This article brings together research from the fields of chronic pain management and somatic practices to develop a novel framework of principles to support people living with persistent pain. These include movement-based approaches to awareness of the internal body (interoception), the external environment (exteroception) and movement in space (proprioception). These significantly work with the lived subjective experiences of people living with pain, to become aware of body signals and self-management of symptoms, explore fear and pleasure of movement, and understand how (...) social environments impact on pain. This analysis has potential to create new ways of supporting, understanding and articulating pain experiences, as well as shaping the future of somatic practices for chronic pain. (shrink)

This theoretical paper argues for prioritarianism as an ethical underpinning for digital health in contexts of extreme disadvantage. In support of this claim, the paper develops three prioritarian principles for making ethical decisions for digital health programme design, grounded in the normative position that the greater the need, the stronger the moral claim. The principles are positioned as an alternative view to the prevailing utilitarian approach to digital health, which the paper argues is not sufficient to address the needs of (...) the worst off. As researchers of digital health, we must ensure that the most globally marginalised are not overlooked by overtly technocentric implementation practices. Consequently, the paper concludes by advocating for use of the three principles to support stronger critical reflection on the ethics involved in the design and implementation of digital health programmes. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the intracultural variability of parental and alloparental caregiving among the Aka foragers of the Central African Republic. It has been suggested that maternal kin offer higher frequencies of allocare than paternal kin and that maternal investment in infants will decrease when alloparental assistance is provided. Behavioral observations were conducted on 15 eight- to twelve-monthold infants. The practice of brideservice and the flexibility of Aka residence patterns offered a means to test the effect of maternal residence (...) on parental and alloparental investment. There was significant variation in the frequency of investment and who supplied care to infants depending on whether mothers resided with their kin or their husbands’ kin. However, in spite of the variation in allocare, when all categories of caregivers were examined collectively, infants received similar overall levels of care. (shrink)

Les personnes malades, handicapées et neurodivergentes ne sont pas censées rêver, surtout si elles sont queers et noires ou racisées − nous sommes simplement censé·es être reconnaissant·es que les « normaux » nous laissent vivre. Mais je suis le produit de nombreux rêves handirévolutionnaires queers noirs et racisés et je me consacre à rêver d’autres rêves de femmes racisées queers malades et handicapées.

Minimal Semantics asks what a theory of literal linguistic meaning is for - if you were to be given a working theory of meaning for a language right now, what would you be able to do with it? Emma Borg sets out to defend a formal approach to semantic theorising from a relatively new type of opponent - advocates of what she call 'dual pragmatics'. According to dual pragmatists, rich pragmatic processes play two distinct roles in linguistic comprehension: as (...) well as operating in a post-semantic capacity to determine the implicatures of an utterance, they also operate prior to the determination of truth-conditional content for a sentence. That is to say, they have an integral role to play within what is usually thought of as the semantic realm. Borg believes dual pragmatic accounts constitute the strongest contemporary challenge to standard formal approaches to semantics since they challenge the formal theorist to show not merely that there is some role for formal processes on route to determination of semantic content, but that such processes are sufficient for determining content. Minimal Semantics provides a detailed examination of this school of thought, introducing readers who are unfamiliar with the topic to key ideas like relevance theory and contextualism, and looking in detail at where these accounts diverge from the formal approach. Borg's defence of formal semantics has two main parts: first, she argues that the formal approach is most naturally compatible with an important and well-grounded psychological theory, namely the Fodorian modular picture of the mind. Then she argues that the main arguments adduced by dual pragmatists against formal semantics - concerning apparent contextual intrusions into semantic content - can in fact be countered by a formal theory. The defence holds, however, only if we are sensitive to the proper conditions of success for a semantic theory. Specifically, we should reject a range of onerous constraints on semantic theorizing (e.g., that it answer epistemic or metaphysical questions, or that it explain our communicative skills) and instead adopt a quite minimal picture of semantics. (shrink)

Discourse ethics represents an exciting new development in neo-Kantian moral theory. William Rehg offers an insightful introduction to its complex theorization by its major proponent, Jürgen Habermas, and demonstrates how discourse ethics allows one to overcome the principal criticisms that have been leveled against neo-Kantianism. Addressing both "commun-itarian" critics who argue that universalist conceptions of justice sever moral deliberation from community traditions, and feminist advocates of the "ethics of care" who stress the moral significance of caring for other individuals, Rehg (...) shows that discourse ethics combines impartiality with solidarity. He provides the first systematic reconstruction of Habermas's theory and explores its relationship to the work of such contemporary philosophers as Charles Taylor. His book articulates a bold alternative to the split between the "right" and the "good" in moral theory and will greatly interest philosophers, social and legal scholars, and political theorists. (shrink)

