This chapter will examine how intentionality shapes the intimate life of people affected by narcissistic traits. Focusing on the notion of interaffectivity, the chapter will discuss the affectivity of people suffering from narcissistic traits through the lenses of passive, active and practical intentionality as expounded in Husserl’s work. I believe that the clarification of the narcissistic wound and its impact on the interaffective dynamics of daily life might help rehabilitation to a healthier life. Removing the “intentional blockage” that prevents them from exploring the content of their lived-experience would restore an interaffective space conducive to a more flourishing intimate life with their loved ones.

Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde (2017) reported that legal experts’ intentionality ascriptions are susceptible to the “severity effect” (i.e., influenced by differently harmful side effects), which violates the outcome-independent legal concept of intentionality prevalent in many criminal law systems. This challenges the “legal expertise defense” (= legal experts are more competent users of legal concepts and their legal judgments are more reliable than those of laypeople). Prochownik, Krebs, Wiegmann, and Horvath (2020) hypothesized that the “severity effect” might be due to confounding features of the previously used vignettes (i.e., the somewhat bad cases not being perceived as harmful by legal experts). They created new stimuli with clear cases of harm that differed in the degree of harm across two conditions, and they did not observe any “severity effect” in legal experts or laypeople. Yet, the difference in harm ratings across conditions was not very large. The current study addresses this limitation: Even after increasing the difference in the perceived degree of harm, we still do not observe the “severity effect” in legal experts or laypeople.

Chapter 7 queries how the law addresses evolving concepts such as intentionality, intersectionality, and multiracial identities. In a common law system, legal precedents are static even though public understanding of race in society has expanded dramatically. This chapter explores the historic requirement to demonstrate evidence of an intent to discriminate to justify intervention by the law, which emerged from a traditional understanding of racism as personal and purposeful. Despite the potential harm of neutral policies creating disparate damages in racialized communities, this barrier to governmental action and its concomitant justification for neglect, matters. Students will explore the inability of the law to address multiple racial identities simultaneously and the legal consequences of ignoring intersectionality. The text considers a proposed constitutional amendment to address this limitation. Finally, the law’s hesitance to address multiracial identities is explored, questioning whether current legal structure is adequate to address contemporary understandings of racism and racial discrimination.

Various areas in psychology are interested in whether specific processes underlying judgments and behavior operate in an automatic or nonautomatic fashion. In social psychology, valuable insights can be gained from evidence on whether and how judgments and behavior under suboptimal processing conditions differ from judgments and behavior under optimal processing conditions. In personality psychology, valuable insights can be gained from individual differences in behavioral tendencies under optimal and suboptimal processing conditions. The current chapter provides a method-focused overview of different features of automaticity (e.g., unintentionality, efficiency, uncontrollability, unconsciousness), how these features can be studied empirically, and pragmatic issues in research on automaticity. Expanding on this overview, the chapter describes the procedures of extant implicit measures and the value of implicit measures for studying automatic processes in judgments and behavior. The chapter concludes with a discussion of pragmatic issues in research using implicit measures.

Despite R. G. Collingwood’s relation to British Idealism, a close reading of his subtle descriptions of imagination and expression reveals important points of contact with the phenomenological tradition. In the first section, I bring together Collingwood’s exploration of the role of imagination in art with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of intentionality and expression. This provides insights into both thinkers’ attempts to describe lived experience and action, highlighting important aspects of their work overlooked by readers. In the second section, I explore how Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty both describe communication as an open and evolving movement of understanding that does not fall back upon a supposedly isolated consciousnesses, thereby eluding the threat of solipsism. In the third section, I outline the connection between Husserl’s identification of a “crisis” in the European sciences and Collingwood’s invocation against what he calls the “corruption of consciousness,” a particularly modern shirking of our responsibilities as expressive and active members of the community.

This chapter takes a psychological perspective on tort law decision-making, drawing on psychological theory, empirical research, and legal practices in tort litigation to assess the state of knowledge about decision-making in tort cases. It examines how plaintiffs decide to bring a lawsuit, how defendants respond, and the process of dispute resolution in tort cases. Most tort cases do not go to trial, but trial decisions remain significant as a framework for negotiations. The chapter also draws on psychological theory and research to describe how the judge and the jury as decision-makers resolve legal issues and reach liability verdicts and damage awards in tort cases. Psychological heuristics, biases, and other psychological phenomena affect decision-making in intentional tort, negligence, and strict liability cases, and judgments about liability and damages. The chapter closes with suggestions for further investigations of understudied topics in tort law decision-making.

This chapter describes, through attention especially to Augustine’s De trinitate, how Christ’s humanity comes to be the point of redemptive mediation between humanity and divinity through the reference of creaturely signs to him. Christ’s flesh is made the unsurpassable redemptive sign as all other creaturely signs come to point to it; yet because Christ’s flesh is shaped through its receptivity to the world, and because the existence and agency of each creature is included within its ability to point to the sign of Christ’s flesh, we must say that creation is given a role to play in God’s redemptive work.

