In this timely and wide-ranging study, Karsten Stueber argues that empathy is epistemically central for our folk-psychological understanding of other agents--that it is something we cannot do without in order to gain understanding of other minds. Setting his argument in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind and the interdisciplinary debate about the nature of our mindreading abilities, Stueber counters objections raised by some in the philosophy of social science and argues that it is time to rehabilitate the empathy (...) thesis.Empathy, regarded at the beginning of the twentieth century as the fundamental method of gaining knowledge of other minds, has suffered a century of philosophical neglect. Stueber addresses the plausible philosophical misgivings about empathy that have been responsible for its failure to gain widespread philosophical acceptance.Crucial in this context is his defense of the assumption, very much contested in contemporary philosophy of mind, that the notion of rational agency is at the core of folk psychology. Stueber then discusses the contemporary debate between simulation theorists--who defend various forms of the empathy thesis--and theory theorists. In distinguishing between basic and reenactive empathy, he provides a new interpretive framework for the investigation into our mindreading capacities. Finally, he considers epistemic objections to empathy raised by the philosophy of social science that have been insufficiently discussed in contemporary debates. Empathy theorists, Stueber writes, should be prepared to admit that, although empathy can be regarded as the central default mode for understanding other agents, there are certain limitations in its ability to make sense of other agents; and there are supplemental theoretical strategies available to overcome these limitations. (shrink)

Both early and later forms of Buddhism developed a set of arguments to demonstrate that the self is an illusion. This article begins with a brief review of some of the arguments but then proceeds to show that these arguments are not themselves sufficient to dispel the illusion. It analyzes three ways in which the illusion of self manifests itself – as wish fulfillment, as a cognitive illusion, and as a phenomenal illusion. With respect to this last, the article reviews (...) some recent developments in cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience to discuss the way in which the phenomenal illusion of self is encoded within our brain processes. This article also considers the way in which the illusion of self is constructed through social interaction, by episodic memory, and by narrative construction. Finally, it focuses on how the illusion of self developed as an evolutionary necessity to make it possible for the human organism to navigate physical and social reality; and that it continues to be useful today. This poses a dilemma for the Buddhist soteriological project of extinguishing the illusion of self. Specifically, while it is possible to develop a non-self perspective though the continued practice of vipassanā, it is not possible to maintain it consistently. The article concludes that even fully enlightened individuals must sometimes oscillate between a non-self perspective and a self-perspective and suggests an analogy between this oscillation and what occurs in the Kanizsa square illusion. (shrink)

Ethical evaluation of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease is complicated by results that can be described as involving changes in the patient’s identity. The risk of becoming another person following surgery is alarming for patients, caregivers and clinicians alike. It is one of the most urgent conceptual and ethical problems facing deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease at this time. In our paper we take issue with this problem on two accounts. First, we elucidate what is (...) meant by “becoming another person” from a conceptual point of view. After critically discussing two broad approaches we concentrate on the notion of “individual identity” which centers on the idea of “core attitudes”. Subsequently we discuss several approaches to determine what distinguishes core attitudes from those that are more peripheral. We argue for a “foundational-function model” highlighting the importance of specific dependency relations between these attitudes. Our second aim is to comment on the possibility to empirically measure changes in individual identity and argue that many of the instruments now commonly used in selecting and monitoring DBS-patients are inappropriate for this purpose. Future research in this area is advised combining a conceptual and an empirical approach as a basis of sound ethical appraisal. (shrink)

Foucault's theory of power and subjectification challenges common concepts of freedom in social philosophy and expands them through the concept of 'freedom as critique': Freedom can be defined as the capability to critically reflect one's own subjectification, and the conditions of possibility for this critical capacity lie in political and social institutions. The article develops this concept through a critical discussion of the standard response by Foucault interpreters to the standard objection that Foucault's thinking obscures freedom. The standard response interprets (...) Fou-cault's later works, especially The Subject and Power, as a solution to the problem of freedom. It is mistaken, because it conflates different concepts of freedom that are present in Foucault's work. By differentiating these concepts, this paper proposes a new institutionalist approach to solve the problem of freedom that breaks with the partly anarchist underpinnings of Foucault scholarship: As freedom as critique is not given, but itself a result of subjectification, it entails a demand for 'modal robustness' and must therefore be institutionalized. This approach helps to draw out the consequences of Foucault's thinking on freedom for postfoundationalist democratic theory and the general social-philosophical discussion on freedom. (shrink)

Wie können Freiheit und Widerstand innerhalb von Foucaults Theorie der Macht und Subjektivierung konzipiert werden? Karsten Schubert liefert die erste systematische Rekonstruktion der sozialphilosophischen Debatte um Freiheit bei Foucault und eine neue Lösung für das Freiheitsproblem: Freiheit als die Fähigkeit zur reflexiven Kritik der eigenen Subjektivierung – kurz: Freiheit als Kritik – ist das Resultat von freiheitlicher Subjektivierung in politischen Institutionen. Der Band zeigt so die Konsequenzen von Foucaults Freiheitsdenken für die Demokratietheorie und die allgemeine sozialphilosophische Freiheitsdiskussion auf.

