This introduction presents a state of the art of philosophical research on cognitive phenomenology and its relation to the nature of conscious thinking more generally. We firstly introduce the question of cognitive phenomenology, the motivation for the debate, and situate the discussion within the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology and consciousness studies. Secondly, we review the main research on the question, which we argue has so far situated the cognitive phenomenology debate around the following topics and arguments: phenomenal contrast, epistemic (...) arguments and challenges, introspection, ontology and temporal character, intentionality, inner speech, agency, holistic perspective, categorical perception, value, and phenomenological description. Thirdly, we suggest future developments by pointing to four questions that can be explored in relation to the cognitive phenomenology discussion: the self and self-awareness, attention, emotions and general the... (shrink)

Effective treatment of disorders of agency presents a clinical conundrum. Many of the core symptoms or maintaining factors are actions and omissions that cause harm to self and others. Encouraging service users to take responsibility for this behavior is central to treatment. Blame, in contrast, is detrimental. How is it possible to hold service users responsible for actions and omissions that cause harm without blaming them? A solution to this problem is part conceptual, part practical. This chapter offers a conceptual (...) framework that clearly distinguishes between ideas of responsibility, blameworthiness, and "detached" and "affective" blame. It argues that affective blame is detrimental to effective treatment. And it suggests that affective blame can be avoided by attention to service users' past history, which directly evokes compassion and empathy. Finally, the chapter briefly considers whether the clinical stance of responsibility without blame should be adopted in non-clinical interpersonal and social contexts. (shrink)

This paper aims to differentiate between lying and irony, typically addressed independently by philosophers and linguists, as well as to discuss the cases when deception co-occurs with, and capitalises on, irony or metaphor. It is argued that the focal distinction can be made with reference to Grice’s first maxim of Quality, whose floutings lead to overt untruthfulness, and whose violations result in covert untruthfulness. Both types of untruthfulness are divided into explicit and implicit subtypes depending on the level of meaning (...) on which they are manifest. Further, it is shown that deception may be based on irony or metaphor, which either promote deceptive implicatures or are deployed covertly. Finally, some argumentation is provided in favour of why these cases of deceiving can be conceptualised as lying. (shrink)

In a series of three behavioral experiments, we found a systematic distortion of probability judgments concerning elementary visual stimuli. Participants were briefly shown a set of figures that had two features (e.g., a geometric shape and a color) with two possible values each (e.g., triangle or circle and black or white). A figure was then drawn, and participants were informed about the value of one of its features (e.g., that the figure was a “circle”) and had to predict the value (...) of the other feature (e.g., whether the figure was “black” or “white”). We repeated this procedure for various sets of figures and, by varying the statistical association between features in the sets, we manipulated the probability of a feature given the evidence of another (e.g., the posterior probability of hypothesis “black” given the evidence “circle”) as well as the support provided by a feature to another (e.g., the impact, or confirmation, of evidence “circle” on the hypothesis “black”). Results indicated that participants’ judgments were deeply affected by impact, although they only should have depended on the probability distributions over the features, and that the dissociation between evidential impact and posterior probability increased the number of errors. The implications of these findings for lower and higher level cognitive models are discussed. (shrink)

In our everyday interaction with the environment, we often perceive objects and spaces as opportunities to feel, maintain, enhance, and change our affective states and processes. The concept of affective affordance was coined to accommodate this aspect of ordinary perception and the many ways in which we rely on the material environment to regulate our emotions. One natural way to think of affective affordances in emotion regulation is to interpret them as tools for regulating felt affective states. We argue that (...) this way of conceiving of affective affordances is too restrictive. By analyzing the role of expressive properties of objects and spaces in emotion regulation, we show that our environment does not need to elicit felt affective states to regulate our emotions. Thus, we revise the concept of affective affordance to accommodate these cases. This revised concept explains more with less. Hence, it should be preferred in wide-reaching philosophical projects that aim to explain human affectivity as a situated phenomenon. (shrink)

