists in Confucius' occasional and sometimes puzzling departures from conventional norms. The combind effect of these two aspects of Confucius' personal style is shown to yield a productive pedagogical tension for the moral learner who would emulate, but cannot imitate, Confucius. (shrink)

In this article we examine moments in which parents or other caregivers overtly invoke rules during episodes in which they take issue with, intervene against, and try to change a child’s ongoing behavior or action(s). Drawing on interactional data from four different languages (English, Finnish, German, Polish) and using Conversation Analytic methods, we first illustrate the variety of ways in which parents may use such overt rule invocations as part of their behavior modification attempts, showing them to be functionally versatile (...) interactional objects. Their interactional flexibility notwithstanding, we find that parents typically invoke rules when, in the course of the intervention episode, they encounter trouble with achieving an acceptable compliant outcome. To get at the distinct import of rule formulations in this context, we then compare them to two sequential alternatives: parental expressions of an experienced negative affective state, and parental threats. While the former emphasize aspects of social solidarity, the latter seek to enforce compliance by foregrounding a power asymmetry between the parent and the child. Rule formulations, by contrast, are designedly impersonal and appear to be directed at what the parents construe as shortcomings in common-sense practical reasoning on the child’s part. Reflexively, the child is thereby cast as not having properly applied common-sense ‘practical reason’ when engaging in what is treated as the problematic behavior or action. Overt rule invocations can, therefore, be understood as indexical appeals to practical reason. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore how food can be analyzed in terms of signs and codes of everyday life, and especially how food can be used to express ethical concerns. The paper investigates the potential of a semiotic conceptual analysis: How can the semiotic approach be used to analyze expressions of ethics and food ethics in everyday life? The intention is to explore from a theoretical point of view and with constructed cases, how semiotics can (...) be used to analyze the role of food as an expression of ethics in everyday life among families, friends, and colleagues: How do foodstuffs function as signs of ethics in everyday life? How is food used to send signals about care and concern? How are the signs of food ethics perceived? It is concluded that analyzing ethical considerations with respect to food with the help of the semiotic model can show us perspectives that otherwise would be difficult to see and thus we can address everyday food ethical issues that otherwise might not be noted. The semiotic approach to food ethics in everyday life is a conceptual framework that can be used to draw attention to certain domains and fields of food ethical behavior that otherwise would tend to remain implicit and unspoken. (shrink)

Frederick Grinnell’s “Everyday Practice of Science” is an ambitious attempt to survey the methodological issues facing practicing scientists. His examples and anecdotes are mainly drawn from his own field of biochemistry, which he argues is representative of the scientific method in general because, quoting Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar, “Biologists work very close to the frontier between bewilderment and understanding.”(p.4) Grinnell’s goal is to explore the ambiguity and messiness of actual scientific practice, but not with an eye to undermine (...) its credibility. Rather, he tries to show how the day-to-day practice of science functions to generate reliable hypotheses from the complexity of reality. (shrink)

This essay originated as a reply to Richard Rorty's ”Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy“. In it, I contest Rorty's deployment of the categories of private selfcreation and the collective political enterprise of increasing freedom, first developed in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, to demonstrate that the philosophical projects of Habermas and Derrida are complementary rather than antagonistic. The focus of my critique is two-fold: firstly, I contend that so-called critiques of metaphysics are always simutaneously engaging with some form of (...) social domination or disintegration (e.g. nihilism or societal rationalization); secondly, I argue that the fault-line in Rorty's thought that structures his categories is his, Davidson inspired, naturalized philosophy of language. This philosophy of language falls afoul of Heidegger's analysis of the present-to-hand. (shrink)

The paper considers contemporary models of presumption in terms of their ability to contribute to a working theory of presumption for argumentation. Beginning with the Whatelian model, we consider its contemporary developments and alternatives, as proposed by Sidgwick, Kauffeld, Cronkhite, Rescher, Walton, Freeman, Ullmann-Margalit, and Hansen. Based on these accounts, we present a picture of presumptions characterized by their nature, function, foundation and force. On our account, presumption is a modal status that is attached to a claim and has the (...) effect of shifting, in a dialogue, a burden of proof set at a local level. Presumptions can be analysed and evaluated inferentially as components of rule-based structures. Presumptions are defeasible, and the force of a presumption is a function of its normative foundation. This picture seeks to provide a framework to guide the development of specific theories of presumption. (shrink)

This paper shows that epidemiology, an approach developed to study the social communication of biological information, can be instructively applied to the diffusion of "endemic" cultural beliefs. In particular, I examine whether exposure to information, or susceptibility to belief is more important in determining the distribution of food taboos in an oral society from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Matrix regression techniques are used on optimally scaled cultural similarity data to infer which social and psychological characteristics of the participating individuals (...) are correlated with a higher probability of taboo transmission between them. Results indicate that, despite a lack of mechanized transportation, access to information in this population is nearly universal. Constraints on belief adoption rather than on information flow are much more important in determining the intra-cultural distribution of food taboos. At least for one class of taboo, belief susceptibility is a function of an individual's social role rather than any intrinsic quality of the individual or the believability of the cultural trait. Nevertheless, the processes underlying the dissemination of both cultural traits and pathogens, considered as replicating units of information, appear close enough to justify using epidemiology as a common framework for investigating cultural and biological diffusion. (shrink)

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is divided into (...) four sections. The first section on ¿Taste and art¿, shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of ¿good taste¿, contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on ¿Taste making and the museum¿ examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, ¿Taste after Bourdieu in Japan¿ offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of ¿good taste¿, exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on ¿Taste, the home and everyday life¿ juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of ¿good taste¿ have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste ¿after Bourdieu¿. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making. (shrink)

I argue that there is a problem for a wide class of theories of art that arises from counterexamples drawn from everyday artistic activity, rather than high artworld artistic activity. I explore how the counterexample functions. Part of the point is to reflect on methodological issues concerning the use of examples when considering theories of art. We will also see why thinking about everyday cases is theoretically significant.

What designers do and how we all, as users of designed things, live with their products raises fundamental philosophical questions about how we should live, and how the nature of design work and good design relates to our lives. Jeffrey Petts presents a holistic and pragmatist approach to the philosophy of design. Acknowledging the importance of function in design without downplaying the aesthetic dimension, Petts relates the manner of evaluating design to the designing process itself as demonstrated in the work (...) of, for example, William Morris, Walter Gropius and Bauhaus, Charles and Ray Eames, and Dieter Rams. This metacritical and everyday approach to the philosophy of design expresses a commitment to real aesthetics, connecting concrete issues in both practice and experience to philosophical ideas, and reveals the role aesthetics plays in considerations about the good life. (shrink)