Extensively updated to include clinical findings over the last two decades, this third edition of A Practitioner's Guide to Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy reviews the philosophy, theory, and clinical practice of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. This model is based on the work of Albert Ellis, who had an enormous influence on the field of psychotherapy over his 50 years of practice and scholarly writing. Designed for both therapists-in-training and seasoned professionals, this practical treatment manual and guide introduces the basic principles of (...) rational-emotive behavior therapy, explains general therapeutic strategies, and offers many illustrative dialogues between therapist and patient. The volume breaks down each stage of therapy to present the exact procedures and skills therapists need, and numerous case studies illustrate how to use these skills. The authors describe both technical and specific strategic interventions, and they stress taking an integrative approach. The importance of building a therapeutic alliance and the use of cognitive, emotive, evocative, imaginal, and behavioral interventions serves as the unifying theme of the approach. Intervention models are presented for the treatment of anxiety, depression, trauma, anger, personality disorders, and addictions. Psychologists, clinical social workers, mental health counselors, psychotherapists, and students and trainees in these areas will find this book useful in learning to apply rational-emotive behavior therapy in practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper aims to offer a new perspective on role modelling by examining adolescents’ own efforts to lead a morally virtuous life. While traditional approaches to moral education emphasize the importance of teachers as role models, this study proposes a shift in focus towards adolescents’ own role models. Drawing on the philosophical concept of moral self-cultivation and psychological insights on identity development and social cognitive learning, it is argued that adolescents have the ability to cultivate their moral character by (...) emulating others. However, empirical evidence suggests that adolescents often do not perceive teachers as their role models. Consequently, moral educational theories are advised to demand less of teachers as role models. Teachers could invest more time in understanding students’ personal role models and encourage them to compare these role models with their own behavior. By acknowledging and addressing students’ role models, teachers can facilitate the moral self-cultivation of adolescents. (shrink)

It is well known that Carnap, early in his philosophical career, took most of metaphysics to consist of meaningless pseudostatements. In contrast to this meaning-theoretic critique of metaphysics, we develop what we take to be Carnap’s later value-based critique. We argue that this later critique is forceful against several central contemporary metaphysical debates, its origin in the principle of tolerance notwithstanding.

Wouter Van Haaften; The Justification of Conceptual Development Claims, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 51–70, https.

If climate change represents a severe threat to humankind, why then is response to it characterized by inaction at all levels? The authors argue there are two complementary explanations for the lack of motivation. First, our moral judgment system appears to be unable to identify climate change as an important moral problem and there are pervasive doubts about the agency of individuals. This explanation, however, is incomplete: Individual emitters can effectively be held morally responsible for their luxury emissions. Second, doubts (...) about individual agency have become overly emphasized and fail to convincingly exonerate individuals from responsibility. This book extends the second explanation for the motivational gap, namely that the arguments for the lack of individual agency do in fact correspond to mechanisms of moral disengagement. The use of these mechanisms enables consumption elites to maintain their consumptive lifestyles without having to accept moral responsibility for their luxury emissions. (shrink)

This paper reviews the debate on the notion of biological function and on functional explanation as this takes place in philosophy. It describes the different perspectives, issues, intuitions, theories and arguments that have emerged. The author shows that the debate has been too heavily influenced by the concerns of a naturalistic philosophy of mind and argues that in order to improve our understanding of biology the attention should be shifted from the study of intuitions to the study of the actual (...) practice of biological inquiry. (shrink)

Edition de la question 6 du deuxième Quodlibet du carme anglais Robert de Walsingham. Le texte présente la première critique dans l’école des Carmes d’Oxford de la doctrine de Dieu comme premier connu de Richard de Conington.

Lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) is a lipid mediator with a wide variety of biological actions, particularly as an inducer of cell proliferation, migration and survival. LPA binds to specific G‐protein‐coupled receptors and thereby activates multiple signal transduction pathways, including those initiated by the small GTPases Ras, Rho, and Rac. LPA signaling has been implicated in such diverse processes as wound healing, brain development, vascular remodeling and tumor progression. Knowledge of precisely how and where LPA is produced has long proved elusive. Excitingly, (...) it has recently been discovered that LPA is generated from precursors by ‘autotaxin’, a once enigmatic exo‐phosphodiesterase implicated in tumor cell motility. Exogenous phospholipases D can also produce LPA, which may contribute to their toxicity. Here we review recent progress in our understanding of LPA bioactivity, signaling and synthesis. BioEssays 26:870–881, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Moral error theorists face the now what question. How, if at all, ought they to adjust their moral practice after having discovered the error? Various answers have emerged in the literature, including, but not limited to, revisionary fictionalism, revisionary expressivism, and revisionary naturalism. Recently, François Jaquet has argued that there are only two available answers to the now what question, since every extant answer except revisionary fictionalism collapses into abolitionism. This paper provides a response. First, it argues that revisionary naturalism (...) does not collapse into abolitionism. The argument is that abolitionists can neither utter schmoralist naturalist replacement judgments that contain moral terms nor eliminativist naturalist replacement judgments that do not contain moral terms. This means that abolitionists cannot utter replacement judgments at all. Since revisionary naturalists can utter replacement judgments, their view does not collapse into abolitionism. Second, the paper gives reason to believe that this result extends beyond revisionary naturalism to the other revisionary metaethical theories, and that this is good news for moral error theory. (shrink)

According to moral error theory, moral discourse is error-ridden. Establishing error theory requires establishing two claims. These are that moral discourse carries a non-negotiable commitment to there being a moral reality and that there is no such reality. This paper concerns the first and so-called non-negotiable commitment claim. It starts by identifying the two existing argumentative strategies for settling that claim. The standard strategy is to argue for a relation of conceptual entailment between the moral statements that comprise moral discourse (...) and the statement that there is a moral reality. The non-standard strategy is to argue for a presupposition relation instead. Error theorists have so far failed to consider a third strategy, which uses a general entailment relation that doesn’t require intricate relations between concepts. The paper argues that both entailment claims struggle to meet a new explanatory challenge and that since the presupposition option doesn’t we have prima facie reason to prefer it over the entailment options. The paper then argues that suitably amending the entailment claims enables them to meet this challenge. With all three options back on the table the paper closes by arguing that error theorists should consider developing the currently unrecognised, non-conceptual entailment claim. (shrink)

I argue that there are at least four different ways in which the term ‘function’ is used in connection with the study of living organisms, namely: function as activity, function as biological role, function as biological advantage, and function as selected effect. Notion refers to what an item does by itself; refers to the contribution of an item or activity to a complex activity or capacity of an organism; refers to the value for the organism of an item having a (...) certain character rather than another; refers to the way in which a trait acquired and has maintained its current share in the population. The recognition of a separate notion of function as biological advantage solves the problem of the indeterminate reference situation that has been raised against a counterfactual analysis of function, and emphasizes the importance of counterfactual comparison in the explanatory practice of organismal biology. This reveals a neglected problem in the philosophy of biology, namely that of accounting for the insights provided by counterfactual comparison. (shrink)

