Naturalism in Ethics and Hegel's Distinction between Subjective and Objective Spirit

2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Dean Moyar

It is widely acknowledged that Hegel's ethical thought moves in a naturalistic direction away from the pure practical reason of Kant's moral philosophy. But the exact character of that naturalistic turn has proven elusive, in part because Hegel so insistently foregrounds the theme of freedom. He often opposes self-determination through freedom to being determined merely by nature, and while Hegel's incorporation of the natural into his theory of freedom has been emphasised by many recent commentators, there remains a fundamental lack of consensus about how nature and freedom intersect in Hegel's ethics. My goal is to shed light on this issue by examining Hegel's distinction between Subjective Spirit and Objective Spirit. This distinction between two domains of inquiry and two perspectives on human action is fundamental for understanding his views about the natural and the normative in ethics. My central claim is that by advocating a division of labor between these domains, and by showing how they are integrated, Hegel is able to capture the best elements of naturalistic inquiry into human psychology and to preserve the distinctive character of the ethical domain. This paper aims to open an avenue for future research into Hegel's naturalism and to demonstrate Hegel's relevance for contemporary debates. In focusing on the difference between Subjective Spirit and Objective Spirit, I am already taking on a large topic for a single essay, and there are many related issues in Hegel that will necessarily go untouched. Some of these are worth mentioning up front. First, one would expect a paper about Hegel's naturalism to explore Hegel's view on nature in general, namely, the content of the Philosophy of Nature which forms the middle part of the Encyclopaedia. Without an account of how Hegel conceives of nature, it seems that we have to assume a conception of nature foreign to his system, and using that to measure his views would seem to violate a number of hermeneutical strictures. While I admit that this is a problem, it is simply beyond the scope of this paper, and I hope that using an intuitive account of the natural, and Hegel's claims about human nature, is enough at least to get this project going. The project itself can then provide a further spur to examining Hegel's views on non-human nature.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney K. Soderberg ◽  
Shannon Peterson Callahan ◽  
Annie Kochersberger ◽  
Elinor Amit ◽  
Alison Ledgerwood

Psychological distance and abstraction both represent key variables of considerable interest to researchers across cognitive, social, and developmental psychology. Moreover, largely inspired by construal level theory, numerous experiments across multiple fields have now connected these 2 constructs, examining how psychological distance affects the level of abstraction at which people mentally represent the world around them. The time is clearly ripe for a quantitative synthesis to shed light on the relation between these constructs and investigate potential moderators. To this end, we conducted 2 meta-analyses of research examining the effects of psychological distance on abstraction and its downstream consequences. Across 106 papers containing a total of 267 experiments, our results showed a reliable and medium-sized effect of psychological distance on both level of abstraction in mental representation and the downstream consequences of abstraction. Importantly, these effects replicate across time, researchers, and settings. Our analyses also identified several key moderators, including the size of the difference in distance between 2 levels of a temporal distance manipulation and the dependent variable's capacity to tap processing of both abstract and concrete features (rather than only one or the other). We discuss theoretical and methodological implications, and highlight promising avenues for future research.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Holyfield ◽  
Sydney Brooks ◽  
Allison Schluterman

Purpose Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is an intervention approach that can promote communication and language in children with multiple disabilities who are beginning communicators. While a wide range of AAC technologies are available, little is known about the comparative effects of specific technology options. Given that engagement can be low for beginning communicators with multiple disabilities, the current study provides initial information about the comparative effects of 2 AAC technology options—high-tech visual scene displays (VSDs) and low-tech isolated picture symbols—on engagement. Method Three elementary-age beginning communicators with multiple disabilities participated. The study used a single-subject, alternating treatment design with each technology serving as a condition. Participants interacted with their school speech-language pathologists using each of the 2 technologies across 5 sessions in a block randomized order. Results According to visual analysis and nonoverlap of all pairs calculations, all 3 participants demonstrated more engagement with the high-tech VSDs than the low-tech isolated picture symbols as measured by their seconds of gaze toward each technology option. Despite the difference in engagement observed, there was no clear difference across the 2 conditions in engagement toward the communication partner or use of the AAC. Conclusions Clinicians can consider measuring engagement when evaluating AAC technology options for children with multiple disabilities and should consider evaluating high-tech VSDs as 1 technology option for them. Future research must explore the extent to which differences in engagement to particular AAC technologies result in differences in communication and language learning over time as might be expected.


Author(s):  
Simon Robertson

Nietzsche is one of the most subversive ethical thinkers of the Western canon. This book offers a critical assessment of his ethical thought and its significance for contemporary moral philosophy. It develops a charitable but critical reading of his thought, pushing some claims and arguments as far as seems fruitful while rejecting others. But it also uses Nietzsche in dialogue with, so to contribute to, a range of long-standing issues within normative ethics, metaethics, value theory, practical reason, and moral psychology. The book is divided into three principal parts. Part I examines Nietzsche’s critique of morality, arguing that it raises well-motivated challenges to morality’s normative authority and value: his error theory about morality’s categoricity is in a better position than many contemporary versions; and his critique of moral values has bite even against undemanding moral theories, with significant implications not just for rarefied excellent types but also us. Part II turns to moral psychology, attributing to Nietzsche and defending a sentimentalist explanation of action and motivation. Part III considers his non-moral perfectionism, developing models of value and practical normativity that avoid difficulties facing many contemporary accounts and that may therefore be of wider interest. The discussion concludes by considering Nietzsche’s broader significance: as well as calling into question many of moral philosophy’s deepest assumptions, he challenges our usual views of what ethics itself is—and what it, and we, should be doing.