Perceptual experience seems to involve distinct intentional and qualitative features. Inasmuch as one can visually perceive that there is a Coke can in front of one, perceptual experience must be intentional. But such experiences seem to differ from paradigmatic intentional states in having introspectible qualitative character. Peacocke argues that a perceptual experience’s qualitative character is determined by intrinsic, nonrepresentational properties. But and also argues that perceptual experiences have nonconceptual representational content in addition to conceptual content and nonrepresentational sensational properties. He (...) thus distinguishes between conceptual, nonrepresentational, and nonconceptual but representational aspects of perceptual experience. I will argue that Peacocke posits too much. Contrary to his arguments, the sensational properties Peacocke claims are nonrepresentational are best construed as representational; they are best explained in terms of their relation to the perceptible properties they enable us to perceive. Since sensational properties are arguably nonconceptual, they are best construed as nonconceptual representational properties. I offer the Homomorphism View of sensory qualities, pioneered by Sellars , as a unified account of qualitative character and nonconceptual sensory representation. According to this view, a sensory quality represents a perceptible stimulus property in virtue of resembling and differing from other sensory qualities in ways parallel to the ways the stimulus property resembles and differs from other perceptible properties. (shrink)

This paper examines maternal trade-offs between subsistence/economic activities and caregiving, and it explores the effect of allomaternal investment on maternal time allocation and child care. I examine how nonmaternal investment in two multiple caregiving populations may offset possible risk factors associated with reductions in maternal caregiving. Behavioral observations were conducted on 8- to 12-month-old infants and their caregivers among the Aka tropical forest foragers and Ngandu farmers of Central Africa. Analysis demonstrates that mothers face trade-offs between subsistence/economic activities and infant (...) care. Infants receive less investment when their mothers engage in subsistence/economic activities, indicating a potential risk to those infants. However, results indicate that allomothers target their assistance during times when mothers are engaged in work activities, partially offsetting potential risks associated with the maternal trade-off. The effects of intercultural variability on maternal time allocation and allomaternal investment are also explored as a means of examining the potential impact of their behaviors on infant care. (shrink)

Emma Borg examines the relation between semantics and pragmatics, and assesses recent answers to fundamental questions of how and where to draw the divide between the two. She argues for a minimal account of the interrelation between them--a 'minimal semantics'--which holds that only rule-governed appeals to context can influence semantic content.

Habermas’ account of the radically intersubjective constitution of subjectivity is of great use to feminist theorists, as is his defense of the rational character of normative claims. Feminists must however, reject his reductive identification of subjectivity with language and rationality. Some feminists’ concerns insist on continuing to distinguish morality from legality, something that Habermas, despite his own better intuitions and arguments, is sometimes disinclined to do.

Several studies have suggested a matrilateral bias in allomaternal (non-maternal) infant and child caregiving. The bias has been associated with the allomother’s certainty of genetic relatedness, where allomothers with high certainty of genetic relatedness will invest more in children because of potential fitness benefits. Using quantitative behavioral observations collected on Ngandu 8- to 12-month-old infants from the Central African Republic, I examine who is caring for infants and test whether certainty of genetic relatedness may influence investment by allomothers. Results indicate (...) a matrilateral bias in caregiving by extended kin members, but this does not affect the total level of care infants receive when fathers and siblings are included in the analysis. These results replicate a previous study done among an adjacent foraging population and emphasize the importance of examining children’s complete social environments when addressing caregiving and child development. (shrink)

In this article, we aim to map out the complexities which characterise debates about the ethics of vaccine distribution, particularly those surrounding the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. In doing so, we distinguish three general principles which might be used to distribute goods and two ambiguities in how one might wish to spell them out. We then argue that we can understand actual debates around the COVID-19 vaccine – including those over prioritising vaccinating the most vulnerable – as reflecting disagreements (...) over these principles. Finally, we shift our attention away from traditional discussions of distributive justice, highlighting the importance of concerns about risk imposition, special duties, and social roles in explaining debates over the COVID-19 vaccine. We conclude that the normative complexity this article highlights deepens the need for decision-making bodies to be sensitive to public input. (shrink)

Scientists, philosophers, and policymakers disagree about how to define microaggression. Here, we offer a taxonomy of existing definitions, clustering around (a) the psychological motives of perpetrators, (b) the experience of victims, and (c) the functional role of microaggression in oppressive social structures. We consider conceptual and epistemic challenges to each and suggest that progress may come from developing novel hybrid accounts of microaggression, combining empirically tractable features with sensitivity to the testimony of victims.

