Excusing Responsibility for the Inevitable

It is by now well established that the fact that an action or aconsequence was inevitable does not excuse the agent from responsibilityfor it, so long as the counterfactual intervention which ensures thatthe act will take place is not actualized. However, in this paper I demonstrate that there is one exception to this principle: when theagent is aware of the counterfactual intervener and the role she wouldplay in some alternative scenario, she might be excused, despite the fact that in the actual scenario she acts, as we say, of her own freewill. I illustrate this contention by way of a critique of Fischer andRavizza's well-known account of responsibility for consequences.     

Remembering as Necessary for Forgiving

As Japan marks the 75th anniversary of World War II in 2020, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not offer a fresh apology and maintained that future generations should not have to keep apologizing for past mistakes. This paper uses the unresolved war issue of the military comfort women system as a context to discuss what it means for political apologies to be more than mere political gestures founded on political interests and discusses what it takes to facilitate forgiveness. It will examine the features of a repentant wrongdoer who deserves forgiveness based on how one relates to one’s past wrongdoing in order to distinguish political apologies that are genuine from those that are mere gestures aimed at hasty reconciliation. This will be discussed through the works of Jacques Derrida and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Next, through Jankélévitch’s and Paul Ricoeur’s ideas of forgiveness, it will be discussed how matters of justice and forgiveness should be understood as well as how the history of past wrongs and injustice is necessary for a genuine apology and makes forgiveness possible. It is also a moral responsibility for both perpetrators and victims to remember history in order to achieve personal forgiveness as well as begin social and political reconciliation.

     

Training Parents in Forgiving and Reconciling

Teaching parents how to forgive transgressions of parenting partners may reduce negative emotions, increase positive emotions, and, thus, decrease parenting stress. We implemented a waiting-list design to investigate the efficacy of a 9-hour psychoeducational group intervention, Forgiveness and Reconciliation through Experiencing Empathy (FREE), presented to 27 parents and caregivers of children 0–9 years old. Participants receiving FREE exhibited increased forgiveness of a target offense by the parenting partner and increased forgiveness of all parenting offenses. This study offers initial evidence that an intervention to promote forgiveness and reconciliation in parents could be beneficial and might improve parenting relations.     

Counseling Within the Forgiveness Triad: On Forgiving,Receiving Forgiveness,and Self-Forgiveness

The concept of the forgiveness triad—forgiving others, receiving forgiveness from others, and self-forgiveness—is introduced and discussed. Each aspect is defined, presented as philosophically rational and therefore appropriate within counseling, and described within a psychological framework of how people go about that aspect of forgiveness. The interactions of the triad are described, showing how the counseling process that employs forgiveness strategies may become quite complicated. A counselor's awareness of all 3 aspects of forgiveness may lead to greater clarity in the therapeutic encounter. Implications for the helping professions and for moral development of the client are discussed.     

How Religious Groups Promote Forgiving: A National Study

A nationally representative survey was conducted of adult Americans who were currently involved in prayer groups, Bible studies, or other religiously oriented small groups. The purpose of the study was to determine if these respondents had engaged in forgiving behavior as a result of being in their group and, if so, to ascertain which group activities were most likely to facilitate this behavior. Of the 1,379 respondents, 61 percent said their group had helped them to forgive someone, 71 percent said they had experienced healings of relationships as a result of their group, and 43 percent said they had worked on improving a broken relationship in recent months. Group activities generating "social capital" or "cultural capital" were mostly unrelated to these responses, while activities involving "emotional capital" and "spiritual capital" showed strong positive relationships. Further analysis suggests that forgiving behavior is especially facilitated by groups that emphasize prayer, sharing, and learning about forgiveness. The study also suggests that forgiving behavior may have such consequences as encouraging prosocial involvement, helping to overcome addictions,and promoting emotional well-being.     

心怀仁爱原谅伤害你的人

尊贵的《古兰经》中说:你们中有恩惠和财富者不可发誓[说]:永不周济亲戚、贫民及为主道而迁居者。他们应当恕饶,应当原谅。难道你们不愿真主赦宥你们吗?真主是至赦的、是至慈的。(24∶22)这节《古兰经》因大贤艾布·伯克尔而降示。当年,他的女儿圣妻阿伊莎被人诬陷,传出谣言。受艾布·伯克尔周济度日的迁士米斯托哈,却听信谣言,人云亦云。     

Forgiving the September 11th terrorists: associations with coping, psychological distress, and religiosity

