Creating Character: Aristotle on Habituation,the Cognitive Power of Emotion,and the Role of Prudence

For Aristotle creating a virtuous character means habituating a stable emotional state or disposition (hexis), which enables the agent to feel and act rightly, and to have the intellectual virtue prudence (phronēsis) complete this habituation. But because feeling or emotion (pathos) is a passive state, it is not clear in what way we can make ourselves be affected correctly. This paper tries to solve this apparent difficulty by emphasizing the cognitive power of emotion. It also examines the role of prudence in the acquisition of ethical virtue, supporting an anti-intellectualist understanding of practical motivation.     

Teaching in the Global Village: Notes Towards a Religious Studies Rhetoric

The author describes her participation in a religious studies teaching workshop where she was asked to think creatively about the art of teaching, what implications result from changes in the field, and the relationship of religious studies to other fields. General conclusions endorse pedagogies that are dialogic, participatory, and experiential and invite possibilities provided by changes in the field that encourage courses that are more inclusive of marginal voices and attentive to multicultural inflections. In assessing the relationship of religious studies to other fields, the author draws on her interdisciplinary background in religion and literature to apply Aristotelian rhetoric to the interpretation of a short story, thereby providing an actual model of how disciplines can complement each other while also highlighting aspects of the pedagogical and multicultural principles endorsed by the workshop participants. The application of Aristotelian principles of logos, ethos, and pathos becomes for the workshop participants a religious studies rhetoric: a provisional model for how to interpret classroom conduct.     

The distorted hand metric representation serves both perception and action

ABSTRACT

The representation of our body location is achieved by integrating sensorimotor inputs with information about our body size. Previous studies have shown that the metric representation of our hand, also called the body model, is distorted, namely overestimated in width and underestimated in length, although we are able to perform accurate fine movements. Considering the known dissociation between action-oriented and perception-oriented body representations, we asked whether the body model mainly serves body perception or whether it is also involved in movements. Twenty-one healthy adults were administered with the Localization Task (LT) which required the participants to localise the perceived position of their unseen hand by means of a stick held by their other hand, and the Proprioceptive Matching Task (PMT) which required the participants to match their perceived hand position with a visual target. LT and PMT maps were compared with the actual hand sizes. We found that the PMT map exhibited similar body model distortions, confirming that the body model is involved in motor programming. Furthermore, we observed that a partial adjustment of the distortions occurs in a motor condition.     

KNOWING OURSELVES AS EMBODIED,EMBEDDED, AND RELATIONALLY EXTENDED

What does it mean to know oneself, and what is the self that one hopes to know? This article outlines the implications of an embodied understanding of persons and some aspects of the “self” that are generally ignored when thinking about our selves. The Cartesian model of body–soul (or body–mind) dualism reinforces the idea that there is within us a soul, or self, or mind that is our hidden, inner, and real self. Thus, the path to self‐knowledge is introspection. The alternative view is that persons are embodied (entirely physical creatures), embedded (formed by our physical and social environment), and at times extended (cognitively soft‐coupled to artifacts or other persons). This article emphasizes the bodily, active, contextual, relational, often simulated, and sometimes extended nature of the selves that we are, and that we hope to know.     

Specifying the human body configuration

Three experiments investigated the specific spatial relations that define the human body configuration. In Experiment 1, participants searched for scrambled bodies amongst normal distractors. In Experiments 2 and 3 participants were asked to identify whether single body images (upright or inverted) were scrambled or normal. Scrambled bodies had head or limbs displaced to either symmetrical or asymmetrical positions. Experiment 1 showed that asymmetrical violations are recognized faster than symmetrical violations. All three experiments revealed that when the number of structural violations is held constant, head violations are recognized faster than limb violations. Experiment 3 also showed a greater inversion effect for scrambled bodies that maintained head on top and vertical symmetry, providing evidence that these are key spatial relations in the human body configuration. Overall, the results supported our hypothesis that the human body configuration is defined primarily by a head at the apex of a vertically symmetrical body.     