In the 1970s, Peter Hacker and Bernard Williams argued that Wittgenstein was a Kantian transcendental idealist. In the 1980s, Hacker officially rescinded this interpretation and Williams in any case regarded Wittgenstein's transcendental idealism as a philosophical mistake. And ever since, there has been a lively debate about Wittgenstein's Kantianism, anti‐Kantianism, or non‐Kantianism. No one doubts that throughout his philosophical writings, Wittgenstein saw a fundamental connection between language and human life. Jonathan Lear's critical judgment on the later Wittgenstein's transcendental anthropology is (...) that it is ultimately a failure, due to an incoherence between the prima‐facie‐opposed 'transcendental' and 'anthropological' levels of reflection. According to Kant, a mental representation is transcendental when it is either part of, or derived from, our nonempirical innately specified spontaneous cognitive capacities. Then Kant's transcendental idealism (TI) can be formulated as a two‐part philosophical equation: representational transcendentalism, cognitive idealism. (shrink)

By “essentially embodied Kantian selves,” I mean necessarily and completely embodied rational conscious, self-conscious, sensible (i.e., sense-perceiving, imagining, and emoting), volitional or willing, discursive (i.e., conceptualizing, judging, and inferring) animals, or persons, innately possessing dignity, and fully capable not only of free agency, but also of a priori knowledge of analytic and synthetic a priori truths alike, with egocentric centering in manifestly real orientable space and time. The basic theory of essentially embodied Kantian selves was spelled out by Kant over (...) the course of slightly less than two decades, between 1768 and 1787, but above all, it flows from an empirical realist and metaphysical reading of the “Refutation of Idealism” that Kant inserted into the Postulates of Empirical Thought section in the 1787 edition of the first Critique. In my opinion, all rational but also “human, all-too-human” creatures like us are, synthetic a priori necessarily, essentially embodied Kantian selves. Let’s call that the essentially embodied Kantian selves thesis, or for short, EEKST. If EEKST is true, then it’s synthetic a priori impossible for the selves of creatures like us to exist independently of our own living organismic animal bodies or beyond the deaths of those bodies, whether temporarily or permanently, by any means whatsoever. Indeed, the very ideas of disembodied selves, their survival after death, and of human immortality, while minimally logically consistent, are in fact conceptually empty and incoherent, even over and above the synthetic a priori impossibility of such things, since the term “myself” indexically picks out an essentially embodied Kantian self, all of whose core features require grounding in a particular living organismic animal body. According to the recent and contemporary movement of transhumanism, the selves of creatures like us can not only exist independently of our bodies, as functional systems of representational content that are inherently able to be implemented or realized in digital-mechanical technology and uploadable to servers, but also to survive accidental or natural human death in server-limbo, then be downloaded into technologically enhanced partially mechanical humanoid bodies or even into wholly artificially-created completely mechanical non-humanoid bodies, survive in these new implementations or realizations for an indefinitely long time, repeat that process, and possibly even become immortal. Transhumanism is in fact metaphysically equivalent to Swedenborgianism, which Kant so effectively criticizes and wittily derides in his 1766 book, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. Moreover, and more importantly, if EEKST is true, then, just like Swedenborgianism, transhumanism is not only conceptually empty and incoherent, but also synthetic a priori impossible. And what’s more, it’s also existentially and morally reprehensible. In short, then, the belief in transhuman selves is nothing but a reprehensible noumenal fantasy or Hirngespinst. (shrink)

Throughout Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI's pontificate he spoke to a range of political, civil, academic, and other cultural authorities. These speeches reveal a striking sensitivity to the fundamental problems of law, justice, and democracy. He often presented a call for Christians to address issues of public ethics such as life, death, and family from what they have in common with other fellow citizens: reason. This book discusses the speeches in which the Pope Emeritus reflected most explicitly on this issue, along (...) with commentary from distinguished legal scholars. It responds to Benedict's invitation to engage in public discussion on the limits of positivist reason in the domain of law from his address to the Bundestag. Although the topics of each address vary, they are joined by a series of core ideas whereby Benedict sketches, unpacks, and develops an organic and coherent way to formulate a 'public teaching' on justice and law. (shrink)

