Locke’s theory of personal identity in Essay 2.27 notably resonates with the account of personal “Ipseity” developed by Henry More in The Immortality of the Soul as a critique of Averroism. Like Locke, More established a connection between personal identity, consciousness, and memory, emphasising the crucial role of consciousness in unifying an individual’s mental life. However, More equated consciousness with an attribute of the soul, thereby making the continuity of personal identity over time dependent on the persistence of the soul’s (...) immaterial substance. He further characterised the sameness of this substance as sufficient to ensure human identity, thus conflating personal identity, human identity, and substance identity. Although Locke did not reference More directly, his arguments in the Essay indicate his intention to challenge More’s substance-based account of personal identity. Additionally, Locke sought to expose the inconsistencies in More’s defence of the pre-existence of the soul, one of the pillars of his rational theology. Locke contended that this doctrine could not adequately vindicate divine justice and benevolence, as it failed to guarantee the continuity of personal identity in this life. Consequently, it could not provide an effective alternative to the traditional doctrine of original sin, contrary to More’s beliefs. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the genesis and evolution of Locke’s idea of human life as a “state of mediocrity”. While this idea had ancient roots going back to the early Church fathers, it remained current in the seventeenth century where mediocrity was generally equated with a condition of partial ignorance and imperfection. Locke’s account of it is original; while life is a time of mediocrity, death opens the way to the extremes of eternal misery or eternal happiness. Initially, inspired by the (...) Church fathers, Locke conceived of human life as a condition of _intellectual_ mediocrity. Subsequently, and arguably prompted by his reading of the pessimistic outlooks of Nicole and Pascal, he redefined the state of mediocrity in more optimistic terms: humans are naturally suited to their mediocre state. A further development of his conception of mediocrity, again involving a partial rethinking of the human condition, can be found in the _Essay_, where Locke represents mediocrity as an imperfect state of insatiable desire. It is redeemed, however, by the ability of living human beings to attain perfect knowledge of morality. (shrink)

The Cambridge Platonist Henry More was fiercely averse to the Lurianic Kabbalah, with which he became acquainted through the two tomes of the Kabbala denudata. More contributed to the first tome substantially and was highly influential in shaping the reception of this work, edited by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. He denounced the incompatibility of the Christian religion with Luria's system and in his last contribution, the Fundamenta, he put forward an apagogical argument meant to show the inconsistency of Luria's teaching. (...) The article aims at exploring the nature of More's argument so as to highlight the philosophical essence of his criticism, the intention of which was to emphasize the incompatibility of the Kabbalah with any form of rational speculation. Luria's doctrine appeared to More to be a compromise between materialism and spiritualism, a sort of hybrid theory that was even worse than materialism, given its misleading theistic appearance as well as the lack of internal coherence. This compromise was also morally unacceptable, being symptomatic of weakness of the will. (shrink)

This book offers an exciting array of contributions to the study of Locke’s own study of travel literature. The importance of its vast topic was acknowledged from the beginning of serious secondary writing about him. Lord Peter King, in his Life of John Locke (1829), remarked that Locke “employed his leisure in reading books of travels, of the best of which he was a great admirer.” This book, drawing upon and considerably expanding the contents of a 2022 special issue of (...) Studi Lockiani, provides recent findings and discoveries, pressing into uncharted areas. The authors and editors use a wide array of sources, treating “travel literature” broadly and capaciously to include the grand works of travel represented by Hakluyt, Purchas, Bernier, Thévenot, Ramusio, Ogilby, and Sagard, as well as specific “relations” of travels to the far reaches of the world, information-conveying correspondence, notebook entries, and maps (especially when annotated). The topic is of great interest not only to Locke scholars, but also to all those investigating cultural anthropology, political philosophy, the expansion of colonialism, the history of ideas, and their circulation in the early modern period. (shrink)

Recent mathematical results, obtained by the author, in collaboration with Alexander Stokolos, Olof Svensson, and Tomasz Weiss, in the study of harmonic functions, have prompted the following reflections, intertwined with views on some turning points in the history of mathematics and accompanied by an interpretive key that could perhaps shed some light on other aspects of (the development of) mathematics.