Entertaining the stranger

This paper attempts to address the problematic of the other in analytical psychology. Despite the important contributions of Papadopoulos (1991, 2002) and Huskinson (2000, 2002) this question has not received the attention it warrants. Read in the light of Levinas' writings on otherness, Jung's tendency to characterize the self as unitary, autonomous and undivided may be seen as a defence against or even an erasure of otherness. However, a Derridean revisioning of this approach suggests that the ambiguities and paradoxes which Jung insisted were intrinsic to his intuitions about the self-concept have the potential to evoke a remarkably subtle vision of Selfhood manifesting within the very tensions generated between Same and Other. In conclusion, this experience of Selfhood is amplified in the light of some of the insights of contemporary German philosopher Waldenfels, with particular attention to the role of pathos in the encounter with alterity.     

身体的意义：生成论视域下的情绪理论

生成论的情绪学说从“意义建构”的视角看待情绪的动力作用, 主张情绪与认知相互交织, 与有机体适应环境的身体活动密切联系。情绪是身体的情绪, 身体是情绪体验中的身体。身体在情绪体验中扮演着构成性角色。根据这一观点, 情绪是一种积极的行动倾向, 是在理解环境意义基础上的具身行动。情绪并非发生于有机体头颅内, 而是产生于大脑、身体和环境的互动与耦合之中。由于认知与情绪在生成论的视域下统一在有机体意义建构的活动之中, 因而认知的4E属性也必然反映到情绪上, 使得情绪和情感也具有了具身、嵌入、延展和生成特征。情绪的生成理论为了解情绪, 进而理解意识的本质提供了一个新视角。     

Tragedy and the art of questioning in depth psychotherapy

Abstract

This essay examines how the art of questioning is central to depth psychotherapy. Conceiving of depth psychotherapy as a tragic art suggests the kind of inquiry unique to psychotherapy is that oriented to pathos. To explicate the art of pathic inquiry, this essay draws upon Nietzsche's depiction of Greek tragedy as structured by the relations between the artistic deities Apollo and Dionysus. As a tragic art, the structure of pathic questioning is formed by the principles these gods embody: reason and passion. Their intertwining within a psychotherapeutic discourse stimulates a liberative self‐knowledge, exemplified here by the differing approaches of Eugene Gendlin and James Hillman.     

The body of the other: intercorporeality and the phenomenology of agoraphobia

How is our experience of the world affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the agoraphobic condition. In agoraphobia, we are rewarded with an enriched glimpse into the intersubjective formation of the world, and in particular to our embodied experience of that social space. I will be making two key claims. First, intersubjectivity is essentially an issue of intercorporeality, a point I shall explore with recourse to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the prepersonal body. The implication of this claim is that evading or withdrawing from the other remains structurally impossible so long as we remain bodily subjects. Second, the necessary relation with others defines our thematic and affective experience of the world. Far from a formal connection with others, the corporeal basis of intersubjectivity means that our lived experience of the world is mediated via our bodily relations with others. In this way, intercorporeality reveals the body as being dynamically receptive to social interactions with others. Each of these claims is demonstrated via a phenomenological analysis of the agoraphobe’s interaction with others. From this analysis, I conclude that our experience of the world is affected by our experience of others precisely because we are in a bodily relation with others. Such a relation is not causally linked, as though first there were a body, then a world, and then a subject that provided a thematic and affective context to that experience. Instead, body, other, and world are each intertwined in a single unity and cannot be considered apart.     

Smells like cooperation? Unpleasant body odor and people's perceptions and helping behaviors

Scents are omnipresent in our daily world and they are of great importance as represented by the use of perfumes or fragrances in the work environment. Even though it has been argued that bad scents invoke negative judgments, we argued and demonstrated that a bad body odor elicits feelings of pity in others (Experiment 1) and increases prosocial behavior (Experiment 2). Further, we showed that only if a person is not held accountable for his own body odor this elevated other's prosocial behavior (Experiment 3). These findings provide a novel perspective on the way human body odor affects our perceptions and consequent behaviors.     

