The Meaning of Things explores the meanings of household possessions for three generation families in the Chicago area, and the place of materialism in American culture. Now regarded as a keystone in material culture studies, Halton's first book is based on his dissertation and coauthored with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. First published by Cambridge University Press in 1981, it has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, and Hungarian. The Meaning of Things is a study of the significance of material possessions in contemporary (...) urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of 'personhood' that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling. Translations: Il significato degli oggetti. Italian translation. Rome: Edizione Kappa, 1986. Der Sinn der Dinge. German translation. Munich: Psychologie Verlags Union, 1989. Japanese translation 2007. Targyaink tukreben. Hungarian translation, 2011. (shrink)

This paper takes stock of all the various factors that cause the design-time opacity of autonomous systems behaviour. The factors include embodiment effects, design-time knowledge gap, human factors, emergent behaviour and tacit knowledge. This situation is contrasted with the usual representation of moral dilemmas that assume perfect information. Since perfect information is not achievable, the traditional moral dilemma representations are not valid and the whole problem of ethical autonomous systems design proves to be way more empirical than previously understood.

We propose that Bloom's focus on cognitive factors involved in word learning still lacks a broader perspective. We emphasize the crucial relevance of working memory in learning elements of language. Specifically, we demonstrate through our data that in impaired populations knowledge of some linguistic elements can be dissociated according to the subcomponent of working memory (visual or verbal) involved in a task. Further, although Bloom's concentration on theory of mind as a precondition for word learning is certainly correct, theory of (...) mind being a necessary condition does not make it a sufficient one. On the basis of our studies we point out the importance of a theory of mind related goal preference in acquiring spatial language. In general, we claim that more specific cognitive preferences and constraints should be outlined in detail for the preconditions of acquiring linguistic elements. (shrink)

This paper challenges the standard interpretation of Descartes’s view that the essence of the mind is thinking. Most commentators take the essence of the mind to be constituted by thoughts as objects of awareness. By contrast, the position defended here is that willing is as much part of the essence of the Cartesian meditating mind as awareness. Willing is not just a type of thought, but whenever thinking occurs it invariably involves both awareness and willing. To substantiate the claim that (...) Descartes could not separate willing from the one meditating, the paper examines the role of the will at all the key junctures of the Meditations: the cogito, the clarity and distinctness of some of our ideas, the arguments for God’s existence, and the propensity to believe that our ideas of sensible things comefrom those things. (shrink)

What constitutes enjoyment of life? Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical and empirical investigations of the "flow" experience, a desirable or optimal state of consciousness that enhances a person's psychic state. "Flow" can be said to occur when people are able to meet the challenges of their environment with appropriate skills, and accordingly feel a sense of well-being, a sense of mastery, and a heightened sense of self-esteem. The authors show the diverse (...) contexts and circumstances in which flow is reported in different cultures (e.g. Japan, Korea, Australia, Italy), and describe its positive emotional impacts. They reflect on the concept of flow vis-à-vis modern social structures, historical phenomena, and evolutionary biocultural selection. The ways in which the ability to experience flow affects work satisfaction, academic success, and the overall quality of life are suggested; and the childrearing practices that result in the ability to derive enjoyment from life, considered. (shrink)

Warfare ideologies are as old as human civilization. By now, they have grown into an important and extended research field, including works analyzing the justification of war in ancient Indian epic...

The title of Tihamér Margitay’s recent article “From Epistemology to Ontology” refers to a strong interpretation of Polanyi’s correspondence between knowing and being that enables ontological claims on purely epistemic grounds. I accept Margitay’s final conclusion which rejects strong correspondence, although on entirely different grounds. In addition, I point out that his treatment of Polanyi’s ontological claims about machines is based on yet unfounded assumptions about the nature of physics and technical design.

The possibility of interacting with remote services in natural language opens up new opportunities for sharing knowledge and for automating services. Easy-to-use, text-based interfaces might provide more democratic access to legal information, government services, and everyday knowledge as well. However, the methodology of engineering robust natural language interfaces is very diverse, and widely deployed solutions are still yet to come. The main contribution is a detailed problem analysis on the theoretical level, which reveals that a text-based interface is best understood (...) as an artificial agent that represents the interests of the remote party who is separated in time and space from the client. A possible ethical issue about the development of such an agent is also discussed. (shrink)

After World War II, Hungary along with other Central-European countries drifted away from theological development of Western-Europe. Both the message and the innovations of the Second Vatican Council arrived with some delay in this country governed by the communist ideology. In spite of this, the agreement concluded between the Holy See and the Hungarian state in 1964, enabled a number of well-prepared priests to study theology at Church universities outside of Hungary. From the 1970s onwards, theological books were more easily (...) available in Hungary and, following the political change that took place in 1989, theology in Hungary began to come closer to the present theological standard of the universal Church. (shrink)

This article brings to light the role and importance of Descartes' concept of freedom for his ethics of belief. For Descartes, I argue, correctly assigning epistemic praise/blame means tracking authentic freedoms: ascertaining whether an act of assent is spontaneous or perverse both before and after eliciting the act of will. Authentic spontaneity ensures that the agent receives praise for his epistemic accomplishment, which includes the right results as well as the right order of steps. Authentic perversity leads to the agent (...) being blamed for not accepting the truth while fully aware of the gravity of the gesture. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the use of effortless attention in performing daily activities and tasks. It details a study developed by The University of Chicago and Claremont Graduate University, and named the Experience Sampling Method to collect data from subjects of the study investigating the use of effortless attention in daily life. The findings are based on an ESM study of subjects consisting of middle and high school students from around the United States and the Sloan Study of Youth and (...) Social Development. The Sloan study focuses on investigating both effortful and effortless attention experiences of the subjects. A large number of students reveal how effortless attention has helped them to focus better on several tasks without much effort. (shrink)

What is the nature of the aesthetic experience? Is it the same for everyone? It is possible to facilitate its occurrence? This book focuses on the psychology of the aesthetic experience and on the perception and understanding of art, suggesting ways to raise levels of visual literacy and enhance artistic enjoyment. The findings will be of importance not only to museum professionals and art educators, but also to psychologists and those interested in the nature of the aesthetic experience.

