We present five experiments and simulation studies to establish late analogical abstraction as a new psychological phenomenon: Schema abstraction from analogical examples can revive otherwise inert knowledge. We find that comparing two analogous examples of negotiations at recall time promotes retrieving analogical matches stored in memory—a notoriously elusive effect. Another innovation in this research is that we show parallel effects for real‐life autobiographical memory (Experiments 1–3) and for a controlled memory set (Experiments 4 and 5). Simulation studies show that a (...) unified model based on schema abstraction can capture backward (retrieval) effects as well as forward (transfer) effects. (shrink)

The first European Congress on Agriculturaland Food Ethics was held at Wageningen University andResearch Center (WUR), Wageningen, The Netherlands, March 4–6, 1999. This was the inaugural conference forthe newly forming European Society for Agricultural andFood Ethics – EUR-SAFE – and around two hundredpeople from across Europe (and a handful of NorthAmericans) participated. Following theCongress/conference, a small (16 people), two-dayworkshop funded in part by the US National ScienceFoundation focused on similarities and differencesbetween the US and the EU regarding publicdiscourse/debate on food (...) biotechnology. A briefoverview of the Congress and the follow-up workshopsuggests what lessons AFHVS and ASFS might learn fromEuropean experience of agricultural and food ethics. (shrink)

The interview reconstructs Jeffrey Schnapp's brilliant career from his origins as a scholar of Dante and the Middle Ages to his current multiple interdisciplinary interests. Among other things, Schnapp deals with knowledge design, media history and theory, history of the book, the future of archives, museums, and libraries. The main themes of the interview concern the relationships between technology and pedagogy, the future of reading, and artificial intelligence.

The presentation of these two projects the metaLAB (at) Harvard complements Jeffrey Schnapp's interview published in the section Perspectives of this issue of Humanist Studies and the Digital Age. The first project, A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze, performs an art historical experiment. The second project, Their Names, is an online Denkmal or monument that visualizes the names of 28,000+ fatal encounters with American police dating from the year 2000 up until the death of George Floyd on (...) May 25, 2020. (shrink)

The cerebellum has been hypothesized to play a role in a variety of movement timing tasks that involve the processing of temporal information on a variety of timescales. Braitenberg, Heck & Sultan propose a new theory of cerebellar function that is able to account for movement timing on the order of a couple of hundred milliseconds. However, this theory does not account for the rôle the cerebellum plays in the acquisition and retention of adaptively timed discrete movements that are on (...) the order of 200 to 1000 milliseconds, and therefore does not account for the entire temporal range of cerebellar dependent processing. (shrink)

This essay is the journal editor's introduction to part 3 of an ongoing symposium on quietism. With reference to writings of James Joyce, Francis Picabia, J. M. Coetzee, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elaine Pagels, and Karen King—and with extended reference to Jonathan Lear's study of “cultural devastation,” Radical Hope—Jeffrey Perl explores the possibility that the fear of anomie (“anomiphobia”) is misplaced. He argues that, in comparison with the violence and narrowness of any given social order, anomie may well be (...) preferable, and, in any case, may be no more than another name for quietism. (shrink)

We explore psychological contracts as mechanisms by which individuals gain influence in organizations. Using two distinct research settings and longitudinal analysis, we demonstrate that ideological contracts endow individuals with increased centrality in the organization’s influence network. More generally, we propose that an important outcome of different psychological contract types may be how they affect the nature of influence in organizations.

We present the findings of a worldwide survey that was administered to business ethic scholars to better understand journal quality within the business ethics academic community. Based upon the data from the survey, we provide a ranking of the top 10 business ethics journals. We then provide a comparison of business ethics journals to other mainstream management journals in terms of journal quality. The results of the study suggest that, within the business ethics academic community, many scholars prefer to publish (...) in the top business ethics academic journals over other mainstream management journals. Furthermore, the results of the study suggest that within the business ethics academic field there are two dominant academic communities: one in Europe and one in North America. Each of these academic communities has its own preferred publication outlets, suggesting a potentially problematic bifurcation of business ethics scholarship. (shrink)

