Ethical leadership in any organisation is expected to come from the top. With business leaders taking a real stand on ethics, it is imperative that business schools instil strong values into their students. Deans of business schools must exhibit these ethical values to provide an example for faculty, students and staff to emulate. This study is an investigation of the ethical values of deans and associate deans in ten business schools in Canada. The results portray the ethical inclination of business (...) school leaders even with substantial monetary gains to be made. The moral climate as a result is discussed to provide further insight into the implications of the ethical values of these deans. Results indicate that although deans in Canadian business schools generally frown upon unethical behaviour, there are some fuzzy instances that still lead to questionable decisions and inconsistencies across the group. (shrink)

This paper reviews the literature concerning the neural correlates of the self, the relationship between self and memory and the profile of memory impairments in Alzheimer’s disease and explores the relationship between the preservation of the self and anosognosia in this condition. It concludes that a potential explanation for anosognosia in AD is a lack of updating of personal information due to the memory impairments characteristic of this disease. We put forward the hypothesis that anosognosia is due in part to (...) the “petrified self.”. (shrink)

Meditation has been for long time avoided as a scientific theme because of its complexity and its religious connotations. Fortunately, in the last years, it has increasingly been studied within different neuroscientific experimental protocols. Attention and concentration are surely among the most important topics in these experiments. Notwithstanding this, inhibition of emotions and discursive thoughts are equally important to understand what is at stake during those types of mental processes. I philosophically and technically analyse and compare results from neuroimaging studies, (...) produced by leading authorities on the theme, dealing with two types of meditation: "one-pointed concentration" and "compassion meditation". Analysing "one-pointed concentration", I show the differences between novice and expert meditation practitioners in terms of brain activity and connectivity, considering the relationship among increased attention and concentration and decreased activity in areas related to discursive thought and emotion. Analysing "compassion meditation", I show the importance of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. I follow the same strategy of comparing novice and expert meditation practitioners. The conclusion establishes a common structure to those different ways of dealing with emotion during meditation. (shrink)

Against narrow understandings of educational research, this article defends the relevance of philosophical anthropology to ethico-political education and contests its lack of space in the philosophy of education. My approximation of this topic begins with comments on philosophical anthropology; proceeds with examples from the history of educational ideas that illustrate what is at stake in placing realism, impossibility and education side by side; and moves to what anthropologically counts as realism or realistic expectations from education. The etymology of the word (...) ‘education’ allows us to unveil educational connections with human nature that demarcate (im)possibility and thematize essentialism. By investigating various questions concerning human nature, philosophical anthropology becomes important for exploring the aims and scope of education in their utopian or anti-utopian framings. (shrink)

The paper has as its standpoint an epigraph from an already classic author, namely, William James, that cope with the relationship between will, self-control, inhibition and reasoning. My aim is to analyze those philosophical and psychological ideas in light of a cutting-edge neuroscientific experiment. I contend that self-control mechanisms can modulate more basic stimuli and interpret that fact as an example of how higher-level properties can be related to lower-level properties.

Este artigo estabelece algumas relações fundamentais entre evolução, a teoria do cérebro triuno e a relevância que esta pode ter para a fundamentação empírica de uma filosofia da mente e das emoções. Inicialmente, será especialmente considerada a posição do filósofo Ronald de Sousa no seu já clássico artigo “The Mind’s Bermuda Triangle: Philosophy of Emotions and Empirical Science”, parte do Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotions. A segunda seção discute a validade da teoria do “cérebro triuno” como abordagem neuroetológica evolutiva, (...) delineando sua divisão tripartite do cérebro e analisando críticas e elogios às suas ideias, além de considerações de neurocientistas importantes no campo do estudo das emoções como Ledoux e Panksepp sobre tal tema. Na terceira seção, trato de um trabalho de Pollen e Hofmann que nos serve de apresentação de novas abordagens contemporâneas para a compreensão da evolução do cérebro. Como conclusão delineio um marco de trabalho na forma de uma agenda de pesquisa para as relações entre biologia evolutiva, neurociência e o estudo filosófico das emoções. (shrink)

Meditation has been for long time avoided as a scientific theme because of its complexity and its religious connotations. Fortunately, in the last years, it has increasingly been studied within different neuroscientific experimental protocols. Attention and concentration are surely among the most important topics in these experiments. Notwithstanding this, inhibition of emotions and discursive thoughts are equally important to understand what is at stake during those types of mental processes. I philosophically and technically analyse and compare results from neuroimaging studies, (...) produced by leading authorities on the theme, dealing with two types of meditation: "one-pointed concentration" and "compassion meditation". Analysing "one-pointed concentration", I show the differences between novice and expert meditation practitioners in terms of brain activity and connectivity, considering the relationship among increased attention and concentration and decreased activity in areas related to discursive thought and emotion. Analysing "compassion meditation", I show the importance of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. I follow the same strategy of comparing novice and expert meditation practitioners. The conclusion establishes a common structure to those different ways of dealing with emotion during meditation. (shrink)

