The Origin of Consciousness Abstract The existence of human consciousness has received a great deal of attention within the scientific community. There are some who deny its existence altogether. There are those who believe it is nothing more than the result of physical properties within the brain. And there are some who contend it exists separate and apart from the brain. Many of these theories have been shaped by the desire of evolutionists to explain human consciousness via a purely (...) materialistic/mechanistic bent. In this paper, we provide a historical background to the conflict and examine the two broad categories—monism and dualism—that are used in an attempt to explain human consciousness. We also discuss many of their subcategories, to see how each fare in light of the available facts. Increasingly, experimental data document the fact that human consciousness is separate and distinct from the mere physical matter of the brain. This understanding indicates that there is, then, a non-material aspect of human beings that must be accounted for. (shrink)

Die „seelische Krankheit Friedlosigkeit“ ist der Ausgangspunkt für die psychologische Begründung einer Streitkultur, die auf Dialog und nicht auf Durchsetzung aufbaut. Intimität und intimer Dialog sind Schlüsselbegriffe zur Formulierung eines „Lernmodell Liebe“ , das einerseits die psychische Funktionalität von Streit betont und andererseits die Konfliktlogik paardynamischer Verflechtungen als Anstoß für ein sinnbezogenes dyadisches Lernen voneinander hervorhebt. C. F. v. Weizsäcker’s notion of a „mental illness of peacelessness“ is the starting point for a psychological theory of a „culture of constructive debates“ (...) based on dialogue as well as resonance instead of enforcement. Intimacy and intimate dialogue are keywords for formulating a “paradigm of love” . On the one hand this emphasises the psychological functionality of disagreements and on the other hand it highlights the logic of conflicts in relationships as an impulse for meaningful dyadic learning. (shrink)

It is common for physicians who prescribe opioids for chronic pain to have their patients sign an opioid contract in order to receive opioid therapy. A vast majority of these contracts contain a stipulation requiring patients to submit to random drug testing which screens for both licit and illicit drugs. Physicians who prescribe opioids may be concerned about prosecution and disciplinary actions; medication abuse and misuse; and addiction. Steven Passik et al. write, “…physicians still fear the risk of abuse or (...) addiction as well as the potential legal consequences of their prescribing.”Issues surrounding OC/RDT need a closer look with a focus on enforceability and efficacy of the opioid contract; accuracy and complications of drug screens and their interpretation; and the importance of trust between patient and physician. In addition, it is vital to dispel fears with facts regarding prosecutions, nonmedical use of prescription opioids, and addiction. (shrink)

Taking the individual human being as a point of reference, this paper examines the sustainability of oneself as a contribution to human society and the biosphere in an evolving world. The proactive role as inquirer/researcher alias designer leads to active inquiry and design of one's life with influential consequences on the lives of other human beings and planetary life forms. To sustain a tenable position between the constructive and destructive forces of contemporary existence, a conscientious and ethical stance becomes central (...) in one's self?understanding of life fulfillment and the pragmatic nature of one's actions in the world. (shrink)

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is considered a universal marker of developmental dyslexia (DD) and could also be helpful to identify a reading deficit in minority-language children (MLC), in which it may be hard to disentangle whether the reading difficulties are due to a learning disorder or a lower proficiency in the language of instruction. We tested reading and rapid naming skills in monolingual Good Readers (mGR), monolingual Poor Readers (mPR), and MLC, by using our new version of RAN, the RAN-Shapes, (...) in 127 primary school students (from 3rd to 5th grade). In line with previous research, MLC showed, on average, lower reading performances as compared to mGR. However, the two groups performed similarly to the RAN-Shapes task. On the contrary, the mPR group underperformed both in the reading and the RAN tasks. Our findings suggest that reading difficulties and RAN performance can be dissociated in MLC; consequently, the performance at the RAN-Shapes may contribute to the identification of children at risk of a reading disorder without introducing any linguistic bias, when testing MLC. (shrink)

This essay is about the relationship between the notions of practical reason, the will, and choice in Kant’s practical philosophy. Although Kant explicitly identifies practical reason and the will, many interpreters argue that he cannot really mean it on the grounds that unless they are distinct, irrational and, especially, immoral action is impossible. Other readers affirm his identification but distinguish the will from choice on the same basis. We argue that proper attention to Kant’s conception of practical reason as a (...) capacity reveals that these distinctions are neither textually grounded nor philosophically necessary. His moral psychology concerns a single capacity, practical reason, which is the will, and whose actualities in this or that individual fall under the title of choice. Practical reason is the will and choice because it is the rational faculty of desire: a rational being’s capacity to be, by means of her representations, the cause of the actuality of their objects. This, we argue, is entailed by his conception of rational action: action not just in accordance with, but in and through the representation of, principles. The possibility of irrational action is explained not by a distinction between capacities but by the finitude, and thereby the fallibility, of human reason. (shrink)