Is a neo-Platonic theory of moral education better than a neo-Aristotelian one, because the former offers a dialogue method that teachers can use in universities to induce epiphanies in students, in order to jump-start the moral development of those with a rather vicious character? In this paper, this claim, put forward by Jonas and Nakazawa in their book A Platonic Theory of Moral Education, is evaluated. Admittedly, the Nicomachean Ethics, which came to us in the form of a collection of (...) edited lecture notes, gives the impression that Aristotle was not interested in dialogue. But by looking at the dialogical form of the Ethics and by consulting some of his ideas on logic, I show that Aristotle’s oeuvre does include valuable ideas about how teachers may conduct dialogues with their students. These dialogues may not yield epiphanies and will not convert vicious adults, but they are suitable for reaching most students and can appeal to their emotions and practical wisdom. While Jonas and Nakazawa argue that Plato and Aristotle only agree on the centrality of habituation, imitation, and role-modelling in their accounts of moral education, I conclude that dialogue should be added to that list. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, I will examine the question why it is so difficult to understand madness. First, I will examine what the third-person approach of psychosis or madness has to offer, and where its limitations lie with respect to its proper understanding. Next I will examine if and how the first-person perspective on madness contributes to our understanding. I will demonstrate that there is a stalemate between third- and first-person perspectives, which on the one hand hinders a free sight (...) on madness, but which is on the other hand exemplary of the problem that is presented by madness. This turns out to be a paradox that haunts both the concept and experience of madness itself, as well as those who try to understand it. In the fourth section, I will unpack some of the operations of the paradox as it is found both in philosophy and madness, both by their producers as by their consumers. In the fifth section, I will tentatively sketch (im)possibilities of escaping paradoxes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How to Reason Beyond Reason? Toward a Philosophical Understanding of MadnessWouter Kusters, PhD (bio)To analyze the situation of madness on the ground, we need a grounded perspective, close to the situation at hand. The closer we come to the subject under scrutiny, the clearer its outlines, fine-grained details, and its dynamics, and the better we reach an explanation and understanding. The closer the approach, however, the higher the chances (...) are of becoming myopic and losing the connections with broader—or higher—perspectives: the view from above. It has been due to philosophical and historical approaches from above to the practices of philosophically inspired psychiatry that we may gain new insights into what is going on on the ground—and underground. This article by Garson provides such a view that may lead to a change in perspective, a new way to draw boundaries on the ground, to discover similarities and dissimilarities through space and time, without thereby losing the lived connection to the problematic ground.Garson proposes to replace a binary opposition of madness (in the sense of sick or insane) versus sanity (in the sense of healthy), with a triad of concepts, sanity, madness, and idiocy, taken from the work of philosophers of psychiatry avant la lettre in the early modern times, Locke, Kant, Wigan, and Heinroth. This triad is to be understood in terms of reason, where idiocy consists of the diminishment of some aspects of reason, while madness would be characterized by a perversion of reason. By examining how this perversion—or more neutrally said, this change—of reason was conceived by the four thinkers, Garson sheds a new light on research and theory within the philosophy of madness and the philosophy of psychiatry today. He examines the question of “how is it that the mad person “has” reason, but is still not reasonable?” with the help of the four authors mentioned above (of which I discuss three).In answering this question, Garson refers specifically to my work as an example of “exactly the kind of ontology we need for rethinking madness in a positive manner—not necessarily ‘positive’ in the sense of good, helpful, or ennobling, but in the sense of going beyond a mere lack, absence, or failure.” I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment, [End Page 317] and Garson’s proposal of this tripartite schema is helpful and valuable for thinking through how we can further nourish a positive view of madness, especially with reference to Mad Pride.Locke and HeinrothGarson discusses some fragments from Locke and concludes that according to Locke “the mad person, in contrast to the idiot, possesses reason by virtue of possessing an intact inferential capacity. What ultimately makes them mad, and not reasonable, is that their premises are flawed by the unhinged power of association.” So, with Locke the capacity for inferential logic is not disturbed, and in that sense reason is intact. The unreasonable behavior would be due, according to Locke, to an unbridled increase in imagination and associations, which are taken for reality. Instead of reason the capacity to align imagination and reality is afflicted. When we translate this Lockean view into contemporary terms, we could say that it is not their cognition, their way of processing stimuli that is problematic, but their being overwhelmed by impressions or stimuli. This is akin to “bottom-up” theories: Something is wrong with perception or experience, and ‘higher’ capacities of cognition and reasoning remain intact. Reason may seem ‘perverted,’ but at a closer look, this is a result of their being victim to anomalous experience, too many stimuli or too strong imaginations.Heinroth also explicitly distinguishes madness from idiocy, that is, from a diminishment of mental capacities. Instead, he considers madness as a reaction to what Garson calls “a reality that is too awful to bear.” Madness is then “a wholesome desire of nature to cure a perversion through another perversion.” Again, madness is then not in itself a diminishment of reason, but an attempt to cure something that went wrong, in a way that is also only seemingly wrong (perverted reason). Madness then is again within reason, but this core of intact reason is... (shrink)

(2001). Association and deliberation in risk society: Two faces of ecological democracy. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 4, Associative Democracy: The Real Third Way, pp. 85-104.

Between 1950 and 1954 Belgium had a homogeneous catholic majority in Parliament. Theoretically this brings about a stable government, but in real term it caused a lot of trouble. The Christian People's Party changed its prime minister three times. Different reasons explain this attempt to further the particracy from a party one had not expected this. First, the outcome ofthe Royal Question creates a tension between the party and the government. The party can not fulfill its election promises. Second, the (...) homogeneous majority is based on a heterogeneous party, where progressives and conservatives, Flemish and Walloon politicians determine the decision-making. Moreover, the party as such claims its position in the decision-making process. The parliamentary groups and the government are considered as executors ofa partyprogram and must thereforebe subordinated to the party. The process where parties expanded to the dominant actor in the political system, becomes clear. (shrink)