Mihalis Matsas situates the specific questions raised by the translation of Deleuze in Greece within the more general context of philosophical translation and the difficulties raised by the translation of Deleuze’s two books on the cinema.

For deliberations on the ethical and meta-ethical implications of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, here are abstracts and papers from the Ethics Section of the 6th International Whitehead Conference held at the University of Salzburg in Salzburg, Austria in July 2006. In accordance with the conference schedule, there are three subsections. The subsection on "Metaphysics of Morals and Moral Theory" includes contributions from Franklin I. Gamwell (Does Morality Presuppose God?), John W. Lango (abstract only), Duane Voskuil ("Ethics' Dipolar Necessities and (...) Theistic Implications), and Theodore Walker Jr. ("Neoclassical Cosmology and Matthew 22:36-40). The subsection on "Evaluating Moral Practices" includes contributions from Frederick Ferrè (abstract only), Seung Gap Lee (Hope for the Earth: A Process Eschatological Eco-ethics for South Korea), Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore (Compassion, Creativity, and Form: The Ethics of Institutions), and George W. Shields (Ruse, Altruism, and Process Philosophy). The subsection on "Ethics and Aesthetic Values" includes contributions from Stephen T. Franklin (abstract only), Brian G. Henning (Is There an Ethics of Creativity?), Mihàly Tòth (Art of Life and the Ethics of Life Forming), and Guorong Yang (Problems and Perspectives in the Emerging of Global Society). (shrink)

Human action and experience are the outcome of genes and memes. Not only are both of these represented in consciousness, but consciousness mediates their claims and thus governs our choices. Hence it is important how consciousness is ordered and where it is directed. Sorokin's typology of the sensate and the ideational (“spiritual”), and the dialectic between them, is relevant to this issue. In our period of history, the sensate factors of materialism and secularism need to be dialectically counterbalanced by the (...) reinforcement of memes that value the spiritual intimations of the realm beyond the senses. As we approach the twenty‐first century, the memes that will undergird our spirituality will be those that resacralize nature and emphasize our unity as humans with all of universal reality, in an idea of common “beinghood.” Spiritual systems that accord with this trend in evolution will have to respect three conditions. They will (1) integrate the sensate and the ideational; (2) reflect the importance of the “flow” state of optimal experience, which matches ever‐complexifying skills with comparable challenges; and (3) move the fulcrum of their worldview from the human being to the network of beings and its evolution. (shrink)

The author, as the leader of the team that translated Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit into Hungarian, tells the story of the translation. The members of this team were anything else but experts in Heidegger. Belonging to the so-called “democratic opposition” at the beginning of the ‘80s, they asked the author, a dissent himself, to hold for them a private seminar on modern phenomenology. It is here where they read Husserl, Scheler, and wanted to read Heidegger as well. Their German, however, (...) was not good enough to understand Being and Time in the original. That’s why they decided to translate it into Hungarian. In a few years the translation was ready – three years ago, in 2001, it was even published its second, revised edition. In the second part of this short essay, the author deals with those Heideggerian words that have proven to present the most serious difficulties at that time, and explains the nature of their difficulties in some cases: Sein, Seiendes, Dasein, Da, Bewandtnis, Zuhanden, Vorhanden, das Man, Befindlichkeit, Angst, Eigentlichkeit, Unheimlichkeit, Platz, Ort. (shrink)

Agnes Heller's Theory of Morals was to be composed of three parts: General Ethics, Moral Philosophy, and a Theory of Proper Behaviour. The first two were born; the third, however, before it was written, was rebaptized by the author who could not resist her inner compulsion to do so. It bears the title Ethics of Personality. This author does not conceal his one-sided preference for this last part of Heller's Theory of Morals which has only one imperative: `Be yourself! Follow (...) your own destiny!'. At the same time he raises the question whether an ethics of personality does not contradict so much a general ethics (that simply describes the functioning of the moral) but a moral philosophy that tries to prescribe how people should behave. The author concludes that the only possibility of ethics in our age is an ethics of personality. (shrink)

L'identité est l'ensemble des représentations qu'une personne a d'elle-même. L'A. définit les différentes facettes de l'identité psycho-spirituelle. •L'identité religieuse s'appuie sur l'expérience de conversion, qui est la perception intuitive de la vérité théologique que Dieu existe et qu'il a créé l'homme pour lui-même. L'expression psychologique d'une telle expérience est la prise de conscience que la direction fondamentale de l'existence humaine est l'orientation vers Dieu. •L'identité spirituelle s'appuie sur l'expérience de sa propre valeur. C'est une perception intuitive de la vérité théologique (...) que Dieu a créé chaque homme individuellement. L'A. définit aussi •L'identité ascétique, •l'identité vocationnelle, •l'identité créaturelle, •l'identité mystique. (shrink)