The interest of conducting this research with people suffering from terminal cancer lies in the fact that this type of diseases radically transforms people's experience. The meaning that is bred around these intimate experiences can be described by the anthropology of health, in order to contribute to research on the body and diseases as part of sociohistorical processes. The questions guiding this work are: How does terminal cancer affect people? What are the bodily transformations generated to face this new reality? (...) In order to interpret the ethnographic findings, the concept of auratic expression from critical theory, Bakhtin’s concepts of polyphony and the concept of fictional lines from North American feminism were used. The methodology employed was a performative ethnography that focuses on the description of the body and perception, also considering narrative production as an extended metaphor in order to question the materialization of experience in rituals, drawings, or performances. (shrink)

This chapter employs hypothetical reasoning to explore Peirce’s idea of metaphor, even though the author never systematically studied the topic and left only fleeting references on the matter. The chapter first aims to illustrate Peirce’s classification of hypoicons, which includes metaphors, images, and diagrams, and outlines metaphor as a symbol where the iconic component prevails. It then investigates the factor differentiating metaphors from images and diagrams, suggesting that it can be found in their abstractness, as metaphors represent the most mature (...) iconic form of synthesis (Thirdness). The chapter also examines the cognitive function of metaphors, arguing that they are products of abductive reasoning. Furthermore, it emphasizes the relevance of cultural context in the creation and interpretation of metaphors, concluding that it is impossible to abstractly define the “concept of metaphor”. Finally, it discusses the relationship between metaphors and scientific knowledge, illustrating that both are produced by abductive reasoning, and highlights how metaphors can contribute to the development of scientific understanding. (shrink)

In the most classic definition, metaphor consists in transferring to an object a name that is proper to another. In this sense, metaphor is based on a principle of substitution. In substituting one element for another, however, metaphor rewrites reality, making us see it from another point of view. In this sense, then, metaphor becomes a tool of additive knowledge and not a substitute: if it merely replaced one conceptual entity with another that is similar to it, it would be (...) redundant and tautological. In this recreation of reality, metaphor creates a violation of referential presuppositions that risks finding the epistemic vigilance of the receiver unprepared. This situation is particularly frequent in digital public debate, where the illusion of proximity and of democratic, horizontal participation obscures the social and sociolinguistic asymmetry of the participants. Metaphor, which in ideal dialogical contexts has the power to revitalise the knowledge process, becomes instead a tool for intentionally increasing the communicative asymmetry. In this contribution I intend to show, through the analysis of texts from the digital environment, the contexts in which metaphor is intentionally used in an abusive and manipulative manner, that is, contexts in which metaphor serves the exercise of power. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to address the analysis of the metaphors that emerge from a deep, pre-linguistic dimension: the activity of dreaming. The work is divided into three main parts: in the first one, we will introduce the debate on metaphor and dreaming. In the second part, we will explore how, according to Hillman, the understanding of dream metaphors necessarily involves the activity of connecting the (rational and speculative) waking Ego with the characters that inhabit the so-called "underworld” (...) in order to produce a reflexive integration able to add meaning to the psychic life. In parallel, we use Merleau-Ponty’s perspective to describe the relationship between dreaming and awake experiences in a new way, for which the waking world is present in the dreaming one as an expression of the same complexity. Finally, we contextualize these ideas in the psychotherapeutic field and argue for a hermetic value of metaphors that appear in dreams. According to this view, metaphors have a strong communicative value and can express the multilayered complexity of subjectivity. (shrink)

Metaphors possess a fundamental and dynamic role in shaping human cognition, language, and experience, moving beyond their traditional understanding as mere linguistic ornaments. Drawing on the embodied cognition hypothesis, I argue that our bodies and interactions with the world form the basis for how we conceptualize and communicate ideas. This includes how embodied emotions give rise to bodily metaphors, creating a hermeneutical bridge between emotion and language. From this viewpoint knowledge is not purely abstract but grounded in bodily experiences, and (...) meaning is tied to our bodily and imaginative structures. With the expression metaphors in action I aim to show how these conceptual mappings function as interpretive frameworks in real-world contexts, guiding perception, constraining reasoning, and influencing institutional practices, policy decisions, and individual choices. (shrink)

“It is as if I have a brick on my stomach”—our stomach aches and we need to use an ‘as if’ to explain others what our experience feels like. This metaphoric language is necessary for us to describe the quality of the pain we experience. The bioethicist Engelhardt reminds us how our body is often opaque to us (1973). The opacity and recalcitrance of the body is comparable to the opacity and autonomous life of the algorithms that we use to (...) organize our society. As they are becoming more and more the body of our collective lives, committing to make an algorithm as translucent as possible might be as challenging as making human bodies as readable as possible. In the same way as we need to know why our stomach hurts if we want to cure it, so we need to read through the opacity of an algorithm if we want to fix the malfunctioning of certain technology in our lives. In this paper I will examine how phenomenology and its metaphorical language can help the digital language of decision-making algorithms, especially in medical humanities, to comply to the ethical commitment to transparency. Namely, I will use phenomenology to shed light on the co-constitutive triad of user-designer-system in decision-making algorithms. (shrink)

