Michael Martin

Mindfulness is frequently invoked as a virtue in discussions of technology, whether in using specific technologies such as cellphones, in creating technologies as new and valuable devices and knowledge, in responsibly developing technologies as “social experiments,” or in participating responsibly as citizens in technological societies. In each of these contexts, mindfulness can have myriad meanings that reflect moral ideals or popular psychological concepts. To explore these meanings, I develop a working definition of mindfulness as paying attention to what matters, in light of relevant values. When those values are sound and applied with good judgment, mindfulness is a virtue.

What sense can we make of Hume’s notorious distinction between impressions and ideas? We look at two sense-datum theories of experience that offer competing accounts of the contrast between sensation and imagination. John Foster’s two-level account of experience presented in The Case for Idealism and The Nature of Perception is contrasted with Bertrand Russell’s discussion of sensation, imagination, and memory in The Theory of Knowledge. The key elements of both approaches are sketched. Foster’s appeal simply to a ‘subjectively manifest’ difference is rejected as inadequate. A problem with Russell’s conception of experience of past is canvassed, and then further elaborated in relation to previous awareness condition on personal memories. The contrasting views of memory are extended to the case of imagination. The chapter concludes with more general morals to be drawn about the relation between the first-person perspective on experience and the underlying psychological properties which explain experience’s being so.

When experiencing personal distress, people usually expect their romantic partner to be supportive. However, when put in a situation to provide support, people may at times be struggling with issues of their own. This interdependent nature of dyadic coping interactions as well as potential spillover effects is mirrored in the state-of-the-art research method to behaviorally assess couple’s dyadic coping processes. This paradigm typically includes two videotaped 8-min dyadic coping conversations in which partners swap roles as sharer and support provider. Little is known about how such dyadic coping interactions may feed back into one another, impacting the motivation and ability to be a responsive support provider. In three behavioral studies, we examined how sharers’ experiences may spill over to affect their own support provision in a subsequent dyadic coping interaction. We hypothesized that the extent to which sharers perceive their partner as responsive to their self-disclosure increases the quality of their own subsequent support provision, whereas sharers’ lingering negative affect reduces the quality of their own subsequent support provision. In line with our first hypothesis, perceived partner responsiveness predicted the provision of higher-quality support, though primarily as perceived by the partner. Sharers who perceived their partner to have been more responsive were somewhat more likely to subsequently engage in positive dyadic coping and were rated as more responsive by their partners. Negative dyadic coping behavior was unaffected. Evidence for our second hypothesis was mixed. While lingering negative affect did not affect positive dyadic coping behavior or perceived support, it did increase the chances of negative dyadic coping behavior. However, given the very low occurrences of negative affect and negative dyadic coping, these findings should be interpreted with caution. Taken together, these findings suggest that support interactions may feed back into one another, highlighting the complex and interdependent nature of dyadic coping. The strongest and most consistent findings concerned the spillover effect of perceived partner responsiveness on subsequent perceived support quality, speaking to the key role of believing that one’s partner is responsive to one’s needs in promoting healthy relationship functioning.

Book description: Much contemporary philosophical debate centres on the topics of logic, thought and language, and on the connections between these topics. This collection of articles is based on the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s annual lecture series for 2000–2001. Its contributors include a number of those working at the forefront of the field, and in their papers they reflect their own current pre-occupations. As such, the volume will be of interest to all philosophers, whether their own work is within the areas of language and thought or not

Yuval Noah Harari contends that human rights are an outdated myth. He calls for replacing them with a new global ethic to meet crises as varied as environmental destruction, disruptive technologies, and extreme gaps between rich and poor. Toward that end, he outlines an ethics that exalts compassion and elides justice, an ethics that animates his trilogy: Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. I draw together the key elements in his personal ethics, tracing them to a combination of scientism, postmodernism, and Buddhism. I then argue that he misunderstands human rights, inflates the role of science in moral matters, and fails to reconcile his moral passion with his moral skepticism.

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa.