: There has been a marked expansion in our human knowledge in recent decades, and much of this new information about ourselves and our world has yet to be integrated into our human self-image. I maintain that understanding how we fit within the spectrum of lifeforms as the primates that we are will enable us to take a more active role in choosing ecologically responsible behavior and will allow us to address more effectively our major problems of overpopulation, (...) overconsumption, and militarism. (shrink)

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision invites us to consider a different approach to life, one in which we stop feeling bad about feeling (...) bad. -/- In this powerful and disarmingly intimate book, Existentialist philosopher Mariana Alessandri draws on the stories of a diverse group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers and writers to help us see that our suffering is a sign not that we are broken but that we are tender, perceptive, and intelligent. Thinkers such as Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, C. S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Søren Kierkegaard sat in their anger, sadness, and anxiety until their eyes adjusted to the dark. Alessandri explains how readers can cultivate “night vision” and discover new sides to their painful moods, such as wit and humor, closeness and warmth, and connection and clarity. -/- Night Vision shows how, when we learn to embrace the dark, we begin to see these moods—and ourselves—as honorable, dignified, and unmistakably human. (shrink)

This article develops a new phenomenological analysis of the interpersonal motives and structure of shame. I pursue the argument that shame is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and conditioned by our ability to see ourselves as we appear to others. My central thesis is that shame is what we feel when, due to some trait or action of ours, we come to perceive ourselves as fundamentally despicable and non-affirmable. By showing how our urge for affirmation fuels (...) and informs our self-perception in shame, the analysis provides a better understanding of the simultaneously interpersonal and personal character of shame. Furthermore, it sheds new light on some central aspects of shame that have been insufficiently understood: on the emotional charge and quality of shame, on the role played by our values and identity in shame, and on the continuity, differences, and transfers between personal shame, social shame, and embarrassment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Painful Lack of ConnectionChristopher Bailey (bio)Keywordsdepression, detachment (as a defense), empathy, evolution, masculinityI greatly appreciate the incredibly thoughtful responses to my clinical anecdote, “A Painful Lack of Wounds.” There is, in some more than others, a peculiar aura of detachment that, for me, evokes the very abyss (and its lack of an opposing force) that Colin and I found ourselves staring into that day. I realize, of (...) course, that some level of detachment is necessary to allow airspace for intellectual arrivals and departures.Detachment, moreover, is a form of emotional and psychological escape. In contrast with physical escape, detachment makes something that is present seem absent and, in that regard, is more like camouflage than flight. In some of the responses, therefore, I find myself tuning out the intellectual labyrinth and tuning in to how well it obscures its creator. What wounds or weaknesses, I wonder, is the author trying to hide? Insulin-dependent diabetes? An inferiority complex? Cannot climb chain-link fences? Is he or she hiding these problems from him- or herself? Or just the rest of us?This drive to connect, to regain the biological and the personal, was the ultimate point of my anecdote. I am not suggesting that human beings are biologically built for warfare or that all forms of pathology, at one time, must have conferred some evolutionary advantage. But as omnivorous, social primates, we are definitely adapted for engagement (of all varieties).Certainly, we need to avoid overidentification or sweepingly premature conclusions. Still, no doctor would deny his or her nostrils if cued by a foul, fetid odor to examine a patient for bed sores or gangrene. Likewise, we cannot in our clinical efforts recoil from the same instincts for sniffing out pathology that once made us successful predators. To paraphrase Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy, the authors of When Elephants Weep, when one feels, from observing a bear, that the bear is sad, chances are the bear is sad. To call this anthropomorphizing is a much less parsimonious explanation than the possibility that evolutionary cousins can accurately read one another. And if inter-mammalian empathy is not too much of a stretch, we can probably trust what we feel from an animal of our own species.Granted, it is a long way from feeling to formulation. I chose to write about Colin because he expressed a kind of craving I am finding in a lot of men these days. I do not doubt that cultural pressure, heaped on personal issues and genetic prerogatives, can push a man to place heroism at the center of his psychic universe. Nonetheless, I find it odd that ostensibly comprehensive formulations, like the biopsychosocial model, fail to acknowledge the greater ecosystem in which we dwell. The wheelchair-accessible communities we have created to detach from natural selection are [End Page 249] the same frictionless planes on which masculinity, like a grotesque evolutionary artifact, tends to stumble nowadays.In short, were we not so dependent on the very things we call progress, had we not atrophied from a well-adapted ape to one that can die of hypothermia in 50° weather, I doubt if Colin's insecurity (or anyone's) would be so great. Not that I did not challenge Colin on aspects of his self-doubt. But I did not see it as “inappropriate” either. And although I agree a sense of helplessness can be both cause and effect of depression, his self-doubt, to me, was more than just a “cognitive error” unconsciously conceived as cover for a dark mood. Nondepressed people, after all, score higher than their depressed counterparts on measures of self-deception. The same false sense of security that we, as a culture, have coasted on for decades was shattered for Colin in Iraq. And I believe that is a good thing.Related ArticlesFeature Article: Clinical Anecdotes: A Painful Lack of WoundsCommentary: The Nature of Proof in PsychiatryCommentary: Truth and Healing a Veteran's DepressionCommentary: Inappropriate RegretCommentary: The Cultural Context of Post-traumatic Stress DisorderCommentary: Explication or Explanation?Commentary: The Importance of What Psychiatrists Care AboutCommentary: Mourning or MelancholiaResponse: A... (shrink)

The “class play” is an annual tradition in residency training programs and medical schools that celebrates the end of the academic year. It is also a locally generated narrative that reveals important components of an institution’s values, culture, and group dynamics. Exploring the class play is a reflexive exercise that allows one to reflect on his or her professional development and place in the department in a structural, historical, and experience-near driven way. In this way, the creation of and examining (...) of the class play may be seen as an opportunity to understand and expand upon medicine’s Hidden Curriculum. (shrink)

This chapter examines central philosophical themes and doctrines of twentieth century philosophy in the light of the Agency Theory. Craig argues that despite the unpopularity of philosophical visions of high generality in contemporary philosophy, the Agency Theory is the one vision, or Weltbild, on which much twentieth century philosophy explicitly or implicitly relies. It is evident in the philosophical doctrines of the Vienna Circle, with its radically emotivist accounts of value and radically conventionalist accounts of the a priori. It is (...) evident in the numerous attacks on moral realism, which invite us, instead of thinking about morality not in terms of an independent realm of moral facts that obtain independently of our thinking about them, to see ourselves as the creators of ethical value. It is evident in existentialism, with its belief in absolute human freedom and its demand for absolute moral independence, manifested in the existentialist ethics of authenticity. It is evident in the prevalence of ‘opacity’, our willing acceptance of brute facts without further explanation as long as our beliefs about those facts are reliable. Finally, the dominance of the Agency Theory is evident in epistemology, where the community has taken over many responsibilities that the individual used to have, as well as in the theory of meaning, where accounts of meaning are given in terms of the use of words in a linguistic community, as by Wittgenstein and Austin, or in terms of the speaker’s environment, as in the externalist account of meaning advocated by Putnam. But, as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four illustrate, too much enthusiasm for human activity has its dangers. (shrink)

