Questo inedito di Ágnes Heller costituisce un approfondimento di un par­ticolare aspetto della sua teoria della morale, la cosiddetta ‘estetica morale’ relativa all’analisi del nesso fra bontà del­l’individuo e manifestazione este­tica di tale bontà nell’azione e nel carattere della sua per­so­nalità. Il saggio of­fre, in primo luogo, una sintesi della teoria morale complessiva di Heller, pre­sentandone alcuni temi fondamentali – la scelta esistenziale della mo­rale, la sintesi tra for­malismo e teleologismo in etica – per poi introdurre il pro­blema dell’estetica morale, (...) e in par­ti­colare le condizioni del giudizio eti­co relativo alla bontà della persona, la rilevanza morale dei sentimenti, la differenza etica fra persona bella e persona sublime.This Heller’s essay, published here for the first time, concerns a specific part of her Theory of Morals: the moral aesthetics, i.e. the relation between individual goodness and its manifestation in the way of acting and in the character of the personality. First, the essay presents a summary of Heller’s ethics: the role of the existential choice of goodness, the link between formalism and teleologism. Then, it analyses some themes of the moral aesthetics like the conditions of ethical judgment on the whole person’s goodness, the moral aspect of feelings, the ethical difference between beautiful and sublime person. (shrink)

The association of celebrity worship with mental health concerns has been extensively studied in the past two decades. However, there is a lack of research on basic demographic characteristics that can potentially alter the link between celebrity admiration and different aspects of mental health. The present study investigates the possible moderating role of gender, age, and opposite/same-gender celebrity selection on the association of celebrity worship with general well-being, self-esteem and perceived daytime sleepiness. A total of 1763 Hungarian adults completed an (...) online survey focusing on attitudes and behaviors relating to celebrities and mental well-being. The moderation analysis showed that the negative association between celebrity worship and self-esteem was slightly stronger for women than for men, and the association between celebrity worship and perceived daytime sleepiness was slightly stronger for younger individuals than for older ones. Although both gender and age were particularly weak moderators, these results draw the attention to some potential individual differences when interpreting links between celebrity worship and different aspects of mental health. (shrink)

Agnes Arber's international reputation is due in part to her exceptional ability to interpret the German tradition of scholarship for the English-speaking world. The Mind and the Eye is an erudite book, revealing its author's familiarity with philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas to Kant and Hegel; but it is not dull, because the quiet enthusiasm of the author shines through. In this book she turns from the work of a specialist in one science to those wider questions which (...) any scientist must ask at intervals. What, in short, is the relationship between the eye that sees and the mind that weighs and pronounces? An important feature of this Cambridge Science Classics reissue is the introduction provided by Professor P. R. Bell, who as a Cambridge botany student at the time that Agnes Arber was writing The Natural Philosopby of Plant Form, is uniquely able to set The Mind and the Eye in the context of contemporary biological research. (shrink)

Réservée à l'élite masculine jusque dans les années 1880-1890, l'adolescence s'élargit alors à l'ensemble d'une classe d'âge. À l'enfance, encadrée par l'école primaire désormais obligatoire, succède, jusqu'au mariage, ou à l'armée, un temps d'« abandon social » qui coïncide avec l'âge critique de l'adolescence. « De l'école au ménage » définit dès lors socialement l'adolescence féminine ouvrière et rurale. Cette période devient un enjeu entre républicains et catholiques car les adolescentes sont les mères et épouses de demain. Elles sont les (...) futures gardiennes de la moralité ou de la foi du foyer. (shrink)

Aspiration by Agnes Callard locates standing assumptions in the theory of rationality, moral psychology and autonomy that preclude the possibility of working to acquire new values. The book also explains what changes need to be made if we are to make room for this form of agency, which I call aspiration.

Entre la Déclaration des droits de l'homme qui affirme l'égalité entre les sexes et la première guerre mondiale, le XIXe siècle apparaît comme une époque de mutations économiques, sociales et culturelles où se modifient le rôle, le statut et l'image de l'homme. Selon André Rauch, « les repères de l'Ancien Régime s'effacent alors que n'existent encore ni mixité réelle ni égalité de fait entre hommes et femmes » de sorte qu'une « crise identitaire masculine » caractériserait cette époque....

