Publications

The Language of Human Character

brendah — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Book Description: Hardcover release date 22 April 2013. It is virtuous to be wise and wise to be virtuous. The Language of Human Character is a reference book, textbook and workbook in one. It contains "The Human Character Dictionary," a definitive record of the language of human character with more than 27,000 definitions of virtues, vices and other human characteristics that represent the character fruits of all human thoughts, beliefs and values. This book is for those who can use enlightened reason and can safely examine vice to better understand and build virtue. This book is for those who want to "Know what's best!™"

To Be Virtuous, Second Edition

brendah — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Book Description: Hardcover release date 12 December 2012. It is virtuous to be wise and wise to be virtuous. To Be Virtuous, Second Edition is a reference book, textbook and workbook in one. It contains "The Human Virtues Dictionary," a definitive record of 4,900 definitions representing the character fruits of all virtuous thoughts, beliefs and values. Each definition represents a human virtue. This book is well suited to all those capable of learning virtue, beginning with the very young. This book is for those who want to "Be what's best!™"

The Language of Human Virtue

brendah — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Book Description: Hardcover release date: 20 December 2012. It is virtuous to be wise and wise to be virtuous. The Language of Human Virtue is a reference book, textbook and workbook in one. It contains "The Building Virtue Dictionary," a definitive record of the language of human virtue with more than 18,000 definitions representing the character fruits of all thoughts, beliefs and values which can be used to build, preserve and strengthen human virtues within us. This book is for those capable of using enlightened reason to better understand and build virtue, beginning with youth. This book is for those who want to "Do what's best!™"

Time for Love: The Place of Marriage and Children in the Thought of Stanley Hauerwas

agomberg — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:00:00 GMT

By Gilbert Meilaender

In essays written throughout his career, Stanley Hauerwas has unfolded a Christian vision of the marriage bond and the presence of children that seeks insistently to place these seemingly natural bonds within the new family of God that is the church. I examine his understanding, aiming to appreciate the Christian vision displayed while also suggesting that his emphasis on the new thing God does in the church is sometimes allowed to absorb and thereby lose the distinctive significance of the created bonds of marriage and family.

Children, Father God, give us children. Give us those balls of energy that mess up and confuse our lives. Give us the unrelenting need children are, so that we are pulled into a world of love otherwise unimagined. Give us the story time children require, so that we might be restored by their love of us. Help us love these strange creatures in a manner that our love of this child does not tempt us to kill other children so that the children we love be safe. Help us remember that you would not have us love even our children with a love undisciplined by the love you have shown us in the crucifixion of your Son. So cared for, may the sheer exuberance of children make us joyful just to the extent that we learn that the patience children teach us is your Kingdom.

—Hauerwas (2004, 125)

THIS PRAYER, among the sermons and prayers written by Stanley Hauerwas, presents in miniature much of the essential substance of his thought about marriage and family, while simultaneously inviting us to reflect upon a central unresolved problem in his approach to Christian ethics. We can unfold some of the substance and, in so doing, give the problem time to emerge.

Review of Stan van Hooft, Hope

agomberg — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:00:00 GMT

By Nancy Snow

An excerpt: In five chapters, an introduction, and a short epilogue, Stan van Hooft conveys in highly readable and non-technical prose most of what is important about hope. He distinguishes hope from hopefulness, and uses the Aristotelian template of virtue as a mean between extremes to conceptualize each. Hope is a mental state consisting of cognitions and motivations that moves us to strive for a desired end. Though hope includes desire among its motivational components, it goes beyond desire. Though similar to wish, hope is much stronger and is distinguished from wish in other ways. Wishes, for example, can be for the impossible, such as objects of fantasy, and can pertain to the past. Hope, by contrast, must be for what is contingent, that is, for that which is possible but not certain, and is future-oriented. Hope is also distinguished from fear, and, interestingly, from prayer, though, like prayer, hope has the structure of supplication insofar as it is a form of appeal to forces beyond our control for something we desire. Though hope is not a virtue in Aristotle’s catalogue, van Hooft understands hope using an Aristotelian framework. Hope the virtue is a mean between despair and resignation on one extreme, and presumption, the conviction that all will go well for us, on the other. Van Hooft identifies ten conditions that a mental state must satisfy in order to count as hope (p. 46).

Hopefulness lies deeper in our psyche than hope, and is a wellspring from which hope springs and from which it takes its character. It is a disposition or orientation to be positive and open to possibility. It is related to the qualities of joyfulness, trust, and courage. In an interesting depth analysis of hopefulness, van Hooft suggests that it lies at a deep reach of our subjectivity, countering deep-seated fears and anxieties that pervade our lives, such as the fear of death. As with hope, hopefulness the virtue is a mean between extremes – those of cynicism, which is a deficiency of hopefulness, and naivety and fantasy, both of which involve having an unrealistically rosy disposition. As with hope, genuine hopefulness must pass the test of the ten conditions.