Karsten M. Thiel interpretiert die Genealogie der Moral neu. Er rückt Nietzsches Kritik an der Geschichtsschreibung ins Zentrum der Betrachtung und nimmt so seiner Moralkritik alles Schrille, das ihr gewöhnlich anhaftet. Für Nietzsche muss die Geschichtsschreibung über einen belastbaren Begriff von Vergangenheit verfügen. Doch wie konnte es zu einer Geschichtsschreibung ohne einen solchen Begriff überhaupt kommen? Nietzsches Antwort ist verblüffend. Für ihn war Geschichtsschreibung bisher fast immer teleologisch, ausgerichtet auf ein Ideal statt auf die Vergangenheit. Sein Gegenmodell ist die (...) Genealogie: Sinn vergeht, indem er von späterem Sinn "überschrieben" wird. In der Genealogie der Moral ist ein solches Überschreiben mehrfach zu beobachten. die Sklavenmoral erobert den Sinn der Herrenmoral, der archaische Vertrag zwischen Schuldner und Gläubiger wird immer wieder neu ausgelegt, wird zu Gerechtigkeit, schlechtem Gewissen und Schuld. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This article will defend the centrality of empathy and simulation for our understanding of individual agency within the conceptual framework of folk psychology. It will situate this defense in the context of recent developments in the theory of mind debate. Moreover, the article will critically discuss narrativist conceptions of social cognition that conceive of themselves as alternatives to both simulation and theory theory.

Wie können Freiheit und Widerstand innerhalb von Foucaults Theorie der Macht und Subjektivierung konzipiert werden? Karsten Schubert liefert die erste systematische Rekonstruktion der sozialphilosophischen Debatte um Freiheit bei Foucault und eine neue Lösung für das Freiheitsproblem: Freiheit als die Fähigkeit zur reflexiven Kritik der eigenen Subjektivierung - kurz: Freiheit als Kritik - ist das Resultat von freiheitlicher Subjektivierung in politischen Institutionen. Der Band zeigt so die Konsequenzen von Foucaults Freiheitsdenken für die Demokratietheorie und die allgemeine sozialphilosophische Freiheitsdiskussion auf.

I shall argue that the solution to the ecological crisis will require a combined political-economic and psychological-spiritual approach. Specifically, I will argue that while there is no way to avoid eco-catastrophe within the framework of capitalism, ecosocialism understood as a political-economic construct focused wholly or even primarily on the survival and flourishing of our species is not a sufficient solution and could, in its anthropocentric and productivist form, exacerbate the problem. What is needed is an understanding of ecosocialism that is (...) both biocentric and ecocentric, an ecosocialism that is sensitive to the suffering and inherent value of the members of other species as well as to the inherent value of whole ecosystems. It will require a new radically different mode of being and a radically new sensibility. I will argue that Buddhism can make a valuable contribution both to the construction of such a society and to the political praxis necessary to achieve it. (shrink)

Derek Parfit defends the Imprecise Lexical View as a way to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. Allowing for ‘imprecise equality’, Parfit argues, makes it possible to avoid some well-known problems for the Lexical View. It is demonstrated that the Lexical View has stronger implications than envisaged by Parfit; moreover, his assumption of Non-diminishing Marginal Value makes the Lexical View collapse into a much stronger view, which lets the two appear incompatible. Introducing imprecise equality does not address the latter problem. But it (...) does makes it possible for the Imprecise Lexical View to soften the discontinuities it would otherwise face, at the cost of blurring the difference between options.However, if Non-diminishing Marginal Value is rejected, the remaining complications for the resulting most plausible version of the Imprecise Lexical View, including a confrontation with Arrhenius’ Non-Elitism Condition, may be within a range where the view largely remains defensible. (shrink)