Mirror neurons are neurons which fire in two distinct conditions: (i) when an agent performs a specific action, like a precision grasp of an object using fingers, and (ii) when an agent observes that action performed by another. Some theorists have suggested that the existence of such neurons may lend support to the simulation approach to mindreading (e.g. Gallese and Goldman, 1998, 'Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind reading'). In this note I critically examine this suggestion, in both (...) its original and a revised form (due to Iacoboni et al., 2005, 'Grasping the intentions of others with one's own mirror neuron system'), and argue that the existence of mirror neurons can in fact tell us very little about how intentional attribution actually proceeds. (shrink)

This article draws attention to the importance of enchantment in business ethics research. Starting from a Weberian understanding of disenchantment, as a force that arises through modernity and scientific rationality, we show how rationalist business ethics research has become disenchanted as a consequence of the normalization of positivist, quantitative methods of inquiry. Such methods absent the relational and lively nature of business ethics research and detract from the ethical meaning that can be generated through research encounters. To address this issue, (...) we draw on the work of political theorist and philosopher, Jane Bennett, using this to show how interpretive qualitative research creates possibilities for enchantment. We identify three opportunities for reenchanting business ethics research related to: moments of novelty or disruption; deep, meaningful attachments to things studied; and possibilities for embodied, affective encounters. In conclusion, we suggest that business ethics research needs to recognize and reorient scholarship towards an appreciation of the ethical value of interpretive, qualitative research as a source of potential enchantment. (shrink)

Recent developments in epistemology have shifted away from idealised perspectives on knowledge acquisition towards an examination of the myriad of ways in which our epistemic practices go astray. This evolution has given rise to the field of non-ideal epistemology, which explores the realities that emerge when individuals and communities falter in their epistemic practices (Barker et al. 2018; Bernecker et al. 2021; Mckenna 2023). This focus extends across various dimensions of applied and social epistemology, addressing issues such as bad epistemic (...) characters, the erosion of trust, epistemic injustice, ignorance, fake news, and corruption. A significant manifestation of this recent shift in non-ideal epistemology is evident in the burgeoning field of vice epistemology. Epistemic vices are dispositions, attitudes and ways of thinking that make us bad thinkers, in so far as they prevent us from acquiring and sharing knowledge, manifest bad motives, and desires, or disrupt both individual and collective epistemic functioning (Kidd et al. 2020). These vices are harmful to the vice-bearer in so far as they distort and impair cognitive faculties, leading to flawed reasoning, and biased judgement, hindering the attainment of epistemic goods such as genuine understanding and knowledge (Cassam 2019a; Medina 2012, 2020; Priest 2020). These harms also extend beyond the individual, contributing to the perpetuation of misinformation and the erosion of trust within social networks and communities (Baird and Calvard 2018; Fricker 2020; Medina 2020; Sullivan and Alfano 2020). The acknowledgement of the social nature of epistemic vices is being increasingly recognised. This recognition underscores that epistemic vices can extend beyond individuals and be held by collectives, including educational institutions, online environments, and prisons (Kidd 2019, 2020; Fricker 2020; Medina 2020; Tanesini 2021). In light of the harms arising from these bad epistemic practices, inquiries into how to respond to and address these wrongs have been crucial. This has led to considerations of responsibility and ameliorative solutions, seeking to rectify these adverse effects (Cassam 2019a; Holroyd 2016; Sherman and Goguen 2019; Tanesini 2021). These ameliorative solutions also extend beyond individual-based strategies to include structural and social solutions. This thesis contributes to these growing debates by focusing on the harms associated with epistemic vices and exploring ways to address them. In Chapters 2 and 3, I focus on some foundational aims in vice epistemology, evaluating three prominent accounts of epistemic vice: obstructivism, motivationalism and personalism (Battaly 2016a, 2018a; Cassam 2016, 2019a; Tanesini 2018, 2021). Within these chapters, I also focus on the harmful nature of epistemic vices and whether vice-bearers should be held responsible for their vices, and if so, what form this responsibility would take. In Chapter 4, I evaluate the role of blame as a response to vice more closely, focusing on its epistemic and ameliorative nature. In Chapters 5, 6 and 7, I turn to assess themes in applied epistemology. Still focusing on the harms of epistemic vices and possible solutions, I examine whether epistemic nudging, a paternalistic method of nudging individuals towards epistemically desirable outcomes, may assist in the mitigation of epistemic vice (Adams and Niker 2021; Grundmann, 2021:213; Miyazono 2023:2). I then focus on how epistemic vices are manifested in online environments, particularly those where information disorder is present (Wardle 2019). Finally, I conclude with an examination of institutional vices, which I argue can act as indicators of institutional trustworthiness. (shrink)