Paul B. Thompson’s From the Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone explains the growing number of ways that food connects to ethical questions concerning our consumption, production, storage, and distribution of food. Although this book serves as an introduction to food ethics for non-experts, professionals in agricultural science and food production, food activists, and philosophers will have a lot to learn from Thompson’s insight, careful argumentation, and mastery of the economic, scientific, and political issues that ground our (...) current debates about food. In my comments, I will first briefly provide an overview of Thompson’s thoughtful book. I will explain the methodology employed in this book and how his methodology applies to specific philosophical questions within food ethics. I will focus my commentary on how Thompson frames the ethics of diet and obesity. I will then raise a few questions concerning food choice and paternalism that were omitted from this book, but that I think raise substantial ethical concerns in affluent countries. I will close with a very brief comment on Thompson’s methodology. (shrink)

Few subjects have provoked more speculation or scholarly inquiry than the relationship between creativity and madness—or, in the case of Jason Thompson, the link between memoir writing and depression. Plato theorized that the poet’s madness is divinely inspired, and two thousand years later Sigmund Freud (1928/1961) admitted that “Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas lay down its arms” (p. 177)—a cautionary injunction he then disregards. Should authors heed Thompson’s prudent advice not to write about (...) present traumas, or should they accept D. H. Lawrence’s (1981) statement that “One sheds one’s sicknesses in books, repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them” (p. .. (shrink)

