By Peter Lawler, The Big Think An excerpt: So we've basically completed our two-year series of conferences, publications, and such at Berry College funded by a grant from the Science of Virtues project at the University of Chicago. My concluding presentation—following directions—is about saying what...

By Luci Scott, AZ Central News Imagine you're riding in a car with a friend who is speeding and the car hits a pedestrian. You're the only witness, and the friend's lawyer asks you to testify that your friend was not at fault. Do you help your friend or tell the truth? This is one of many...

By Amy Dockser Marcus, Wall Street Journal online Some scientists find inspiration in the lab. Others trek into the field. Laurie Santos likes the local coffee house. The 36-year-old runs Yale University's Comparative Cognition Laboratory, which examines the origins of the human mind by studying...

By Ashley Welch, Scientific American Anyone who has ever devoured a triple-chocolate brownie after an intense workout knows how tempting it can be to indulge after behaving virtuously. A new study suggests, however, that we often apply this thought process to inappropriate scenarios, giving ourselves...

By Colin Allen, New York Times A robot walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a screwdriver.” A bad joke, indeed. But even less funny if the robot says “Give me what’s in your cash register.” The fictional theme of robots turning against humans is older than the word itself, which first appeared in the...

Virtues News: The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions presents Virtuous Empathy: Scientific and Humanistic Investigations. Indiana University has received a grant from the University of Chicago (sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation) to study "Virtuous Empathy:...

By Cordelia Fine, the Wall Street Journal 'If there were an Olympics of desiring," the philosopher William B. Irvine once observed, "we would all make the team." Desire animates us: What, quite literally, would we do without it? Yet all too often—for about four hours a day, according...

Video from The Science Network Patricia Churchland is one of the most interesting public intellectuals of our time. Since the publication in 1986 of her seminal book “Neurophilosophy”, which began to explain the neural underpinnings of an enormous tradition of philosophy, Churchland has been a major...

3/11/11 By David Brooks, The New York Times We’re an overconfident species. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills. A survey of high school students found that 70 percent of them have above-average leadership skills and only 2 percent are below average...

By Joshua Knobe from The New York Times. "...The study of human nature, whether in Nietzsche or in a contemporary psychology journal, is obviously relevant to certain purely scientific questions, but how could this sort of work ever help us to answer the distinctive questions of philosophy? It may...

By Gabriel Ignatow. This article argues that a modified version of Bourdieu's habitus concept can generate insights into moral culture and the ways people use culture to make changes in their lives. If revised in light of recent findings from cognitive neuroscience, the habitus allows for the analysis...

"What is a good life? What does it mean to be a good person? Richard White answers these questions by considering aspects of moral goodness through the virtues: courage, temperance, justice, compassion, and wisdom. White explores how moral virtues affect and support social movements such as pacifism...

Abstract: In a world of continued and expanding empire, does sociocultural anthropology in itself offer grounds for moral and social criticism? One line in anthropological thought leads to cultural relativism and an awareness that a cloud of alternative possibilites surrounds any moral code. However...

This book lucidly explains how the Parallel Lives of Plutarch (c. AD 45-120) are more than mere `sources' for history. The Lives offer us a unique insight into the reception of Classical Greece and Republican Rome in the Greek world of the second century AD. They also explore and challenge issues...