One's contemporaneous conscious mental states seem bound in a single, unified experience. Dainton argues, against what he calls the S-Thesis, that we cannot explain such co-consciousness in terms of states' being located in a single phenomenal space, a functional space posited to explain our ability to locate ourselves relative to perceived stimuli. But Dainton's argument rests on a conflation of egocentric and allocentric self-localizing, and thus fails to undermine the S-Thesis. Nevertheless, experiments on visual neglect suggest one can have unconscious (...) mental states that are located in the same phenomenal field, so the S-Thesis fails after all. I examine a modified version of the S-Thesis according to which mental states are co-conscious when one is aware of them via a higher-order sensation that represents them as located in the same phenomenal field. But among other problems, this view fails to explain the co-consciousness of intentional states, which aren't located in phenomenal fields. Finally, I argue that a higher-order-thought model of consciousness best explains the apparent unity of experience in terms of one's tacit assumption that all the first-person thoughts in virtue of which one is conscious of one's mental states refer to the same individual. (shrink)

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Both patients and clinicians frequently report problems around communicating and assessing pain. Patients express dissatisfaction with their doctors and doctors often find exchanges with chronic pain patients difficult and frustrating. This chapter thus asks how we could improve pain communication and thereby enhance outcomes for chronic pain patients. We argue that improving matters will require a better appreciation of the complex meaning of pain terms and of the variability and flexibility in how individuals think about pain. We start by examining (...) the various accounts of the meaning of pain terms that have been suggested within philosophy and suggest that, while each of the accounts captures something important about our use of pain terms, none is completely satisfactory. We propose that pain terms should be viewed as communicating complex meanings, which may change across different communicative contexts, and this in turn suggests that we should view our ordinary thought about pain as similarly complex. We then sketch what a view taking seriously this variability in meaning and thought might look like, which we call the “polyeidic” view. According to this view, individuals tacitly occupy divergent stances across a range of different dimensions of pain, with one agent, for instance, thinking of pain in a much more “bodycentric” kind of way, while another thinks of pain in a much more "mindcentric” way. The polyeidic view attempts to expand the multidimensionality recognised in, e.g., biopsychosocial models in two directions: first, it holds that the standard triumvirate— dividing sensory/cognitive/affective factors— needs to be enriched in order to capture important distinctions within the social and psychological dimensions. Second, the polyeidic view attempts to explain (at least in part) why modulation of experience by these social and psychological factors is possible in the first place. It does so by arguing that because the folk concept of pain is complex, different weightings of the different parts of the concept can modulate pain experience in a variety of ways. Finally, we argue that adopting a polyeidic approach to the meaning of pain would have a range of measurable clinical outcomes. (shrink)

Understanding in Epistemology Epistemology is often defined as the theory of knowledge, and talk of propositional knowledge has dominated the bulk of modern literature in epistemology. However, epistemologists have recently started to turn more attention to the epistemic state or states of understanding, asking questions about its nature, relationship … Continue reading Understanding in Epistemology →.

Microaggressions are seemingly negligible slights that can cause significant damage to frequently targeted members of marginalized groups. Recently, Scott O. Lilienfeld challenged a key platform of the microaggression research project: what’s aggressive about microaggressions? To answer this challenge, Derald Wing Sue, the psychologist who has spearheaded the research on microaggressions, needs to theorize a spectrum of aggression that ranges from intentional assault to unintentional microaggressions. I suggest turning to Bonnie Mann’s “Creepers, Flirts, Heroes and Allies” for inspiration. Building from Mann’s (...) richer theoretical framework will allow Sue to answer Lilienfeld’s objection and defend the legitimacy of the concept, ‘microaggression’. (shrink)

In Searle’s social ontology, collective intentionality is an essential component of all institutional facts. This is because the latter involve the assignment of functions, namely "status functions," on entities whose physical features do not guarantee their performance, therefore requiring our acceptance that it be performed. One counter-example to that claim can be found in Carl Menger’s individualistic account of the money system. Menger’s commitment to the self-interest assumption, however, prevents him from accounting for the deontic dimensions of institutional facts.