Bodily Awareness, Imagination and the Self

Common wisdom tells us that we have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. These senses provide us with a means of gaining information concerning objects in the world around us, including our own bodies. But in addition to these five senses, each of us is aware of our own body in ways in which we are aware of no other thing. These ways include our awareness of the position, orientation, movement, and size of our limbs (proprioception and kinaesthesia), our sense of balance, and our awareness of bodily sensations such as pains, tickles, and sensations of pressure or temperature. We can group these together under the title ‘bodily awareness’. The legitimacy of grouping together these ways of gaining information is shown by the fact that they are unified phenomenologically; they provide the subject with an awareness of his or her body ‘from the inside’. Bodily awareness is an awareness of our own bodies from within. This perspective on our own bodies does not, cannot, vary. As Merleau‐Ponty writes, ‘my own body…is always presented to me from the same angle’ (1962: 90). It has recently been claimed by a number of philosophers that, in bodily awareness, one is not simply aware of one's body as one's body, but one is aware of one's body as oneself. That is, when I attend to the object of bodily awareness I am presented not just with my body, but with my ‘bodily self’. The contention of the present paper is that such a view is misguided. In the first section I clarify just what is at issue here. In the remainder of the paper I present an argument, based on two claims about the nature of the imagination, against the view that the bodily self is presented in bodily awareness. Section two defends the dependency thesis; a claim about the relation between perception and sensory imagination. Section three defends a certain view about our capacity to imagine being other people. Section four presents the main argument against the bodily self awareness view and section five addresses some objections.     

After Dogma: Reinhard H¨tter's Challenge to Contemporary Theology: A Review Essay

Reinhard Hütter's Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice constitutes an important new proposal for relating theology, doctrine and the life of the church. The central problematic is posed by the privatization of Christianity in the modern world, as exemplified in the classic debate between Karl Barth and Erik Peterson on the status of dogma. Against modern theological constructivism, Hütter argues that theology must be situated within the overall pathos of life in the Spirit, concretely mediated through church practices and the dogma that defines them as a distinctive 'public'. Despite its sometimes thin exegetical basis, the work offers a fresh, ecumenically promising account of the theological endeavour.     

Where are you,my beloved?: On absence,loss, and the enigma of telepathic dreams

The subject of dream telepathy (especially patients' telepathic dreams) and related phenomena in the psychoanalytic context has been a controversial, disturbing ‘foreign body’ ever since it was introduced into psychoanalysis by Freud in 1921. Telepathy ‐ suffering (or intense feeling) at a distance (Greek: pathos + tele)‐is the transfer or communication of thoughts, impressions and information over distance between two people without the normal operation of the recognized sense organs. The author offers a comprehensive historical review of the psychoanalytic literature on this controversial issue, beginning with Freud' years‐long struggles over the possibility of thoughttransference and dream telepathy. She then describes her own analytic encounter over the years with five patients' telepathic dreams' dreams involving precise details of the time, place, sensory impressions, and experiential states that the analyst was in at that time, which the patients could not have known through ordinary sensory perception and communication. The author's ensuing explanation combines contributory factors involving patient, archaic communication and analyst. Each of these patients, in early childhood, had a mother who was emotionally absent‐within‐absence, due to the absence of a significant figure in her own life. This primary traumatic loss was imprinted in their nascent selves and inchoate relating to others, with a fixation on a nonverbal, archaic mode of communication. The patient's telepathic dream is formed as a search engine when the analyst is suddenly emotionally absent, in order to find the analyst and thus halt the process of abandonment and prevent collapse into the despair of the early traumatization. Hence, the telepathic dream embodies an enigmatic ‘impossible’ extreme of patient‐analyst deep‐level interconnectedness and unconscious communication in the analytic process. This paper is part of the author's endeavour to grasp the true experiential scope and therapeutic significance of this dimension of fundamental patient‐analyst interconnectedness.     

The Experience of Agency: Feelings, Judgments, and Responsibility

ABSTRACT— The experience of agency refers to the experience of being in control both of one's own actions and, through them, of events in the external world. Recent experimental studies have investigated how people recognise a particular event as being caused by their own action or by that of another person. These studies suggest that people match sensory inputs to a prediction based on the action they are performing. Other studies have contrasted voluntary actions to physically similar but passive body movements. These studies suggest that voluntary action triggers wide-ranging changes in the spatial and temporal experience not only of one's own body but also of external events. Prediction and monitoring of the consequences of one's own motor commands produces characteristic experiences that form our normal, everyday feeling of being in control of our life. We conclude by discussing the implications of recent psychological work for our notions of responsibility for action.     