I argue that any account of imagination should satisfy the following three desiderata. First, imaginations induce actions only in conjunction with beliefs about the environment of the imagining subject. Second, there is a continuum between imaginations and beliefs. Recognizing this continuum is crucial to explain the phenomenon of imaginative immersion. Third, the mental states that relate to imaginations in the way that desires relate to beliefs are a special kind of desire, namely desires to make true in fiction. These (...) desires to make true in fiction do not differ from regular desires in kind, but only in content. I argue for these three desiderata in turn by critically discussing several recent accounts of imagination. (shrink)

It is argued that at the center of Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousness is the notion that experience is shaped by identification and sacrifice. Experience is the process of self - constitution and self -transformation of a self -conscious being that risks its own being. The transition from desire to recognition is explicated as a transition from the tripartite structure of want and fulfillment of biological desire to a socially structured recognition that is achieved only in reciprocal recognition, or (...) reflexive recognition. At the center of the Hegelian notion of selfhood is thus the realization that selves are the locus of accountatibility. To be a self, it is concluded, is to be the subject of normative statuses that refer to commitments; it means to be able to take a normative stand on things, to commit oneself and undertake responsibilities. Key Words: commitments • desire • experience • G.W.F.Hegel • identity • recognition • risk • sacrifice • self -consciousness • self - constitution. (shrink)

This chapter discusses desire theory and how the temporal gap between desires and the states of affairs that satisfy them affects this theory. Satisfaction is not that important in desire theory because even if getting what we want fails to satisfy, we are better off for having got it. The rationale for rejecting hedonistic accounts of well-being in favor of desire theories is the intuition that states of affairs that are not “like” anything for us can harm (...) and benefit us. Sumner, however, suggests that even if we grant the desire theorist’s fundamental assumption that they can make a difference to our well-being, the prospective character of desire, which opens a temporal gap between desires and the states of affairs that satisfy them, undermines the account. (shrink)

When we compare contemporary moral philosophy with the well-known moral systems of earlier centuries, we should be struck by the fact that a certain assumption about human well being that is now widely taken for granted was universally rejected in the past. The contemporary moral climate predisposes us to be pluralistic about the human good, whereas earlier systems of ethics embraced a conception of well being that we would now call narrow and restrictive. One way to convey the sort of (...) contrast I have in mind is to note that according to Plato and Aristotle, there is one kind of life, that of the philosopher, that represents the summit of human flourishing, and all other lives are worth leading to the extent that they approximate this ideal. Certain other ethical theories of the past were in a way more narrow than this, for whereas Plato and Aristotle maintained that many things are in themselves worthwhile, others argued that there is only one intrinsic good—pleasure according to the Epicureans, virtue according to the Stoics. By contrast, it is now widely assumed that all such approaches are too exclusive, that not only are there many types of intrinsic goods but there is no one specific kind of life—whether it is that of a philosopher or a poet or anyone else—that is the single human ideal. Even hedonism, a conception of the good that had a powerful influence in the modern period, has few contemporary proponents. A consensus has arisen in our time that there is no single ultimate good that provides the measure by which the worth of all other goods must be assessed. (shrink)

We develop a novel challenge to pragmatic encroachment. The significance of belief-desire psychology requires treating questions about what to believe as importantly prior to questions about what to do; pragmatic encroachment undermines that priority, and therefore undermines the significance of belief-desire psychology. This, we argue, is a higher cost than has been recognized by epistemologists considering embracing pragmatic encroachment.

In Wuthering Heights a man and a woman fall in love and their passion for each other wreaks havoc on several lives, theirs included. Long after his beloved is dead, Heathcliff’s life revolves entirely around his love for her. Frustrated by events, his grand romantic passion expresses itself in destructive spasms of antisocial behavior. Catherine, the object of this passion, marries another man on a whim, but describes her feelings for him as like superficial foliage, whereas ‘her love for Heathcliff (...) resembles eternal rocks beneath.’ ‘I am Heathcliff,’ she declares, shortly before dying at the age of nineteen. (shrink)

Rachana Kamtekar offers a new understanding of Plato's account of the soul and its impact on our living well or badly, virtuously or viciously. She argues that throughout the dialogues Plato maintains that human beings have a natural desire for our own good, and that actions and conditions contrary to this desire are involuntary.

