Moral foundations research suggests that liberals care about moral values related to individual rights such as harm and fairness, while conservatives care about those foundations in addition to caring more about group rights such as loyalty, authority, and purity. However, the question remains about how conservatives and liberals differ in relation to group-level moral principles. We used two versions of the moral foundations questionnaire with the target group being either abstract or specific ingroups or outgroups. Across three studies, we observed (...) that liberals showed more endorsement of Individualizing foundations with an outgroup target, while conservatives showed more endorsement of Binding foundations with an ingroup target. This general pattern was found when the framed, target-group was abstract and when target groups were specified about a general British-ingroup and an immigrant-outgroup. In Studies 2 and 3, both Individualizing-Ingroup Preference and Binding-Ingroup Preference scores predicted more Attitude Bias and more Negative Attitude Bias toward immigrants, more Implicit Bias, and more Perceived Threat from immigrants. We also demonstrated that increasing liberalism was associated with less Attitude Bias and less Negative Bias toward immigrants, less Implicit Bias, and less Perceived Threat from immigrants. Outgroup-individualizing foundations and Ingroup-Binding foundations showed different patterns of mediation of these effects. (shrink)

The logical consistency of a collection of assertions about events can be viewed as a special case of coherent probability assessments in the sense of de Finetti.

This is a selection of readings about professionalism and ethics in engineering. It addresses topics such as the concept of professionalism, education, and maintenance of competence, registration, professional autonomy, social effects and responsibilities, and enforcement of codes of ethics.

Moral foundations theory has provided an account of the moral values that underscore different cultural and political ideologies, and these moral values of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity can help to explain differences in political and cultural ideologies; however, the extent to which moral foundations relate to strong social ideologies, intergroup processes and threat perceptions is still underdeveloped. To explore this relationship, we conducted two studies. In Study 1, we considered how the moral foundations predicted strong social ideologies such (...) as authoritarianism and social dominance orientation as well as attitudes toward immigrants. Here, we demonstrated that more endorsement of individualizing moral foundations was related to less negative intergroup attitudes, which was mediated by SDO, and that more endorsement of binding moral foundations was related to more negative attitudes, which was mediated by RWA. Crucially, further analyses also suggested the importance of threat perceptions as an underlying explanatory variable. Study 2 replicated these findings and extended them by measuring attitudes toward a different group reflecting an ethnic minority in the United States, and by testing the ordering of variables while also replicating and confirming the threat effects. These studies have important implications for using MFT to understand strong ideologies, intergroup relations, and threat perceptions. (shrink)

Subjective feelings of familiarity associated with a stimulus tend to be strongest when specific information about the previous encounter with the stimulus is difficult to retrieve . Recognizing: The judgment of previous occurrence. Psychological Review, 87, 252–271.]). When a stimulus has been encountered previously and the circumstances of the encounter cannot be recollected, additional cognitive resources may be directed toward recollection processes; this resource allocation is accompanied by autonomic arousal [Dawson, M. E., Filion, D. L., & Schell, A. M. . (...) Is elicitation of the autonomic orienting response associated with allocation of processing resources?. Psychophysiology, 26, 560–572]. One easily measurable index of autonomic arousal is the skin conductance response . In the present study, participants studied lists of words and then gave recognition ratings to briefly displayed and masked studied and nonstudied test words while their SCRs were monitored. Results revealed a relationship between recognition ratings and the temporal characteristics of the SCR, supporting the idea that feelings of familiarity are indeed “feelings” in that they stem from autonomic arousal associated with cognitive resource allocation. (shrink)