Distorted body representations in healthy cognition

Delusions and misperceptions about the body are a conspicuous feature of numerous neurological and psychiatric conditions. In stark contrast to such pathological cases, the immediacy and familiarity of our ordinary experience of our body can make it seem as if our representation of our body is highly accurate, even infallible. Recent research has begun to demonstrate, however, that large and systematic distortions of body representation are a normal part of healthy cognition. Here, I describe this research, focusing on distortions of body representations underlying tactile distance perception and position sense. I also discuss evidence for distortions of higher-order body representations, such as the conscious body image. Finally, I will end with a discussion of the potential relations among different body representations and their distortions.     

The role of hand size in the fake-hand illusion paradigm

When a hand (either real or fake) is stimulated in synchrony with our own hand concealed from view, the felt position of our own hand can be biased toward the location of the seen hand. This intriguing phenomenon relies on the brain's ability to detect statistical correlations in the multisensory inputs (ie visual, tactile, and proprioceptive), but it is also modulated by the pre-existing representation of one's own body. Nonetheless, researchers appear to have accepted the assumption that the size of the seen hand does not matter for this illusion to occur. Here we used a real-time video image of the participant's own hand to elicit the illusion, but we varied the hand size in the video image so that the seen hand was either reduced, veridical, or enlarged in comparison to the participant's own hand. The results showed that visible-hand size modulated the illusion, which was present for veridical and enlarged images of the hand, but absent when the visible hand was reduced. These findings indicate that very specific aspects of our own body image (ie hand size) can constrain the multisensory modulation of the body schema highlighted by the fake-hand illusion paradigm. In addition, they suggest an asymmetric tendency to acknowledge enlarged (but not reduced) images of body parts within our body representation.     

Disowning one's seen real body during an out-of-body illusion

Under normal circumstances, we experience that our center of awareness is located behind our eyes and inside our own body. To learn more about the perceptual processes that underlie this tight coupling between the spatial dimensions of our consciously perceived self and our physical body, we conducted a series of experiments using an 'out-of-body illusion'. In this illusion, the conscious sense of self is displaced in the testing room by experimental manipulation of the congruency of visual and tactile information and a change in the visual perspective. We demonstrate that when healthy individuals experience that they are located in a different place from their real body, they disown this body and no longer perceive it as part of themselves. Our findings are important because they reveal a relationship between the representation of self-location in the local environment and the multisensory representation of one's own body.     

Embodied simulation: From neurons to phenomenal experience

The same neural structures involved in the unconscious modeling of our acting body in space also contribute to our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains. Neuroscientific research also shows that there are neural mechanisms mediating between the multi-level personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode the emotions and sensations they experience. A common functional mechanism is at the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding: embodied simulation. It will be shown that the present proposal is consistent with some of the perspectives offered by phenomenology.     

Body Dysmorphia and the Phenomenology of Embodiment

This paper explores the relationship between phenomenology and body dysmorphia. This is, to explain, a disorder in which the sufferer perceives, and is obsessed by, defects in appearance which are either non-existent or severely exaggerated. I will see how Husserl’s and Sartre’s analyses of embodiment can explain the radical uncertainty, and anxiety, about appearance that underscores this condition. Their accounts of the body-as-lived reveal first of all an essential intimacy between body and self that the “objective”, material, view of the body covers over. Second, however, their analyses show that there is always also an essential elusiveness of the body before our attempts to grasp or know it. Taken together, these points indicate how body dysmorphia arises. If there is an essential project of the self to know the body, but this is necessarily frustrated, then we can see how an obsession and anxiety surrounding bodily appearance can emerge.     

Left caloric vestibular stimulation as a tool to reveal implicit and explicit parameters of body representation

Homeostatic parameters, such as temperature, are related to body representation. In this study, we measured whether caloric vestibular stimulation (CVS) alters body temperature and tactile processing, and if in the direction predicted by a holistic body matrix representation.Skin temperature and tactile two-point discrimination (TPD) acuity were measured for both arms before, immediately after and with a delay from CVS. Participants were also administered a personality questionnaire and an anxiety inventory to rule out confounding factors. Two control experiments were planned to exclude casual variations.Our results show that temperature drops significantly in both arms after CVS. CVS also induces a bilateral improvement in tactile acuity (even though not immediately after but in the delayed condition). Finally, these effects are not due to learning, as demonstrated by the control experiment.In summary, our results suggest that vestibular stimulation updates body representation, supporting the evidence in favor of a body matrix.