My paper wants to analyze the relationship between metaphor and grief since the development of the so-called Digital Death. The term Digital Death is used to identify a group of interdisciplinary studies explaining the different ways in which our present-day digital technologies are changing the human relationship with death, grieving, memory and immortality. The technological metamorphoses of our relationship with death imply many important social, philosophical and linguistic changes in the field of funeral rites and grief: virtual cemeteries, collective cultural (...) autobiographies and encyclopedias of the dead 2.0, digital ghosts of the dead, unprecedented forms of digital immortality, etc. My paper wants to underline the ways in which these concepts intercept the process of social and cultural removal of death and the ways in which the linguistic expressions used by people change. Specifically, my paper will analyze the relationship between Digital Death and Covid-19 to underline the new progress in our uses of metaphors in the field of Death Studies. (shrink)

In this chapter, I will explore the idea of “normative imagery”, intended as a set of metaphors, images and visions aimed at explaining and making sense of the legal sensibility of a given civilization, with particular reference to the Western and the Islamic worlds. In these contexts, law is indeed a culture-specific phenomenon, whose conceptualization and categorization greatly vary depending on the cultural milieu in which it develops. Therefore, each civilization does not simply shape a determined legal order, but also (...) proper intellectual instruments, like metaphors and images, to understand it and to explain its rationales and aims. This is particularly true for the Western civilization, with its Christian and Roman heritages in turn having established their own visions of reality, and for Islam, which gradually developed a complex and multifaceted order grounded on a divinely revealed normativity. By analyzing this usually underestimated aspect of law, it will be eventually possible to deepen our knowledge of legal phenomena going beyond the positivized dimension of rules and norms, and embracing an entire normative Weltanschauung. (shrink)

The notion of metaphor undergoes a series of reconsiderations within the aesthetic works of Gaston Bachelard. In this study we will consider only a very small part of his broad production on rêverie (1938–1948). The aim of this contribution is to show how the function of the metaphor can’t in any way be limited to a rhetorical expedient. In fact, it represents a very powerful manifestation of the imaginative faculty. As proof of this thesis, we will consider Bachelard’s reflections on (...) the active function of the metaphor, on the reversibility of the metaphor and on the relationship between metaphor and metamorphosis. (shrink)

The relationship between schizophrenia and metaphorical expression is a pivotal one for phenomenology, as it provides insight into both the nature of the schizophrenic experience as well underlying and fundamental structures of human meaning-making and language. In what follows, I will explore how alterations in metaphorical understanding and expression in schizophrenia illuminate broader questions about consciousness, intersubjectivity, and the lived experience of schizophrenia. Starting from the role played by embodied semantics, a neuroscientific theory that describes how the brain processes meaning (...) and how word comprehension is intrinsically linked to sensory-motor experiences, I argue that what is left out is the lived body, known in phenomenology as the Leib. In accounts such as these, what remains is only the biological body, which becomes reduced to those sensory-motor capacities that influence specific brain regions and networks. Correspondingly, our ability to speak and use metaphors is itself reduced to a mere brain activity. In contrast to this perspective, I offer a phenomenologically grounded reading to address the relationship between our lived body and living subjectivity. Drawing upon theoretical resources from Minkowski, Binswanger, Jaspers, and Blankenburg, my aim is to show how metaphorical disturbance must be understood not as a mere linguistic impairment but as an opening onto the radical restructuring of consciousness itself, a transformation that reveals the distinctive mode of being-in-the-world proper to schizophrenic experience. (shrink)

I aim to show how experience is constructed through a process that can be called ‘metaphorical’. I will do this by beginning with Paul Natorp’s view of the problem of consciousness and some reflections on metaphor in Paul Ricoeur. I will go through some of the basic concepts of Natorp’s Allgemeine Psychologie and focus on the role that ‘re-presentation’ plays in determining how things appear to consciousness. In this way, and through Ricoeur’s remarks on metaphor, I will propose a parallel (...) that aims to show how experience is constituted through the use of metaphor by consciousness. (shrink)

