My aim in this paper is to chart what I see as parallels between the ontology of self in Charles Taylor’s work and that of various Buddhist ‘no-self’ views, along with parallels between Taylor’s commitment to reviving republican ideas and some aspects of Buddhist ethics. I see key resemblances and overlaps at the level of metaphysics as well as ethics. For Taylor, the sorts of atomistic accounts of self that have come to be accepted as natural and unquestionable in the (...) West are deeply misguided. The dominant Hobbesian-Lockean procedural picture of selfhood blinds us to the intrinsic relatedness of self to others and has profoundly negative consequences for the kinds of shared conceptions of the good necessary for viable and functioning democracies to survive and flourish. For Taylor, we thus need to retrieve and rearticulate a more accurate understanding of the self (Taylor 1985a, c, d, 1989, 1995a, b, 2003). This conception acknowledges that the self is located in a web of locution, conversation, and social interconnectedness, a sense that gives rise to an expanded notion of our moral and political duties. I argue that such an understanding of the self and ethics has strong resemblances to the kinds of views of the self and ethics as articulated by various schools of Buddhism. Conceptions of anātman or no-self and pratītyasamutpāda (interconnectedness) similarly broaden the scope and domain of our moral concern to be more inclusive by interrogating perspectives that conceive of the self as a separate and isolated individual. This is illustrated by many Buddhist schools of philosophy, which argue that a more accurate understanding of the self as empty of inherent and separate existence leads to adopting a more compassionate ethical stance towards others. I would suggest that, along the same lines, this understanding is required for a sustainable future for not only our communities, but that of an increasingly interrelated and interdependent world. (shrink)

Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic (...) change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and reference are defined. Frege’s context and compositional principles are generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered. Connections with other branches of linguistics, especially psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and natural language processing, are explored. -/- The book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It should also interest readers in related fields like literary and cultural theory and the social sciences. (shrink)

Empirical evidence shows that non-conscious appraisal processes generate bodily responses to the environment. This finding is consistent with William James’s account of emotion, and it suggests that a general theory of emotion should follow James: a general theory should begin with the observation that physiological and behavioral responses precede our emotional experience. But I advance three arguments (empirical and conceptual arguments) showing that James’s further account of emotion as the experience of bodily responses is inadequate. I offer an alternative model, (...) according to which responses (physical states) are perceived and interpreted by a separate cognitive process, one that assigns meaning to those responses. The non-conscious appraisal process and the interpretive process are distinct, hence a two-stage model of emotion. This model is related to Schachter and Singer’s two-factor theory. Their often-discussed experiment showed that interpretation can play a role in producing emotions. But they do not show that interpretation is necessary for producing emotions in general, outside of the experimental conditions that generated unexplained arousal in subjects. My two-stage model supports this stronger claim by situating the interpretive process in a comprehensive model of emotion. (shrink)

Neuroscientific data may be usefully invoked in the arbitration of debates concerning the scope of representational theories of the mind. Contemporary cognitivists tend toward theoretical imperialism in that they argue that all types of intelligent behaviour, including perceptual-motor skills, can be explained within the framework of representationalism. Phenomenologists argue that the scope of cognitivism is not as vast as its proponents suppose. They claim that perceptual-motor skills are non-representational and thus fall beyond the purview of cognitivism. I argue that this (...) debate can be resolved in favour of the phenomenologists by citing the neuroscientific evidence for the claim that there are two distinct neural memory systems: a hippocampal system which operates over neurally realized Fodorian representations and subserves rational thought and action and a non-representational striatal system which subserves perceptual-motor skills. (shrink)

In this paper the moral responsibility of a Healthcare Organization (HCO) is conceived as an inextricable aspect of the identity of the HCO. We attempt to show that by exploring this relation a more profound insight in moral responsibility can be gained. Referring to Charles Taylor we explore the meaning of the concept of identity. It consists of three interdependent dimensions: a moral, a dialogical, and a narrative one. In section two we develop some additional arguments to apply his concept (...) of personal identity to organizations. The final section works out the relationship of three dimensions of identity to some actual issues in contemporary HCOs: the tension between care and justice, the importance of dialogues about the diversity of goods, and the relevance of becoming familiar with the life-story of the HCO. Identity of an HCO is established and developed in commitments to and identification with certain goods that are central for a HCO. However, many of these goods are interwoven with everyday practices and policies. Therefore, moral responsibility asks for articulation of goods that often stay implicit and should not be reduced to a merely procedural approach. However difficult this articulation may be, if it is not tried at all HCOs run the risk of drifting away from their very identity as healthcare institutions: to offer care to patients and to do this in accordance with demands of social justice. (shrink)