Bourdieu once commented that what was needed was a 'new gaze' on the social world - a metanoia. This book describes this view and how to do it. Based on biographical detail and the socio-political contexts, which surrounded him, it sets out his vision of society and culture. Grounded on the distinction between traditional and modern worlds, it shows how ethnographic experience led Bourdieu to an intellectual epiphany. It shows the growth of his conceptual tools and the emergence of 'field (...) theory' in various contexts: Law, Religion, Fashion, Sport, Culture, Fine Art, Philosophy, Literature, and Politics. The book offers an up-to-date, extensive account of Bourdieu, his work and its significance. It centres on philosophical questions of social experience and intellectual practice. Based around his entire oeuvre, it features recent posthumous publications in French, providing important insights for the first time into his way of viewing the world. Including issues of the State, Neoliberalism, and resistance this book explores how the social, philosophical and political came together for Bourdieu to shape how we see ourselves, and our place in the contemporary world - a metanoia. As both an introductory and advanced text, it is a valuable resource for both the newcomer to Bourdieu and the experienced researcher. It will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers of Bourdieu's work in the areas of Sociology, Media, Philosophy, Religion, Economics, Architecture, Cultural Studies, Education, Music, Journalism, Gender Studies, Politics, the Law, Fine Arts, and Linguistics. (shrink)

How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today’s world The demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before. Heather Widdows argues (...) that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough—not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist. If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices—and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms. (shrink)

Reach true clarity and insight by looking deeply, minimizing misperceptions, and having the courage to see things as they really are. The seventh book in the bestselling Mindfulness Essentials series, a back-to-basics collection from world-renowned Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh that introduces everyone to the essentials of mindfulness practice. Profound and always approachable, Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us the art of looking deeply—in to our knee-jerk assumptions and runaway thoughts—so we can recognize the true meaning and essence of our lives. (...) How to See teases apart the act of seeing-both inside and outside of ourselves, and points the way to developing true clarity. Written with his signature warmth, these pithy meditations are accompanied by playful sumi-ink drawings by California artist Jason DeAntonis. (shrink)

Reach true clarity and insight by looking deeply, minimizing misperceptions, and having the courage to see things as they really are. The seventh book in the bestselling Mindfulness Essentials series, a back-to-basics collection from world-renowned Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh that introduces everyone to the essentials of mindfulness practice. Profound and always approachable, Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us the art of looking deeply—in to our knee-jerk assumptions and runaway thoughts—so we can recognize the true meaning and essence of our lives. (...) How to See teases apart the act of seeing-both inside and outside of ourselves, and points the way to developing true clarity. Written with his signature warmth, these pithy meditations are accompanied by playful sumi-ink drawings by California artist Jason DeAntonis. (shrink)

We naturally see ourselves as capable of being active with respect to the matter of what we believe – as capable of epistemic agency. A natural view is that we can exercise such agency by engaging in reasoning. Sceptics contend that such a view cannot be maintained in light of the fact that reasoning involves judgements, which are not decided upon or the products of prior intentions. In response, I argue that reasoning in fact can amount to epistemic agency (...) in virtue of its being aim-directed in a way that cannot be reconciled with the sceptics' conception of it. (shrink)

After years of failure, in November 2007 primate embryonic stem cells were derived by somatic cellular nuclear transfer, also known as therapeutic cloning. The first embryo transfer for human reproductive cloning purposes was also attempted in 2006, albeit with negative results. These two events force us to think carefully about the possibility of human cloning which is now much closer to becoming a reality. In this paper we tackle this issue from two sides, first summarising what scientists have achieved so (...) far, then discussing some of the ethical arguments in favour and against human cloning which are debated in the context of policy making and public consultation. Therapeutic cloning as a means to improve and save lives has uncontroversial moral value. As to human reproductive cloning, we consider and assess some common objections and failing to see them as conclusive. We do recognise, though, that there will be problems at the level of policy and regulation that might either impair the implementation of human reproductive cloning or make its accessibility restricted in a way that could become difficult to justify on moral grounds. We suggest using the time still available before human reproductive cloning is attempted successfully to create policies and institutions that can offer clear directives on its legitimate applications on the basis of solid arguments, coherent moral principles, and extensive public consultation. (shrink)

This paper focuses around women in the food chain, not in terms of agriculture and development, but as food ourselves. I start from the work of Eva-Maria Simms and Val Plumwood, who examine being eaten by non-human animals, and by human infants and fetuses. I use Simms’s and Plumwood’s examples to argue that in viewing our human selves as edible creatures, we not only distance ourselves from the role of "eater" in the masculinist domination framework but reject and (...) break down the very dichotomy of eater/eaten, predator/prey, diner/dinner. Through the work of Maurice-Merleau Ponty, I argue that our being edible is the obverse of our being consumers: it is this fact which is proven or fulfilled when the consumer is consumed. I then suggest that seeing ourselves as edible is both a call to a greater onto-ecological understanding and to a new understanding of the life/death/life cycle: as an asymmetrical yet symbiotic relationship between organic, decaying, and nourishing bodies. (shrink)

Though many scholars have made claims as to the nature of sport, this article argues that these claims tend to narrowly focus on modern ideas derived primarily from Western competitive sport. Thus, most notions of sport fail to capture how various historical and non-Western cultures valued sport. In an attempt to provide a broader and more durable description of the nature of sport, this article argues that sports are fundamentally about telling a story about ourselves. These stories are meaningful (...) narratives. Meaningful narratives, the article argues, exist in three ways: the individual, the collaborative, and the collective. By seeing sport as inherently about ‘a story we tell ourselves about ourselves’, the article concludes that not only do philosophers realize a more complete understanding of what sport is about but also receive and apply this understanding to normative debates within sport ethics. (shrink)