As a phenomenological challenge, we propose here to address the question of metaphor in an immersive exercise in its strange Logos, articulated through references (impulses) and attractions that transcend the everyday expectations of the consolidated world. In this sense, one could speak of a miracle of metaphor. Metaphor has its own anarchy, because it does not belong to the real, nor merely to the unreal, nor only to the fantastic. It undoubtedly requires the power of the imaginary, but above all (...) an area that we could almost call ‘weightless,’ conducive to the transgressions that metaphor summons in its alchemy, with the aim of revealing and illuminating an exotic meaning, coming from afar and ‘from outside,’ beyond the triviality of the world (although some metaphors become trivial and, obviously, go unnoticed). (shrink)

Through a transdisciplinary lens, this book offers a unique description of how metaphors inform our conceptual system and shape our world accordingly. Metaphors in action means marking a break from conventional methodologies: observing metaphors as they operate reveals how conceptual mappings serve as interpretive tools, directing perception, limiting reasoning patterns, and either enabling or hindering comprehension in practical situations. This collection guides through an exploration of how metaphors exhibit consistency with the cultural contexts and value systems from which they emerge. (...) We examine metaphor as a "semantic network", a framework that immediately suggests new pathways for generating alternative ontological possibilities. This book explores the role and significance of metaphors and the landscapes they shape in five disparate fields: philosophy, linguistics, law, health and digital technologies. This volume is an invaluable resource for students and researchers in philosophy, health sciences, psychology, and the digital humanities. (shrink)

Although Locke never ventured beyond the borders of Europe, he was profoundly captivated by accounts of distant lands—the Americas, the West Indies, and Canada on one side, the Near and Far East on the other. The narration of travel, after all, constitutes a heuristic endeavour in its own right. This fascination led Locke, as well as his colleagues at the Royal Society, to be not merely collectors of books but owners of a library shaped by deliberate intellectual intent. Indeed, during (...) the very years in which Locke was deeply engaged in drafting the early sections of the Essay concerning Human Understanding—devoted to the nature and limits of human cognition and the formative role of experience—the first Latin edition of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān was published in Oxford, a city with a pronounced interest in the language and culture of the Near East. (shrink)

This chapter explores John Locke’s investigative curiosity about Canada between 1678 and 1680—especially the spring of 1679. Canada was a place of great importance in the geopolitics of early colonial America; and Locke was curious, to say the least, about its people, places, and territorial reach. The centerpieces of Locke’s scouting at that time were two ethnographic volumes on the Huron by Gabriel Sagard; a map of the lower great lakes by René de Bréhant de Galinée; and—it will be suggested—a (...) series of maps of all the great lakes and environs by Claude Bernou. The chapter hopes to shed further light on the vast reach and political motivations of Locke’s intrigue with the travel writing and charted geography of the new world. It emerges that Locke’s notes on the maps of Canada are a crucial if belated source confirming the dates of Bernou’s maps. (shrink)

John Locke maintained a longstanding engagement with the practice of framing inquiries in order to advance knowledge in different domains. Influenced by Robert Boyle and the Royal Society, he devised questions on a wide range of topics, shared questionnaires, and wrote to individuals with specific queries, as his journals, notebooks and correspondence testify. Locke’s method coincides with attempts by natural historians to capture insights from travellers, armed with suitable questions for a variety of destinations. Little attention has been paid to (...) Locke’s approach beyond valuable work by Peter Anstey. This article investigates Locke’s commitment to inquiries and modes of communicating them. It also discusses a neglected manuscript in which Locke outlines a brief set of inquiries devoted to religion. Thus he adapted the method of naturalists to advance the anthropological study of religious belief and enthusiasm in particular. (shrink)

During the 1690s Scotland embarked on an ambitious programme to create a colony at Darien in Panama. The English government, advised by John Locke in his role as a member of the Board of Trade and Plantations, resolutely resisted the Scottish ambition, not least because the alliance with Spain during the Nine Years War was paramount. In the contest over Darien much depended upon claims and counter-claims about the status of the native Kuna people, their dependence or independence on the (...) Spanish Empire, and their right to treat with European settlers. Buccaneer travel reports offered an anthropology of the Kuna, which the English and Scots deployed in rival positions concerning jurisdiction and entitlement. The Darien venture ended in disaster, which Scots patriots attributed to English ministerial malfeasance. The impact of failure reverberated through Anglo-Scottish politics in the years leading to the Treaty of Union of 1707. Scottish patriots mobilized Lockean rights of resistance against English oppression, thus deploying the Two Treatises of Government in ways unanticipated by its author. (shrink)