In this essay, I will suggest ways of improving on Davidson’s conception of the explanatory autonomy of folk psychological explanations. For that purpose, I will appeal to insights from the recent theory of mind debate emphasizing the centrality of various forms of empathy for our understanding of another person’s mindedness. While I will argue that we need to abandon Davidson’s position of anomalous monism, I will also show that my account is fully compatible with Davidson’s non-reductive and interpretationist account of (...) meaning and mental content. Indeed, my account does more justice to the empathic capacities underlying our interpretive capacities, which Davidson himself has to acknowledge in thinking about the constitutive features of thought and meaning. More specifically, I will propose a new way of philosophically safeguarding the causal-explanatory autonomy of our ordinary action explanations by showing how our empathic capacities are involved in epistemically delineating the domain of rational agency. (shrink)

Can architecture help us find our place and way in today's complex world? Can it return individuals to a whole, to a world, to a community? Developing Giedion's claim that contemporary architecture's main task is to interpret a way of life valid for our time, philosopher Karsten Harries answers that architecture should serve a common ethos. But if architecture is to meet that task, it first has to free itself from the dominant formalist approach, and get beyond the notion (...) that its purpose is to produce endless variations of the decorated shed. In a series of cogent and balanced arguments, Harries questions the premises on which architects and theorists have long relied—premises which have contributed to architecture's current identity crisis and marginalization. He first criticizes the aesthetic approach, focusing on the problems of decoration and ornament. He then turns to the language of architecture. If the main task of architecture is indeed interpretation, in just what sense can it be said to speak, and what should it be speaking about? Expanding upon suggestions made by Martin Heidegger, Harries also considers the relationship of building to the idea and meaning of dwelling. Architecture, Harries observes, has a responsibility to community; but its ethical function is inevitably also political. He concludes by examining these seemingly paradoxical functions. (shrink)

The principles of responsible bioentrepreneurship are a call for multiple stakeholders to engage in a manifold discourse driving a solution-oriented innovation process.

Die 'Musica' ist in Weltvorstellungen des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit oft nicht nur ein Bestandteil des Wissens neben vielen anderen, sondern stellt ein übergeordnetes Ordnungsprinzip dar. Erstmals untersucht dieses Buch die genaue Stellung von Musik innerhalb der universalen Ordnung der Dinge, wie sie sich in enzyklopädischen Texten auch jenseits des fachdisziplinären Diskurses darstellt. Anhand zentraler Leitthemen wie Produktivität, Kombinatorik und Kosmologie führt die Untersuchung von der mittelalterlichen Logik Ramon Llulls über zahlreiche Stationen bis hin zur Weltkonzeption Athanasius Kirchers. Noch (...) im 17. Jahrhundert, so wird deutlich, kann die Rolle der Musik nur vor dem Hintergrund der anhaltenden Wirksamkeit mystischer, magischer und kosmologischer Denkweisen verstanden werden. (shrink)

This paper asks whether the genuine representation of future generations brings any added value that could not be achieved by institutions or procedures installed to supplement and support ordinary representative democracy. On this background, it reviews some arguments for genuine representation of future generations. The analysis reveals that they tend to overlook the democratic costs of such representation, while they seem to ignore the alternative of giving consideration to the interests of future generations within current democracy. It is concluded that (...) what really matters in terms of the democratic ideal is to ensure an impartial deliberation which takes the interests of all affected parties sufficiently into account. (shrink)

That death is not a welfare issue appears to be a widespread view among animal welfare researchers. This paper demonstrates that this view is based on a mistaken assumption about harm, which is coupled to ‘welfare’ being conceived as ‘welfare at a time’. Assessments of welfare at a time ignore issues of longevity. In order to assess the welfare issue of death, it is necessary to structure welfare assessment as comparisons of possible lives of the animals. The paper also demonstrates (...) that excluding the welfare issues of being deprived of life from the ethical assessment of killing distorts the ethical considerations. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Die deutschsprachige Religionswissenschaft setzt sich zunehmend mit den Grenzen des religiösen Feldes auseinander. Vor diesem Hintergrund möchte der vorliegende Artikel Religionswissenschaftlerinnen und Religionswissenschaftler dazu einladen, die Beschäftigung mit Meso-Phänomenen an den Grenzen des religiösen Feldes weiter zu systematisieren. In Auseinandersetzung mit Pierre Bourdieu schlägt der Autor dabei vor, Grenzen nicht als einfach Demarkationslinien zwischen ‚dem Religiösen‘ und ‚dem Säkularen‘ zu greifen, sondern als komplexe und dynamische Grenzstreifen zwischen unterschiedlichen Feldern. Am Beispiel des Menschenrechtsdiskurses in der religiös affiliierten Nichtregierungsorganisation Pax (...) Romana entwickelt der Artikel ein komplexes Konzept von Grenzstreifen, welches das Augenmerk auf die vielfältigen empirischen Prozesse auf den Grenzstreifen des religiösen Feldes lenkt. Besonders richtet er den Blick auf Sedimentierungsprozesse und ihre Konsequenzen für die kulturellen Tiefenstrukturen des religiösen Feldes. (shrink)