The search for living (relevant and significant) values in societies has become increasingly widespread and institutionalized through the last decades. The paper argues that there are serious theoretical limitations (biases) inherent in the most widespread survey techniques, which jeopardize their very reason for existence: to foresee directions of social and political change. In fact the predictions made on the basis of these techniques manage to reach partial confirmation, but none are uncontested on theoretical and/or empirical grounds. Starting from the statement (...) that empirical value inquiry continues to be very fragmented, the paper proceeds from critiques formulated on the basis of a hermeneutic analysis of survey methods to a comparison of these critiques with other attempts in the social sciences to treat the phenomenon of value. The third section of the paper relates the moral outlook of these surveys to another moral outlook seemingly operative nowadays: a global ethical vision. The section concludes that the value surveys fail to grasp both the ways values are organized and their dynamic because of their bias toward a Developmentalist ideology of world progress. (shrink)

Agnes Heller conversó con la Redacción de Areté el 24 de abril de 2003, durante una visita a la Universidad Católica para dictar la Lección Inaugural del Año Académico de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias Humanas. En la conversación estuvieron presentes los profesores Pepi Patrón, Fidel Tubino y Miguel Giusti.

Freud, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism offers an innovative general theory of symbolism, derived from Freud's psychoanalytic theory and relocated within mainstream scientific psychology. It is the first systematic investigation of the development of Freud's treatment of symbolism throughout his published works, and discovers in those writings a broad theory which is far superior to the widely accepted, narrow, 'official' view. Agnes Petocz argues that the treatment of symbolism must begin with the identification and clarification of a set of logical constraints and (...) psychological requirements which any general theory of symbolism must respect, and that these requirements have been neglected by existing accounts across a number of disciplines. Her newly proposed 'Freudian broad' theory of symbolism, by contrast, does meet these requirements, but only after it has been rehabilitated within a revised psychoanalytic context, encompassing major changes to our understanding of the concepts of unconscious and repression and the role of language. (shrink)

Objections to the use of historical case studies for philosophical ends fall into two categories. Methodological objections claim that historical accounts and their uses by philosophers are subject to various biases. We argue that these challenges are not special; they also apply to other epistemic practices. Metaphysical objections, on the other hand, claim that historical case studies are intrinsically unsuited to serve as evidence for philosophical claims, even when carefully constructed and used, and so constitute a distinct class of challenge. (...) We show that attention to what makes for a canonical case can address these problems. A case study is canonical with respect to a particular philosophical aim when the features relevant to that aim provide a reasonably complete causal account of the results of the historical process under investigation. We show how to establish canonicity by evaluating relevant contingencies using two prominent examples from the history of science: Eddington’s confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity using his data from the 1919 eclipse and Watson and Crick’s determination of the structure of DNA. (shrink)

The paper sketches the historical development from emotion as a mysterious entity and the source of maladaptive behaviour, to emotion as a collection of ingredients and the source of also adaptive behaviour. We argue, however, that the underlying mechanism proposed to take care of this adaptive behaviour is not entirely up for its task. We outline an alternative view that explains so-called emotional behaviour with the same mechanism as non-emotional behaviour, but that is at the same time more likely to (...) produce adaptive behaviour. The phenomena that were initially seen as requiring a separate emotional mechanism to influence and cause behaviour can also be explained by a goal-directed mechanism provided that more goals and other complexities inherent in the goal-directed process are taken into account. (shrink)

This paper seeks to determine the extent to which individuals with borderline personality disorders can be held morally responsible for a particular subset of their actions: disproportionate anger, aggressions and displays of temper. The rationale for focusing on these aspects lies in their widespread acknowledgment in the literature and their plausible primary association with blame directed at BPD patients. BPD individuals are indeed typically perceived as “difficult patients” (Sulzer 2015, Bodner et al. 2011), significantly more so than schizophrenic or depressive (...) patients (Markam 2003). The “responsibility question” for patients with BPD has already been raised (Martin 2010, Zachar & Potter 2009, Bray 2003), but this paper tackles it from a novel perspective. First, I narrow down the category of things for which the responsibility question is specific to individual with BPD. After that, I argue that some of the diagnosis criteria of BPD such as emotional instability or impulsivity might serve as excusing factors targeting the “control condition” on moral responsibility. Second, this paper also considers another widely accepted condition on moral responsibility: the epistemic condition. The view defended in the paper is that the answer to the responsibility question for individuals with BPD, concerning both the control condition and the epistemic condition, hinges on an understanding of their epistemic profile. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAt least during his critical period, all of Kant’s philosophical works have a secret political dimension. Among other things, following the analysis of Hannah Arendt, the Critique of Judgment – paragraph 40 in particular – became a main text of political philosophy. In looking at the Critique of Judgement from a political perspective, I shall refer not to paragraph 40 but to the Kantian discussion of pure aesthetic judgement. In my opinion, one can understand Kant’s remarks on aesthetic judgement, and (...) especially transcendental anthropology, as meaning that Kant philosophically attributes the three political ideas of the French Revolution to the whole human being as such, and not just to the intelligible man. (shrink)