The ordination of women in the Church of England has had a long hard road. Other denominations, and other parts of the Anglican Communion took the step, but it was not until the 1990s that the first women priests were ordained in the Church of England itself. Even then, Emma Percy describes the situation as an ‘ambiguous welcome’. Careful provision has been made at every stage for those who not only will not accept women as priests, but require the (...) service of bishops who have not participated in the ordination of women. The path to acceptance for women bishops has also been lengthy and subject to the same caveats and provisions. Percy argues that this reveals an underlying failure to think theologically about gender. She recognizes that there are still profound inequalities in the Church’s treatment of women in leadership. (shrink)

Some demonstrative expressions, those we might term ‘bare demonstratives’, appear without any appended descriptive content (e.g. occurrences of ‘this’ or ‘that’ simpliciter). However, it seems that the majority of demonstrative occurrences do not follow this model. ‘Complex demonstratives’ is the collective term I shall use for phrases formed by adjoining one or more common nouns to a demonstrative expression (e.g. ‘that cat’, ‘this happy man’) and I will call the combination of predicates immediately concatenated with the demonstrative in such phrases (...) the ‘matrix’ of the expression. The question, then, is how we should construe the logical form of such expressions within a semantic theory for our language; and I wish to suggest that some recent answers to this question are, in fact, mistaken. The structure of the paper is as follows: first, I wish to highlight two (often underlying) assumptions about the nature of noun phrases in general, and suggest that, if they are both adopted, they apparently constrain the possible accounts of the logical form of complex demonstratives to just three options. The second and third parts of the paper will be concerned with expanding these options and arguing that none of them are adequate; thus the major part of the paper is concerned with the negative claim that the most obvious moves to make in this area must actually fail on closer inspection. The fourth and final section will then (very briefly) sketch the positive thesis of the paper: that we can deliver a clear and cohesive account of complex demonstratives, armed simply with elements which we will draw from David Kaplan’s theory of demonstratives, but only at the cost of rejecting (or at least refining) one assumption we recognised initially. (shrink)

In this study, we analyzed the academic integrity policies of colleges in Ontario, Canada, casting a specific lens on contract cheating. We extracted data from 28 individual documents from 22-publicly-funded colleges including policies and procedures (n = 27) and code of conduct (n = 1). We analyzed the characteristics of the documents from three perspectives: (a) document type and titles; (b) policy language; and (c) policy principles. Then we examined five core elements of the documentation including (a) access; (b) approach; (...) (c) responsibility; (d) detail; and (e) support. Key findings revealed that specific and direct language pertaining to contract cheating was largely absent from the policy documents, that underlying policy principles lacked clear definition, and that exemplary policy has yet to be developed in this context. We conclude with recommendations for increased policy research in the area of academic integrity and a call for policy revision in Canadian higher education institutions to more explicitly address the issue of contract cheating, as well as provide more support to students and other campus stakeholders to better understand how contract cheating impacts and impedes teaching and learning. (shrink)

Twelve essays by the influential radical include "Marriage and Love," "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism," "The Traffic in Women," Anarchism," and "The Psychology of Political Violence." Other enduringly relevant essays examine patriotism, the failure of the penal system, and drama as a means of conveying political theory.

At first glance, hate speech and microaggressions seem to have little overlap beyond being communicated verbally or in written form. Hate speech seems clearly macro-aggressive: an intentional, obviously harmful act lacking the ambiguity (and plausible deniability) of microaggressions. If we look back at historical discussions of hate speech, however, many of these assumed differences turn out to be points of similarity. The harmfulness of hate speech only became widely acknowledged after a concerted effort by critical race theorists, feminists, and other (...) activists. Before the 1990s, slurs were widely considered socially acceptable behavior: mere jokes that weren’t intended to be harmful. Authors like Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence pushed back against this dismissal. In this chapter, I show that their arguments for the serious harmfulness of hate speech prefigure and provide support for current debates about the serious harmfulness of microaggressions. Exploring resonances with the 1980s hate speech debate will allow us to explain why microaggressions fall below the cutoff for legal liability but remain apt targets for moral blame. (shrink)