Aristotelian Naturalism is an ethics on which moral goodness is a species of natural goodness—the kind of goodness we find on display in other creatures whose habits and activities enable them to thrive. What it takes for humans to be good is to have habits and engage in activities that contribute to human flourishing. The primary aim of the book is to present a version of Aristotelian Naturalism enriched by empirical evidence and responsive to criticisms from feminist and disability ethics. (...) On the revisionist, Pluralist Aristotelian Naturalism developed here, human goodness is not a single, unitary ideal to which all humans should aim. Instead, it instead admits of real diversity, just as goodness in general admits of diversity across various species. There is a plurality of human goodnesses, and consequently, a variety of sets of human virtues that promote human flourishing in its many forms. The book explicates an Aristotelian methodology of ethics on which we must use philosophical reasoning to integrate observational evidence about the shape life forms take and the dispositions that contribute to good human lives. When we observe about what humans are and do in order to thrive in a wide array of bodies, social-political contexts, and environments, this puts pressure on the standard Aristotelian Naturalist singular ideal of human goodness as depicted by a flourishing neurotypical, able-bodied, resource-rich mature adult. Rather, we have reason to think that there is such substantial variation in human forms of life, and in what people can do and be in order to flourish, that there is not one human goodness and one set of virtues. Instead, there is a diversity of forms of human goodness, all equally valuable—whether the goodness of young children, adolescents, for people with intellectual disabilities, in old age, for people living in affluent democratic states, and for those managing to be good while under oppression in authoritarian regimes. Moreover, when we achieve one kind of human goodness, this changes what we are able to do and be. By being good in one way, we acquire the capacity to be good in another way. Thus we learn that most of us, for most of our lives, are simultaneously being and becoming good. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes four senses of naturalism: reductive physicalism; a naturalism that departs from what Thompson calls “natural-historical judgments”; a naturalism that recognizes that physical nature is located within the space of reasons; and a phenomenological naturalism that shifts the focus to the “natural” experiences of subjects who encounter the world. The paper argues for a “phenomenological neo-Aristotelianism” that accounts both for the internal justification of our first-order moral experience and the need for a broader grounding in a universalistic (...) account of the goods of agency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dark Arts of Politics:Aesthetics and Engineering in Nazism and FascismJonathan AllenThe Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, by Eric Michaud, translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 271 pp.Building Fascism, Communism, and Liberal Democracy: Gaetano Ciocca—Architect, Inventor, Farmer, Writer, Engineer, by Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 291 pp.Despite their obvious centrality to the history of the twentieth century, sixty years after (...) the defeat of the Axis powers fascism and Nazism remain elusive phenomena, hard to define with any real clarity. Scholars wrangle not only over the identification of their central characteristics but also over whether the similarities between fascism and Nazism are close enough to justify considering them as parts of a single category. A growing number of studies, however, ranging from general histories such as Norman Davies's Europe: A History and Mark Mazower's Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, to more specialized works such as Zeev Sternhell's Neither Left Nor Right and Robert Paxton's fine The Anatomy of Fascism, argue the case for treating fascism and Nazism together.1 A mark of all of these books is their willingness to give serious attention to fascist ideologies and to the interactions between these ideologies and fascist practice and culture. This interest, in turn, makes it necessary to examine anew broader questions about the relations between fascism and the circumstances and attitudes of modern life.The two works under consideration here—The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, by Eric Michaud, and Building Fascism, Communism, and Liberal Democracy, by Jeffrey T. Schnapp—share the growing concern to take seriously fascist ideology and culture as essential to an understanding of the movement. Michaud sets out to present an analysis of Nazi myth, which he argues was constructed with reference to two models: art and Christianity (xii). His immensely erudite study relates Nazi conceptions of the leader to Romantic views of genius and Christian doctrines concerning the role of the Savior. This allows him to present a distinctive view of Nazi ideology, one that relates it to themes and debates that have figured prominently in the history of European culture and belief. [End Page 113]Schnapp, on the other hand, focuses on the career of a single man—Gaetano Ciocca. Though Ciocca is now an obscure figure, unlikely to be familiar even to most students of fascism, Schnapp argues that his career deserves attention for several reasons. In the first place, he "strove to translate a fascist politics into the language of modern technics in the domains of architecture, urbanism, theater design, animal husbandry, drainage and transportation systems" (7). What is more, Ciocca was no power-hungry opportunist but rather a committed and reflective intellectual, who spent much of his time writing books and articles aimed at explaining and justifying his various projects to a general audience. Last but not least, though Ciocca's passionate commitment to fascism cooled as World War II wore on, this had no visible effect on his engineering projects. In the aftermath of the war, Ciocca presented himself as a nonpolitical "rebuilder" concerned to provide for popular need. In this guise, he served Italy's postwar liberal democracy as enthusiastically as he had previously devoted his projects to the cause of fascism. Ciocca thus presents us with an intriguing puzzle: a committed and reflective fascist intellectual—no Eichmann, Schnapp insists—who was nevertheless able to function equally effectively after the demise of the fascist regime. Schnapp argues that Ciocca's career forces us to examine with care the complex relations between technologies and political ideologies. In fact, I think it compels us to consider more general questions about the extent to which Ciocca's conception of himself as a modernizing technocrat could be equally at home in the political contexts of fascism and a certain kind of elite-centered liberal democracy. Schnapp hints at this issue at several moments but does not address it in a sustained way.Though there have been some notable exceptions, most studies of Nazism in particular have tended to gravitate toward one of two explanatory options. The first, more common in philosophical circles, has been to view... (shrink)

This volume of Social Philosophy Today contains a selection of papers presented at the 30th International Social Philosophy Conference (2013), an annual event sponsored by the North American Society for Social Philosophy. The theme of the conference was "Food". This volume invites wider discussion of the issues explored at the conference, including food production, distribution, and consumption. Contributors include Susan Dielman, Erinn Gilson, Joan McGregor, José Medina, Andrew Pierce, and Sally Scholz.

In the age of the `return to the empirical' in which the theoretical disputes of an earlier era seem to have fallen silent, we seek to excavate the intellectual conditions for reviving theoretical debate, for it is upon this recovery that deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of empirical social science depends. We argue against the all too frequent turn to ontology, whereby critical realists have sought an epistemological guarantor of sociological validity. We seek, to the contrary, to crystallize (...) a culturally-based, hermeneutic account of a rational social science. Derived from disputes within the sociology of culture, on the one hand, and the long-standing concerns of interpretive philosophy, on the other, we offer a cultural-sociological approach to epistemology. We view the production of truth in social science as a reading of a meaningful social world, and as a performance of truth-claims that is constrained by evidence, but whose success depends on other contextual factors. We conclude that the rationality of social science can be achieved only by forgoing ontology. Theories are abstractions of investigators' meanings that allow the interpretation of social meanings in turn, whether those are actions, relations, or structures. Successful explanations are those that intertwine these meaning structures of investigators and actors in an effective way. (shrink)