In this paper, I take scientific models to be epistemic representations of their target systems. I define an epistemic representation to be a tool for gaining information about its target system and argue that a vehicle’s capacity to provide specific information about its target system—its informativeness—is an essential feature of this kind of representation. I draw an analogy to our ordinary notion of interpretation to show that a user’s aim of faithfully representing the target system is necessary for securing this (...) feature. (shrink)

Comment faire un compte rendu de ce livre, court mais dense, que la plupart des lecteurs et lectrices de Clio ont probablement lu dès sa parution, il y a déjà deux ans, et qui a fait déjà l'objet de nombreuses critiques? Il faudrait pouvoir tenir compte de ces dernières ainsi que des réponses apportées par l'auteur pour s'inscrire à mon tour dans le débat en cours. Mais j'avoue avoir été un peu effrayée par l'ampleur de cette entreprise. Aussi ai-je préféré (...) me plonger à nouveau dans l... (shrink)

The structures of protein and DNA were discovered primarily by means of synthesizing component-level information about bond types, lengths, and angles, rather than analyzing X-ray diffraction photographs of these molecules. In this paper, I consider the synthetic and analytic approaches to exemplify alternative heuristics for approaching mid-twentieth-century macromolecular structure determination. I argue that the former was, all else being equal, likeliest to generate the correct structure in the shortest period of time. I begin by characterizing problem solving in these cases (...) as proceeding via the elimination of candidate structures through the successive application of component-level information and interpretations of X-ray diffraction photographs, each of which serves as a kind of constraint on structure. Then, I argue that although each kind of constraint enables the elimination of a considerable proportion of candidate structures, component-level constraints are significantly more likely to do so correctly. Thus, considering them before X-ray diffraction photographs is a better heuristic than one that reverses this order. Because the synthetic approach that resulted in the determination of the protein and DNA structures exemplifies such a heuristic, its use can help account for these discoveries. (shrink)

Among emotions, surprise has been extensively studied in psychology. In linguistics, surprise, like other emotions, has mainly been studied through the syntactic patterns involving surprise lexemes. However, little has been done so far to correlate the reaction of surprise investigated in psychological approaches and the effects of surprise on language. This cross-disciplinary volume aims to bridge the gap between emotion, cognition and language by bringing together nine contributions on surprise from different backgrounds - psychology, human-agent interaction, linguistics. Using different methods (...) at different levels of analysis, all contributors concur in defining surprise as a cognitive operation and as a component of emotion rather than as a pure emotion. Surprise results from expectations not being met and is therefore related to epistemicity. Linguistically, there does not exist an unequivocal marker of surprise. Surprise may be either described by surprise lexemes, which are often associated with figurative language, or it may be expressed by grammatical and syntactic constructions. Originally published as a special issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 13:2 (2015). (shrink)

In this journal I showed that an English monastery-teacher's marginal interpretations of Virgil had furnished material to the English group of Latin Glossaries—Corpus, First Amplonian , Second Amplonian , etc.; also that this English edition had no connexion with that Spanish Virgil whose ‘glossae collectae’ make Professor Goetz' so-called Virgil Glossary and furnished material to the Abolita Glossary.

Horizons is a critical inventory of value-related thinking, demonstrating that the mind has the ability to profile a distinctive circumstance in diverse ways. Readers are first invited to a historical inquiry into typical configurations of values, their collisions, and the worldviews that drive them. They are then introduced to the epistemologies employed by the social sciences, so that they are better able to gauge the potential of these disciplines for coming to terms with values. Axiology is portrayed as a field (...) that has broken free from its neo-Kantian roots, benefiting from challenging new conceptual frames based in documents with global reach-mainly the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After scrutiny of what various sociological models claim about values and the way in which empirical surveys approach them, Horizons reaffirms the assumption that social life and its dynamics condition the fate of values. Yet, for the sake of more accurate accounts, research should consider to a greater extent social stratification, and pressing macrosocial problems such as environmental protection, sustainable development, and attainment of some form of global equity. Social sciences' limitations modulate their ability to serve as an unequivocal guide for value choices. These limitations are a problem because of the significance of the process of dialogue and deliberation in value-related fields. Rather than advancing the allegedly universal characteristics of any one culture, in a world consisting of many civilizations, the imperative is to acknowledge pluralism and discern what is held in common. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This thesis investigates the nature of Dr. Johnson's arguments in four main areas: religion, morality, literature and politics. The investigation proceeds by analysing the forms of the arguments and the coherence of their logic, establishing the premises of the arguments, and indicating which of a number of sanctions govern these premises. The sanctions looked at are reason, revelation, experience, testimony, authority and universality, with an attempt to establish whether (...) or not there is a hierarchy of these sanctions and, if so, which Johnson regards as the most important in each area. The thesis is organised in four parts which correspond to the subject areas. Each part has two sections: the first analyses the sanction applied to that subject, and the second takes from Johnson's writings examples of specific issues, showing how the sanctions are applied to them. ;Part I deals with Johnson's arguments on religion. The sanctions considered in this part are reason, revelation, testimony, authority, universality and experience. Attention is drawn to the antecedents of Johnson's arguments in order to indicate the background to Johnson's arguments. The specific issues looked at are the immateriality and immortality of the soul, ghosts and second sight, and the problem of evil. ;Part II deals with Johnson's moral arguments. Here the sanctions are reason, revelation, universality and experience. Again, the antecedents are identified, notably Samuel Clarke, Richard Cumberland, Mandeville and Shaftesbury. The specific issues highlighted are the duties of charity, retirement and idleness. ;In Part III Johnson's literary arguments come under scrutiny, and here the sanctions dealt with are rather different. Revelation is not involved here . Its place is taken by morality, which, having been examined in the preceding part, itself becomes a sanction, and is considered along with reason, experience, authority and universality. These sanctions are then applied to biography and pastorals. ;The final part deals with Johnson's political arguments based on the sanctions of authority, universality, reason and experience, and shows how these are applied to the American problem. (shrink)