In the last decade, fierce controversy has arisen over the nature of sexual orientation. Scientific research, religious views, increasingly ambiguous gender roles, and the growing visibility of sexual minorities have sparked impassioned arguments about whether our sexual desires are hard-wired in our genes or shaped by the changing forces of society. In recent years scientific research and popular opinion have favored the idea that sexual orientations are determined at birth, but philosopher and educator Edward Stein argues that much of what (...) we think we know about the origins of sexual desire is probably wrong. Stein provides a comprehensive overview of such research on sexual orientation and shows that it is deeply flawed. Stein argues that this research assumes a picture of sexual desire that reflects unquestioned cultural stereotypes rather than cross-cultural scientific facts, and that it suffers from serious methodological problems. He considers whether sexual orientation is even amenable to empirical study and asks if it is useful for our understanding of human nature to categorize people based on their sexual desires. Perhaps most importantly, Stein examines some of the ethical issues surrounding such research, including gay and lesbian civil rights and the implications of parents trying to select or change the sexual orientation of their children. The Mismeasure of Desire offers a reasoned, accessible, and incisive examination of contemporary thinking about one of the most hotly debated issues of our time and adds a compelling voice of dissent to prevailing--and largely unexamined--assumptions about human sexuality. (shrink)

The law of desire has been proposed in several forms, but its essential claim is that agents always act on their strongest proximal action motivation. This law has threatening consequences for human freedom, insofar as it greatly limits agents’ ability to do otherwise given their motivational state. It has proven difficult to formulate a version that escapes counterexamples and some categorically deny its truth. Noticeable by its absence in the literature is any attempt to provide an argument for the (...) law of desire – I propose such an argument here. It is noted that Sripada's “divided mind” theory of willpower provides a counterexample to the version of the law of desire my argument defends, but I note that a reformulated version of the law of desire survives this critique. I conclude that there is a serious case for the law of desire, and note the broader implications of this. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the question of whether the phenomenon of self-deception requires a radical sort of partitioning of the mind, and argue that it does not. Most of those who argue in favor of partitioning accept a model of self-deception according to which the self-deceived person desires to and intentionally sets out to form a certain belief that she knows to be false. Such a model is similar to that of deception of other persons, and for this (...) reason is thought to require that the self-deceiver’s mind be partitioned; one “part” of her knows the truth, while the other “part” is convinced of a false belief. I argue that while both the partitionist model and its main competitor should be rejected, each contains a key insight. On the one hand, anti-partitionist models correctly invoke some sort of desire or motivation on the part of self-deceivers as playing a role in the acquisition of their beliefs. But it is partitionists who identify the right sort of desire, namely, the desire to believe. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 4, Page 511-521, December 2021.

Desire-based theories of well-being claim that a person's well-being consists of the satisfaction of her desires. Many of these theories say that well-being consists of the satisfaction of desires that she would have if her desires were "corrected" in various ways. Some versions of this theory claim that the corrections involve having "full information" or being an "ideal observer." I argue that well-being does not depend on what one would desire if she were an “ideal observer.” Rather, it (...) depends on what she would desire if she had as much information as she could have and still maintain her identity as the particular person she is. The paper attempts to spell out this suggestion by constructing a notion of integrity. Roughly, integrity is preserved if one’s most central projects, commitments, and character traits are left in tact. I argue that desire-based theories of well-being should define well-being in terms of the satisfaction of those desires that one would have if one’s epistemic situation were idealized as much as would be consistent with maintaining her integrity. (shrink)

Desire has not been at the center of recent preoccupations in the philosophy of mind. Consequently, the literature settled into several dogmas. The first part of this introduction presents these dogmas and invites readers to scrutinize them. The main dogma is that desires are motivational states. This approach contrasts with the other dominant conception: desires are positive evaluations. But there are at least four other dogmas: the world should conform to our desires (world-to-mind direction of fit), desires involve a (...) positive evaluation (the “guise of the good”), we cannot desire what we think is actual (the “death of desire” principle), and, in neuroscience, the idea that the reward system is the key to understanding desire. The second part of the introduction summarizes the contributions to this volume. The hope is to contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on this neglected, albeit crucial, aspect of the mind. (shrink)

It has often been said that 'desire' is ambiguous. I do not believe the case for this has been made thoroughly enough, however. The claim typically occurs in the course of defending controversial philosophical theses, such as that intention entails desire, where it tends to look ad hoc. There is need, therefore, for a thorough and single-minded exploration of the ambiguity. I believe the results will be more profound than might be suspected.