Decision-making is an intricate subject in neuroscience. It is often argued that laboratorial research is not capable of dealing with the necessary complexity to study the issue. Whereas philosophers in general neglect the physiological features that constitute the main aspects of thought and behaviour, I advocate that cutting-edge neuroscientific experiments can offer us a framework to explain human behaviour in its relationship with will, self-control, inhibition, emotion and reasoning. It is my contention that self-control mechanisms can modulate more basic stimuli. (...) Assuming the aforementioned standpoints, I show the physiological mechanisms underlying social assessment and decision-making. I also establish a difference between veridical and adaptive decision-making, useful to create experimental designs that can better mimic the complexity of our day-by-day decisions in more ecologically relevant laboratorial research. Moreover, I analyse some experiments in order to develop an epistemological reflection about the necessary neural mechanisms to social assessment and decision-making. (shrink)

Decision-making is an intricate subject in neuroscience. It is often argued that laboratorial research is not capable of dealing with the necessary complexity to study the issue. Whereas philosophers in general neglect the physiological features that constitute the main aspects of thought and behaviour, I advocate that cutting-edge neuroscientific experiments can offer us a framework to explain human behaviour in its relationship with will, self-control, inhibition, emotion and reasoning. It is my contention that self-control mechanisms can modulate more basic stimuli. (...) Assuming the aforementioned standpoints, I show the physiological mechanisms underlying social assessment and decision-making. I also establish a difference between veridical and adaptive decision-making, useful to create experimental designs that can better mimic the complexity of our day-by-day decisions in more ecologically relevant laboratorial research. Moreover, I analyse some experiments in order to develop an epistemological reflection about the necessary neural mechanisms to social assessment and decision-making. (shrink)

The official documents on formation to priesthood in the Catholic Church encourage the use of personality psychology. Generally, the documents understand human personality to be dynamic. What does this mean in the light of the contemporary debate on the psychology of personality change? This article attempts to summarize the salient features of this debate, pointing out its relevance to priestly formation. Supporting a “whole-person model” of personality as proposed by Dan McAdams, the article considers the possibility of personality change at (...) some levels in the context of religious experience facilitated by seminary formation. This article is also aimed at enlightening formation guides to make an informed decision in the choice of appropriate models of personality in the accompaniment of their candidates. (shrink)

For a quantum mechanical measurement to be complete, John von Neumann and others assumed that a conscious observer must be present to affect a reduction or collapse of the state function. Also, William James believed that the influence of consciousness on physical bodies is required by the demands of biological evolution. The author shows how both of these ideas might be correct if there exists a neurological mechanism that responds to the presence of an “inside observer” of a kind defined (...) in a previous paper. An experiment is proposed to test the hypothetical mechanism. (shrink)

The discursive production of the ‘self in the context of mental health care has potential implications for how the subjects of intervention come to understand and experience themselves. Eating disorders provide an illustrative example of the ways in which conceptualizations of the self that structure mental health practices can be gendered, because they are mainly diagnosed in women and dominant explanations of their origins are feminized. This discourse analytic study examines the gendered nature of mental health workers’ constructions of the (...) eating-disordered self through the psychological construct of ‘identity’, examining the dominant discourses implicated in the feminization of deficient identity, and addressing the implications of this construction for mental health practice. (shrink)

If conscious observers are to be included in the quantum mechanical universe, we need to find the rules that engage observers with quantum mechanical systems. The author has proposed five rules that are discovered by insisting on empirical completeness; that is, by requiring the rules to draw empirical information from Schrödinger's solutions that is more complete than is currently possible with the (Born) probability interpretation. I discard Born's interpretation, introducing probability solely through probability “current.” These rules tell us something about (...) brains. They require the existence of observer brain states that are neither conscious nor unconscious. I call them “ready” brain states because they are on stand-by, ready to become conscious the moment they are stochastically chosen. Two of the rules are selection rules involving ready brain states. The place of these rules in a wider theoretical context is discussed. (shrink)

In a previous paper, the author proposed a quantum mechanical interaction that would insure that the evolution of subjective states would parallel the evolution of biological states, as required by von Neumann's theory of measurement. The particular model for this interaction suggested an experiment that the author has now performed with negative results. A modified model is outlined in this paper that preserves the desirable features of the original model, and is consistent with the experimental results. This model will be (...) more difficult to verify. However, some strategies are suggested. (shrink)

The “observer” in physics has always referred to someone who stands on the outside of a system looking in. In this paper an “inside observer” is defined, and an experiment is proposed that tests a given formulation of the problem of measurement in quantum mechanics.

Technology always provides a new perception of the world. However, it is not clear when technology produces “mere” new informations and when it provides something more such as a production of new objects in our world which start to “live” around us. The aim of this paper is to study how technology shapes our surrounding world. The questions which we are going to answer are: Is it really adding new objects to our world? If yes, does every technology have this (...) potentiality? We are going to tackle the problem using a phenomenological and post-phenomenological approach focussing our attention on the perceptual level. Using Husserl’s philosophy we will study how technology are deeply involved in our perception and, thanks to post-phenomenology and its concept of “embodiment relations,” we will be able to determine which kind of technologies have the potentiality to change our surrounding world introducing and producing new objects in it. (shrink)