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Female sexuality is often seen through a narrow-minded perspective because of Islam's patriarchal structure. The notion that women would be engaged in securing relationships with other women has been rejected since the Qur'an does not state anything about such activities. Those who advocate patriarchy view this issue as something that is not worthy of serious consideration. This may, in no small part, be attributed to female physiology since there is no anatomical way that a woman may be able to penetrate another women. Muslim men have fostered a relatively limited conception of sexuality across history since this is conventionally perceived as an act of copulation regardless of “pleasure.” Although this male egocentrism is still prevalent, modern Islamic societies foster varied attitudes towards lesbian behavior.

To the canonical phenomenologies of the Stranger in Jacques Derrida and Bernhard Waldenfels, this chapter offers a third voice: that of the eighteenth-century religious thinker David Brainerd. Both Waldenfels and Derrida address the need to avoid both an egocentrism and a logocentrism that would reduce the other to the self or the alien to the familiar. True hospitality involves a creative response to the other, not an absorption of otherness. This chapter shows how these visions of hospitality are marked by a sort of “magnetism”: a mutual affection and repulsion. Brainerd's writing presents a scene in which the approach of the Stranger is fraught with an almost electric tension between invisible forces. Concentrating on the phenomenological disclosure of a difference between what is relative and conditional, on one hand, and what is absolute and unconditional on the other, serves to position us, theoretically and concretely, in a scene marked by the tension between magnetism and mourning.

This chapter discusses place–food associations; the origins of people’s negative perceptions of garlic, which are rooted in culinary egocentrism from the colonial era and reinforced during the period of massive southern European migration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century; and garlic’s infiltration of mainstream American cookery.

This chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine aesthetic eccentricity as an emergent feature of identity formation during this new age and traces its trajectory throughout the Edo period (1600–1868). Aesthetic eccentricity refers not only to deviant cultural forms—mainly within the visual arts—but also to subjectivities that privilege individuality, emotion, and intuition over conventional behavior. It tends toward egocentrism and often conveys a subject's desire for detachment from occupational responsibilities, ideological constraints, or commercial pressures. The remainder of this chapter first situates the topic within existing English and Japanese scholarship by examining how others have approached eccentricity as a field of study. It then offers a genealogy of the terms commonly used to signify aesthetic eccentricity in the Edo period. Next, it introduces some of the historiographical issues that have guided inquiry into aesthetic eccentricity in early modern Japan, including the favored tendency to equate it with later avant-garde movements. The chapter concludes by advancing several counterintuitive arguments that collectively demonstrate how strangeness, particularly during the last century of the Edo period, permeated mainstream ethical values to assume an inviolable position within mainstream culture.

This chapter summarizes the main tenets of the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) that is the theoretical framework for intercultural pragmatics. It explains how SCA relates to the positivist and constructivist views. Intercultural pragmatics is rooted in the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) that combines the intention-based, pragmatic view of cooperation with the cognitive view of egocentrism to incorporate emerging features of communication. The chapter explains the interplay of intention and attention and cooperation and egocentrism. It also describes the frame in which speaker's production and hearer's interpretation get equal attention, and underlines that speaker's utterance is a full proposition without any underdeterminacy of what is said from the speaker's perspective. The chapter also demonstrates how recipient design is affected by salience in speaker's production

This chapter shifts the focus of Sōseki's reminiscence to family and one's role as husband and father. Here, depictions in both the shōhin and the autobiographical fiction point to an uneasy modus vivendi with one's domestic circumstance and an ongoing tension between egocentrism and empathy. Notwithstanding the crafted persona of shosai ningen—the study-bound recluse—Natsume Sōseki lived under the same roof as his family, and it was a large and growing family at that. His desire for privacy is understandable, given that he worked out of his home office, but this desire did not go unchallenged. The household, in short, was contested space. The Natsume brood had competing claims, and an undercurrent of tension marks the domestic situation as depicted in his personal writing.