RESUMEN: En este artículo se presenta la evaluación eudaimonista como una articulación entre el agente y los objetos del mundo. Sostendremos que, gracias a esta noción, la teoría de las emociones de Nussbaum es adecuada para dar cuenta de la función adaptativa de las emociones, por lo que las teorías no cognitivas no resultarían superiores en este aspecto. Esta noción serviría, asimismo, para no dejar de lado los aspectos cognitivos de la emoción. Veremos cómo las ideas de Nussbaum se basan (...) en las de las teorías evaluativas provenientes de la psicología, para después desplegar su propuesta en detalle. En la exposición, también trataremos otras cuestiones, entre ellas, la racionalidad de las emociones, la relación entre éstas y el florecimiento humano, o la vinculación de las mismas con nuestra condición vulnerable. ABSTRACT: This article presents eudaimonistic evaluation as an articulation between the agent and the objects of the world. We will argue that, thanks to this notion, Nussbaum's theory of emotions is appropriate to accounting for the adaptive function of emotions. This notion is useful for shedding light on the cognitive aspects of emotion. We will see how Nussbaum's ideas are based on evaluative theories from psychology, and we will explain in detail her proposals. In our explanation, we will deal with other questions such as the rationality of emotions, the relationship between emotions and human flourishing, and the link between emotions and our vulnerable nature. (shrink)

BackgroundThis study aims to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the activities of a Bioethics Unit (BU) 5 years since its implementation (2016–2020). The BU is a research unit providing empirical research on ethical issues related to clinical practice, clinical ethics consultation, and ethical education for health care professionals (HPS).MethodsWe performed an explanatory, sequential, mixed-method, observational study, using the subsequent qualitative data to explain the initial quantitative findings. Quantitative data were collected from an internal database and analyzed by descriptive analysis. Qualitative evaluation (...) was performed by semi-structured interviews with 18 HPs who were differently involved in the BU’s activities and analyzed by framework analysis.ResultsQuantitative results showed an extensive increment of the number of BU research projects over the years and the number of work collaborations with other units and wards. Qualitative findings revealed four main themes, concerning: 1. the reasons for contacting the BU and the type of collaboration; 2. the role of the bioethicist; 3. the impact of BU activities on HPs, in terms of developing deeper and more mature thinking; 4. the need to extend ethics support to other settings. Overall, our results showed that performing both empirical bioethics research and more traditional clinical ethics activities at the same unit would produce an impetus to increase collaboration and spread an 'ethical culture' among local HPs.ConclusionsOur findings contribute to a growing body of literature on the models of clinical ethics support services and the role of empirical research in bioethics internationally. They also prepare the ground for the implementation of a multidisciplinary Clinical Ethics Committee (CEC) that aims to support the BU’s ethics consultation service within the local context. (shrink)

BackgroundIn their professional practice, teachers can exert a strong influence on students, promoting healthy habits for life through the example of their own lifestyle. The aim of this study was to compare sports habits and attitudes in Physical Activity and Sports Education students at the universities of León and Mostaganem.MethodsWe administered the “Motivations and Attitudes Toward Physical Activity and Sports” questionnaire to 125 Algerian university students from the Institute for Physical Education and Sport and 122 Spanish university students from the (...) Faculty of Physical Activity and Sport Science.ResultsChi-square tests showed significant differences with a large effect size in perceptions of sport and satisfaction with participation.ConclusionThe students from Mostaganem and Leon show many similarities, such as the number of female students in physical education and sport is quite small compared to male students. Both consider that universities should improve sports facilities to promote good practice. The practice of sports by our university students is far superior to that of students with other degrees, suggesting that they will set a good example of healthy habits once they enter their profession. Nevertheless, the participation of female Algerian students in sport was lower than that of Spanish students, and students at León showed more intrinsic motivation for participating in sport than their counterparts at Mostaganem. (shrink)

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead (...) of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory. (shrink)