Locke’s interest in travel literature had significant bearing on his sexual morality. Drawing on the accounts of Gabriel Sagard, Samuel de Champlain, Samuel Purchas, and José de Acosta, among many others, Locke incorporated Huron, Algonquin, Inca, and Iroquois polyandry into his understanding of the natural law. In the Second Treatise and in his private journals, he suggests that their alternative sexual practices did not violate two key elements of the natural law, namely God’s mandate that humans reproduce and then effectively (...) care for their children. He uses Huron social practices around divorce to describe the limits of the marriage contract. Based on these sympathetic observations, and his assessment of biblical sexual morality in the Paraphrases of Paul’s epistles, Locke forcefully argues against the ascendant natural law tradition which claimed that a community could be correctively invaded for sexual immorality. Communities with alternative sexual mores should be left to God’s judgment. (shrink)

From 1668 to 1675, John Locke served as the Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of the newly founded Carolina Colony. Sometime between 1675 and 1683, he wrote the Two Treatises of Government. This essay considers whether his experience as Secretary influenced his drafting of chapter V, ‘Of Property’ in the Second Treatise. Documents relating to Carolina Colony reviewed by Locke are compared with excerpts from chapter V about Native Americans and their use of land. Rather than accepting that Locke intended, (...) at least in part, for chapter V to justify the appropriation of Native American lands, it is proposed that he never intended for his labor theory of property to apply to the Colony. He knew the Natives had a flourishing agricultural society, and the early settlers depended on them for food. Instead, he developed his labor theory to show how men could acquire property without the express consent of others, inventing a fictitious group of Native Americans for that purpose. Chapter V was written as a brief history of commerce, culminating with the purchase of large tracts of land. When Locke finished chapter V, he knew that land in Carolina Colony was purchased from its Natives, not appropriated under his labor theory. It is proposed that a better reading of chapter V is that, even though not explicitly stated, Locke implicitly recognized that Native Americans had a sophisticated enough society and economy to contract for the sale of land to Carolina Colony and that the colonists did not simply appropriate it, as a superficial reading of the chapter might suggest. This interpretation casts Locke in a better light with respect to his views of Native Americans than does applying his labor theory of property to the settlement of Carolina Colony. (shrink)

Jonas Proast’s argument against religious toleration is often accepted as far more compelling than the ‘Mile End’ argument presented by Locke in his Third Letter for Toleration, which has largely been replaced by twentieth century versions of Social Contract Theory and theories of rightsRights based on the concept of the Westphalian System. These theories have coloured the way in which Locke’s letters on toleration are read and a significant element of their content and context has been elided. The key element (...) missing from modern readings is Locke’s reliance on travel literature and particularly the Spanish travel literature, which formed the basis of his theory of Natural Law. Locke followed his ‘Mile End’ remark with a discussion of America largely drawn from José de Acosta whose works were part of a much older and more philosophically sophisticated debate on toleration and coercion than that in Protestant Europe, which is often seen as the dominant or even the sole tradition of toleration. A focus on the ‘Mile End’ passage in Locke’s Third Letter makes it possible to explore this wider context of Locke’s case for toleration. (shrink)

This introductory chapter indicates the breadth of travel writing—books, correspondence, maps, and much else—that Locke perused and deployed to advantage in the development of his philosophy and political theory. It provides a detailed overview of the books of travel in Locke’s extensive library, organized by places in the Old and New World. It begins by placing the volume in the context of recent literature and ends with a brief description of the chapters which follow.

This chapter takes up Locke’s interest in travel literature and examines the ways in which travel literature of two types—explorer travelogues and utopian texts—can be used to expand our understanding of Locke’s colonial thinking and to better render the details not only of colonial founding but also colonial unsettlement. The essay focuses on Locke’s notes on ‘Atlantis’ and his work with the Carolina colony and other colonial ventures of the period, such as the East India Company and the Royal African (...) Company. These facets of Locke’s work, although less familiar to many political theorists, help to further flesh out Locke’s complex legacy and our understanding of ‘settler colonial logic’ in the period. (shrink)

During his time in France, Locke and Toinard engaged in discussions about the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a document Locke had helped draft while serving as secretary to the Lords Proprietors of the colony. Toinard later exhibited a keen interest in the Constitutions throughout their correspondence. This chapter explores the motivations behind Toinard’s curiosity, drawing on references to voyages and travel literature present in his letters to Locke and other correspondents. It highlights Toinard’s connections with notable explorers such as La (...) Salle and Iberville, as well as his strong ties to the court and members of the French Navy. The aim is to illuminate Toinard’s involvement in the French expansionist plans in North America and his understanding of the intricate relationship between travel and politics, thus offering new insights into his correspondence with Locke. (shrink)