Translated by Henrik Rosenmeier, _A History of Ancient Philosophy_ charts the origins and development of ancient philosophical thought. For easy reference, the book is divided chronologically into six main parts. The sections are further divided into philosophers and philosophical movements: *Pre-Socratic Philosophy, including mythology, the Pythagoreans and Parmenides *The Great Century of Athens, including the Sophists and Socrates *Plato, including The Republic, The Symposium and The Timaeus *Aristotle, including The Physics, The Metaphysics and The Poetics *Hellenistic Philosophy, including the Sceptics, (...) the Stoics, the Epicureans and Cicero *Late Antiquity, including Neoplatonism, Origen and St Augustine. This comprehensive and meticulously documented book is structured to make ancient philosophical thought and ancient thinkers accessible. It contains: *full references to primary sources *detailed interpretations of key philosophical passages, including surveys of previous philosophical readings *an overview of the development of ancient philosophical thought *discussions of the relationships between philosophers and their ideas *analyses of key philosophical concepts and ideologies including ontology, epistemology, logic, semantics, moral and political philosophy, theology and aesthetics *explanations of Greek philosophical terminology. (shrink)

Foucault’s theory of power and subjectification challenges common concepts of freedom in social philosophy and expands them through the concept of ‘freedom as critique’: Freedom can be defined as the capability to critically reflect upon one’s own subjectification, and the conditions of possibility for this critical capacity lie in political and social institutions. The article develops this concept through a critical discussion of the standard response by Foucault interpreters to the standard objection that Foucault’s thinking obscures freedom. The standard response (...) interprets Foucault’s later works, especially The Subject and Power, as a solution to the problem of freedom. It is mistaken, because it conflates different concepts of freedom that are present in Foucault’s work. By differentiating these concepts, this article proposes a new institutionalist approach to solve the problem of freedom that breaks with the partly anarchist underpinnings of Foucault scholarship: As freedom as critique is not given, but itself a result of subjectification, it entails a demand for ‘modal robustness’ and must therefore be institutionalized. This approach helps to draw out the consequences of Foucault’s thinking on freedom for postfoundationalist democratic theory and the general social-philosophical discussion about freedom. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a tremendous resurgence of interest in ethical sentimentalism, a moral theory first articulated during the Scottish Enlightenment. Ethical Sentimentalism promises a conception of morality that is grounded in a realistic account of human psychology, which, correspondingly, acknowledges the central place of emotion in our moral lives. However, this promise has encountered its share of philosophical difficulties. Chief among them is the question of how to square the limited scope of human motivation and psychological mechanism (...) - so easily influenced by personal, social, and cultural circumstance - with the seeming universal scope and objective nature of moral judgment. The essays in this volume provide a comprehensive evaluation of the sentimentalist project with a particular eye to this difficulty. Each essay offers critical clarification, innovative answers to central challenges, and new directions for ethical sentimentalism in general. (shrink)

This essay will defend a causal conception of action explanations in terms of an agent’s reasons by delineating a metaphysical and epistemic framework that allows us to view folk psychology as providing us with causal and autonomous explanatory strategies of accounting for individual agency. At the same time, I will calm philosophical concerns about the issue of causal deviance that have been at the center of the recent debates between causalist and noncausalist interpretations of action explanations. For that purpose, it (...) is important to realize that the domain of folk-psychological action explanation is also the domain of skillful and goal-directed bodily movements, a domain to which we have independent epistemic access. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Aktuell entstehen zunehmend Studien, die sich dezidiert mit den Lebenswelten ‚muslimischer Jugendlicher‘ auseinandersetzen. Nur wenige dieser Studien folgen einem vergleichenden Forschungsdesign, welches ihre Ergebnisse in einem weiteren Kontext verortet. Der Artikel trägt zur Schließung dieser Forschungslücke bei. Auf der Basis qualitativer Fallanalysen beschäftigt er sich mit den Religionskonstruktionen sunnitischer Jugendlicher, die ihren Lebensmittelpunkt in ländlichen Regionen Österreichs haben und in Moscheegemeinden aktiv sind. Diese Religionskonstruktionen werden mit denen von Jugendlichen verglichen, deren Interviews in protestantischen und römisch-katholischen Kontexten geführt wurden. (...) So können zwei dominante Typen von Religionskonstruktionen unterschieden werden: „Religion im Rahmen von Freizeitaktivitäten“ und „Religion im Rahmen der lokalen Kultur“. Diese Typen finden sich in unterschiedlicher Ausformung in allen Interviews. Die Religionskonstruktionen sind dabei ähnlich, aber unterschiedlich. Die zwei dominanten Typen prägen die Religionskonstruktionen in unterschiedlichen Ausprägungen. (shrink)