Two studies examined how non-interpersonal forgiveness (when there is no social relationship between the transgressor and forgiver) related to coping and involuntary responses to stress, psychological distress, and religiosity. Three to six weeks after September 11th, 2001, forgiveness had non-linear associations with other responses to the terrorist attacks. Among college students (N=488), those who were trying or had forgiven (pro-forgiveness) the terrorists reported less involuntary engagement, more primary and secondary control coping, and more meaning finding than those who were unsure about forgiveness (ambivalent) and those who did not believe the perpetrators should be forgiven (anti-forgiveness). Ambivalent students reported the most distress, even after controlling for religion. Anti-forgiveness students reported less religiosity than ambivalent and pro-forgiveness students. Most findings were consistent among middle schoolers (N=154), particularly regarding psychological distress and responses to stress. Also, forgiveness of strangers for acts against one's community functioned separately from religion.     

Understanding Narratively,Understanding Alterity

Phenomenology's systematic exploration of how a world comes into existence for knowers – knowers who are often conceptualized as individual and ostensibly isolated – requires that it provide some account of the constitution of alterity. In this paper, I address this issue by arguing that we apperceive alterity in terms of the intentionality of behavior. A corollary of this argument is that the apperception of an alter as specifically human is a secondary attribution, following the primary apperception of intention. I further argue that the intentionality of behavior is understood through the projection of a narrative frame, or a “protonarrative,” onto the alter's behavior. I suggest that protonarrativity is the form that experience takes as its ontological condition. Our living is not simply known to us reflectively as protonarrative; rather, experience is lived as protonarrative.This essay is based on a paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, Memphis, Tennessee, October 28–30, 2004.     

德性、传统、理解——在麦金太尔的意义上

德性的传统不应被看作是流逝而去的历史痕迹,而应看作能够指引我们在当代更好地认识德性的前辕之辙.作者试图通过对德性历史传统的考察,理解德性的内在普遍性与可理解性的发展历史,从而从先思之中找到当代道德回归的应然之路;并且由此来看麦金太尔对于德性的现代性意识的理解以及对于当代道德异化的批判,重释对于德性的古典思考,揭示德性在现代生活世界的真相,把握德性的当代理论及其实践意义.德性,究竟是一种根植于人性的人类理想的道德范式?还是对于现实生活的可能性的把握?由此试解.     

时间、理解及意志

《九章集》中专门讨论和界定时间本质的一段文字写道,人们首先必然体验永恒,而永恒,正如人人所知,是时间的模型和原型。这一初始告诫由于我们相信它出于真心而尤其不可掉以轻心,凡是想寻找与告诫者共同的立场的希望似乎都要被它灭绝。豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯,《永恒的历史》     

Sibesh Bhattacharya,Understanding Itihasa

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research -     

Ernest Sosa, Knowledge, and Understanding

This paper offers and analysis of Ernest Sosa's Virtue Perspectivism.Although Sosa has been credited with fathering the influentialcontemporary movement known as Virtue Epistemology, I argue that Sosaimprudently abandons the reliabilist-based insights of VirtueEpistemology in favor of a reflection-based, ``perspectival' view.Sosa's mixed allegiance to reliabilist-based and reflection-based viewsof knowledge, in fact, leads to an unwelcome tension in his thoughtwhich can be relieved by recognizing that his reflection-based view isin fact an account of the cognitive state of understanding,rather than an account of knowledge. Sosa makes mattersdifficult for himself because he expects too much, as it were, from theconcept of knowledge, and in the process burdens his view with elementsof reflection it does not require. To solve the problem, I suggest thatSosa needs to develop a two-tiered epistemology whichrecognizes that knowledge, on the one hand, and understanding, on theother, both have necessary and sufficient conditions unique tothemselves.     

Attention,Emotion, and Evaluative Understanding

Philosophia - This paper assesses Michael Brady’s claim that the ‘capture and consumption of attention’ in an emotion facilitates evaluative understanding. It argues that...     

Understanding others,reciprocity, and self-consciousness

The article explores the basic conceptual relationship between social cognition, intersubjectivity and self-consciousness. A much-debated recent approach to social cognition, the so-called interaction theory, is the view that the ability to perceive, understand and interpret the behavior of others relies on interaction in the sense of mutual coordination of the embodied agents involved. It will be shown that this notion of reciprocity is too weak in order to fully account for social understanding. It will be argued that the idea of reciprocity should at least in some cases be conceived of as a stance persons adopt towards each other, which in turn presupposes that they acknowledge each other as self-conscious agents. This view is inspired by an argument originally introduced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte.     

Meaning Relations,Syntax, and Understanding

Axiomathes - This paper revisits the conception of intelligence and understanding as embodied in the Turing Test. It argues that a simple system of meaning relations drawn from words/lexical items...