Peirce considered his esthetics to be one of a trio of normative sciences. Ostensibly, the sciences of logic, ethics and esthetics, would study the traditional norms of truth, goodness and beauty. Logic was normative in the sense that it studied how people ought to reason, if truth is to be the result. Similarly, ethics is the study of how we ought to conduct ourselves, if good is to happen. At the same time, Peirce seems to have difficulty fitting the (...) study of the beautiful into this sort of normative framework. As Peirce says, esthetics was handicapped by its definition as a theory of beauty. Instead, Peirce sees esthetics as bound up with a study of ends. Peirce argues that ends are essential to normative behavior, understood as the deliberate pursuit of a purpose, the latter serving to direct and correct the behavior. Ends may be ideals, ideas, standards, or goals. In this regard, the study of esthetics is bound up with what ought to be pursued. The key problem of the normative sciences is to discover which ends ought to be pursued. In Peirce’s formative accounts, he seems to waver between assigning this task to ethics at times and esthetics otherwise. In some places, he argues that ethics defines the ends to be pursued and studies the summum bonum. On the other hand, esthetics is claimed to be the study of ideals, that which is objectively admirable, and the conditions of attractive and repulsive ideas. To that extent, Peirce claims in a number of places that the ethically good rests on a notion of the esthetically good, the morally good being a species of the esthetically good. Although Peirce notes his neglect of the study of esthetics, he does provide a preliminary study of ends, which prove to be instructive in getting a sense of what he counts as admirable to pursue. I argue that besides this positive esthetics, which identifies ends and the conditions which makes them worthy of pursuit, he also suggests a negative esthetics, one that is does not work backwards from the ideal to the means to achieve it, but sees ends as something that evolves forward as human endeavor attempts to correct those pursuits that have led to error and misdirection. Peirce’s negative esthetics is modelled after the way in which he accounts for the ability of science to self-correct away from errant hypotheses to ones less subject to error, converging toward the truth. In the same way, the pursuit of ends is a matter of converging toward the right end through self-correction. (shrink)

Many of us, even on our happiest days, struggle to quiet the constant buzz of anxiety in the background of our minds. All kinds of worries--worries about losing people and things, worries about how we seem to others--keep us from peace of mind. Distracted or misled by our preoccupations, misconceptions, and, most of all, our obsession with ourselves, we don't see the world clearly--we don't see the world as it really is. In our search for happiness and the good (...) life, this is the main problem. But luckily there is a solution, and on the path to understanding it, we can make use of the rich and varied teachings that have developed over centuries of Buddhist thought. With clarity and compassion, Nicolas Bommarito explores the central elements of centuries of Buddhist philosophy and practice, explaining how they can improve your life and teach you to live without fear. Mining important texts and lessons for practical guidance, he provides a friendly guide to the very practical goals that underpin Buddhist philosophy. After laying out the basic ideas, Bommarito walks readers through a wide range of techniques and practices we can adopt to mend ingrained habits. Rare for its exploration of both the philosophy that motivates Buddhism and its practical applications, this is a compassionate guide to leading a good life that anyone can follow. (shrink)

Care, we suspect, is initiated with an appeal. Something appeals to us which becomes a matter of concern. In accordance with this concern, we develop a volition: we want that which promotes the thriving – even to the smallest extent – of that which has appealed to us, regardless of how we may establish what that entails. Eventually we take practical action: we act according to our volition. Immediately after this has taken effect, as the case may be, we release (...) the source of the appeal from our care. As far as we can see, this quartet – appeal, concern, volition and practice – covers the four constitutive moments of care, although these moments are only theoretically separable from one another. The practice, as we have said, follows the volition. The volition, however, has arisen because we wanted to foster the wellbeing, however we may have recognised this, of the subject from which the initial appeal came. We have thus placed our volition in the service of this wellbeing, that is to say: we have subjected ourselves to an ought which we instantiated ourselves with the acceptance of the appeal. This seems to us to be the decisive point: in the act of caring, we instantiate an ought, a regulative element, which we then willingly follow. In the process of caring, we thus bring forth an ought, from our own being as it were – and as short-lived as this may be – to which we subject ourselves: in the process of caring, normativity only appears at all because we produce a will in the interest of the subject of the initial appeal to which we then dedicate ourselves, as if this were not our own will. Normativity is thus, as we further suspect, to be understood as a descriptive term of a phenomenology of care, or indeed a phenomenology of normativity. The phenomenon of caring provides the first indication that the ought arises directly from the practical experience of our lives. The phenomenology of care seems to us to be of eminent importance for health care ethics. To denote professional caring, we use the term nursing. The professional caregiver purposefully exposes him/herself to appeals, making him/herself receptive to such an appeal and reliably allowing the appeal to become a concern. The first fundamental principle of nursing ethics thus appears to us to be: to make known one’s receptiveness to an appeal – in a particular situation at a particular time – and to process this appeal reliably such that it becomes a concern. This encompasses the professionalism of care at its initiation. We believe that a precise phenomenology of care will provide, on the one hand, an exact understanding of the genesis of normativity, and on the other hand, in its practical application, a definition of the professional care that is nursing and an ethics of nursing for the care-giving professions. (shrink)

One way in which the characteristic gestures of philosophy and criticism differ from each other lies in their involvements with disillusionment, with the undoing of our naivete, especially regarding what we take ourselves to know about the meaning of what we say. Philosophy will often find less than we thought was there, perhaps nothing at all, in what we say about the “external” world, or in our judgments of value, or in our ordinary psychological talk. The work of criticism, (...) on the other hand, frequently disillusions by finding disturbingly more in what is said than we precritically thought was there. In our relation to the meaningfulness of what we say, there is a disillusionment of plentitude as well as of emptiness. And no doubt what is “less” for one discipline may be “more” of what someone else is looking for.In recent years, metaphor has attracted more than its share of both philosophical and critical attention, including philosophical denials of the obvious, as well as critical challenges to the obviousness of the ways we talk about metaphor. In this paper I discuss a problem of each sort and suggest a complex of relations between them. The particular denial of the obvious that I’m interested in is the claim recently made by Donald Davidson that “a metaphor doesn’t say anything beyond its literal meaning ,” nor is it even correct to speak of metaphor as a form of communication.1 There’s disillusionment with a vengeance; and even if not strictly believable, it is still not without its therapeutic value, as we shall see. 1. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks , p. 30; hereafter abbreviated “WMM.” Davidson’s view has found supporters among both philosophers and literary theorists. It is, for example, important to the early argument of Richard Rorty’s recent book. See his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity , p. 18. Richard Moran is an assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He is currently working on a book on subjectivity and contemporary concepts of personhood. (shrink)