Political parties are at the centre of democratic and parliamentary systems. The current classic political parties are expressions of societal cleavages of the nineteenth and twentieth century. After the Second World War, those parties look for new strategies to assure important parts of the electorate. One of the strategies is to integrate the existent cleavages into the party itself. But this kind of integration is not without ideological and organisational consequences. These cleavages manifest themselves within the party as subgroups and (...) have to respect some overarching loyalties. As far as the internal decision making process is concerned, they have some consequences as well. Rules of pacification have to be respected when the integration of cleavages has to be recognizable and successful. The disadvantage of these rules of pacification is the absence of a formal active involvement of the party on the ground. At the same time, the presence of subgroups can lead to realdemocratic involvement and even discourage oligarchie tendencies. (shrink)

The present book is the result of the conference 'Renovatio, inventio, absentia imperii. From the Roman Empire to Contemporary Imperialism', held in Brussels at the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Academia Belgica in Rome (September 11-13, 2014). At the heart of the conference was the 'reception', 'Nachleben' or 'permanence' of the Roman Empire, of an idea and a historical paradigm which since classical Antiquity has supported the most widespread claims to obtain and consolidate power. The volume's focus is (...) on culture in a broad sense, i.e. including besides the arts, philosophy, religion and, most importantly, discourse. As such, a wide array of themes are subjected to academic scrutiny. Whereas the main focus is on Europe and North America, some contributors also reach out towards non-Western contexts, whether or not directly related to the Roman example. A theoretical and sociological dimension is also added thanks to the discussion on methodological issues. More specifically, the following question(s) receive particular attention: what is our position as researchers, embedded in a contemporary, often Western, democratic and capitalist context; what about the notion of empire itself, its constituent elements and the kind of ideological prerogatives to which it is generally subjected; in other words, apart from the many historical variants and instances of reception of empire, through which filters can, and inevitably do, we approach this topic? A question that has become ever more pregnant since the beginning of the twenty-first century, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the events of September 11, which have revivified what could be called American 'imperialism', and at a time when an essentially economic variant, driven by 'emerging' powers such as China, has increasingly contested existing power structures."--Page [4] of cover. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Rituals in dying and mourning have a social and a psychic aspect: they have the twin function of diminishing the danger of succumbing to intense emotions (fear, despair, powerlessness and grief) by evoking a feeling of solidarity, and of enhancing the sense of being connected to a larger community, on which basis these emotions are acknowledged as well as dimmed and kept under control. As the changes in mourning ritual of the last half of the 20th century demonstrate, the relation (...) or balance between these social and psychic functions of mourning rituals has been changing. From the 1960s onward, many traditional rituals came under suspicion and were pushed aside. Since the 1980s, a quest for new rituals has emerged. The article will address the question of what has changed in the social and individual regulation of these feelings by comparing old, mostly religious rituals, to more recent ones. The latter will be interpreted as part of a highly individualized quest for societal recognition and solidarity, demonstrating how processes of individualization, `solidarization' and globalization are interconnected. (shrink)

This book provides a novel formulation and defence of moral error theory. It also provides a novel solution to the so-called now what question; viz., the question what we should do with our moral thought and talk after moral error theory. The novel formulation of moral error theory uses pragmatic presupposition rather than conceptual entailment to argue that moral judgments carry a non-negotiable commitment to categorical moral reasons. The new answer to the now what question is pragmatic presupposition substitutionism: we (...) should substitute our current moral judgments, which pragmatically presuppose the existence of categorical moral reasons with ‘schmoral’ judgments that pragmatically presuppose the existence of a specific class of prudential reasons. These are prudential reasons that, when we act on them, contribute to the satisfaction of what the author calls ‘the fundamental desire’; namely, the desire to live in a world with mutually beneficial cooperation. (shrink)

If coherence is to have justificatory status, as some analytical philosophers think it has, it must be truth-conducive, if perhaps only under certain specific conditions. This paper is a critical discussion of some recent arguments that seek to show that under no reasonable conditions can coherence be truth-conducive. More specifically, it considers Bovens and Hartmann’s and Olsson’s “impossibility results,” which attempt to show that coherence cannot possibly be a truth-conducive property. We point to various ways in which the advocates of (...) a coherence theory of justification may attempt to divert the threat of these results. (shrink)

