This study examines whether character strengths predict resilience (operationalized as stable or higher mental health and subjective well-being despite an adverse event) over a period of approximately one month during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Spain. Using a longitudinal design, participants (N = 348 adults) completed online measures of sociodemographic data, information regarding their situation in relation to the COVID-19, character strengths, general mental health, life satisfaction, positive affect and negative affect. All variables were measured at Time 1 and Time (...) 2, except for sociodemographic and most COVID-related information (Time 1 only). Time 1 data collection was conducted between March 21, 2020 and April 2, 2020, i.e., approximately the second week of lockdown in Spain. Time 2 data collection was conducted between April 24, 2020 and May 18, 2020, after the Spanish government announced ita intention to progressively release the lockdown. A principal component analysis of character strengths was conducted. Five character strength factors were extracted: fortitude, goodness, intellectual, interpersonal, and restraint. Factor structures at Times 1 and 2 were highly consistent. All character strength factors at Time 1 correlated positively with life satisfaction and positive affect, and negatively with negative affect and mental health at T2 (higher scores in the mental health measure indicate poorer mental health). Fortitude strengths showed the highest correlations. We conducted a series of regression analyses with strength factors at Time 1 as predictors, and mental health, life satisfaction, and positive and negative affect as dependent variables, controlling for their baseline levels. To test the directionality of the relationship between strengths and the dependent variables, all analyses were reversed. All character strength factors predicted an increase in mental health. They also predicted positive affect, with the exception of strengths of restraint. Fortitude, intellectual and interpersonal strengths predicted an increase in life satisfaction. Finally, fortitude strengths, interpersonal strengths, and strengths of restraint, predicted a decrease in negative affect. None of the reversed analyses yielded significant effects. Limitations, implications, and possible character strengths-based interventions aimed at promoting mental health in the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed. (shrink)

McGowan argues that everyday verbal bigotry makes a key contribution to the harms of discriminatory inequality, via a mechanism that she calls sneaky norm enactment. Part of her account involves showing that the characteristic of conversational interaction that facilitates sneaky norm enactment is in fact a generic one, which obtains in a wide range of activities, namely, the property of having conventions of appropriateness. I argue that her account will be better-able to show that everyday verbal bigotry is a key (...) factor in social inequality if it tries to isolate a more specific property of conversation as the thing that facilitates sneaky norm enactment. (shrink)

Experiences like pains, pleasures, and emotions have affective phenomenal character: they feel pleasant or unpleasant. Imperativism proposes to explain affective phenomenal character by appeal to imperative content, a kind of intentional content that directs rather than describes. We argue that imperativism is on the right track, but has been developed in the wrong way. There are two varieties of imperativism on the market: first-order and higher-order. We show that neither is successful, and offer in their place a new theory: reflexive (...) imperativism. Our proposal is that an experience P feels pleasant in virtue of being constituted by a Command with reflexive imperative content, while an experience U feels unpleasant in virtue of being constituted by a Command with reflexive imperative content : More of P!Less of U! If you need a slogan: experiences have affective phenomenal character in virtue of commanding us Get more of me! Get less of me! (shrink)

Human persons can act with libertarian freedom in heaven according to one prominent view, because they have freely acquired perfect virtue in their pre-heavenly lives such that acting rightly in heaven is volitionally necessary. But since the character of human persons is not perfect at death, how is their character perfected? On the unilateral model, God alone completes the perfection of their character, and, on the cooperative model, God continues to work with them in purgatory to perfect their own character. (...) I argue that although both models can make sense of all human persons enjoying free will in heaven on various assumptions, the cooperative model allows all human persons in heaven to enjoy a greater degree of freedom. This consideration about the degree of heavenly freedom provides a reason for God to implement the cooperative model. (shrink)