Since the BBS article in which Premack and Woodruff (1978) asked “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?,” it has been repeatedly claimed that there is observational and experimental evidence that apes have mental state concepts, such as “want” and “know.” Unlike research on the development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no substantial progress has been made through this work with nonhuman primates. A survey of empirical studies of imitation, self-recognition, social relationships, deception, role-taking, and perspective-taking (...) suggests that in every case where nonhuman primate behavior has been interpreted as a sign of theory of mind, it could instead have occurred by chance or as a product of nonmentalistic processes such as associative learning or inferences based on nonmental categories. Arguments to the effect that, in spite of this, the theory of mind hypothesis should be accepted because it is more parsimonious than alternatives or because it is supported by convergent evidence are not compelling. Such arguments are based on unsupportable assumptions about the role of parsimony in science and either ignore the requirement that convergent evidence proceed from independent assumptions, or fail to show that it supports the theory of mind hypothesis over nonmentalist alternatives. Progress in research on theory of mind requires experimental procedures that can distinguish the theory of mind hypothesis from nonmentalist alternatives. A procedure that may have this potential is proposed. It uses conditional discrimination training and transfer tests to determine whether chimpanzees have the concept “see.” Commentators are invited to identify flaws in the procedure and to suggest alternatives. Key Words: apes; associative learning; concepts; convergence; deception; evolution of intelligence; folk psychology; imitation; mental state attribution; monkeys; parsimony; perspective-taking; primates; role-taking; self-recognition; social cognition; social intelligence; theory of mind. (shrink)

We are purposive agents; but we—adult humans in a broadly modern world—are more than that. We are reflective about our motivation. We form prior plans and policies that organize our activity over time. And we see ourselves as agents who persist over time and who begin, develop, and then complete temporally extended activities and projects. Any reasonably complete theory of human action will need in some way to advert to this trio of features—to our reflectiveness, our planfulness, and our (...) conception of our agency as temporally extended. These are, further, features that have great significance for the kinds of lives we can live. For these two reasons I will say that these are among the core features of human agency. A theory of human action needs to say what these core features consist in and how they are related to each other. And such a theory needs also to clarify the relation between these core features of our agency and the possibility that we are fully embedded in an event causal order. (shrink)

We suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that (...) this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them. (shrink)

For Emily Dickinson, perhaps no more so than for the rest of us, there was a powerful discrepancy between what was "inner than the Bone"1 and what could be acknowledged. To the extent that her poems are a response to that discrepancy—are, on one hand, a defiant attempt to deny that the discrepancy poses a problem and, on the other, an admission of defeat at the problem's enormity—they have much to teach us about the way in which language articulates our (...) life. There is indeed a sense in which these poems test the limits of what we might reveal if we tried and also of what, despite our exertions, will not give itself over to utterance. The question of the visibility of interior experience is one that will concern me in this essay, for it lies at the heart of what Dickinson makes present to us. In "The Dream of Communication," Geoffrey Hartman writes: "Art represents a self which is either insufficiently present or feels itself as not presentable."2 On both counts one thinks of Dickinson, for her poems disassemble the body in order to penetrate to the places where the feelings lie as if hidden, and they tell us that bodies are not barriers the way we sometimes think they are. Despite the staggering sophistication with which we discuss complex issues, like Dickinson we have few words, if any, for what happens inside us. Perhaps this is because we have been taught to conceive of ourselves as perfectly inexplicable or, if explicable, then requiring the aid of someone else to scrutinize what we are explicating to validate it. We have been taught that we cannot see for ourselves—this despite the current emphasis on our proprioceptive functions. But Dickinson tells us that we can see. More important, she tells us how to name what we see. · 1. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson , n. 321.· 2. Geoffrey Hartman, "The Dream of Communication," in I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor, ed. Reuben Brower et al. , p. 173. Sharon Cameron, associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, is currently preparing a theoretical study of the lyric and is examining the relationship between obsession and lyrical structures. The present essay is part of her Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. (shrink)

Amartya Sen argues that sectarian discord and violence are fueled by confusion about the nature of identity, including the pervasive tendency to see ourselves as members of singular social groups standing in opposition to other groups (e.g. Democrat vs. Republican, Muslim vs. Christian, etc.). Sen defends an alternative model of identity, according to which we all inevitably belong to a plurality of discrete identity groups (including ethnicities, classes, genders, races, religions, careers, hobbies, etc.) and are obligated to choose, in (...) any given context, which among our multiple affiliations to prioritize. While Sen’s model of discrete identity prioritization is a clear advance over single-factor accounts, it overlooks significant lessons about identity from over 150 years of scholarship by feminists of color. In ignoring the experiences of women of color, Sen’s model falsely assumes that identities are in-principle separable for the purposes of practical deliberation; and, in obligating individuals to make such identity-based “reasoned choices,” Sen’s model forces those with multiply marginalized identities to choose from a set of externally defined identity options, none of which sufficiently captures their experiences. (shrink)

The authors of this essay have been committed practitioners and teachers of Philosophy for Children in a variety of educational settings, from pre-schools through university doctoral programs and in adult community and religious education programs. The promotion of critical thinking has always been a primary goal of this movement. But communal practices of critical thinking need to include other kinds of democratic conversation that prompt us to see others as full-fledged persons and to be curious about how our being in (...) community with them makes growth and self-correction possible. As we continue to experiment and innovate in new contexts we see ourselves continuing the inquiry around expanding the inclusivity of conversations about basic human concerns. In this essay we describe an inclusive strategy called the story circle, that was first developed as a method of popular education in Denmark and was then adapted as a tool of social change among poor and dis-empowered American citizens in Appalachia. Story circles were later utilized in a philosophical living-learning community and most recently coupled with Lipman and Sharp’s dialogue method of the community of philosophical inquiry. The authors of this paper have combined story circles with the community of philosophical inquiry in a variety of contexts. In each iteration, telling one’s own story and listening carefully to the stories of others can be equally revelatory actions. (shrink)

I am interested in the “rational irrationality hypothesis” about voter behavior. According to this hypothesis, voters regularly vote for policies that are contrary to their interests because the act of voting for them isn’t. Gathering political information is time-consuming and inconvenient. Doing so is unlikely to lead to positive results since one's vote is unlikely to be decisive. However, we have preferences over our political beliefs. We like to see ourselves as members of certain groups (e.g. “rugged individualists”) and (...) being part of those groups depends on having certain beliefs (e.g. about welfare spending). Even if a decrease in welfare spending would be bad for me, I might still benefit by believing in and, consequently, voting for a decrease since my vote is unlikely to make a difference but getting to see myself as a rugged individualist will make a noticeable difference to my wellbeing. It is sometimes argued that this hypothesis fails for empirical reasons. I will argue that things are worse: it is conceptually incoherent. I will do so by first showing that it is a rationalizing explanation and then argue that rationalizing explanations must be reflectively stable from the agent's perspective. The rational irrationality hypothesis is not. (shrink)