One of the major prophecies in the Aeneid is given to Aeneas in the underworld by Anchises, who had ordered his son to come to him to learn of his whole race and the city which would be given to him . In the prophecy , which covers more than a thousand years, Anchises identifies the spirits who will be born as his descendants, from Aeneas' son Silvius to the young Marcellus, and describes how they will win glory and world (...) dominion for Rome. Aeneas sees the spirit of each man as he will appear in life, and hears Anchises' admonition to the Roman who embodies the race, in which he tells him how to rule the world . The speech is stirring, and one would expect that this vision of the future glory of his race would have some effect on Aeneas, but we may ask whether in fact it does. First, consider Aeneas' behaviour during his meeting with Anchises. At their first encounter all he asks is to embrace his father . Next, when he sees the spirits near the river Lethe, he shudders and asks who they are. When Anchises tells him that they are waiting to be reborn and that he is eager to point out his descendants, so that Aeneas will rejoice to have found Italy, Aeneas shows no curiosity about the spirits, but protests against the idea that they should have to leave Elysium and go back to the life of the body. (shrink)

This article analyzes the moral reasoning implied in a very commonly used expression, namely, "What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over", or "What you don't know won't hurt you." It especially deals with situations in which it is used for trying to justify acts that are, in themselves, reprehensible. For instance, when a cheating husband tries to justify his adultery by appealing to the alleged fact that he does not tell his wife about it and thus she (...) is not harmed by it: "If you are not informed, you are not hurt" (NINH). The components of NINH reasoning are unfolded, as well as its grounds, starting from a consequentialistic, deontological, or virtue ethics perspective. Two special characteristics of NINH reasoning are discussed, namely, that it tries to bridge deontological and consequentialistic approaches of morality in a commonsense way and that it contains a special type of paternalism. Finally, some ethical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Hoffnung als einer Form der Kontingenzbewältigung kommt im menschlichen Existenzzusammenhang eine zentrale Funktion zu, weshalb sie in zahlreichen theoretischen und literarischen Texten verhandelt wird. Dennoch bildet eine wissenschaftliche Analyse des Hoffnungsdiskurses bislang ein Desiderat. Der vorliegende Band verfolgt ausgehend von diesem Befund eine doppelte Zielsetzung: In einer historischen Perspektivierung nimmt er zunächst eine Archäologie des Hoffnungsdiskurses vor, indem wesentliche kulturgeschichtliche Stationen von den mythischen Anfängen bis in die Spätmoderne nachgezeichnet und Traditionsstränge offengelegt werden. In systematischer Hinsicht erfolgt dann eine typologische (...) Annäherung an Verfahrensweisen mit der Hoffnung in Philosophie und Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Denn in der Spätmoderne mit ihren historischen Bedrohungen und Katastrophen findet eine paradigmatische Umwertung der Hoffnung statt. Bislang gültige Attribute wie Komplexitätsreduktion und Linearität werden verabschiedet. Stattdessen rückt nun vermehrt der ungewisse Prozess des Hoffens in den Fokus, der in absurden, dialektischen und paradoxen Denkmodellen seinen Ausdruck findet und eine sprachliche Annäherung an die unsichere Zukunft ermöglicht. (shrink)

This radical analysis of the role and importance of historiography interprets the philosophy and theory of history on the basis of historicity as a human condition. The book examins the norms and methods of historiography from a philosophical point of view, but rejects generalisations tht the philosophy of history can provide all the answers to contemporary problems. Instead it outlines a feasible theory of history which is still radical enough to apply to all social structures.