This article argues that Epictetus employs the terms orexis and hormê in the same manner as the older Stoics. It then shows, on the basis of this claim, that the older Stoics recognized a distinction between dispositional and occurrent forms of motivation. On this account of Stoic theory, intentional action is in each instance the product of two forms of cognition: a value ascription that attributes goodness or badness to some object, conceiving of its possession as beneficial or harmful to (...) the agent, together with a situational judgment about appropriate action. The resulting interpretation suggests that the Stoic theory of motivation as a whole — and not merely the Stoic analysis of the pathê — has the basic shape of a practical syllogism, with more psychological depth than commentators have recognized. (shrink)

I defend a necessary condition of local autonomy inspired by Aristotle and Marx. One does something autonomously, I argue, only if one does it for its own sake and not for the sake of further ends alone. I show that this idea steers an attractive middle path between the subjectivism of Dworkin- and Frankfurt-style theories of autonomy on the one hand and the objectivism of Raz-style theories on the other. By doing so, it vindicates and explains two important pieces of (...) common sense of which those theories struggle to make sense. First, it explains how external sources of compulsion, such as coercion by other people and duress by unfavorable circumstances, can compromise the autonomy of an activity. Second, it explains this by articulating the sense in which to act autonomously is to do what one really or truly wants to do, and the correlative sense in which to do something unfreely is instead to be forced or necessitated to do it. At the same time, my proposal brings into view distinctive species of external unfreedom beyond the traditional paradigm cases of coercion and duress. Most importantly, it implies that toil—labor which is not valued intrinsically but is done purely on account of its instrumental necessity—is essentially unfree. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungEines der medizinischen Felder, in dem die ethische Diskussion um die „wunscherfüllende Medizin“ am intensivsten geführt wird, ist die Reproduktionsmedizin, die die Erfüllung des „Kinderwunsches“ verspricht. Strittig ist besonders, ob Sterilität als Krankheit definiert wird, die eine medizinische Intervention rechtfertigt, ob sich aus der Sterilität oder Infertilität lediglich ein Abwehr- oder auch ein positives Anspruchsrecht auf medizinische Ressourcen ergibt, ob legitime Fortpflanzungsmedizin Grenzen hat. Nach einer Übersicht über Eckpunkte der nationalen und internationalen Debatte beschreiben wir im zweiten Teil Ansichten zum (...) Status ungewollter Kinderlosigkeit, zum Recht auf Fortpflanzungsmedizin und zur möglichen Legitimität ihrer Begrenzung anhand der Ergebnisse unserer vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung geförderten Studien. Während der letzten fünf Jahre haben wir u. a. Paare mit und ohne Sterilitätsproblematik sowie verschiedene Expertengruppen qualitativ und standardisiert befragt. Die stark divergierenden Auffassungen konfrontieren wir im dritten Abschnitt mit internationalen Standards, zum anderen mit dem „Capability-Ansatz“ und dem freiheitsfunktionalen Liberalismus von Sen und Pauer-Studer. Dies ergibt, dass die Bereitstellung verschiedener Möglichkeiten der In-vitro-Fertilisations-Behandlung nicht lediglich einen Wunsch auf Elternschaft erfüllt sondern als die gesollte Erfüllung eines normativen Bedürfnissanspruchs begriffen werden muss. (shrink)

In French, the verb "to live" designates both being alive and the experience of something. This ambiguity has a philosophical meaning. The task of a phenomenology of life is to describe an originary sense of living from which the very distinction between life in the intransitive sense and life in the transitive, or intentional, sense proceeds. Hans Jonas is one of those rare authors who has tried to give an account of the specificity of life instead of reducing life to (...) categories that are foreign to it. However, the concept of metabolism, by which Jonas characterizes vital activity, attests to a presupposition as to life: life is conceived as self-preservation, that is, as negation of death, in such a way that life is, in the end, not thought on the basis of itself. The aim of this article is to show that life as such must be understood as movement in a radicalized sense, in which the living being is no more the subject than the product. All living beings are in effect characterized by a movement, which nothing can cause to cease, a movement that largely exceeds what is required by the satisfaction of needs and that, because of this, bears witness to an essential incompleteness. This incompleteness reveals that life is originarily bound to a world. Because the world to which the living being relates is essentially non-totalizable and unpresentable, living movement can not essentially complete itself. Thus, in the final analysis, life must be defined as desire, and in virtue of this view, life does not tend toward self-preservation, as we have almost always thought, but toward the manifestation of the world. (shrink)