Hume’s Ethics: Ancient or Modern?

At Treatise 581ff., Hume seems to ground moral distinctions in therational deliberations of the observer, thereby making sentiment expendable.Is Hume then an example of an early modern ethicist, for whom moral distinctions are derived from reason alone? I argue that Hume's use of strategiesfrom ancient ethics can help explain how reason remains subordinate to sentiment.For if to take up the point of view of the judicious spectator we musthave the right constellation of sentiments and passions (the right character, asthe ancients might say), then moral distinctions are only derivatively based onreason.     

Israel: What's a Radical Feminist Doing in a Place Like This?

These are Marcia Freedman's personal observations of the fate of feminism in Israel. Her observations reveal that the current emphasis on "machismo" could spell the decline of feminist gains, and she concludes by showing the country's need for a strengthened feminism and a realistic cooperation between men and women. Freedman was a member of the Knesset in Jerusalem at the time she made these observations.     

The capacity for selective concentration on color versus form of consonants

The concept of active exclusion or inhibition of some stimuli while focusing on others has been largely ignored or rejected in recent work in the field of attention. As part of an ongoing series of studies involving five posthypnotically cued levels of mental concentration, it was possible to test the capacity for active blurring of one stimulus attribute (form) while simultaneously perceiving another attribute (color) accurately. In lowered concentration conditions three highly trained hypnotic Ss were dramatically successful in blurring the form and thereby impairing identification of colored consonants flashed tachistoscopically at speeds ranging from 300 msec down to 50 msec—without any concomitant loss in accuracy of identification of the color in which the letter was printed. Among a supplemental series of control experiments, it was further demonstrated that the active inhibitory process can be reversed so as to act upon color but not form; and that the Ss were unable to duplicate these feats in the waking state without benefit of posthypnotic programming. A theoretical interpretation of the findings, in terms of a conceptual model of the mind, is offered.     

Part I: Psychoanalysis and Undergraduate Education

ABSTRACT

Part I consists of two articles by the professors who invented the Chicago course, articulating why they think that teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates is crucial. Marcia Dobson, who is a clinician along with being a professor of Classics, gives some personal history as to why she is so invested in psychoanalysis and offers a clinical understanding for why she thinks undergraduates need psychoanalysis to help them understand themselves better. John Riker, a philosopher, concentrates on why the conceptual tools of psychoanalysis are crucial for undergraduates as they think about who they are, who they want to be, and how they are going to negotiate adult life.     

Pleasure and displeasure from the body: Perspectives from exercise

We investigated some types of triggers of embarrassment and their personality correlates. A total of 161 undergraduates indicated how embarrassed they would be in a variety of situations classified a priori into three types. The types were based on the kind of trigger they embodied and were derived in part from current theories of embarrassment. Several analytic techniques, including factor analysis, suggested that there are at least three sorts of situations people find embarrassing: committing a faux pas, being the centre of attention, and threatening another's social identity. We created a subscale for each subtype of trigger. Embarrassibility on each subscale was correlated with embarrassibility on the others, but the reliabilities of the subscales substantially exceeded their intercorrelations. Some personality variables, for example, Neuroticism (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975) correlated with all subscales, whereas other personality variables correlated differentially, for example, Revised Self-Monitoring (Lennox & Wolf, 1984), Interaction Anxiousness (Leary, 1983), and Rejection Sensitivity (Downey & Feldman, 1996). We believe, contrary to previous suggestions (Edelmann & McCusker, 1986), that there are subtypes of triggers of embarrassment and they they roughly correspond to the different causes of embarrassment as proposed by various theorists. We discuss the implications of our results for theories of embarrassment.