This book offers a unified collection of published and unpublished papers by Robert Audi, a renowned defender of the rationalist position in ethics. Taken together, the essays present a vigorous, broadly-based argument in moral epistemology and a related account of reasons for action and their bearing on moral justification and moral character. Part I details Audi's compelling moral epistemology while Part II offers a unique vision of ethical concepts and an account of moral explanation, as well as a powerful model (...) of moral realism. Part III extends this account of moral explanation to moral responsibility for both actions and character and to the relation between virtue and the actions that express it. Part IV elaborates a theory of reasons for action that locates them in relation to three of their traditionally major sources: desire, moral judgment, and value. Clear and illuminating, Audi's introduction outlines and interconnects the self-contained but cumulatively arranged essays. It also places them in relation to classical and contemporary literature, and directs readers to large segments of thematically connected material spread throughout the book. Audi ends with a powerfully synthetic final essay. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to determine what is to remember something, as opposed to imagining it, perceiving it, or introspecting it. What does it take for a mental state to qualify as remembering, or having a memory of, something? The main issue to be addressed is therefore a metaphysical one. It is the issue of determining which features those mental states which qualify as memories typically enjoy, and those states which do not qualify as such typically lack. In (...) sections 2 and 3, I will discuss the two main existing conceptions of the conditions that a mental state must satisfy to count as an episode of remembering. The first of these approaches is backward-looking. It puts forward conditions that strictly concern the aetiology of the mental state. I will argue that the conditions offered by the backward-looking approach are both too strong and too weak: They rule out mental states which, intuitively, count as memories while including mental states which, intuitively, do not qualify as memories. The second approach is forward-looking. It puts forward conditions that only concern the use that the subject makes of the mental state while forming beliefs about their own life. I will argue that the conditions proposed by the forward-looking approach are both too weak and too strong as well. However, the discussion of the two approaches will allow us to extract some helpful lessons on the constraints that any proposal about the nature of remembering should respect. An alternative approach aimed at incorporating those lessons will be offered in section 4 by drawing on the literature on functionalism. In section 5, I will argue that this approach can, on the one hand, accommodate as memories those mental states which indicate that the backward-looking approach and the forward-looking approach are too strict while, on the other hand, excluding those mental states which suggest that the two alternative approaches are too permissive. Accordingly, I will conclude that construing memory along functionalist lines is a satisfactory approach to the nature of remembering. (shrink)

In the Republic, Plato developed an educational program through which he trained young Athenians in desiring truth, without offering them any knowledge-education. This is not because he refused to pass on knowledge but because he considered knowledge of the Good as an ongoing research program. I show this by tracing the steps of the education of the Philosopher-Kings in Plato’s ideal state, to establish that the decades-long educational regime aims at training them in three types of virtue: Moral Virtue; the (...) Cognitive Virtue of Abstraction; the Cognitive Virtue of Debate.Plato’s theory of education has much to teach us about intellectual character education today. The Platonic educational program does not advocate the direct transmission of knowledge from teacher to learner but rather focuses on building the learners’ epistemic dispositions. Building upon the Socratic Method, Plato’s educational program does not ‘spoon-feed’ knowledge to the learners but rather fosters the growth of intellectual virtues through problem-solving.I explain ways in which fostering intellectual virtues through problem-solving could be applied in classrooms today. I conclude that Plato’s rigorous educational program is of definite merit for contemporary virtue education, especially since Aristotle offers us surprisingly little on how to educate for intellectual virtues. (shrink)

Character formation is a central theme in Katherin Rogers’s Freedom and Self-Creation: Anselmian Libertarianism. According to Rogers, Anselm holds that the purpose of free choice is to afford creatures the possibility of creating their own characters through their free choices. I argue that Anselm has no doctrine of character formation. Accordingly, he does not hold the view of the purpose of free choice that Rogers attributes to him. Creatures cannot bring about justice in themselves, let alone increase it by their (...) own efforts; any moral progress is divine gift, not creaturely achievement. I offer an alternative account of the purpose of free choice. (shrink)

This book argues that the question posed by virtue theories, namely, “what kind of person should I be?” provides a more promising approach to moral questions than do either deontological or consequentialist moral theories where the concern is with what actions are morally required or permissible. It does so both by arguing that there are firmer theoretical foundations for virtue theories, and by persuasively suggesting the superiority of virtue theories over deontological and consquentialist theories on the question of explaining morally (...) bad behavior. Virtue theories can give a richer account by appealing to the kinds of dispositions that make certain bad choices appear attractive. This richer account also exposes a further advantage of virtue theories: they provide the best kinds of motivations for agents to become better persons. (shrink)