Author(s):  
Mark Textor

When we are aware of our perceiving, we cannot attend to (observe) our perceiving, only the object which we (seem to) perceive. The perceiving is therefore the secondary, the object perceived the primary object. The chapter develops and evaluates Brentano’s grounds for the distinction between the primary and the secondary object. This project is of independent philosophical interest because Brentano’s view promises to shed light on the distinctive character of awareness. Awareness cannot become observation, because mere awareness of a mental phenomenon cannot contrast it with others. I argue further that Brentano’s account of noticing and observation has room for an ‘anatomy of the soul’ that proceeds by noticing the elements of our mental life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 4121
Author(s):  
Hana Tomaskova ◽  
Erfan Babaee Tirkolaee

The purpose of this article was to demonstrate the difference between a pandemic plan’s textual prescription and its effective processing using graphical notation. Before creating a case study of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) of the Czech Republic’s pandemic plan, we conducted a systematic review of the process approach in pandemic planning and a document analysis of relevant public documents. The authors emphasized the opacity of hundreds of pages of text records in an explanatory case study and demonstrated the effectiveness of the process approach in reengineering and improving the response to such a critical situation. A potential extension to the automation and involvement of SMART technologies or process optimization through process mining techniques is presented as a future research topic.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (23) ◽  
pp. 9813 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuta Uchiyama ◽  
Eduardo Blanco ◽  
Ryo Kohsaka

Application of biomimetics has expanded progressively to other fields in recent years, including urban and architectural design, scaling up from materials to a larger scale. Besides its contribution to design and functionality through a long evolutionary process, the philosophy of biomimetics contributes to a sustainable society at the conceptual level. The aim of this review is to shed light on trends in the application of biomimetics to architectural and urban design, in order to identify potential issues and successes resulting from implementation. In the application of biomimetics to architectural design, parts of individual “organisms”, including their form and surface structure, are frequently mimicked, whereas in urban design, on a larger scale, biomimetics is applied to mimic whole ecosystems. The overall trends of the reviewed research indicate future research necessity in the field of on biomimetic application in architectural and urban design, including Biophilia and Material. As for the scale of the applications, the urban-scale research is limited and it is a promising research which can facilitate the social implementation of biomimetics. As for facilitating methods of applications, it is instrumental to utilize different types of knowledge, such as traditional knowledge, and providing scientific clarification of functions and systems based on reviews. Thus, interdisciplinary research is required additionally to reach such goals.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Corina E. Brown ◽  
Ben Whaley ◽  
Richard M. Hyslop

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of three methods used to assist in teaching molecular geometry to college chemistry students. A pre- and post-test quasi-experiment was used to collect data about students’ performance in a given chemistry exercise. One research question was intended to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of the three methods in assisting students to understand the topic and carry out the exercise correctly, and a second research question addressed students’ attitudes towards the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in chemistry education. Results show a positive attitude towards the use of VR as an assisting tool to aid in understanding chemistry concepts. While the difference among the three methods was not significant, the results show that the VR brought more enthusiasm and positive attitudes toward the topic of molecular geometry among the students. Educational implications and recommendations for future research are presented as well.


Author(s):  
Alexander Baturo ◽  
Johan A. Elkink

Abstract How can one assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest office? There is wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime types. It is therefore challenging to obtain a truly comparative measure of political experience; empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. This article proposes PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of career paths and generalizes based on the duration, quality and breadth of an individual's experience in politics. The analysis draws on a novel data set of around 2,000 leaders from 1950 to 2017 and uses a Bayesian latent variable model to estimate PolEx. The article illustrates how the new measure can be used comparatively to assess whether democracies select more experienced leaders. The authors find that while on average they do, the difference with non-democracies has declined dramatically since the early 2000s. Future research may leverage PolEx to investigate the role of prior political experience in, for example, policy making and crisis management.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 450
Author(s):  
Chao Wang ◽  
Ravi P. Agarwal

As an effective tool to unify discrete and continuous analysis, time scale calculus have been widely applied to study dynamic systems in both theoretical and practical aspects. In addition to such a classical role of unification, the dynamic equations on time scales have their own unique features which the difference and differential equations do not possess and these advantages have been highlighted in describing some complicated dynamical behavior in the hybrid time process. In this review article, we conduct a survey of abstract analysis and applied dynamic equations on hybrid time scales, some recent main results and the related developments on hybrid time scales will be reported and the future research related to this research field is discussed. The results presented in this article can be extended and generalized to study both pure mathematical analysis and real applications such as mathematical physics, biological dynamical models and neural networks, etc.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 44-47
Author(s):  
Zhaoqiong Qin

This study aims to investigate the literature in product distribution and channel competition. In this study, past work related to the product distribution through different channels is extensively reviewed. Based on the channel differentiation, channel competition is also reviewed. Finally, the study proposes that the future research may focus on helping the producer make a decision whether to sell the product through its own direct channel (online) through a physical channel or both based on the difference between these two channels.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document