The cornerstone of contemporary nursing practice is the provision of individualised nursing care. Sustaining and nourishing the stream of research frameworks that inform individualised care are the findings from qualitative research. At the centre of much qualitative research practice, however, is an assumption that experiential understanding can be delivered through a thematisation of meaning which, it will be argued, can lead the researcher to make unsustainable assumptions about the relations of language and meaning‐making to experience. We will show that an (...) uncritical subscription to such assumptions can undermine the researcher's capacity to represent experience at the high level of abstraction consistent with experience itself and to thus inform genuinely individualised care. Instead, using qualia as a touchstone for the possibilities of understanding and representing experience, we trace the ‘designative’ and ‘expressive’ distinction to language in order to raise critical questions concerning both these assumptions and common practices within qualitative research. Following the ‘expressive’ account of language, we foreground in particular the hermeneutic work of Gadamer through which we explore the possibilities for a qualitative research approach that would better seek the mot juste of individual experience and illuminate qualia in order to better inform genuinely individualised care. (shrink)

Decisions regarding the attribution of personhood to nonhuman animals have implications not only for the rights held by a particular species but also for the moral obligations of humans as moral agents. Since humans decide which species are accorded moral standing; thus becoming candidates for legal standing as legal persons; we need to be aware of our own vested interests in where the boundaries of duty are drawn. This paper argues that simple determination of moral standing is not sufficient to (...) induce relevant changes in moral behavior. It examines six problems that emerge for us in determining the personhood of nonhuman animals: identifying which capacities we believe to be morally relevant; separating the identification of capacities from the duty consequences; designing appropriate methodologies for assessing morally relevant capacities in nonhuman animals; identifying relevant claim rights for nonhuman animals; resolving competing moral interests among species and between nonhumans and humans; and ensuring appropriate moral behavior. The conclusion of this examination is that we have a long way to go in order to be consistent in our moral behavior. (shrink)

In Politics without Vision, Tracy Strong claims that in order to adequately grasp the politics of the twentieth century, and so be capable of meeting the challenges of the present, political theory must think without banisters. In this article I take up the task of thinking without banisters through the work of Theodor W. Adorno. Following the startling claim made by Adorno in a lecture course in 1963 that the term ‘humanity’ tends to ‘reify’ and ‘falsify’ important moral issues, I (...) examine three different usages of the concept of humanity in Adorno’s work, which I develop as a critique of foundations. I argue that understanding Adorno’s critique of humanity and of foundations involves understanding the role played by art in connecting the concepts of morality and politics. In connecting morality and politics in this manner, Adorno moves from a moral theory of resistance to a political theory of transformation whose insistence on the radical discontinuity between the present and the future serves as a model of a political theory without banisters. (shrink)

This article suggests first that the concept of interpersonal recognition be understood in a multidimensional (as opposed to one-dimensional), practical (as opposed to symbolic), and strict (as opposed to broad) way. Second, it is argued that due recognition be seen as a reason-governed response to evaluative features, rather than all normativity and reasons being seen as generated by recognition. This can be called a response-model, or, more precisely, a value-based model of due recognition. A further suggestion is that there is (...) a systematic basis for distinguishing three dimensions of recognition, depending on whether recognition is given to someone qua a person, qua a certain kind of person, or qua a certain person. Finally, it is argued that recognition is a necessary condition of personhood, but whether it is of direct or indirect relevance depends on our theories of personhood (social vs. capacity-theory) and practical identity (dialogical definition model vs. feature-model). Despite the apparent opposition, it is shown that interpersonal recognition is both a response to value and a precondition of personhood. (shrink)

This article aims to present the life and work of German thinker Hartmut Rosa as a philosopher of interest for nursing. Although his theoretical framework remains fairly unknown in the nursing domain, its main key concepts open up a philosophical and sociological approach that can contribute to the understanding of a wide range of study phenomena related to nurses, nursing, and healthcare. The concepts of social acceleration, alienation, and resonance are useful to explore healthcare organizations' performance by bringing the time (...) dimension of modernity to the center; to grasp nurses' experiences of caring for patients; and to understand nurses as agents endowed with the capacity to deploy their political agency to create alternative forms of relationship to themselves, to others, and the world, challenging the institutional order of healthcare organizations when it fails to resonate with their professional ethos. In this article, we propose Hartmut Rosa's theoretical framework as a new and inspiring phenomenological and critical lens that should be further explored to advance knowledge concerning phenomena that are found at the crossroads of the nursing domain and other fields of knowledge. (shrink)