The fearful ape hypothesis revolves around our ability to express and perceive fearfulness. Here, we address these abilities from a social learning perspective which casts fearfulness in a slightly different light. Our commentary argues that any theory that characterizes a (human) social signal as being adaptive, needs to address the role of social learning as an alternative candidate explanation.

As shown through an inventory of the procedures used in diverse forms of qualitative content analysis projects, the logic of qualitative procedures is in most cases not standardized. Often researchers pay little or no attention to the procedures which they apply. This contribution presents and discusses a procedure for interpretive content analysis which was applied in an empirical study into trans-border news coverage in the Dutch-German Euregion Rhine-Waal. First, we will describe the study on the portrayal of the Dutch and (...) German people as well as their respective countries, The Netherlands and Germany, in the four main regional newspapers of this region. Secondly, basic principles of qualitative methodology are discussed and, thirdly, the procedure of the applied method based on these principles is presented and illustrated by means of exemplary material. Finally, after a brief presentation of some empirical results, the applied procedure of interpretive content analysis is discussed. (shrink)

This study explored in what way and to what extent people's occupational position corresponds with the consumption of news and the exposure to political content offered by the traditional mass media TV, radio, and newspaper, using survey data. The influence of occupational position in general and perceived amount of public social capital on especially consumption of news as well as the exposure to political media content, was evident. Findings are in line with the central assumptions on ‘audience activity’ of audience-centered (...) models in communication research in general and the ‘media use as social action’ approach especially. The subjectively perceived social context, indicated by occupational position as well as the subjectively held structure of relevancies is a central predictor of media use. (shrink)

Nothing reveals the differences between an internal (i.e., inherently pedagogical) reflection on educational processes and an external (i.e., derived from a philosophical, sociological, psychological, theological or other perspective) more clearly than the differing attitudes towards alienation. Looked at from outside a pedagogical context, alienation appears only negative, deserving nothing but contempt and rejection; examined from inside a pedagogical framework, it proves to be a conditio sine qua non, the process through which transformative education is possible. This article juxtaposes both perspectives (...) in order to defend the conviction that within educational reflections, only an inherently pedagogical, i.e., positive, understanding of alienation is persuasive, whereas other approaches by definition either are outside of pedagogical reflections or belong to a kind of metaphysical thinking that nowadays seems rather outdated. This paper forms part of a Special Issue titled ‘Beyond Virtue and Vice: Education for a Darker Age’, in which the editors invited authors to engage in exercises of ‘transvaluation’. Certain apparently settled educational concepts (from agency and fulfilment to alienation and ignorance) can be radically reinterpreted such that virtues can be seen as vices, and vices as virtues. The editors encouraged authors to employ polemics and some occasional exaggeration to revalue the educational values that are too readily accepted within contemporary educational discourses. (shrink)

Nothing reveals the differences between an internal (i.e., inherently pedagogical) reflection on educational processes and an external (i.e., derived from a philosophical, sociological, psychological, theological or other perspective) more clearly than the differing attitudes towards alienation. Looked at from outside a pedagogical context, alienation appears only negative, deserving nothing but contempt and rejection; examined from inside a pedagogical framework, it proves to be a conditio sine qua non, the process through which transformative education is possible. This article juxtaposes both perspectives (...) in order to defend the conviction that within educational reflections, only an inherently pedagogical, i.e., positive, understanding of alienation is persuasive, whereas other approaches by definition either are outside of pedagogical reflections or belong to a kind of metaphysical thinking that nowadays seems rather outdated. This paper forms part of a Special Issue titled ‘Beyond Virtue and Vice: Education for a Darker Age’, in which the editors invited authors to engage in exercises of ‘transvaluation’. Certain apparently settled educational concepts (from agency and fulfilment to alienation and ignorance) can be radically reinterpreted such that virtues can be seen as vices, and vices as virtues. The editors encouraged authors to employ polemics and some occasional exaggeration to revalue the educational values that are too readily accepted within contemporary educational discourses. (shrink)

