Action,interaction and inaction: post-Kantian accounts of thinking,willing, and doing in Fichte and Schopenhauer

This article features the contributions of Fichte and Schopenhauer to a philosophical account of action against the background of Kant's earlier and influential treatment of the topic. The article first presents Kant's pertinent contributions in the areas of general epistemology and metaphysics (“transcendental philosophy”), general practical philosophy (“moral philosophy”), the philosophy of law (“doctrine of right”) and ethic (“doctrine of virtues”). Then the focus is on Fichte's further original work on the issue of action in those same areas. Finally, the article turns to Schopenhauer's radical revision of the Kantian and Fichtean affirmative accounts of acting and willing through the correlated introduction of the irrational will, the self-negated will and ethical inaction.     

Nietzsche’s account of self-conscious agency

This essay is an overview of Nietzsche’s philosophy of action. I discuss the central features of Nietzsche’s account and the ways in which it departs from standard accounts. Section 1 discusses Nietzsche’s view of the opacity of human action. I focus on the way in which the agent’s experience of the world is shaped by unnoticed and unconscious factors. Section 2 asks what role self-consciousness has in the production of action. Section 3 turns to the way in which Nietzsche understands the action/behavior distinction. Finally, Section 4 analyzes Nietzsche’s account of freedom. What emerges is a view that is not just one more entry into the standard debates, but an attempt at rethinking the terms in which the debate is cast.     

Multiplicity Within and Between: Addressing Multiple Roles Through Role Profiles in Couples

The purpose of this study is to test the validity of a personality assessment, Role Profiles, by exploring the relationship between role balance and individual well-being and the relationship between couples’ role profiles similarity and their marital satisfaction. Twenty couples were recruited and completed the assessments. This study partially supported Role Profiles’ validity and the findings were consistent with previous studies: individuals with higher role confusion were more likely to report lower self-esteem, and couples who shared many identical roles in their roles profiles were more likely to report higher marital satisfaction. The utility of Role Profiles as a clinical assessment in couples therapy is discussed.     

Postural coordination patterns as a function of dynamics of the support surface

The present study investigated the compensatory postural coordination patterns that emerge in the face of dynamic changes in the surface of support. Adult subjects stood on a moving platform that was sinusoidally translated in the anterior-posterior direction. The frequency and amplitude of the support surface translation were manipulated over a wide range of parameter values. The results revealed that as the frequency of platform motion increased, the postural system systematically exploited the available joint-space degrees of freedom and generated four distinct postural coordination modes (a rigid mode --> ankle mode --> ankle-hip mode --> ankle-hip-knee mode). It appears that upright standing posture has a small set of coordination patterns that are particular to the dynamics of the surface of support.     

The Relevance of Tillich for the Theology and Science Dialogue

This paper explores the relevance of the theology of Paul Tillich for the contemporary dialogue with the natural sciences. The focus is on his Systematic Theology , volume I. First I discuss the general relevance of Tillich's methodology (namely, the method of correlation) for that dialogue, stressing that a genuine dialogue requires cognitive input from both sides and that both sides find "value added" according to their own criteria (or what I call the method of "mutual creative interaction"). Then I move specifically to a Tillichian theological analysis of twentieth-century theoretical science and its empirical discoveries, including Big Bang, inflationary, and quantum cosmologies, quantum physics, thermodynamics, chaos and complexity, and molecular and evolutionary biology, suggesting how they relate to such Tillichian themes as finitude and the categories of being and knowing (time, space, causality, and substance) and to Tillich's understanding of such symbols as God, freedom and destiny, creation, and estrangement. In doing so, my intention is to provide a point of departure for further extended analyses of Tillich's theology in relation to contemporary natural science.     

Differential Factors in the Testing of Personality: II. Differences in Maturity

ABSTRACT

The evoking freedom or “but you are free” (BYAF) technique is a social influence tactic that offers recipients the freedom to accept or decline a request. This research tested the effectiveness of the evoking freedom technique in two field experiments. Participants were asked either to complete a survey (Experiment 1) or to allow a stranger to borrow their mobile phone to make a call (Experiment 2) on an urban university campus. Half of the requests involved language that evoked freedom, and half of the requests were direct. In both experiments, results showed significantly greater compliance in the evoking freedom condition. This research extends previous work by demonstrating the effectiveness of the technique using a high-stakes request and in a culture other than that of France, where the majority of evoking freedom studies have been conducted.     

Is expressive suppression an effective coping strategy? A study of Chinese rescue medical staff following an earthquake

The current study examined the function of expressive suppression among Chinese rescue medical staff following a major earthquake. We administered self‐report questionnaires to (1) a sample of Chinese hospital medical staff (n = 305) who assisted victims of the Sichuan earthquake, and (2) a second sample of Chinese hospital medical staff (n = 149) who had not been exposed to a major stressor. To examine possible interaction effects among differing emotion regulation strategies, we also conducted structured interviews with a subset of rescue medical staff to obtain support for a positive function of expressive suppression and a mediating role of positive reappraisal. Structural equation modelling indicated that expressive suppression was associated with higher levels of job engagement and lower levels of job burnout among the rescue medical staff and that these effects were mediated by positive reappraisal. However, for regular medical staff (not exposed to traumatic stress), expressive suppression was associated with higher levels of both job engagement and job burnout; these effects were mediated by acceptance. These results provide preliminary evidence for the positive role of expressive suppression within Chinese culture.     

Cultural foundations of safety culture: A comparison of traffic safety culture in China,Japan and the United States

Understanding how to assess the influence of culture on traffic safety is important for improving traffic safety globally. Traffic safety culture is embedded in the larger context of country’s cultural norms and values, producing different safety outcomes even when other factors are similar. The current work examines how culture influences traffic safety outcomes in three of the largest automobile countries in the world, but which have very different cultural values and which also have very different traffic safety outcomes: China, Japan and the United States. China has an emerging driver population and cultural values that result in aberrant driving behaviors and “scrambling” to gain the right of way, producing a high number of crashes. Japan has an established driver culture, but an emphasis on reducing risk, which results in a lower rate of crashes. The United States, with the most established “car culture”, has an historical and cultural view of the car as a representation of freedom, leading to choices that result in higher crash rates than many countries around the world. The current work explores these cultural underpinnings for traffic safety culture in each country by establishing the historical basis for a traffic culture, examining road, vehicle engineering and legal standards, and reviewing available crash data and data on safety attitudes. These countries are compared across the different dimensions to establish unique cultural influences on traffic safety.     

Caring,final ends and sports

In this essay I argue that sports at their best qualify as final ends, that is, as ends whose value is such that they ground not only the practices whose ends they are, but everything else we do as human agents. The argument I provide to support my thesis is derived from Harry Frankfurt's provocative work on the importance of the things we care about, more specifically, on his claim that it is by virtue of caring about things and practices, really caring about them – even loving them – we are able to regard and treat them as final ends. Sports, I claim, are paradigmatic examples of practices cared about and loved in these deep ways, and as such deserve to be considered, rather than dismissed because of their supposed triviality, as one of those ends around which a life most worth living can be legitimately forged.