The Heterological Quest: Michel de Certeau's Travel Narratives and the "Other" of Comparative Religious Ethics

One of the central methodological issues for contemporary practitioners of comparative ethics is how to conceptualize and relate to the "other" encountered in cross-cultural studies. A valuable resource for reflection on this problem is the work of the French historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, whose diverse opus coheres around his notion of heterology—a "science of the other." In this article I explore perspectives on the cultural "other" emerging from Certeau's analyses of a series of "travel narratives" documenting the European encounter with the peoples of the New World. Certeau's meditations on the metaphor of the voyage, the interplay of orality and literacy, the politics of ethnography, and the semiotics of the "return of the repressed" offer, I suggest, important insights for comparative ethicists.     

Moral cognition and moral action: A theoretical perspective

Considerable theoretical work has been done in the area of moral reasoning. However, little conceptual thinking has been done about the relations between moral cognition and moral action. As a result, empirical research in this area has been unsystematic and difficult to interpret. A theoretical model, the Self Model, is proposed here, starting from the assumption that moral reasons are functionally related to action. First, a concept of cognitive motivation is presented as necessary for any cognitive account of morality. Two cognitive approaches to moral conduct, Piaget's and Haan's, are then discussed in their positive contributions and in their limitations. The Self Model is finally described through a set of empirically testable propositions. Its major theoretical characteristics are: it is cognitive, recognizing as the central function of human cognition the appraisal of truth; it acknowledges a basic duality of motivation, but stresses the normative pull of cognitive motivation; it is developmental; it uses the self as the central explanatory concept, establishing both the sense of personal responsibility and the dynamism of self-consistency.     

Functional representation of 3d space in endogenous attention shifts

The aim of this study was to explore whether the attentional system, as far as an endogenous orienting is concerned, allocates resources along the sagittal plane and whether such a process is affected by, and is likely to be based on, different functional representations of 3D space in the brain. Several models make a main action-based distinction between representations of peripersonal space and of those extrapersonal space. Accordingly, if attention has to move from one representation to another, it should be possible to observe a decrease in performance during such a transition. To test this hypothesis three experiments were run in which participants performed a cued detection task. Cue stimuli were informative and were centrally located around the fixation point. Target stimuli were displayed at four different depth planes. In the first experiment, assuming that the border between the peripersonal space and the extrapersonal space was at 1 m from the observer, half the target stimuli were located in the peripersonal space and half in the extrapersonal space. The fixation point was located at 1 m from the observer. In the second experiment, the fixation point was moved at 2 m from the observer in order to rule out the possible effects of ocular motor programming. In the third experiment, in order to rule out effects related to the spatial layout of target stimuli (i.e., centre of mass effect) two target stimuli were located in the peripersonal space and six in the extrapersonal space. In all the experiments, besides a validity effect, we observed greater reaction times when attention shift was across spatial representations than when it was within the same representation. The implications for action-oriented models of attention are discussed.