As social theorists seek to understand the contemporary challenges of radical populism, we would do well to reconsider the febrile insights of the psychoanalytic social theorist Erich Fromm. It was Fromm who, at the beginning of the 1930s, conceptualized the emotional and sociological roots of a new ‘authoritarian character’ who was meek in the face of great power above and ruthless to the powerless below. It was Fromm, in the 1950s, who argued that societies, not only individuals, could be sick. (...) This essay traces the intertwining of psychoanalytic and sociological methods that allowed Fromm to create such new ideas. At the same time, it highlights how Fromm’s sociology was hampered by an economistic Marxist approach to the institutions and culture of democratic capitalist societies. Such theoretical restriction prevented Fromm from conceptualizing how institutions like democracy, science, and psychotherapy can provide resources for widespread emotional recuperation and civil repair. (shrink)

Intelligent design (ID) raises several challenges for the relation between science and religion. One's views on these matters ramify across the other sciences, including physics. Can design, especially supernatural design, play any legitimate role in science? Is the ID question just a matter of evidence? What is the proper role for naturalism in all this? These are important questions in the philosophy of science. Before taking them up, this chapter briefly looks at the core concepts used in ID today. There (...) is a less visible but equally menacing problem for the viability of ID. Methodological naturalism (MN) gets a lot of attention, but there is another methodological shaping principle to be contended with, namely, conservatism. Conservatism is also the reason ID attracts so many theists and few nontheists. If one already believes in an intelligence that can play the role of designer, then ID‐based science is not a radical move. (shrink)

Making up your mind can include making up your mind about how to change your mind. Here a suggestion for coding imputations of influence into the kinematics of judgmental probabilities is applied to the treatment of Newcomb problems in The Logic of Decision framework. The suggestion is that what identifies you as treating judgmental probabilistic covariance of X and Y as measuring an influence of X on Y is constancy of your probabilities for values of Y conditionally on values of (...) X as your judgmental probability distribution for values of X changes. (shrink)

"To some people, life is very simple . . . no shadings and grays, all blacks and whites. . . . Now, others of us find that good, bad, right, wrong, are many-sided, complex things. We try to see every side; but the more we see, the less sure we are.".

This essay concerns various difficulties encountered in the attempt to assess the relation between Heidegger and Nietzsche. More specifically, those difficulties are due to the notion and function of repetition in the texts of both Heidegger and Nietzsche. I attempt to provide an analysis of repetition in the Heidegger of Being and Time and surrounding texts (e.g., Plato’s Sophist and Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie). Following this attempt, I then examine the transformed notion of repetition operative in the now famous text (...) written at the time of the Nietzsche lectures, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), a repetition that goes by the name of crossing (Übergang). In my presentation of crossing, I attempt to draw Heidegger and Nietzsche together through the repetition of crossing and that of eternal recurrence of the same. Finally, I argue that what draws Heidegger and Nietzsche together is also what prevents us from distinguishing them in any traditional way, a distinction that could then be followed by any number of judgments regarding historical influence. That is, that what draws the two to thinking is what both draws them together, which is abyssal repetition, and problematizes any attempt to distinguish them. (shrink)

Preface Leadership, Spirituality and the Common Good East and West Approaches Henri-Claude de Bettignies & Mike J. Thompson For many, to bring together “ leadership”, “spirituality” and “the Common Good” will be seen more as a ...

We identify the significance and typical requirements of developmental analyses of the microbiome-gut-brain in parents, offspring, and parent-offspring relations, which have particular importance for neurobehavioral outcomes in mammalian species, including humans. We call for a focus on behavioral measures of social-emotional function. Methodological approaches to interpreting relations between the microbiota and behavior are discussed.