Afferent feedback can appreciably alter the pharyngeal phase of swallow. In order to measure the stability of the swallow motor pattern during several types of alterations in afferent feedback, we assessed swallow during a conventional water challenge in four anesthetized cats, and compared that to swallows induced by fixed (20 Hz) and stochastic (1-20Hz) electrical stimulation applied to the superior laryngeal nerve. The swallow motor patterns were evaluated by electromyographic activity (EMG) of eight muscles, based on their functional significance: laryngeal (...) elevators (mylohyoid, geniohyoid, and thyrohyoid); laryngeal adductor (thyroarytenoid); inferior pharyngeal constrictor (thyropharyngeus); upper esophageal sphincter (cricopharyngeus); and inspiratory activity (parasternal and costal diaphragm). Both the fixed and stochastic electrical stimulation paradigms increased activity of the laryngeal elevators, produced short-term facilitation evidenced by increasing swallow durations over the stimulus period, and conversely inhibited swallow-related diaphragm activity. Both the fixed and stochastic stimulus conditions also increased specific EMG amplitudes, which never occurred with the water challenges. Stochastic stimulation increased swallow excitability, as measured by an increase in the number of swallows produced. Consistent with our previous results, changes in the swallow motor pattern for pairs of muscles were only sometimes correlated with each other. We conclude that alterations in afferent feedback produced particular variations of the swallow motor pattern. We hypothesize that specific SLN feedback might modulate the swallow central pattern generator during aberrant feeding conditions (food/liquid entering the airway), which may protect the airway and serve as potentially important clinical diagnostic indicators. (shrink)

Sartre posed a problem for himself in his discussion of bad faith: how is it possible to deceive oneself, given the unity and translucency of consciousness? Many critics of Sartre interpret translucency as transparency; some, such as M.R. Haight, conclude that Sartre's account of consciousness makes self-deception impossible.A reply to those critics takes the form of showing that translucent consciousness has a number of dimensions: (a) non-positional versus positional aspects; (b) prereflective versus reflective levels; (c) temporally synthetic flux; and (d) (...) the first-person perspective versus the third-person perspective. These dimensions enable Sartre to succeed in describing subtle and varied patterns of self-deception, based on such strategies as obscuring, evasion, distraction, misdescription and disavowal. The translucency of consciousness is not a barrier to self-deception.However, there is another problem in Sartre's claim that all purposive activity is conscious, including our practice of self-deception. The bodily subject of consciousness performs important purposive activities beyond the range of the most obscure non-positional consciousness. This calls into question Sartre's existentialist claim that we are wholly responsible for all we do. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CALL FOR PROPOSALS TRAUMA AND HEALING 12TH EAST-WEST PHILOSOPHER’S CONFERENCE MAY 24-31, 2024 The 12th East-West Philosopher’s Conference will explore the many dimensions of trauma and healing. While trauma can be physical, it can also be psychological, social, political, economic, and cultural—encompassing the immediate effects of global pandemics, the ongoing impacts of ethnic and gender bias, the intergenerational legacies of colonization and geopolitical strife, and the planetary ramifications of (...) anthropogenic climate disruption. Ours is an era in which differences of histories, cultures, and identities are engaged as sources of insight, but also one of retrenchment—a period of relational appreciation, but also one of schism. The global scientific community’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a stunning example of human potential for empathetic collaboration in the face of global personal and public health trauma. Yet, the economic trauma of the pandemic has resulted in crumbling international alliances, deepening trade wars, and an unfortunate collective reinvestment in zero-sum endgame framings of geopolitics against which there is no vaccination and through which the terms of healing have become delinked from the restoration of global wholeness. These traumas do not stop shaping our lives when the immediate danger comes to an end. Traumatic pain remains stored in the memories of peoples and individuals, it populates their imagination and shapes horizons of possibility. Thus a philosophical exploration of trauma and healing is not only diagnostic of current problems but also a form of genealogy. We invite participants to reflect upon the relational complexity of both trauma and healing, critically and historically engaging concrete occurrences of trauma while also drawing out theoretical insights regarding healing that strengthens and empowers and resists the forms of personal and social amnesia that make the repetition of trauma so tragically common. Of special interest are panels and papers that explore the trauma and healing at all scales from the interpersonal, to the relational traumas experienced by nations at war and cultures in conflict, thus addressing the interplay of the private and public spheres, of ethics and economics, of the human and the natural sciences, and among disciplines, classes, genders, and generations. Panel and paper proposals are encouraged that explore trauma and healing during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the trauma of refugees, displaced and colonized peoples, trauma and healing in personal relationships, climate change as a form of trauma to the planet and its people, trauma and healing related to issues of gender and sexuality, and how philosophers of all traditions, ancient and modern, cross-culturally deal with trauma and healing. KEYNOTE PRESENTERS: Jin Y. Park, Chair of Philosophy and Religion at American University, Washington DC, “Translating Violence.” Ato Quayson, Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford University, CA, “The Ethnography of the Private Sphere: Trauma, Domesticity, and Healing in the Work of Toni Morrison.” We invite proposals for individual papers and panels. Please submit a 250-300 word abstract to the Conference organizers via: ewpc2024@gmail.com. Submission Timeline: November 1, 2023 Notifications of acceptance for abstracts and panel proposals received by November 1 will be sent out by December 15, 2023. We have established an early submission timeline to facilitate faculty applying to their own institutions for travel funding. Abstracts received after November 1, 2023, will be vetted as received, taking into consideration the late submission. The absolute deadline for abstract submissions is March 15, 2024. After this, we will not be able to accommodate additional proposals. Final Papers Due: April 15, 2024 CONFERENCE REGISTRATION AND LOGISTICS: Hosted in keeping with the Hawaiian Islands’ spirit of aloha, breakfast and lunch will be provided for all registered presenters, as well as an opening reception and final dinner. The Conference does not provide lodging or travel support, but economical lodgings of various kinds are readily available in Honolulu. ABOUT THE EAST-WEST PHILOSOPHER’S CONFERENCE: The East-West Philosophers’ Conference series is the premier forum for convening philosophers from across the academy who are committed to cross-cultural inquiry. The Conference is the oldest continuous international gathering in Hawai‘i and has been a model of productive collaboration between the University of Hawai‘i at... (shrink)

