Herr Royce ist doch ein bedeutender Denker und darf nur als solcher behandelt werden.("Royce is an important thinker, and may only be treated as such.")Scholars of pragmatism and of phenomenology have observed striking similarities between Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl, foundational thinkers at the origins of two major philosophical movements whose effects are still strongly felt in the present day—Royce being considered a central founder of American pragmatic idealism, and Husserl of modern German phenomenology. Other scholars have noted striking similarities (...) between Royce's thought and that of the broader circle of phenomenology.2Can we discover in these relations definitive historical influences, rather than.. (shrink)

Understanding what features influence the believability of expressions in computer-generated (CG) faces is key to predicting how humans will respond to them. In human faces, eye-gaze has been shown to influence the interpretation of expressions. The present study advances understanding by testing whether eye-gaze affects the believability of CG people’s expressions – how much they appear to come from genuinely-felt emotion. First, participant (N = 70) ratings of believability and emotion clarity were used to identify a set of angry, fearful, (...) happy and sad facial expressions for use in Study 1. Study 1 (N = 150) then measured believability for these CG expressions paired with one of six increasingly sideways (anger, fear) or downcast (happy, sad) gaze aversions. Happiness and anger were most believable with direct rather than averted gaze, while sadness became increasingly believable as gaze turned downward. Fear showed no effect of gaze. Study 2 (N = 64) replicated the increased believability of sadness with downcast gaze but showed decreased believability with sideways aversion. Overall, our results highlight the theoretical importance of alignment between the signalled meaning of co-occurring facial cues in driving perceptions of believability and provide practical guidance on how gaze can optimise the believability of CG facial expressions. (shrink)

Background: Mild traumatic brain injury results from an external force to the head or body causing neurophysiological changes within the brain. The number and severity of symptoms can vary, with some individuals experiencing rapid recovery, and others having persistent symptoms for months to years, impacting their quality of life. Current rehabilitation is limited in its ability to treat persistent symptoms and novel approaches are being sought to improve outcomes following mTBI. Neuromodulation is one technique used to encourage adaptive neuroplasticity within (...) the brain.Objective: To systematically review the literature on the efficacy of neuromodulation in the mTBI population.Method: A systematic review was conducted using Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES and EBM Review. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and the Synthesis Without Meta-analysis reporting guidelines were used and a narrative review of the selected studies was completed. Fourteen articles fulfilled the inclusion criteria which were published in English, investigating an adult sample and using a pre- and post-intervention design. Studies were excluded if they included non-mild TBI severities, pediatric or older adult populations.Results: Thirteen of fourteen studies reported positive reductions in mTBI symptomatology following neuromodulation. Specifically, improvements were reported in post-concussion symptom ratings, headaches, dizziness, depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance, general disability, cognition, return to work and quality of life. Normalization of working memory activation patterns, vestibular field potentials, hemodynamics of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and excessive delta wave activity were also seen. The studies reviewed had several methodological limitations including small, heterogenous samples and varied intervention protocols, limiting generalisability. Further research is required to understand the context in which neuromodulation may be beneficial.Conclusions: While these positive effects are observed, limitations included unequal representation of neuromodulation modalities in the literature, and lack of literature describing the efficacy of neuromodulation on the development or duration of persistent mTBI symptoms. Better clarity regarding neuromodulation efficacy could have a significant impact on mTBI patients, researchers, clinicians, and policy makers, facilitating a more productive post-mTBI population. Despite the limitations, the literature indicates that neuromodulation warrants further investigation. PROSPERO registration number: CRD42020161279. (shrink)

The history of the encounters between pragmatism and phenomenology is long, fruitful, yet also tormented. From the time of the 19th century American phenomenology of Josiah Royce up to the arrival of Husserl’s phenomenology in North America, pragmatism was always one of the leading American philosophical movements that actively contributed to the re-elaboration of the issues and strategies of phenomenology in order to make them comply and adjust to the new context. This was possible, in the f...

Hermann Lotze was an important influence for founding philosophers in major contemporary philosophical methodologies such as pragmatism (e. g. William James and Josiah Royce), phenomenology (e. g. Edmund Husserl), and analytic philosophy (e. g. Gottlob Frege). This chapter focuses on Lotze’s Logic for clues to Lotze’s widespread appeal to various contemporary philosophical movements. In particular this essay explores the logical status of Lotze’s Sigma as the sought but not yet fully understood subject. By finding in Sigma a shared term between (...) idealistic and empirical sciences, Lotze provides an interpretive middle ground between pure (a priori) and applied (a posteriori) logic, as well as between purely logical scientific inquiries (as are found in mathematics and philosophy, for instance), and applied logical inquiries into the nature of the world (as for instance in the natural sciences). Sigma may have been a powerful influence on the phenomenologists, pragmatists, and analytic philosophers who followed, having shown a way beyond seeming dichotomies of idealism vs. empiricism. Lotze shows the fruitful interaction between these two modes of logical science but also their uniqueness; in turn, he shows how logic is both a unique philosophical science and also valuably related to ethics and metaphysics. (shrink)

