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Showing posts with the label mental time travel

Autonoesis and Moral Agency

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This post is by Phil Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett . It is a reply to the post we published on Tuesday on Metaethics and Mental Time Travel . In Metaethics and Mental Time Travel , Fileva and Tresan (F&T) fairly and accurately reconstructed (improved?) and intricately dissected our paper. We cannot follow every twist and turn in a short blog post so concentrate on the key issue. They partially agree with us that semantic knowledge detached from diachronic self-awareness is insufficient for moral agency but disagree (i) whether that awareness needs to be "richly experiential" and (ii) the nature of diachronic deficits in the cases we discuss (see their discussion of these cases which is deeper than ours). As they say, Representations with past- or future-oriented, autobiographical content, crucially, awareness of one’s past actions or future options as consistent or inconsistent with one’s principles do seem necessary : but MTT involves experiential representations of thos...

Metaethics and Mental Time Travel

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We are Iskra Fileva and Jonathan Tresan . Both of us teach philosophy, at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at the University of Rochester, respectively. We recently wrote a paper in response to " Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency ," by Philip Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett published in Mind in 2010. We summarize our paper " Metaethics and Mental Time Travel " here. When we make moral judgments, we often experientially project ourselves into the past or the possible futures, a capacity dubbed “mental time travel” (MTT). For instance, in judging whether her mom was wrong to keep her away from her dad after the parents divorced, Sally may try to recall what it was like to be her father’s daughter. Was it a good experience or a bad one? Was the mother rightly protective or just trying to spite the dad? Sally’s evaluation will likely be informed not just by propositional memories (e.g., “My father was born in June”) but by richly detailed and vivid first-person...

Psychopathy, Identification, and Mental Time Travel

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Luca Malatesti and Filip Čeč collaborated on the project Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law ( CEASCRO ), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (Grant HRZZ-IP-2013-11-8071).  Both are based in the  Department of Philosophy  of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia). Luca is associate professor of philosophy and works mainly in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychiatry. Filip is assistant professor of philosophy and his interests include the metaphysical problem of free will and moral responsibility, and the history of psychiatry. In this post Luca and Filip summarize their chapter " Psychopathy, Identification and Mental Time Travel ", that is contained in the collection edited by Filip Grgić and Davor Pećnjak,  Free Will & Action . Psychopaths are characterised by a callous, manipulative and remors...