With a myriad of others, Francis Crick has sought the nature of the soul in the observable functioning of the nervous system, beginning with seeing. In contrast, this paper explores the nature of the soul through the grounding of the act of seeing in the power of seeing as its “soul” and folds in the kinds of attention we pay through seeing. We begin with the eidetic characteristics of the visual field. We then explore three theoretical (...) positions on where what is seen presents itself: within the brain, on things, or between awareness and things. What makes possible the appearance of things is the self-presence of the seer revealed in the nature of touch which suffuses the functional, self-directive body. Objectifying the eyes by the ophthalmologist abstracts from their essential expressivity and from the speech that can explain that expression. In the situation of encounter, focus upon the empirical features breaks the character of the encounter where we live “outside” ourselves and within the space of common meaning expressed in language. Even in the empirical focus, the ophthalmologist recognizes, through her seeing, deviations from normality of functioning and uses techniques that follow from her having intellectually mastered the field of practice. As a native power, seeing is a universal orientation towards all instances of the colored kind, cutting through the problem of universals by finding them in powers and correlative kinds. Recognition of this is made possible by the functioning of the notion of Being that grounds both intellectual and volitional activities. A concluding section explores several tasks for neuro-psychological research and expands into the grounds of a general cosmology centered upon the free and intelligent commitment of neuro-psychologists. (shrink)

In this essay, the relation between art and religion is explored using the concepts experience and imagination as understood by the American philosopher John Dewey. In Dewey’s view, experience involves both the experiencer and the experienced: it is a phenomenon of the in-between. When we are really touched by what we meet in interacting with our physical and social surroundings, experience acquires an aesthetic quality that opens us to the value and the potential of what we perceive. We can see (...) the factual in light of the possible, thus enriching it with new layers of meaning. We experience this as resonance between us and the world. It is the work of the imagination. Due to their imaginative capacity, humans can aspire to a ‘good life’. This aspiration is discussed in terms of invitation and response. Can we experience ourselves as being invited to respond to this unruly world with attachment and care? Here art and religion come into play. Art is understood as the domain of the possible: it explores the world behind or beyond what we usually accept as fact. An aesthetic experience acquires religious quality when it evokes in us an ideal that guides our sense of self and world, stimulating us to realize our ideals in daily actions. If inspired by imagination, art and religion may evoke intense experiences of resonance and invite us to new ways of connecting and transformative action. This is explored with the help of a hermeneutical circle, a ‘cycle of imagination’. (shrink)

Many argue that higher-cognitive emotions such as pride arose de novo in humans, and thus fall outside of the scope of the kinds of evolutionary explanations offered for ?basic emotions,? like fear. This approach fractures the general category of ?emotion? into two deeply distinct kinds of emotion. However, an increasing number of emotion researchers are converging on the conclusion that higher-cognitive emotions are evolutionarily rooted in simpler emotional responses found in primates. I argue that pride fits this pattern, and (...) then consider some of the possible mechanisms by which the basic forms of these emotions have been transformed, arguing that we can see this transformation in part as the progressive internalization of originally externalized processes associated with norms, selfhood, and social structure. This connects the emotion literature with the literatures on the Social/Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis and situated cognition, offering the possibility of a more unified theory of human emotions. (shrink)

Foucault’s invitation to the subject is to become free of themselves by learning to think differently. Such a project has as its goal the mastery of the self, and can be understood as a Foucaultian ‘politics of ourselves’. Foucault’s ethical turn is an invitation for subjectivity to undertake its own radical education. Whilst this invitation has characteristics unique to Foucault’s philosophical discipline, I argue that it sheds light upon a diversity of practices of subjectivity from the psychotherapeutic and mystic (...) traditions. By seeing these currently available technologies of self in the Foucaultian lens we are given the opportunity to appreciate their work on subjectivity as necessarily political and social, a radical education not limited to the realm of individualistic aspiration and narcissistic temptations. The paper concludes by drawing attention to some implications for education, and for a teacher education that embraces the ‘radical reflexivity’ of some psycho-spiritual practices. (shrink)

In this paper, I sketch a general framework for theorizing about bias and bias attributions. According to the account, paradigmatic cases of bias involve systematic departures from genuine norms. I attempt to show that the account illuminates a number of important psychological phenomena, including: the fact that accusations of bias frequently inspire not only denials but also countercharges of bias (“you only think that I'm biased because you're biased!”); the fact that we tend to see ourselves as less biased (...) than our peers (the so‐called ‘bias blind spot’); and the fact that we tend to see people who share our views as less biased than people who don't. I explore the circumstances in which we're committed to believing that those who disagree with us are not only mistaken but also biased simply because they disagree with us in the way that they do. In addition, the account also sheds light on another notorious and well‐documented psychological phenomenon: the fact that introspection is an unreliable way of detecting our biases. On the account that I offer, the unreliability of introspection for this purpose isn't a contingent fact that depends on the finer details of human psychology but rather holds of necessity: even God could not have made us creatures who reliably detect our own biases by way of introspection. (shrink)

This chapter discusses some conceptual undercurrents, which flow beneath the surface of the literature on information and computer ethics (ICE). It focuses on the potential impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on our lives. Because of their 'data superconductivity', ICTs are well known for being among the most influential factors that affect the ontological friction in the infosphere. As a full expression of techne, the information society has already posed fundamental ethical problems, whose complexity and global dimensions are rapidly (...) evolving. The task is to formulate an ethical framework that can treat the infosphere as a new environment worth the moral attention and care of the human inforgs inhabiting it. We have begun to see ourselves as connected informational organisms (inforgs), not through some fanciful transformation in our body, but, more seriously and realistically, through the re-ontologization of our environment and of ourselves. (shrink)

Desire comes in two kinds: attraction and aversion. But contemporary theories of desire have paid little attention to the distinction, and some philosophers doubt that it is psychologically real. I argue that one reason to think there is a difference between the attitudes, and to care about it, is that attractions and aversions contribute in radically different ways to our well-being. Attraction-motivated activity adds to the good life in a way that aversion-driven activity doesn’t. I argue further that the value (...) of attraction-motivated activity is irreducible to the prudential value of pleasure or desire-satisfaction. Rather it contributes in a distinctive way to the felt meaningfulness of life. In the end I offer a hypothesis: when we are attracted to something, we see it as (non-comparatively) good; and it is only when we pursue the apparent good that we see ourselves as engaged with value that makes our lives and the universe worth maintaining. -/- . (shrink)