Hope and hopefulness are the subjects of the first two chapters. In the next three, van Hooft goes on to explore these conceptions in the context of health care, politics, and religion. These chapters contain robust and rich discussions. However, a methodological concern should be noted. In each of these chapters, van Hooft applies the ten conditions to discussions of hope, arguing that hope as it arises in these contexts satisfies the ten conditions, and thus, truly counts as hope according to his lights. Yet, ‘hope’ is defined and used in various ways in literature on health care, politics, and religion. Sometimes, as in the political arena, the word ‘hope’ is used, but not defined. It could well be that the definitions and uses of ‘hope’ in these contexts overlap significantly with the ten conditions of hope and hopefulness, and consequently, are close enough to van Hooft’s Aristotelian conceptions to defuse this methodological concern. Yet, some recognition of this issue would have been helpful.

www.precollegephilosophy.blogspot.com

joemurphy — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:00:00 GMT

This blog is for philosophers, teachers who'd like to learn to teach AP-CP, interested students, and friends. It is also an American IPO source site. I blog and invite both national and international guest bloggers to write on relevant ideas & aspirations, arguments, plans & projects, events, news, and people.

Individual differences in theory-of-mind judgments: Order effects and side effects

agomberg — Tue, 01 May 2012 05:00:00 GMT

By Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely

Abstract: We explore and provide an account for a recently identified judgment anomaly, i.e., an order effect that changes the strength of intentionality ascriptions for some side effects (e.g., when a chairman's pursuit of profits has the foreseen but unintended consequence of harming the environment). Experiment 1 replicated the previously unanticipated order effect anomaly controlling for general individual differences. Experiment 2 revealed that the order effect was multiply determined and influenced by factors such as beliefs (i.e., that the same actor was involved in bringing about both good and bad side effects) and philosophical training (i.e., more training was associated with smaller differences in judgment when harm followed help). Results provide more evidence that the folk's philosophically relevant intuitions are predictably fragmented and depend on the dynamic interplay between persons, process, and environments. Methodological and theoretical implications are discussed.

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Why Deliberative Polling

agomberg — Tue, 01 May 2012 05:00:00 GMT

By James S. Fishkin

An excerpt: Contrary to Laurel Gleason's assertions, Deliberative Polling among random samples is not a process that is dominated by “experts” or by certain categories of deliberator; it produces genuine gains among the participants in knowledge of information that has been verified as true and relevant; it does not cause ideological polarization; and it is not intended as a substitute for, rather than a supplement to, deliberation on the part of the general public.

Instead of deliberative democracy being merely a distant aspiration or a hazy ideal, it can be realized practically, in my view, with the right institutional design. Deliberative Polling1 is both a form of public consultation and an exploration of what that design should be. It attempts to explore what the public would conclude about a policy issue under good conditions for thinking about the issue. The idea is to realize two fundamental values—political equality and deliberation—that, in my view, are the core values of deliberative democracy.

I first conceived of Deliberative Polling in 1988 and have been implementing it in collaboration with Robert C. Luskin and others in various countries around the world, usually working with local institutions and scholars in the specific countries. Over the years there have been many refinements as well as unexpected applications. Laurel Gleason's critique, keyed to my early book The Voice of the People (1995), raises a number of important questions. However, there are crucial misunderstandings in her paper and I will try to sort them out here. In doing so I will rely on the way I have set out the issues in my more recent book When the People Speak (2009).

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The Possibility of Virtue

malzola — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 05:00:00 GMT

To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They claim a sizable amount of empirical evidence in their support. This paper is concerned with the existence and explanatory power of character as a way to assess the possibility of achieving moral virtue, with particular attention paid to business context. I aim to unsettle the so-called situationist challenge to virtue ethics. In the course of this paper, I shall defend four claims, namely, that virtues are more than just behavioral dispositions, that at least some virtues may not be unitary traits, that psychologists cannot infer virtues from overt behavior, and that the situationist data do not account for the observational equivalence of traits. Since it rests on a misconception of what virtue is, the situationist objection remains unconvincing.

