Tragedy and Resentment

Précis of Self-Knowledge and Resentment

The term ‘privileged access’, on the lips and keyboards of philosophers, expresses an intuition that self-knowledge is unique among the knowledges human beings possess, unique in being somehow more direct and less prone to error than other kinds of knowledge such as, say, our knowledge of the physical world or of the mental states of others. These notions of ‘directness ‘ and ‘immunity to error...

Owning Our Implicit Attitudes: Responsibility, Resentment, and the Whole Self

Are implicit biases something we can rightly be held responsible for, and if so, how? A variety of social and cognitive psychological studies have documented the existence of wide-ranging implicit biases for over 30 years. These implicit biases can best be described as negative mental attitudes that operate immediately and unconsciously in response to specific stimuli. The first chapter of this...

Sex, death and tragedy.

The population consequences of sexual conflict are relatively unexplored. In a recent paper, Le Galliard et al. now show that males of the common lizard Lacerta vivipara cause such damage to females that male-biased populations decrease in size, posing a real risk to the persistence of local lizard populations. Their study reveals surprising parallels between sexual conflict and the tragedy of ...

Pediatric Tragedy

Recurrent Human Tragedy During Hajj

Hajj, a unique yearly mass gathering pilgrimage of more than 2 million Muslims from around the world, presents enormous challenges to the Saudian Arabia government.1 The potential for deadly epidemic outbreaks of bacterial and viral diseases leading to upper respiratory infection and meningitis and human stampedes call for prompt attention from both pilgrims and the ministry of healt...