We are purposive agents; but we—adult humans in a broadly modern world—are more than that. We are reflective about our motivation. We form prior plans and policies that organize our activity over time. And we see ourselves as agents who persist over time and who begin, develop, and then complete temporally extended activities and projects. Any reasonably complete theory of human action will need in some way to advert to this trio of features—to our reflectiveness, our planfulness, and our (...) conception of our agency as temporally extended. These are, further, features that have great significance for the kinds of lives we can live. For these two reasons I will say that these are among the core features of human agency. A theory of human action needs to say what these core features consist in and how they are related to each other. And such a theory needs also to clarify the relation between these core features of our agency and the possibility that we are fully embedded in an event causal order. (shrink)

It is a philosophical truism that we must think of others as moral agents, not merely as causal or statistical objects. But why? I argue that this follows from the best resolution of an antinomy between our experience of morality as necessarily binding on the will and our knowledge that all moral beliefs originate in contingent histories. We can address this antinomy only by understanding moral deliberation via interpersonal relationships, which simultaneously vindicate and constrains morality’s bind on the will. This (...) means that moral agency is fundamentally social. I model an attitude toward our causal nature on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘civil inattention’; our social practice of agency requires that we give minimal attention to the contingent origins of moral judgments in ourselves and others. Understood this way, seeing ourselves as moral agents requires avoiding appeal to causal aetiology to settle substantive moral disagreement. (shrink)

We are purposive agents; but we—adult humans in a broadly modern world—are more than that. We are reflective about our motivation. We form prior plans and policies that organize our activity over time. And we see ourselves as agents who persist over time and who begin, develop, and then complete temporally extended activities and projects. Any reasonably complete theory of human action will need in some way to advert to this trio of features—to our reflectiveness, our planfulness, and our (...) conception of our agency as temporally extended. These are, further, features that have great significance for the kinds of lives we can live. For these two reasons I will say that these are among the core features of human agency. A theory of human action needs to say what these core features consist in and how they are related to each other. And such a theory needs also to clarify the relation between these core features of our agency and the possibility that we are fully embedded in an event causal order. (shrink)

Jealousy is an emotion that arises in diverse circumstances and is experienced in phenomenologically diverse ways. In part because of this diversity, evaluations of jealous subjects tend to be conflicting and ambiguous. Thus philosophers who are interested in the moral status of jealousy face a challenge: to explain how, despite the diversity of jealous subjects and experiences of jealousy, our moral evaluations of those subjects in light of those experiences might be unified. In this project, I confront and respond to (...) this challenge, which I call the challenge of heterogeneity. -/- In Part I, I refine and expand on existing descriptive accounts of jealousy, defending an account with three necessary but not sufficient conditions. On my view, if one is jealous: -/- A. One desires that oneself stand in some relation to a specific, non-replicable good. B. One has in mind a (possibly imagined) rival and regards the rival’s having the good as logically or causally inconsistent with the satisfaction of this desire C. One has in mind some (possibly imagined) set of circumstances in which this desire would be satisfied. -/- In discussing this view I emphasize the role that relationships play in giving rise to jealousy, since its connections to relationships make jealousy descriptively and normatively unique. -/- In Part II, I develop an account of jealousy’s moral significance. To do so, I divide cases of jealousy into three types: those involving jealous desires relating to (1) caring relationships, (2) non-caring relationships, and (3) material goods or personal qualities. I argue that in all three types of cases, jealousy undermines the actual or potential moral value of the jealous subjects’ relationships, and that this undermining provides the paradigmatic moral reason to criticize jealous subjects. Thus I respond to the challenge of heterogeneity without simply portraying jealous subjects as selfish or insecure. -/- After doing so, I consider multiple arguments for the claim that a person’s being jealous sometimes constitutes a moral reason to praise that person. I critique each of those arguments and conclude that we have good reasons to see jealous subjects as worthy of moral criticism but not moral praise. (shrink)

The fourteen authors in this collection used phenomenology and hermeneutics to conduct deep inquiry into perplexing and wondrous events in their work and personal lives. These seasoned scholar-practitioners gained remarkable insight into areas such as health care and illness, organ donation, intercultural communications, high-performance teams, artistic production, jazz improvisation, and the integration of Tai Chi into education. All authors were transformed by phenomenology's expanded ways of seeing and being.

The existence of nonhuman persons would fly in the face of everything our species has believed about its uniqueness for thousands of years. If an “animal” like a dolphin actually has all of the traits of a “person”, that would call for as fundamental, dramatic and unsettling a shift in how we see ourselves as abandoning a geocentric view of the heavens did. In the same way that Earth no longer occupied the centre of the universe, neither would humans. (...) It would also call for a shift in how humans treat dolphins – and, very likely, many other nonhumans. (shrink)

The partiality we display, in so far as we form and sustain personal attachments, is not normatively fundamental. It is a by-product of the deference and responsiveness that are essential to our engagement with the world. We cannot form and sustain valuable personal relationships without seeing ourselves as answerable to the other participants in those relationships. And we cannot develop and sustain valuable projects without responding to the constraints imposed on our activities by the nature and requirements of (...) those projects themselves. More generally, we cannot engage with the world without responding differentially—or displaying partiality—with respect to the objects of our engagement. Partiality is thus a by-product of engagement. We cannot engage with the world at all without exhibiting forms of partiality. (shrink)

The visual world of animals is highly diverse and often very different from the world that we humans take for granted. This book provides an extensive review of the latest behavioral and neurobiological research on animal vision, highlighting fascinating species similarities and differences in visual processing. It contains 26 chapters written by world-leading experts about a variety of species including: honeybees, spiders, fish, birds, and primates. The chapters are divided into six sections: Perceptual grouping and segmentation, Object perception and (...) object recognition, Motion perception, Visual attention, Different dimensions of visual perception, and Evolution of the visual system. An exhaustive work in range and depth, How Animals See the World will be a valuable resource for advanced students and researchers in areas of cognitive psychology, perception and cognitive neuroscience, as well as researchers in the visual sciences. (shrink)

We argue against the dominant view in the literature that concepts are modulated in lexical modulation. We also argue against the alternative view that ‘grab bags’ of information that don’t determine extensions are the starting point for lexical modulation. In response to the problems with these views we outline a new model for lexical modulation that dispenses with the assumption that there is a standing meaning of a general term that is modified in the cases under consideration. In applying general (...) terms we intend to conform with our linguistic ancestors and in doing so we take facts about the referents of these terms for granted. In cases of lexical modulation we become aware of facts we took for granted and we need to change the facts we take for granted in order to see ourselves as continuing in a practice. These changes result in utterances of the general term referring to different properties. In general, concepts are neither the starting point for lexical modulation nor the standing meanings of words. (shrink)