Seeing Emotion in the Brain

agomberg — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Portraying emotions at their unfolding: A multilayered approach for probing dynamics of neural networks

By Gal Raza,Yonatan Winetrauba, Yael Jacoba, Sivan Kinreicha, Adi Maron-Katza, Galit Shahamf, Ilana Podlipskya, Gadi Gilama, Eyal Soreqa, and Talma Hendler

Abstract: Dynamic functional integration of distinct neural systems plays a pivotal role in emotional experience. We introduce a novel approach for studying emotion-related changes in the interactions within and between networks using fMRI. It is based on continuous computation of a network cohesion index (NCI), which is sensitive to both strength and variability of signal correlations between pre-defined regions. The regions encompass three clusters (namely limbic, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and cognitive), each previously was shown to be involved in emotional processing. Two sadness-inducing film excerpts were viewed passively, and comparisons between viewer''s rated sadness, parasympathetic, and inter-NCI and intra-NCI were obtained. Limbic intra-NCI was associated with reported sadness in both movies. However, the correlation between the parasympathetic-index, the rated sadness and the limbic-NCI occurred in only one movie, possibly related to a “deactivated” pattern of sadness. In this film, rated sadness intensity also correlated with the mPFC intra-NCI, possibly reflecting temporal correspondence between sadness and sympathy. Further, only for this movie, we found an association between sadness rating and the mPFC–limbic inter-NCI time courses. To the contrary, in the other film in which sadness was reported to commingle with horror and anger, dramatic events coincided with disintegration of these networks. Together, this may point to a difference between the cinematic experiences with regard to inter-network dynamics related to emotional regulation. These findings demonstrate the advantage of a multi-layered dynamic analysis for elucidating the uniqueness of emotional experiences with regard to an unguided processing of continuous and complex stimulation.

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Virtue and Virility

agomberg — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 05:00:00 GMT

By Dov Cohen and Angela K.-y. Leung

Abstract: In many honor cultures, honor as martial honor and honor as character/integrity are often both subsumed under the banner of honor. In nonhonor cultures, these qualities are often separable. The present study examines political elites, revealing that Presidents, Congresspeople, and Supreme Court Justices from the Southern United States with a greater commitment to martial honor (as indexed by their military service) also show more integrity, character, and moral leadership. This relationship, however, does not hold for nonsoutherners. The present studies illustrate the need to examine both betweenculture differences in cultural logics (as these logics connect various behaviors under a common ideal) and within-culture differences (as individuals rise to meet these cultural ideals or not).

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Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior

agomberg — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

By Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côtébo, Rodolfo Mendoza-Dentona, and Dacher Keltnera

Abstract: Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

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The Influence of Morality Subcultures on the Acceptance and Appeal of Violence

agomberg — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

By Ron Tamborini, Allison Eden, Nicholas David Bowman, Matthew Grizzard, and Kenneth A. Lachlan

Abstract: Two studies examined how disposition theory-based morality subcultures predict the acceptance and appeal of violence. Study 1 used groups formed by median splits of individual difference variables (religiosity, aggression, and sex) thought to be trait correlates of morality subcultures in three 2 × 2 × 2 designs varying trait, perpetrator disposition (positive, negative), and motive (justified, unjustified) to predict the acceptance of violence in story resolutions for a scenario. Study 2 extended this design using domain-specific dimensions of morality from moral foundations theory (MFT) to predict perceptions of violent content and its appeal. The results suggest that morality subcultures predict response to violent drama and that dimensions of morality based on MFT offer a framework for defining morality subcultures.

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More than Enjoyment

agomberg — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Appreciation of Entertainment: The Importance of Meaningfulness via Virtue and Wisdom

By Mary Beth Oliver and Anne Bartsch

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to examine the experience of appreciation to media entertainment as a unique audience response that can be differentiated from enjoyment. To those ends, the first section provides a conceptualization of appreciation in which we outline how we are using the term and how it is distinct from questions of emotional valence. The second section discusses the types of entertainment portrayals and depictions that we believe are most likely to elicit feelings of appreciation. Here, we suggest that appreciation is most evident for meaningful portrayals that focus on human virtue and that inspire audiences to contemplate questions concerning life’s purpose. In the final section we consider the affective and cognitive components of appreciation, arguing that mixed-affective responses (rather than bi-polar conceptualizations of affective valence) better capture the experience of appreciation and its accompanying feelings states such as inspiration, awe, and tenderness.

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The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money, Enlightenment

mahagala — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Focusing on contemporary Tibetan Buddhist revivals in the Tibetan regions of the Sichuan and Qinghai Provinces in China, this book explores the intricate entanglements of the Buddhist revivals with cultural identity, state ideology, and popular imagination of Tibetan Buddhist spirituality in contemporary China. In turn, the author explores the broader socio-cultural implications of such revivals. Based on detailed cross-regional ethnographic work, the book demonstrates that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism in contemporary China is intimately bound with both the affirming and negating forces of globalization, modernity, and politics of religion, indigenous identity reclamation, and the market economy. The analysis highlights the multidimensionality of Tibetan Buddhism in relation to different religious, cultural, and political constituencies of China. By recognizing the greater contexts of China’s politics of religion and of the global status of Tibetan Buddhism, this book presents an argument that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism is not an isolated event limited merely to Tibetan regions; instead, it is a result of the intersection of both local and global transformative changes. The book is a useful contribution to students and scholars of Asian religion and Chinese studies.