A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stimuli, particularly those threat-related, are processed preferentially, i.e., they are capable of capturing and grabbing attention automatically. Research has recently challenged this view, showing that the task relevance of emotional stimuli is crucial to having a reliable behavioral effect. Such evidence indicated that emotional facial expressions do not automatically influence motor responses in healthy young adults, but they do so only when intrinsically pertinent to the ongoing (...) subject’s goals. Given the theoretical relevance of these findings, it is essential to assess their generalizability to different, socially relevant emotional stimuli such as emotional body postures. To address this issue, we compared the performance of 36 right-handed participants in two different versions of a Go/No-go task. In the Emotional Discrimination task, participants were required to withhold their responses at the display of emotional body postures and to move at the presentation of neutral postures. Differently, in the control task, the same images were shown, but participants had to respond according to the color of the actor/actress’ t-shirt, disregarding the emotional content. Results showed that participants made more commission errors for happy than fearful body postures in the Emotional Discrimination task. However, this difference disappeared in the control task. Such evidence indicates that, like facial emotion, emotional body expressions do not influence motor control automatically, but only when they are task-relevant. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated measures to restrict the spread of the virus correlated with limitations in healthcare and changes in depression-related lifestyle elements for depressed patients, both of which are known to negatively affect the course of depression. This paper examines, the reporting of a worsening state of illness as a result of COVID-19-related measures among individuals with depressive disorders; and whether this worsening was related to restrictions in healthcare for depression or changes in depression-related lifestyle. The analysis was (...) based on a population-representative survey of the German population aged 18–69 years. The key findings were: 49% of respondents with self-reported diagnosed depression reported that the measures against the pandemic had a negative impact on their depressive illness. Of those who reported impaired access to healthcare for their depressive illness, 70% also reported a worsening of their depressive illness. This was a significantly higher percentage than those who did not experience impaired access to healthcare. Of those who reported changes in depression-related lifestyle, 58% reported a worsening of their depressive illness. This was a significantly higher percentage than those who did not exhibit any of the outlined behaviours. Worsening of the depressive illness was most common among those who reported a lack of daily structure or extended bedtimes. People who mentioned a lack of exercise also reported a worsening of their depressive illness. These findings reinforce the need to consider the suffering and possible increased suicide risk to people suffering from depression induced by measures designed to constrain the COVID-19 pandemic; an important consideration in identifying the optimal risk-benefit ratio when setting pandemic measures. Our study highlighted the importance of maintaining healthcare, even in crisis situations, and ensuring access to guideline-based treatment for people who need urgent care. It also showed that political interventions can influence individual behaviours that can have negative effects on depressive illness. (shrink)

From Letter to Phantasm. Some Remarks on Deleuze and Psychoanalysis in Logic of Sense. Our aim is to show how the two heterogeneous series of letter and phantasm make possible, through their convergence understood as the event of sense, a double passage. First, in the order of the Symbolic, the passage of the signifier into the signified. Second, the passage of the whole Symbolic order out of the desiring body. It will be shown that this amounts to a re-conceptualization of (...) causality as sense – event. (shrink)

This article presents the findings of a study on homeschooling in Czechia. It focuses on the gender aspects of this uncommon educational decision. Based on forty-three individual interviews with homeschooling parents, the article’s unifying thread is interest in understanding how mothers are involved in the decision to homeschool, and how the practice is embedded in gendered relationships within the society. We explore the results from two perspectives. First, we consider how the choice to homeschool lies simultaneously in embracing and opposing (...) cultural imperatives of good mothering. Second, we explore the precarious status of homeschooling mothers in relation to economic independence. By shedding light on individual choice within social structures, we situate the practice of homeschooling within the gender inequalities of today’s society. (shrink)

A Deleuzian incursion into Kantian Criticism. About the Doctrine of the Faculties from the Perspective of their Interest. Deleuze describes the doctrine of the faculties as a complete system of permutations. These faculties are analyzed in part according to their own interest: speculative or practical. Each faculty has a superior form through which it is realized. Deleuze’s question is to what extent a faculty becomes able to achieve its own interest and bear the legislative burden for another. Reflective judgment generally (...) makes it possible to move from the faculty of knowledge to that of desire, from speculative to practical. These are also questions concerning the free agreement of our faculties with the contingency of Nature’s own accord with them. (shrink)

We introduce the logic LRC, designed to describe and reason about agents’ abilities and capabilities in using resources. The proposed framework bridges two—up to now—mutually independent strands of literature: the one on logics of abilities and capabilities, developed within the theory of agency, and the one on logics of resources, motivated by program semantics. The logic LRC is suitable to describe and reason about key aspects of social behaviour in organizations. We prove a number of properties enjoyed by LRC and (...) its associated analytic calculus. These results lay at the intersection of the algebraic theory of unified correspondence and the theory of multitype calculi in structural proof theory. Case studies are discussed which showcase several ways in which this framework can be extended and enriched while retaining its basic properties, so as to model an array of issues, both practically and theoretically relevant, spanning from planning problems to the logical foundations of the theory of organizations. (shrink)

