The ability of a group of adults with high functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS) to distinguish moral, conventional and disgust transgressions was investigated using a set of six transgression scenarios, each of which was followed by questions about permissibility, seriousness, authority contingency and justification. The results showed that although individuals with HFA or AS (HFA/AS) were able to distinguish affect-backed norms from conventional affect-neutral norms along the dimensions of permissibility, seriousness and authority-dependence, they failed to distinguish moral and (...) disgust transgressions along the seriousness dimension and were unable to provide appropriate welfare-based moral justifications. Moreover, they judged conventional and disgust transgressions to be more serious than did the comparison group, and the correlation analysis revealed that the seriousness rating was related to their ToM impairment. We concluded that difficulties providing appropriate moral justifications and evaluating the seriousness of transgressions in individuals with HFA/AS may be explained by an impaired cognitive appraisal system that, while responsive to rule violations, fails to use relevant information about the agent’s intentions and the affective impact of the action outcome in conscious moral reasoning. (shrink)

The foundation of Economic failures to solve the economic problems is in the epistemological contradiction and failures of Economic Theories. This paper shows the most important contradictions in the Big Paradigms of the las centuries (Marx, Walras, Keynes).

A review of Tiziana Andina's The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories (Bloomsbury 2013).

Responding to the power of algorithms to operate within our daily lives, this article proposes to think of our contemporary moment as that of a society of preemption. Preemption defines the action of taking away something before an opportunity emerges or is actualized. By coupling anticipatory algorithms and preemptive technologies—like the premeditation of future events prior to their occurrence, as exemplified in popular culture by Minority Report (Massumi, Hansen)—state apparatuses force upon their subjects a modality of control that forestalls behaviors (...) according to a massive system of data-mining and digital profiling. In this society of preemption, data are not simply voluntary exteriorized onto technical supplements (Stiegler); they are extracted from individuals by devices that preempt events and program behavior. Such a society calls for a noopolitics of the milieu, a politics that focuses on the relation between psychic and collective individuals. Whereas noopolitics has mainly been understood as a pejorative term for the hegemonic operations of power on knowledge production (Lazzarato, Terranova, Hauptmann), this article proposes a more nuanced definition of noopolitics, reconceptualized from a power that controls to a power that operates on people’s memory, behaviors, and desire. Such a noopolitics takes place in a milieu (Canguilhem, Simondon) whose relational ontology and technicity now crucially address today’s society of preemption. (shrink)

In this article, I set out Suárez's conception of the demon's obstinacy. For Suárez, the demons’ obstinacy is a divine punishment. It is the result of the free and awful choice to turn away from God that the demons have decided to make, the main consequence of which is the loss of the freedom to will and to do the good. Taking up Aquinas’s conception, Suárez considers that the demonic nature is irredeemably corrupt and obstinate in evil. Demons are provided (...) only with a miserable freedom, consisting of the possibility to choose between different evils. Perpetually sinful and eternally constrained to remain so, they are condemned to wretchedness, to complacency in evil, and to the unremitting torments of hell. (shrink)