Translated by Henrik Rosenmeier, _A History of Ancient Philosophy_ charts the origins and development of ancient philosophical thought. For easy reference, the book is divided chronologically into six main parts. The sections are further divided into philosophers and philosophical movements: *Pre-Socratic Philosophy, including mythology, the Pythagoreans and Parmenides *The Great Century of Athens, including the Sophists and Socrates *Plato, including The Republic, The Symposium and The Timaeus *Aristotle, including The Physics, The Metaphysics and The Poetics *Hellenistic Philosophy, including the Sceptics, (...) the Stoics, the Epicureans and Cicero *Late Antiquity, including Neoplatonism, Origen and St Augustine. This comprehensive and meticulously documented book is structured to make ancient philosophical thought and ancient thinkers accessible. It contains: *full references to primary sources *detailed interpretations of key philosophical passages, including surveys of previous philosophical readings *an overview of the development of ancient philosophical thought *discussions of the relationships between philosophers and their ideas *analyses of key philosophical concepts and ideologies including ontology, epistemology, logic, semantics, moral and political philosophy, theology and aesthetics *explanations of Greek philosophical terminology. (shrink)

Following up on Thomas Nagel’s paper “What is it like to be a bat?” and Alan Turing’s essay “Computing machinery and intelligence,” it shall be claimed that a successful interaction of human beings and autonomous artificial agents depends more on which characteristics human beings ascribe to the agent than on whether the agent really has those characteristics. It will be argued that Masahiro Mori’s concept of the “uncanny valley” as well as evidence from several empirical studies supports that assertion. Finally, (...) some tentative conclusions concerning moral implications of the arguments presented here shall be drawn. (shrink)

The pre-1932 writings of Otto Kirchheimer are often described by researchers as the work of a young ‘left-Schmittian’, a radical Marxist who gave the anti-liberal critique and theoretical apparatus of his Doktorvater Carl Schmitt a new purpose for different ‘political ends’. The danger of this approach is that fundamental divisions between the societal conceptualizations of both theoreticians are ignored in lieu of apparent terminological similarity. Through the lens of economy, it is therefore the intent of this article to continue in (...) the tradition of Alfons Söllner and Frank Schale, pushing against this assumed affinity and highlighting Otto Kirchheimer’s unique defense of liberal democracy. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the concept of waiting from a phenomenological point of view. In order to do so, we start with a definition from Andreas Göttlich and contextualize it within the theoretical framework provided by Alfred Schutz, Thomas Luckmann and Peter L. Berger. Additionally, we discuss waiting on the basis of our previous research, specifically within the context of a field extract from an earlier life-world analytical ethnography on the parents of pre-adolescent, non-professional soccer players. The field vignette (...) depicts a mother who has problematic possibilities of conflicting preferences due to the apperception of her soccer playing child, who was injured during the match. This negotiation within projects of action will be outlined as a specific facet of waiting. (shrink)

Embodied cognition postulates a bi-directional link between the human body and its cognitive functions. Whether this holds for higher cognitive functions such as problem solving is unknown. We predicted that arm movement manipulations performed by the participants could affect the problem-solving solutions. We tested this prediction in quantitative reasoning tasks that allowed two solutions to each problem. In two studies with healthy adults, we found an effect of problem-congruent movements on problem solutions. Consistent with embodied cognition, sensorimotor information gained via (...) right or left arm movements affects the solution in different types of problem-solving tasks. (shrink)

This paper presents a case for compensation of actual harm from climate change in the poorest countries. First, it is shown that climate change threatens to reverse the fight to eradicate poverty. Secondly, it is shown how the problems raised in the literature for compensation to some extent are based on misconceptions and do not apply to compensation of present actual harm. Finally, two arguments are presented to the effect that, in so far as developed countries accept a major commitment (...) to mitigate climate change, they should also accept a commitment to address or compensate actual harm from climate change. The first argument appeals to the principle that if it is an injustice to cause risk of incurring harm in the future, then it is also an injustice to cause a similar harm now. The second argument appeals to the principle that if there is moral reason to reduce the risk of specific harms in the future, then there is also moral reason to address these harms if they materialize now. We argue that these principles are applicable to climate change, and that given the commitment of wealthy countries to a “common but differentiated responsibility,” they lead to a commitment to address or compensate harm from climate change in poor and vulnerable developing countries. (shrink)