This essay discusses how our traditional ethics may harbor assumptions that place humans in a position in which overt violence towards animals is an almost inevitable outcome since their formulation involves violence towards ourselves and our animal fellows in our cutting our embodied ties with them. The essay explores Derrida’s Animal that Therefore, I Am, in its detailing of the two discourses within European intellectual history of those who felt they were “above” animals and were not addressed by them (...) versus those who could acknowledge that animals do address us. Derrida also cites the “lyconomy” of this tradition that brandishes the image of the “wolf” within us as a streak of rapacious violence that we can only fight with violence, thus projecting onto the wolf a false identity to justify our own demons of violence. Merleau-Ponty’s notions of embodiment further this idea that we are enmeshed with animals in a basic affective, perceptual and visceral way and that to ignore this interweaving of lives is to do violence to ourselves as well as violence towards them. I then cite ethologists for evidence that wolves are one of the most social, non-violent animals on the planet and detail how two million were slaughtered in the name of eradicating an “evil” being. Such behavior on our part I call “speciocide,” as heinous as genocide. Finally, phenomenology, as one particular philosophical approach, may have a critical edge in helping us to see our animal fellows more clearly, to understand them better, and discern our truer moral obligations to them. (shrink)

Often we make decisions whose purpose is to reduce the likelihood of our making bad decisions in the future—for example, by turning off my phone to make it more difficult for me to go on Tik Tok during the work day, or staying at home on a Friday instead of going to a party where I know my friends will be drinking to excess. These decisions seem essential, but they raise some philosophical questions. Here is one of them: What is (...) the view that a person takes of her own future when she goes in for this kind of planning? And here is another: How does seeing ourselves as subject to temptation, in the way that this kind of planning presumes, not serve as an invitation to irresolution when tempting situations arise? In this essay, I show how the answers to these questions are mutually illuminating. (shrink)

A constant theme in Sherry Turkle’s work is the idea that computers shape our social and psychological lives. This idea is of course in a sense trivial, as can be observed when walking down any city street and noting how many of the passers-by have their heads buried in screens. In The Second Self, however, Turkle makes a stronger claim to the effect that where people confront machines that seem to think this suggests a new way for us to think (...) – about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding and thereby affects the way we think and see ourselves as humans. I here attempt here to throw a sceptical light on claims of this sort by examining the Chinese chatbot “Xiǎoice”, which is described by its authors as “the most popular social chatbot in the world”. (shrink)

The expression “human enhancement” could be placed in the ontological, cognitive, and symbolic dimension in which we conceive and experience the faculty, that is constitutive of human beings, of giving name and thus consistence to things, relations and phenomena in general. It is necessary to point out that this symbolic dimension of emerging technologies has been obstinately and jealously anthropocentric, at least in the modern Western world. In this contribution, I aim to develop a philosophical account of post-human enhancement that (...) allows us to conceive a future society of humanoids – humans, hybrids, artificial beings – who are free and equal. This expression – “post-human enhancement” – is to be understood as referring to symbols and phenomena different from those associated with “trans-human”. Post-human is to be interpreted here as material, not anthropocentric but rather interspeciesist, osmotic and relational, horizon of effective sharing of experiences, dangers and challenges. In contrast, trans-human is meant to refer to the transcending of humans into the pure ether of an ‘ideal’, immaterial network made up only of software, and lacking of relations with any material beings in the ecosystem or cosmos. On my account, reframing the debate about human enhancement means to guarantee widest possible conditions of non-hegemonic or expansive conscious contextuality of legislative and decisional systems. I focus rather on the social circumstance whereby we see ourselves as subjects that already co-inhabit multiform social identities, in changeable and hybrid bodies and identitary images, in potential or latent conditions of moral and political asymmetry. These conditions, I hold, are therefore to be preventively identified and neutralized. (shrink)