This chapter, “From Olive Groves to Hell’s Kitchen,” examines Callas’s experiences during early childhood in New York City that left her with permanent psychological vulnerabilities. Having been deprived of adequate parental input during a critical developmental stage and growing up in a family beset by conflict exacerbated by a move from a provincial town in Greece to New York City, Maria found it hard to compensate later in life for her egocentrism and her lack of empathy. Callas’s adult life can be construed as an unrelenting pursuit of the psychological bounties she was deprived of in childhood. It is not accidental that Callas’s strength as an opera performer lay largely in her insatiable need for adulation from the audience (mirroring) and that her relationships with the significant men in her life were characterized by idealization.

This chapter argues that a speaker’s utterance is not just recipient design. While fitting words into actual situational contexts, speakers are driven not only by the intent that the hearer recognize what is meant as intended by the speaker, but also by individual salience, which affects production subconsciously. The interplay of these social (recipient design) and individual factors (salience) shapes a speaker’s utterance. Recipient design is the result of being cooperative, which, according to Grice,is a part of human rationality. This chapter claims, however, that individual egocentrism that results in individual salience is part of human rationality just as much as cooperation is. It is claimed and demonstrated through examples that recipient design usually requires an inductive process that is carefully planned, while salience effect generally appears in the form of a deductive process that may contain repairs and adjustments.

This chapter explicates cognitive developmental themes in moral development. The attention of young children is readily captured by or centered on that which is immediate and salient in their sociomoral and non-social worlds. Just as centrations and superficiality characterize early childhood moral judgment, “decentration” and depth can be said to characterize the moral competence constructed in the school years and beyond. We relate morality to logic (cf. Piaget); explain that the ideals of justice or moral reciprocity are constructed, not merely enculturated, socialized, or internalized; explicate the role of peer interaction and social perspective-taking opportunities in this moral constructive process across diverse cultures; argue that justice can be a moral motive in its own right; and ponder issues in the concept and assessment of “stages” in the development of moral judgment.

The referent for social behavior shifts in this chapter to antisocial behavior and how to account for it. Most offenders, from petty pranksters to ideological terrorists, fail (except for self-serving purposes) to take the perspectives of their victims. Social perspective-taking limitations pervade the “three Ds” of antisocial youth: moral developmental delay, self-serving cognitive distortions, and social skills deficiencies. The latter variables are needed to supplement Kohlberg’s and Hoffman’s emphasis on developmental delay if we are adequately to account for antisocial behavior. The chapter concludes with the powerful illustrative case of Timothy McVeigh. This case makes particularly clear how cognitive distortions can insulate a self-centered worldview (itself a primary distortion, linked to feeling superior or inadequately respected); that is, self-serving distortions can preempt or neutralize social perspective-taking, moral understanding, and veridical empathy.

This chapter discusses the role and impact of personality on the vote. It reopens the question of what a notion of ‘personality’ entails, focusing on eight discrete personality traits: sensitivity, anxiety, alienation, freedom aspiration, extraversion, risk aversion, care, and confrontation. The chapter assess whether personality derivatives such as favourite colours and animal resemblances also help to explain differences in electoral behaviour. It then introduces a twist to the question of morality. While different people may be more, or less, vocal about their sense of morals, the most relevant variation in electoral politics pertains rather to moral hierarchization: different citizens prioritizing differently some moral principles over others. The chapter also reintroduces the notion of egocentrism and sociotropism in the vote. It identifies four dimensions of sociotropism: economic, social, safety, and misery.

This essay explores the adequacy of Sidgwick’s contrast between the egocentrism of ancient ethics and the impartiality of modern ethics by evaluating the resources of eudaimonists, especially Aristotle and the Stoics, to defend a cosmopolitan conception of the common good. Adapting ideas from Broad, we might contrast the scope and weight of ethical concern, distinguishing ethical conceptions that are parochial with respect to both scope and weight, conceptions that are cosmopolitan with respect to both scope and weight, and mixed conceptions that combine universal scope and variable weight. Aristotle’s conception of the common good appears doubly parochial. By contrast, the Stoic conception of the common good is purely cosmopolitan. But the Stoics have trouble providing a eudaimonist defense of their cosmopolitanism. However, Aristotelian eudaimonism has resources to justify a mixed conception. Mixed cosmopolitanism may be cosmopolitanism enough.