Shame

Shame is one of the emotions that a person experiences in a variety of everyday situations and many cases it is annoying. Shame is known as a moral emotion, yet its role in psychopathology has been emphasized. This study aimed to examine the lived experience of shame in individuals . This research is a qualitative study with a phenomenological approach. This research describes in-depth what shame is and how it is experienced from the perspective of individuals. The participants included eight men and seven women who contributed to an in-depth unstructured interview. A seven-step Colaizzi method was used to analyze the data. Data were analyzed using MAXQDA (2018) software.Based on our findings, the eight themes of "physical reactions", "accompanying emotions", "making mistakes", "vicarious shame", "gaze of others", "being subject to judgment", " preoccupation" and three sub-themes of "worry", "rumination" and "blame", "existential shame" with the sub-themes of "inadequacy" and "feeling different" are the most common ones in people's experience of shame. Results are discussed regarding the existing literature. In general, the study of people's experience of shame shows that there are common themes in the description of different people from what they have experienced. The use of shame as a concept in psychotherapy may improve our understanding of the nature of some psychological problems.

In this article, I approach some phenomena seen predominantly on social-media sites that are grouped together as cancel culture with guidance from two major themes in Plato’s thought. In the first section, I argue that shame can play a constructive and valuable role in a person’s improvement, just as we see Socrates throughout Plato’s dialogues use shame to help his interlocutors improve. This insight can help us understand the value of shaming people online for, among other things, their morally reprehensible views. In the second section, I argue that it is required for the proper functioning of democratic institutions that some views be excluded from the public sphere, which follows some Platonic ideas from the Laws. In neither case do I argue that this approach is good in an unqualified sense or even ultima facie good. However, I maintain that these important insights from Plato’s dialogues illuminate crucial aspects of how we should think about cancel culture.

This paper corrects a historical injustice that has been perpetrated against Kant for some time now. Mostly on good grounds, Kantian ethics has been accused of neglecting the role played by the emotions in moral deliberation and in morally informed action. However, the contemporary moral philosophers who have put forth such a claim tend to bypass textual sources, on the one hand, and to downplay the role played by the anthropological writings on Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole, on the other. Relying on highly relevant pre-critical texts in which Kant sketches future argumentative patterns and discusses the role of a negative emotion like shame on the improvement of the human species, I address a mistaken conclusion about Kantian ethics as a whole that is common in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. I also raise paradoxical conclusions that follow from Kant’s argument, once its implicit premises have been brought to light. I conclude that Kant did indeed think seriously about a so-called ‘shame-instinct’, however much his central ideas diverge from contemporary readings of the emotion, and fall short of fulfilling the ultimate target one can assume his insights would be drawing at