This article focuses on Edmund Husserl’s first and most enduring interaction with pragmatism, on the conception of habit. This began a decade before Husserl’s first writings on phenomenology, and continued throughout the time he invented and developed his new phenomenological method. Husserl first encountered pragmatic habit from the founder of pragmatism Charles S. Peirce around 1890. Husserl then further interacted with the pragmatic theory of habit through the work of William James and Josiah Royce, two scholars deeply influenced by Peirce. (...) This article explores how the theory of habit mutually influenced pragmatism and phenomenology at their origins, and how this dialogue can inform philosophy today. (shrink)

is philosophy worthy of loyal service? Using Josiah Royce and Frank Oppenheim as guides, I will argue that philosophy is indeed a worthy and crucial loyalty. Its special cause will be considered here as a mode of what Royce terms a "loyalty to loyalty," as an infinite service of all specific truth-seeking activities undertaken by all communities of loyal individuals. Regarding them as individually valuable, philosophy champions them in their individuality and plays an interpretive function among them, so that specification (...) of truth-seeking in distinct domains leads to communicable discoveries valuable for all truth-seekers, as opposed to the discreteness, separation, and lifeless abstraction that can occur when... (shrink)

Ruminative thinking is considered a vulnerability factor for eating disorder symptomatology. Research suggests that attentional bias to body shape stimuli may serve to underpin this maladaptive for...

In 1927, Winthrop Bell inaugurated the teaching of phenomenology in the English-speaking world, with his course “Husserl and the Phenomenological Movement” at Harvard University. The seminar shows ways to introduce phenomenology to students who have a philosophical background, but who do not yet know phenomenology. Additionally, it reveals phenomenology’s relations to pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and the broader continental tradition. Bell, as the first Anglophone student who wrote his dissertation with Husserl, enjoyed a privileged access to his phenomenological teachers, with whom (...) he studied between 1911-1914, during the time of Husserl’s publication of the Ideen and Scheler’s publication of his Formalism in Ethics. Bell, relying not only on Husserl’s and Scheler’s books but on his own detailed notes from his studies with these founding figures, shows students the germination of the movement, and its most fundamental ideas: its understanding of the a priori and its relation to induction, the nature of intentionality, the relation of idealism and empiricism, along with studies of attention, fulfillment, and meaning. Given phenomenology’s important influences on the North American curriculum, attention to Bell’s seminar can show us how this influence begin, and why phenomenology has become and remained such an important influence in English and in North American philosophy. (shrink)

Questo articolo esplora la nascita della Fenomenologia americana nella "Nuova Fenomenologia" di Josiah Royce, proposta nel suo Thought Diary (1878-1880), in dialogo sia con il tema della pratica contemplativa di Husserl sia con la versione del pragmatismo di Peirce.

The chapters, written by leading experts on American philosophy, reexamine Josiah Royce's work as a resource for contemporary thought. Themes include: metaphysics, phenomenology, logic; problems of individualism, loyalty, and community; practical matters of race, religious faith, and feminist epistemology, and Royce's place in the history of philosophy.

Inaccurate body size judgements are associated with body image disturbances, a clinical feature of many eating disorders. Accordingly, body related stimuli have become increasingly important in the study of estimation inaccuracies and body image disturbances. Technological advancements in the last decade have led to an increased use of computer generated (CG) body stimuli in body image research. However, recent face perception research has suggested that CG face stimuli are not recognised as readily and may not fully tap facial processing mechanisms. (...) The current study assessed the effectiveness of using CG stimuli in an established body size estimation task (the ‘bodyline’ task). Specifically, we examined whether employing CG body stimuli alters body size judgments and associated estimation biases. One hundred and six 17- to 25-year-old females completed the CG bodyline task, which involved estimating the size of full-length CG body stimuli along a visual analogue scale. Our results show that perception of body size for CG stimuli was non-linear. Participants struggled to discriminate between extreme bodies sizes and overestimated the size change between near to average bodies. Furthermore, one of our measured size estimation biases was larger for CG stimuli. Our collective findings suggest using caution when employing CG stimuli in experimental research on body perception. (shrink)

Homer’s Odyssey has long served as a touchstone for environmental writers, but is this text itself a work of environmental ethics? Homer portrays, as a major and consistent purpose, the environmentally destructive consequences of hedonism, and the environmentally beneficent consequences of conservation and sustainable agriculture. The evidence of The Odyssey suggests that public critical dialectic about the treatment of animals, soil, and forests was not unknown to the ancient Greek world. Further, The Odyssey can have relevance to modern environmental ethics, (...) especially in Homer’s study of the relation between religion (especially its eating rituals) and the health of the natural environment. Finally, Homer teaches that it is not only possible but also worthwhile to code the arguments of environmental ethics in poetic/fictional terms. (shrink)