This chapter unpacks the book’s two-fold concern with ‘narrative’: The study of narrative is the empirical focal point for exploring US defense policymaking in the context of the end of the Cold War and, developing a narrative mode of knowing, it is also the methodological cornerstone of how this is done. Looking more closely at the process of reconstituting meaning in relation to the international security environment after a dominant storyline has suddenly become invalid gives a snapshot of the narrative politics that precede the strategic use of security stories to shape political agendas and behavior. This shifts analytic attention beyond narrative purpose and intention toward discursive processes of forming and becoming, in which materiality intra-acts with narrative development. As the chapter demonstrates, a narrative analysis is a way of understanding (inter)national politics that allows us to study security in motion rather than through static outcomes.

Calls to ‘be responsible’ render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims on others and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to build a good life within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to do so. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility hinge upon specific enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remains no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these enactments of responsibility; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. In explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter explores how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life.

What counts as a philosophical issue in computational cognitive science? This chapter briefly reviews possible answers before focusing on a specific subset of philosophical issues. These surround challenges that have been raised by philosophers regarding the scope of computational models of cognition. The arguments suggest that there are aspects of human cognition that may, for various reasons, resist explanation or description in terms of computation. The primary targets of these “no go” arguments have been semantic content, phenomenal consciousness, and central reasoning. This chapter reviews the arguments and considers possible replies. It concludes by highlighting the differences between the arguments, their limitations, and how they might contribute to the wider project of estimating the value of ongoing research programs in computational cognitive science.

Aristotle’s sense of the movement out of dynamis (potential, capacity) and into energia (actuality) was itself ethically neutral, designed to account for a wide range of types of becoming. Yet it also provided a way of conceptualizing the translation of interior states of being into embodied action. Aristotle’s dynamis-energia continuum, along with his taxonomy of voluntary and involuntary behavior, provided the foundational ethical terms by which early moderns negotiated legal cases, theological disputes, and, just as crucially, the regular dilemmas presented by daily social life. Within this context, the Shakespearean stage became a signal space for working out the era’s complicated ways of understanding the move from dynamis to energia as it pertains to intentional ethical action. This chapter focuses on Julius Caesar and Richard II, two plays that take as their central concern the uncertain intentions of potentially rogue agents and the fashioning of multiple forms of community that occurs in response to such ambiguous interior states. By attending closely to the shifts from dynamis to energia within communities as well as individuals – and to variant resonances of these concepts largely lost to modern audiences – Shakespearean drama freshly reimagines classical ethical ideals as a means for fostering communal tranquility within post-Reformation English culture.

I provide an explication of the content and method of Husserl’s phenomenology, explicating the ideas of bracketing and reduction and of descriptive, eidetic and transcendental phenomenology. In the process I set out his ideas of act intentionality, of co-intending and horizons and of active and passive constitution. I then give an account of how Merleau-Ponty adopts and adapts Husserl’s ideas and methodology, recasting phenomenology as an existential and genetic but nonetheless transcendental enterprise. I go on to outline his account of the scientistic and physicalistic picture of the world presented by what he calls objective thought, his major target from the outset. Against this backdrop, I show that he opposes objective thought because it either reduces consciousness to a physical body in a determined world (as empiricism) or takes it as something that acts from above on a physical and agency-neutral body in a similarly determined world (as intellectualism).

It is essential that we rethink psychology. The rethinking that has taken place in the past has resulted in the decline of some schools of thought, such as behaviorism, and the rise of others, such as cognitive psychology. However, past rethinking has not solved two major flaws in mainstream psychology: reductionism and the wrong-headed exclusive adherence to causal accounts of behavior. Reduuctionism has resulted in a focus on isolated individuals and increasingly isolated brains and brain parts. Instead, the perspective of 'society to cells' is advocated, giving priority to macro processes and context. Second, it is argued that psychological science must be concerned with both causally determined and normatively regulated behavior. Although some human behavior is causally determined, much of behavior is regulated by cultural beliefs about what is 'correct' for particular individuals in particular contexts. Such normatively regulated behavior involves some level of intentionality. Psychology as the science of causal and normative behavior moves from contexts to individuals, from societies to cells.

Most metaphors are highly conventionalized expressions that are typically read and understood by native speakers effortlessly. For instance, while reading the brightest child in the classroom native speakers naturally understand that the speaker is not referring to a child who is literally shiny, but rather, a smart child.

Non-native speakers and language learners, however, may find some metaphoric expressions difficult to understand, if expressed in a language that they do not master fluently. Moreover, they may try to use conventional metaphoric expressions translated directly from their own native or first language, into another language. This can create problems in intercultural settings, where the expression may sound unheard before, and possibly unclear. For instance, the arguably unclear expression climbing up on mirrors is actually a direct translation of a highly conventional Italian metaphoric expression, frequently used to say “finding excuses”. In this chapter I elaborate on the way in which metaphoric expressions are understood, and how such comprehension processes vary in relation with metaphor conventionality, aptness and deliberateness. I then take these observations into the field of intercultural communication, explaining how the pragmatics of metaphor comprehension may be affected by intercultural settings.