In this poster I compare two types of visualization that can be distinguished by the role of the viewer. In the first, which I call “closed visualization,” interpretation is seen as a decoding of meanings already set by the author. The other—“open visualization”—sees the viewer as an active co-creator of meanings. In its processual character, open visualization elicits the critical potential of the imagination and is open to new contexts and interpretations. As such, open visualization democratizes the production of knowledge (...) by enabling the critical analysis of the spectator. Instead of the hegemonic production of discourse typical of closed visualization, it introduces a “diagonal perspectivism” that allows problems to be seen from differentiated perspectives. As examples of the mentioned models of visualization I will analyze two projects: Neil Halloran’s The Shadow Peace: The Nuclear Threat and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. (shrink)

This paper attempts an overview on the ethical issues of pharmaceutical industry gift-giving in the United States of America. The article shows that law is not the only way in which the relationship between physicians and pharmaceutical industry can be regulated. Most important professional associations of physicians, pharmacists, residents etc. consider industry gifts as a conflict of interest. They created different ethical guidelines for this complicated issue. The paper demonstrates various solutions of ethical matters in the relationship between physicians and (...) pharmaceutical industry by analyzing codes and guidelines of different associations. On the one hand it shows organizations which allow exchanging of gifts of no value. On the other hand it presents associations that forbid physicians accepting even a pen. The article also shows various attitudes of these associations to situations like inviting physicians to dinner, accepting drug samples, taking subsidies from the company to defray the cost of the conference etc. The problem of those relations has been neglected for long time. From society’s point of view it is important for physicians to be informed about the rules and ways that pharmaceutical companies try to influence physicians’ prescription habits. (shrink)

Over the recent years more and more often we can hear in public debate that pharmaceutical industry is using aggressive marketing to increase the market growth. Their marketing actions are addressed mainly to physicians, because doctors are those who raise gains of pharmaceutical companies in the most considerable extent. The main aim of this paper is to answer the question what kinds of methods pharmaceutical companies are using to influence physicians’ prescribing practice. On examples will be shown how pharmaceutical sales (...) representatives are using reciprocity rule, liking, contrast, authority, scarcity, social proof and consistence to manipulate on doctors. The paper will try to answer the questions: Are physicians aware of influence of pharmaceutical companies? What should be done to increase their awareness? The article is based on the CAWI research. It is analysis of 372 questionnaires filled by physicians. Research was conducted with the support of Medycyna Praktyczna site – one of the most famous websites among the doctors in Poland. (shrink)

The burden of social responsibility is on the pharmaceutical industry. It is producing drugs and medical equipment which have to fulfill high quality standards, because they are very important from society point of view. The main business activity of pharmaceutical companies can be assessed as doing something good. However, a lot of drug producers are also involved in other ways of working for public wellness. There are using a great range of the instruments and programs to manage the corporate social (...) responsibility. The article describes the results of 31 in-depth interviews with the pharmaceutical sales representatives conducted between the June – November 2007. It shows what problems can be created during organizing: charity action, white Sundays, conferences for physicians and other pro bono events. It explains how such actions can meet with public opinion accusations. The main aim of this paper is to answer the questions: What are the advantages of realizing CSR for pharmaceutical companies? Is it true that this conception is used as a marketing tool by drug producers? What the pharmaceutical sales representatives think about charity actions that are conducted in their companies? (shrink)

The critical discourse analysis is the tool used in this article, to study how audiovisual media have constructed mental representation about the historical facts occurred in Spain between the final stage of the Spanish Civil War and the late 1980s: the theft of newborn babies. The State has failed in an attempt to establish policies that support truth, justice and reparation as it has been recalled by United Nations experts to the Government of Spain, and the reports and documentaries have (...) become vehicles to capture and recover memories. Our objective is to analyze how this collective awareness has been realized and the contribution of reports and documentaries. Our results show that the Spanish television channels silence the Francoist context to depict the thefts as the product of economical mobs focused on child trafficking. The international channels, however, put the origin of the dictatorship at the center of the discourse. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the problem of particularistic and objective approach to morals in the debate on global justice. The former one is usually defended by the communitarian philosophy and moderate liberal nationalism that claim for moral significance of national borders. Within this approach, patriotism is a fundamental virtue. The latter approach is presented by the cosmopolitans who apply the Rawlsian justice as fairness to the world at large. They reject moral significance of national borders and claim for equal (...) rights and obligations to all human beings regardless of their origin and nationality. This approach to global justice treats patriotism as a vice. The main aim of this essay is to analyse whether the concept of patriotism and the concept of global justice necessarily come into conflict with one other. (shrink)