Much of the recent philosophical discussion about free will has been focused on whether compatibilists can adequately defend how a determined agent could exercise the type of free will that would enable the agent to be morally responsible in what has been called the basic desert sense :5–24, 1994; Fischer in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Philos Stud, 144:45–62, 2009). While we agree with Derk Pereboom (...) and others that the compatibilist’s burden should be properly understood as providing a compelling account of how a determined agent could be morally responsible in the basic desert sense, the exact nature of this burden has been rendered somewhat unclear by the fact that there has been no definitive account given as to what the basic desert sense of moral responsibility amounts to. In Sect. 1 we set out to clarify the compatibilist’s burden by presenting our account of basic desert moral responsibility—which we call retributivist desert moral responsibility for purposes of clarity—and explain why it is of central philosophical and practical importance to the free will debate. In Sect. 2 we employ a thought experiment to illustrate the kind of difficulty that compatibilists of any stripe are likely to encounter in attempting to explain how determined agents can exercise the kind of free will needed for retributivist desert moral responsibility. (shrink)

This special issue includes papers authored by Sean Morris, Tudor M. Baetu, Tamás Demeter, Dan O’Brien, Barbara Vetter, Daniel Dohrn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Barry Loewer, Aaron Segal, Miren Boehm, Vera Matarese, Stefanie Rocknak, Rachel Cohon, David Mark Kovacs, and Michael Esfeld.

In a previous paper by Pollock and Singh, it was proven that the total entropy of de Sitter space-time is equal to zero in the spatially flat case K=0. This result derives from the fundamental property of classical thermodynamics that temperature and volume are not necessarily independent variables in curved space-time, and can be shown to hold for all three spatial curvatures K=0,±1. Here, we extend this approach to Schwarzschild space-time, by constructing a non-vacuum interior space with line element ds (...) 2=e2λ(r) dt 2−e−2λ(r) dr 2−r 2(dθ 2+sin2 θdϕ 2), where $\mathrm{e}^{2{\lambda }(r)}=-\frac{1}{2}(1-\frac{r^{2}}{R_{0}^{2}})$ , which matches onto the vacuum exterior Schwarzschild metric in such a way that e2λ and d(e2λ )/dr are both continuous at the Schwarzschild radius R 0=2M. Then we show that the volume entropy is equal to A/4, where $A\equiv 4\pi R_{0}^{2}$ is the area of the apparent horizon, as found by Hawking. (shrink)