This paper examines to what extent Jaeggi’s concept of alienation can account for instances of alienation that have a social cause and require a social solution. The paper argues that there are three interrelated problems with her account of alienation. First, Jaeggi’s conception of alienation is unable to make a distinction between individual and social causes of alienation. Second, Jaeggi constructs alienation as an individual failure to appropriate norms and roles properly, but in doing so, conflates two requirements for appropriation, (...) namely, objective appropriability, and successful appropriation. Third, the failure to make this distinction causes Jaeggi to be unable to understand alienation truly as a social pathology because she is unable to distinguish incidental sources for alienation from structural, social sources for alienation. Only the second kind of alienation can count as a social pathology. A solution is proposed to overcome those problems, namely to understand instances of structural alienation as blockages of social freedom. Structural alienation occurs if social structures make self-determination impossible, so that alienation is the result of a structural flaw. Understanding alienation in this way enables us to think of alienation as a social problem that requires a social solution. This is an important insight because, given the centrality of the concept of alienation, it suggests a way in which the concept of alienation can be used in the tradition of critical theory to criticize social conditions. (shrink)

In this commentary, I discuss three aspects of Monique Deveaux’s account. First, the method of Grounded Normative Theorizing she adopts to engage directly with the contexts and views of those experiencing poverty fits within a range of proposals to enhance the methodology of moral and political philosophy, and I would call on all philosophers working in this space to further develop these innovative methodologies. Second, Deveaux extends the capabilities approach by focusing on the group-based character of poverty and making the (...) case for building the collective capabilities of poor-led social movements. While I do not substantially disagree with this argument (in practice), I argue that we should be careful to avoid normative collectivism (as a theoretical assumption). Finally, Deveaux discusses political solidarity with people experiencing poverty. I argue that this should be based on esteeming each other’s various contributions in more diverse ways than only in narrow economic terms. Treating people in poverty and poor-led social movements as agents of justice, as Deveaux advocates, is a significant step in this endeavour. (shrink)

Full virtue and practical wisdom comprise the end of neo-Aristotelian moral development, but wisdom cannot be cultivated straight away through arguments and teaching. Wisdom is integrated with, and builds upon, habituation: the acquisition of virtuous character traits through the repeated practice of corresponding virtuous actions. Habit formation equips people with a taste for, and commitment to, the good life; furthermore it provides one with discriminatory and reflective capacities to know how to act in particular circumstances. Unfortunately, habituation is often understood (...) primarily as a method suitable only for children. This article examines whether Aristotle limited habituation to children and, if not, what the relationship between habituation and wisdom beyond childhood might look like. This article concludes that wisdom-guided habituation is also possible for adults who continue and confirm their already established virtuous habits. The implications of this for professional moral education are subsequently discussed. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with reasonings that purport to explain why certain organisms have certain traits by showing that their actual design is better than contrasting designs. Biologists call such reasonings 'functional explanations'. To avoid confusion with other uses of that phrase, I call them 'design explanations'. This paper discusses the structure of design explanations and how they contribute to scientific understanding. Design explanations are contrastive and often compare real organisms to hypothetical organisms that cannot possibly exist. They are not (...) causal but appeal to functional dependencies between an organism's different traits. These explanations point out that because an organism has certain traits, it cannot be alive if the trait to be explained were replaced by a specified alternative. They can be understood from a mechanistic point of view as revealing the constraints on what mechanisms can be alive. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in unethical work behavior. Several types of survey instruments to collect information about unethical work behavior are available. Nevertheless, to date little attention has been paid to design issues of those surveys. There are, however, several important problems that may influence reliability and validity of questionnaire data on the topic, such as social desirability bias. This paper addresses two important issues in the design of online surveys on unethical work behavior: the (...) response scale for questions regarding the frequency of certain types of unethical work behavior and the location of the background questions in an online survey. We present the results of an analysis of a double split-ballot experiment in a large sample (n = 3,386) on governmental integrity. We found that, when comparing response scales that have labels for all categories with response scales that only have anchors at the end, the latter provided answers with higher validity. The study did not provide support for the conventional practice of asking background questions at the end. (shrink)

This article deals with a type of functional explanation, viability explanation, that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of science. Viability explanations relate traits of organisms and their environments in terms of what an individual needs to survive and reproduce. I show that viability explanations are neither causal nor historical and that, therefore, they should be accounted for as a distinct type of explanation.