본고에서 논자는 알패노와 스콜버그에 의해 제시된 내장된(embedded) 성격과 확장된 (extended) 성격 가정에 대해 비판적으로 검토하고 문제점을 지적한다. 이 가정은 행위자가 고정된 성격 보다는 상황적 요소에 따라 행동한다고 주장하는 상황주의의 도전에 대한 대응이라고 간주될 수 있다. 알패노와 스콜버그는 고정관념 위협 사례를 통해 내장된 성격 가정을 그리고 우정 사례를 통해 확장된 성격 가정을 제시하였다. 이 가정들은 확장된 마음 이론(The extended mind theory)과 내장된 인지 이론(The embedded cognition theory) 등과 같은 인지과학의 최근 연구 성과를 성격 개념에 응용한 것이라고 할 수 있다. 확장된 마음 (...) 이론에 따르면, 외부의 소품, 도구, 다른 체계 등이 행위자의 기능적 장치에 적절하게 통합될 때 그것들은 행위자의 인지를 담당하는 요소이다. 내장된 인지 이론에 따르면, 환경 속에 있는 소품이나 도구 등에 의존해서 인지하는 사람의 인지적 업무의 부담을 좀 줄일 수 있다. 논자는 확장된 성격에 대하여 두 가지 문제점을 제시하였다. 첫째, 통제할 수 없는 변화와 성격 평가의 문제이다. 한 행위자에게 타인이 성격의 한 요소가 되는 경우 타인의 변화는 자신이 조정할 수 있는 범위를 벗어나서 일어날 수 있다. 이렇게 자신의 통제를 벗어난 영역의 것을 성격의 요소라고 할 경우 성격을 칭찬할 때나 비난할 때 우리가 가지는 일반적인 가정을 유지할 수 없게 된다. 둘째, 확장된 성격 개념은 마마보이 같은 사람들의 정당화 혹은 핑계로 사용될 수 있다. 내장된 성격 개념에 반대하여 두 가지 반론을 제시하였다. 첫째, 우리의 성격을 결정짓는 것은 환경적 요소가 아닌 환경적 요소에 대응하는 우리의 태도일 수 있다. 어떤 사람들은 고정관념의 영향 아래에 있을 수 있으나 또 다른 사람들은 고정관념의 영향에서 벗어나는 방식으로 판단하고 그것에 기초해 행동할 수 있다. 고정관념이라는 환경적 요소에 어떻게 대응하느냐가 그 행위자의 성격을 결정짓는 요소일 수 있다. 둘째, 거대해지는 성격의 문제이다. 고정관념의 위협과 같은 것을 성격의 한 요소로 여길 경우 수많은 외부적 요소를 성격의 요소로 간주해야 할 수 있다. 이러한 경우에 행위자가 온전히 파악하지 못해 반성의 대상으로 삼기 힘든 부분이 성격의 요소로 통합되는 것일 수 있다. 이런 결과는 성격에 대해 우리가 일반적으로 가정하는 것과 조화를 이루기 힘들다. (shrink)

이 연구의 목적은 대한민국의 인성교육에서 논의에서 드러나는 ‘개인의 도덕성’과 ‘시민성’ 간의 분리 현상을 극복하기 위한 화해 방안을 제시하는 것이다. 이 분리 현상은 ‘시민성’에 대한 강조를 통해 더욱 가속화된다. 이를 위해 첫째, 대한민국의 헌법 및 교육부의 목표에 제시된 인성교육의 개념 검토를 통해 인성교육에서 겨냥하는 ‘인성’ 개념이 어느 한 속성이 아닌 ‘개인의 도덕성’과 ‘시민성’을 포함하는 개념임을 드러낸다. 그리고 둘째, 인성을 구성하는 개인의 도덕성과 시민성의 관계에 대해 탐색한다. 이를 통해 ‘시민성의 조건으로서의 개인의 도덕성’과 ‘개인의 확장으로서의 시민성’이라는 유기적 관계 속에서 다루어져야 하는 것임을 피력하고자 (...) 한다. 마지막으로 셋째, 이 두 요소 간의 긴밀한 연결을 위해 개인적 노력으로서 ‘자아리터러시’ 강화 방안을 모색한 후, 이것이 사회에서 건전하게 발현되기 위한 조건으로서 ‘관용과 무관용의 조화로운 적용’을 통해 건전한 인성교육으로의 방향성을 제시하고자 한다. (shrink)

In this article I want to focus on a specific function that promises fulfil in our lives: their role as a way of shaping our character. To make my case, I will present an account of truth-telling based on Bernard Williams’ work on genealogy and on the virtues of truth. This account will highlight how our selves (or characters) are not static entities in time, that they are not immediately transparent to us. Nonetheless, we seem to have what I call (...) a drive to be someone, to have a character. We need ways to ‘steady the mind’, that is, ways of shaping our selves to whom we are or want to be. The argument I will put forward is that promises are one of the resources we have for doing so. By making promises, we commit ourselves to acting in a certain way and by doing that we also shape our selves. The argument will help us to answer some philosophical challenges raised against promises, notably about their rationality and about their relationship with vows and resolutions. Additionally, it will impact our thinking about contract law. What emerges from this article is an account of an important role played by promises that has been often neglected by the literature. (shrink)