Two major features of emotions are their personal, interested nature and the centrality of the self-other relation. There seems to be a built-in tension between the two: this is evident, for example, in negative emotions such as envy and hate, where one person has a significant negative attitude toward another. This tension is also obvious in positive emotions, such as schadenfreude, where an individual is pleased about the other’s misfortune. Such tension may even be greater in romantic love, where the (...) lover should give special attention and status to the beloved. The tension gains further momentum when we assume that self-fulfillment is an essential feature of romantic relationships. Indeed, it seems that in many low-quality romantic relations, the tension between self-fulfillment and the needs of the beloved is real and toxic. However, in enduring profound love, which involves the personal growth of each partner, self-fulfillment is not egoistic, and the tension drives mutual thriving. (shrink)

Much work in care ethics and disability studies is concerned with the flourishing of human animals as an independent species. As a result, it focuses on how the built environments and the social structures that produce them restrict and exclude us. This paper addresses this problem and provides tentative first steps towards sketching an account of ethics that is structured around the interdependent nature of human and more than human life. I argue that our embodied existence places us in a (...) shared condition of vulnerability with all forms of life on earth. This allows us to conceive of caring as an essential condition of the sustainability and well-being of social and ecological life systems. To this end, I discuss the notion of anthropocentrism – and the attendant notion of Anthropocene – and argue that the conception of human animality that underwrites it posits a disembodied and homogenous ‘anthropos’ that is equally responsible for and equally affected by unsustainable social systems. Further, I examine the debate that opposes realist and constructivist accounts of nature, and I argue that it is inadequate to look at nature through the lenses of the predatory social systems that are responsible for ecological injustices in the first place. (shrink)

Within the empirical study of moral decision making, people’s morality is often identified by measuring general moral values through a questionnaire, such as the Moral Foundations Questionnaire provided by Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). However, the success of these moral values in predicting people’s behaviour has been disappointing. The general and context-free manner in which such approaches measure moral values and people’s moral identity seems crucial in this respect. Yet, little research has been done into the underlying notion of self. This (...) article aims to fill this gap. Taking a phenomenological approach and focusing on MFT, we examine the concept of moral self that MFT assumes and present an improved concept of moral self for the empirical study of morality. First, we show that MFT adopts an essentialist concept of moral self, consisting of stable moral traits. Then, we argue that such a notion is unable to grasp the dynamical and context sensitive aspects of the moral self. We submit that Ricoeur’s narrative notion of identity, a self that reinterprets itself in every decision situation through self-narrative, is a viable alternative since it is able to incorporate context sensitivity and change, while maintaining a persisting moral identity. Finally, we argue that this narrative concept of moral self implies measuring people’s morality in a more exploratory fashion within a delineated context. (shrink)

Theories of cognition and theories of social practices and institutions have often each separately acknowledged the relevance of the other; but seldom have there been consistent and sustained attempts to synthesize these two areas within one explanatory framework. This is precisely what my dissertation aims to remedy. I propose that certain recent developments and themes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, when understood in the right way, can explain the emergence and dynamics of social practices and institutions. Likewise, the (...) view I construct explains how social practices and institutions shape the character of cognition of their constituent agents. Moreover, I explain both cognitive and social agency under the single explanatory framework provided by Dynamic Systems Theory. Drawing upon the phenomenological tradition, "embodied, "extended", "embedded", "enactive", and "ecological" approaches to cognition, as well as the conceptual resources of Dynamic Systems Theory, I construct a theory of agency that sees cognitive and social agents as far-from-equilibrium, open, recursively self-maintenant dynamic systems. Depending on the specifics of concrete circumstances, such systems, which I call "Dynamic Embodied Agents", may develop and possess emergent capacities for error-detection, flexible learning, normative behavior, representation, self-reflection, various modes of pattern-recognition, a temporal sense of self, and even moral responsibility. Some such systems are also sensitive to perceived social influences ; while reciprocally constituting and causally affecting them. (shrink)