My dissertation, “Love, Self-Constitution, and Practical Necessity,” offers an interpretation of love between people. Love is puzzling because it appears to involve essentially both rational and non-rational phenomena. We are accountable to those we love, so love seems to participate in forms of necessity, commitment, and expectation, which are associated with morality. But non-rational attitudes—forms of desire, attraction, and feeling—are also central to love. Consequently, love is not obviously based in rationality or inclination. In contrast to views that attempt to (...) fit love into existing models of practical reasoning, I argue that love participates in a unique form of practical necessity, different from both moral and psychological necessity, yet bearing resemblances to each. Distinctive to this type of practical necessity is a direct appeal to another particular person that cannot be delivered in third-personal terms—that is, a non-moral yet normative type of expectation on another person. This type of expectation is predominant in loving relationships, but can also make better sense of the experiences of humor and beauty, as well as attitudes like forgiveness, gratitude, and agent-regret. I treat Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the experience of beauty in the Critique of Judgment and Christine Korsgaard’s work on self-constitution as fruitful starting points for this account of love. I conclude that our loving relationships enable us to have distinctive personal selves, and provide support for this account of love by offering a complementary theory of grief. In Part One of the dissertation, I focus on two prominent approaches to love characteristic of the sentimentalist and rationalist traditions. I begin with the work of David Hume, which treats desire (understood as something like a simple impulse or craving) as the paradigmatic mental state, and emphasizes our personal and affective dimensions. Hume has the valuable insight that loving someone affects our sense of ourselves. But Hume’s view becomes unsatisfying when he claims that love is essentially enfeebling, implying that to love is to be passive toward and readily overcome by another person. While this indicates Hume’s awareness that love involves being open and receptive to another person, the problem is that love is also a demanding attitude. Hume lacks the conceptual resources to offer a nuanced view of the self, in which we can—with one attitude—be both demanding of and vulnerable to another person. Hume’s model of a desire-based deliberative process has recently been revived in Harry Frankfurt’s discussions on love and rationality. Frankfurt, however, goes beyond Hume’s picture of the self by introducing a notion of “identification,” which he offers to make sense of our apparent ability to commit ourselves decisively to certain projects or people. I argue that active powers like identification and commitment cannot be accommodated within any basically Humean moral psychology. Such abilities, and with them the possibility of love, depend on something closer to a Kantian conception of rational agency. I next focus on the work of Kant, who provides the substantial counterpart to Humean-inspired moral theories, but is not known for his insight into our emotional lives. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant divides love into “practical love”—what we experience when we are morally motivated to help someone—and “pathological love”—what we experience when we feel fond of something. But in reality, we experience love neither as a mere preference for another person, nor as something that generates the kind of demands that would be binding on any rational creature. David Velleman attempts to remedy the deficiency of Kant’s dichotomy. Velleman offers a Kantian theory in which he describes love and respect as two ends of a continuum of attitudes that it is morally appropriate to have toward people. Velleman’s view has the peculiar implication that everyone deserves the love of everyone else, and I argue that this is a fatal flaw. Like Kant and Velleman, Korsgaard characterizes personal love as involving the treatment of other people as Kantian ends-in-themselves to a heightened degree. Korsgaard, though, also contends that our individual identities depend upon our personal relationships, and I take this position seriously for the remainder of the dissertation. Ultimately, however, characterizations of loving relations as subsets of moral relations can account for the authority of the demands of love, but not its particularity. The major conclusion of Part One is that any attempt to understand love primarily on a model of practical reasoning with which we are already familiar is doomed to fail. Our experience of love calls for a theory of a unique type of practical necessity. In Part Two I take seriously the possibility that love is simultaneously inescapable (in something like the way morality is supposed to be), and yet ineluctably personal. In love, we experience an engagement with a person as essentially particular, rather than as an instance of a rational agent in general. To make sense of this direct attachment to an individual, I argue that love involves distinctive forms of expectation and disappointment. When those we love let us down, they hurt our feelings, which is not a response to a failed prediction, but nor is it a reaction to a moral insult or offense. According to Peter Strawson and Stephen Darwall, second-personal moral reactive attitudes (such as resentment) always have third-personal analogues (such as indignation). In contrast, I argue that the type of hurt feelings associated with love is a second-personal reactive attitude that does not have a third-personal corollary. I take this as evidence that the expectations involved in love are not objective in the way that the moral is objective. Nor, however, is love a matter of mere preference. On my interpretation, Kant introduces this different type of expectation in the Critique of Judgment. Whereas he characterizes moral judgments as universally communicable, judgments of beauty implicitly involve only second-personal address: I appeal to your direct experience with a particular object. This provides the conceptual space for an account of love according to which it involves a uniquely second-personal form of practical necessity. I contend that the second-personal addresses we make in love are appeals to strengthen the intimacy implicit in the loving relationship, and I identify three interrelated dimensions of that intimacy. First, those we love have the standing to interpret us in a constitutive manner. We fine-tune and make determinate the character of our concerns and interests in part by accepting the interpretations provided by those we love. In that way, the people we love have the normative power to constitute who we are. Second, we share a perspective with those we love in a way that is not reducible to or derivative of our independent perspectives. Loving someone centrally involves the activity of forming concerns together, and we do this in a mode best understood on the model of playing a spontaneous game or improvising music. Finally, being loved enables us to see ourselves as distinctive and special, because the concern those who love us have for us does not track the objective merit of our characteristics. These dimensions of the intimacy that characterizes a loving relationship reveal what it is that we appeal for in love, and how we are hurt when our appeals are rebuffed. In broad terms, this dissertation advocates the recognition of a non-moral yet normative type of expectation, which is predominant in loving relationships. Humor and beauty, too, make more sense when understood in terms of this non-moral yet normative type of expectation, as they involve appeals to others that are more than mere predictions of, but less than rational demands for, a certain kind of response. Introducing this alternative notion of expectation into the discourse of moral philosophy can shed light on other common attitudes that are clearly normative, but defy translation into objective, third-personal terms. Such attitudes include certain experiences of pride and shame, apology and forgiveness, the bestowing of mercy, gratitude, agent-regret, and perhaps a basic sense of trust we have in others. Ultimately, I situate love in respect to grief, which demonstrates my theory’s ability to make sense of related dimensions of our emotional lives. The people we love and grieve over give us a sense of who we are as distinctive, particular individuals, as the three interrelated dimensions of intimacy in loving relationships reveal. Consequently, grief is best understood as a type of practical disorientation—namely, a disorientation that involves the loss of the personal self. I present my account of grief against the type of account that would draw philosophical conclusions about the nature of love and grief from empirical psychological data alone. In particular, these data indicate that we recover quickly from the deaths of loved ones, and Dan Moller draws the philosophical conclusion that those we love fulfill certain roles in our lives and are replaceable. In contrast, I contend that while we should acknowledge the truth of the objective judgment, made in the third-person, that we will likely recover after the deaths of those we love, it does not follow that we must affirm such a claim from the internal perspective of one person who loves another. As a result, the case of love and grief supports a general claim concerning the proper work of moral philosophy, which is that the understanding of ourselves gained through empirical data is not a substitute for the normative conclusions that are revealed through first-personal reflections on our relationships. (shrink)

Attempts to justify the special moral status of human beings over other animals face a well-known objection: the challenge of marginal cases. If we attempt to ground this special status in the unique rationality of humans, then it becomes difficult to see why nonrational humans should be treated any differently than other, nonhuman animals. We respond to this challenge by turning to the social contract tradition. In particular, we identify an important role for the concept of recognition in attempts to (...) secure rights through a social contract. Recognition, which involves identifying with or seeing ourselves as others, is the key to establishing the scope of justice, and we argue that this scope extends to all humans—even the so-called marginal cases—but not to other animals. If this is correct, then we have a principled reason for why all humans have certain rights that other animals lack. (shrink)

For centuries, philosophers have debated the question of free will. Do we make our own choices? Or are we more like rudderless ships drifting on the ocean, buffeted by winds and currents outside ourselves? In TK, research psychologist Ken Sheldon reveals that the way we answer these questions has serious implications for our wellbeing. We may never know for certain whether free will exists, Sheldon argues, but recent studies have found that believing in free will matters-indeed, it's an essential (...) component of psychological health. Freely Determined offers an argument for embracing our capacity to choose our own destiny, and a guide for how we might recognize our freedom and use it wisely. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work on motivation, as well as recent research in personality science and social psychology, Sheldon shows us that far from being in the thrall of animal urges and unconscious biases, we humans are constantly making conscious choices: whether to eat the nachos or the salad, whether to shoot the basketball or pass it to a teammate, whether to take that job or marry that person or write that novella. Indeed, over decades of research, Sheldon has established that seeing ourselves as change-makers in our own lives, and in the world, helps us feel happier and even behave more ethically. By identifying and pursuing our deepest values, he argues, we can set and achieve meaningful goals, ones that will help us and our communities flourish. Offering readers insight into how they can live a more self-directed, satisfying life, Freely Determined demystifies the science of choice and reveals that we are radically free to live with greater purpose. (shrink)