John Locke’s interest in ‘travel literature’ is a datum in the scholarship of his life and thought. A perusal of his writings from the 1660s onwards reveals an increasing inclination to invoke examples of foreign practices when surveying a moral, ecclesiological, or political problem. The impetus of Locke’s interest in these matters is typically attributed to a mixture of his intellectual taste, a polymathic attitude to scholarly matters, and the intellectual tasks that he confronted after he joined the Ashley household (...) in 1667. Yet a separate impetus is less often considered: Locke’s direct experience of foreign practices as a traveller himself. The focus of this chapter is on Locke’s experience of religious toleration as a traveller and how it shaped his tolerationism; it draws a general, if confined, picture of the role that travel played in Locke’s advocacy of religious toleration. (shrink)

Introduction: Novel coronavirus is having a devastating psychological impact on patients, especially patients with cancer. This work aims to evaluate mood disorders of cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy during COVID-19 in comparison with cancer patients who underwent radiation therapy in 2019.Materials and Methods: We included all the patients undergoing radiation therapy at our department in two-time points and during the COVID-19 outbreak. All the patients were asked to fulfill a validated questionnaire, the Symptom Distress thermometer, and the Beck Depression Inventory (...) v.2. We took into account the COVID-19 outbreak and also sex, age, week of radiation treatment, and disease.Results: We included 458 patients, with a median age of 64 years. STAI-Y1 median score was 40, whereas the median score of SDT was five and BDI-2 median score was 11. STAI-Y1, SDT, and BDI-2 were significantly correlated with the COVID-19 outbreak, sex, week of treatment, and disease.Conclusions: The prevalence of mood disorders in patients undergoing radiation therapy is higher than expected and even higher during the COVID-19 outbreak. These measurements could be useful as a baseline to start medical humanities programs to decrease these scores. (shrink)

Is our case strong enough to go to trial? Will interest rates go up? Can I trust this person? Such questions - and the judgments required to answer them - are woven into the fabric of everyday experience. This book, first published in 2002, examines how people make such judgments. The study of human judgment was transformed in the 1970s, when Kahneman and Tversky introduced their 'heuristics and biases' approach and challenged the dominance of strictly rational models. Their work (...) highlighted the reflexive mental operations used to make complex problems manageable and illuminated how the same processes can lead to both accurate and dangerously flawed judgments. The heuristics and biases framework generated a torrent of influential research in psychology - research that reverberated widely and affected scholarship in economics, law, medicine, management, and political science. This book compiles the most influential research in the heuristics and biases tradition since the initial collection of 1982. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists have argued that fiction can ethically educate us: fiction supposedly can make us better people. This view has been contested. It is, however, rarely argued that fiction can morally “corrupt” us. In this article, we focus on the alleged power of fiction to decrease one's prejudices and biases. We argue that if fiction has the power to change prejudices and biases for the better, then it can also have the opposite effect. We further argue that (...) fictions are more likely to be a bad influence than a good one. (shrink)

Empirical evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias, another is future-bias, and a third is present-bias. Philosophers are concerned with the normative status of these time-biases. They have argued that, at least in part, the normative status of these biases depends on the extent to which they tend to promote, or frustrate, wellbeing, where “wellbeing” is taken to be of fundamental value. Since near-bias is thought to be associated with impulsivity, lack of self-control, and (...) poor long-term health and financial outcomes, it has often been supposed that it is associated with lower wellbeing. On those grounds, philosophers have argued that near-bias is rationally impermissible. By contrast, philosophical views about the normative status of future-bias have been mixed, with some arguing that future-bias is impermissible because, they think, it frustrates wellbeing, and others arguing that it is at least permissible (and perhaps obligatory) because it is the product of mechanisms whose functioning can be expected to promote wellbeing. However, to date there are no studies that have directly probed how time-biases correlate with wellbeing. Since it's not a settled matter which psychological mechanisms underlie time-biases, it is not uncontroversial which things serve as proxies for these preferences. We directly empirically investigate the connection between time-biases and measures of wellbeing, to see which of these biases is associated with promoting, or frustrating wellbeing. Contrary to expectation, we found no evidence that near-bias or present-bias are associated with frustrating wellbeing on any of the constructs we measured. On the other hand, and contrary to what some philosophers have supposed, we found that future-bias was associated with higher measures of wellbeing on several measures. We consider the implications of these findings for the evaluation of the normative status of these time biases. (shrink)