It is well established that the temporal proximity of two events is a fundamental cue to causality. Recent research with adults has shown that this relation is bidirectional: events that are believed to be causally related are perceived as occurring closer together in time—the so‐called temporal binding effect. Here, we examined the developmental origins of temporal binding. Participants predicted when an event that was either caused by a button press, or preceded by a non‐causal signal, would occur. We demonstrate for (...) the first time that children as young as 4 years are susceptible to temporal binding. Binding occurred both when the button press was executed via intentional action, and when a machine caused it. These results suggest binding is a fundamental, early developing property of perception and grounded in causal knowledge. (shrink)

We report the results of a cross-cultural investigation of person-body reasoning in the United Kingdom and northern Brazilian Amazon (Marajó Island). The study provides evidence that directly bears upon divergent theoretical claims in cognitive psychology and anthropology, respectively, on the cognitive origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-body dualism. In a novel reasoning task, we found that participants across the two sample populations parsed a wide range of capacities similarly in terms of the capacities’ perceived anchoring to bodily function. Patterns of (...) reasoning concerning the respective roles of physical and biological properties in sustaining various capacities did vary between sample populations, however. Further, the data challenge prior ad-hoc categorizations in the empirical literature on the developmental origins of and cognitive constraints on psycho-physical reasoning (e.g., in afterlife concepts). We suggest cross-culturally validated categories of “Body Dependent” and “Body Independent” items for future developmental and cross-cultural research in this emerging area. (shrink)

Branden Fitelson and Alan Hájek have suggested that it is finally time for a “revolution” in which we jettison Kolmogorov’s axiomatization of probability, and move to an alternative like Popper’s. According to these authors, not only did Kolmogorov fail to give an adequate analysis of conditional probability, he also failed to give an adequate account of another central notion in probability theory: probabilistic independence. This paper defends Kolmogorov, with a focus on this independence charge. I show that Kolmogorov’s sophisticated theory (...) of conditional distributions, advocated by authors such as Kenny Easwaran but often overlooked by philosophers, has the resources to define the notion of independence Fitelson and Hájek seek. I then argue that Kolmogorov’s original definition of independence, once suitably reinterpreted as capturing a slight logical weakening of this notion, is not so problematic after all. Indeed, rather than discarding Kolmogorov’s definition, we should make room for two distinct notions of probabilistic independence, one stronger and one weaker, which play different theoretical roles. (shrink)

Long-lasting interference effects in picture naming are induced when objects are presented in categorically related contexts in both continuous and blocked cyclic paradigms. Less consistent context effects have been reported when the task is changed to semantic classification. Experiment 1 confirmed the recent finding of cumulative facilitation in the continuous paradigm with living/non-living superordinate categorization. To avoid a potential confound involving participants responding with the identical superordinate category in related contexts in the blocked cyclic paradigm, we devised a novel set (...) of categorically related objects that also varied in terms of relative age – a core semantic type associated with the adjective word class across languages. Experiment 2 demonstrated the typical interference effect with these stimuli in basic level naming. In Experiment 3, using the identical blocked cyclic paradigm, we failed to observe semantic context effects when the same pictures were classified as younger–older. Overall, the results indicate the semantic context effects in the two paradigms do not share a common origin, with the effect in the continuous paradigm arising at the level of conceptual representations or in conceptual-to-lexical connections while the effect in the blocked cyclic paradigm most likely originates at a lexical level of representation. The implications of these findings for current accounts of long-lasting interference effects in spoken word production are discussed. (shrink)

Spinoza’s account of human agency is presented as a solution to the fundamental dichotomy between physicalism and mentalism in psychology. It is argued that this dichotomy originates in the 17th century with the Cartesian and Hobbesian responses to the collapse of the Scholastic synthesis. Spinoza’s view of nature as equally Mind and Body, and his understanding of efficient causality as grounded in a self-caused natural totality are described. Spinozism’s relative lack of influence on contemporary scientific culture is attributed to his (...) work having been marginalized during the 1st century after his death by political and religious authorities. Contemporary responses to the mentalist/physicalist dichotomy are discussed, as are trends in contemporary psychology that were foreshadowed by Spinoza’s observations. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)