While much has been written on the cultural and intellectual antecedents that gave rise to Carolus Linnaeus?s herbarium and his Systema Naturae, the tools that he used to transform his raw observations into nomenclatural terms and categories have been neglected. Focusing on the Philosophia Botanica, the popular classification handbook that he published in 1751, it can be shown that Linnaeus cleverly ordered and reordered the work by employing commonplacing techniques that had been part of print culture since the Renaissance. Indeed, (...) the functional adaptability of commonplace heads allowed him to split and combine the book?s chapters and tables and played a notable conceptual role in the way in which he spatialized words and, to a certain extent, specimens. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prolegomenon to the Homeric CentosM. D. UsherHomeric centos are poems made up entirely of verses lifted verbatim, or with only slight modification, from the Iliad and Odyssey. Only a few have survived antiquity. There exist three short Homeric centos in the Palatine Anthology (9.361, 381, 382; cf. Hunger 1978, 98–101), a ten–line cento about Herakles quoted by Irenaeus (Wilken 1967), and a seven– line cento grafitto inscribed on the (...) leg of a statue of Memnon in Egypt, which dates from the reign of Hadrian (Bernand 1960, 111–13; Bowie 1990, 65). There are also several cento–like incantations from the Greek Magical Papyri that use lines from Homer (Maltomini 1995). The only Homeric centos we possess in any quantity are the topic of this study. These originated with a Christian bishop named Patricius in the fourth century C.E., and were later expanded by Eudocia Athenaïs, wife of the emperor Theodosius II, in the early fifth.Eudocia's Homeric centos have long been neglected for lack of a complete and authoritative text. The responsibility for this situation rests with the otherwise eminent Homerist, Arthur Ludwich, whose Teubner edition of 1897, the only edition of the centos currently available, is based on a single, partially edited manuscript (Par. graec. suppl. 388: "Codex Mutinensis").1 Pessimism about establishing a reliable text and aesthetic disenchantment with the poem itself have hampered further study: according to Joseph Golega, for example, the Homeric centos are "weder des Druckes noch des Lesens wert" (Golega 1960, 1).Such an assessment lacks understanding and imagination. In his short study of 1979, Kurt Smolak called for a new edition of the centos in no uncertain terms, emphasizing the poem's great heuristic potential (49):Die Zentonen als spezielle Form der spätantiken Homerrezeption erwiesen sich als der Interpretation ihrer oft nicht anerkannten dichterischen Möglichkeiten durchaus zugänglich—dann sind sie doch wohl auch eine [End Page 305] Edition wert! Denn die frühbyzantinische Bibeldichtung kann dem Theologen, Komparatisten und sich auch dem Philologen ein wenig bebautes Arbeitsfeld eröffnen—sofern dieser sich nicht als Zensor im Namen einer klassizistischen Ästhetik versteht.The present study is offered as a prolegomenon to a new, complete edition of Eudocia's poem—a first installment on the larger interpretive program suggested by Smolak.2 It concerns my collation and transcription of a manuscript of the Homeric centos in the collection of the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos, Greece, which I inspected meis oculis in the summer of 1995.3 This hitherto unaccounted–for cento manuscript, datable on palaeographical grounds to the mid–fourteenth century, is one of a type used by Aldus Manutius for the editio princeps of the centos, published in Venice in 1502 (Renouard 1825, 57–62). Ludwich all but ignored Aldus' edition and the important revision of it published by Henricus Stephanus in 1578. His oversight was unfortunate, for the Iviron–Aldus–Stephanus recension of the centos (hereafter simply "Iviron," or "Iviron recension") is completely different from his, and as we shall see, better than his as well.Our investigation begins with the Aldine edition, the preface to which indicates that the text was transcribed and corrected for Aldus by Petrus Candidus, the son or perhaps nephew of Petrus Candidus Decembrius (1399–1477), papal secretary to Nicolas V. This younger Candidus belonged to the Benedictine order of the Camaldunensians, who were housed in the Venetian monastery of St. Michael Murianus. Following the preface of Candidus is a six–line elegiac poem on the centos composed by Scipio Fortiguerra, a member of the Aldine Academy who frequently collaborated with Aldus in preparing printed editions. We can safely infer, therefore, that both Candidus and Fortiguerra had a hand in the production of the editio princeps, and it is likely that the ms or mss they used were Venetian, or at least Italian (cf. Harris 1898, 25–26). That manuscript has yet to resurface, and may no longer exist, though it is possible that Iviron 4464 was once in Venice. The monastery obtained it, according to its librarian Father Theologos, from the personal library of [End Page 306] Maximos Margounios (1549–1602), bishop of Kythera, who... (shrink)