Crisis management can be simultaneously a content specific problem solving process and an opportunity for stimulating and enabling an organization's ethical tradition. Crisis can be an opportunity for ethical organizational development. Kierkegaardian "upbuilding" dialog method builds from within the internal ethical tradition of an organization to respond to crises while simultaneously adapting and protecting the organization's tradition. The crisis itself may not be a directly ethical crisis, but the method of responding to the crisis is built upon the ethical foundations (...) of an organization's tradition. A limitation of this method is that it may be less applicable to organizations with questionably ethical traditions. The concept of "upbuilding" dialog is derived from Kierkegaard, but here is applied to organizational crisis management. The method is illustrated and discussed in the context of a wrongful death crisis of the Dana- Farber Cancer Institute, a non-profit organization, and an economic survival crisis at Ben and Jerry's, a business organization. (shrink)

This paper investigates the concept of emotion and its relevance to education via character education through the medium of poetry. The objective is to demonstrate the potential implementation of character education through poetry, and to show the intrinsic link between poetry and virtue, knowledge and reasoning. It is argued that poetry serves as a bridge between emotion and character education. The philosophy of emotions is explored through the works of Aristotle, Karin Bohlin and David Carr. Character education is understood in (...) terms of a Neo-Aristotelian approach, drawing on Kristján Kristjánsson, Bohlin and Carr. My position is that, through exercising the craft of poetry, children and young students are provided with tools for exploring emotions, and for discerning and deliberating about virtues and moral contextual nuances in the broader context of human experience. (shrink)

This article studies the moral metaphor system focusing on a subsystem consisting of five pairs of MORAL and IMMORAL metaphors whose source concepts represent some contrastive categories in our visual experience: WHITE and BLACK, LIGHT and DARK, CLEAR and MURKY, CLEAN and DIRTY, PURE and IMPURE. The study examines whether these moral metaphors are manifested in Chinese and English, looking for linguistic evidence in both languages. It is found that the studied moral metaphors are applicable in both languages at varying (...) degrees. This finding suggests that these metaphors may range from being widespread to being universal. The study then further analyzes them regarding whether they are primary or complex metaphors and whether they are equal in status, applying a decompositional approach to metaphor analysis. The result suggests that the moral metaphors under study are complex rather than primary metaphors, and that they are actually not equal in status, some depending on others in meaning making in our moral cognition. If the analysis is valid, the implications are: some conceptual metaphors are more fundamental than others, those that are more fundamental are more likely to be widespread or universal, and hypotheses can be made about conceptual metaphors based on in-depth analysis of their conceptual composition. (shrink)

This chapter examines the modifications William James made to his account of the ethics of belief from his early ‘subjective method’ to his later heightened concerns with personal doxastic responsibility and with an empirically-driven comparative research program he termed a ‘science of religions’. There are clearly tensions in James’ writings on the ethics of belief both across his career and even within Varieties itself, tensions which some critics think spoil his defense of what he calls religious ‘faith ventures’ or ‘overbeliefs’. (...) But our study of James in the first half of the chapter reveals a significant degree of unnoticed unity: The two distinct defenses of faith ventures he develops post-1900 are actually both versions of the Dialogue Model of the relationship between individual religiosity and scientific reasoning. One shared theme in the diverging approaches to doxastic responsibility suggested by the two versions is what some interpreters have called ‘the character issue’ in James’ writings. The second half of the chapter develops these connections and argues that a neo-Jamesian approach tying the ethics of belief with Rawlsian reasonable pluralism and with contemporary character epistemology results in a stronger yet more clearly delimited defense of responsible faith ventures. (shrink)

This chapter defends an Aristotelian account of patriotism that differs from, and improves upon, the ‘extreme’ account of Aristotelian patriotism defended by Alasdair MacIntyre in a famous lecture. The virtue of patriotism is modeled on Aristotle’s account of the virtue of friendship; and the resulting account of patriotism falls between MacIntyre’s extreme patriotism and Marcia Baron’s moderate patriotism. The chapter illustrates how this plausible Aristotelian account of patriotism can avoid the dilemma that Baron has pressed against MacIntyre’s extreme account. It (...) also illustrates why the virtue of patriotism cannot coexist with willful forms of ignorance. In its discussion of patriotism and ignorance the chapter draws on a recent study (2018) of the especially strong connection in the United States between patriotism and poverty. (shrink)

his study aims to determine whether the application of brain-friendly learning through whole brain teaching gives a positive effect on the creative character of students, to know the response of the students against the application of brain-friendly learning through whole brain teaching, and to find out if the student response against the application of brain-friendly learning through whole brain teaching correlates positively with the creative character of students in learning mathematics. The research method used that is quantitative. The instruments used, (...) namely the now student response related application of brain-friendly learning through whole brain teaching, and sheets of observation about the creativity of students in learning mathematics after implementing this method. The correlation analysis with the results of the study showed that the value of the larger significance of the alpha values (5%) which means accepting and rejecting H0 Ha which means student response against the application of brain-friendly learning through whole brain teaching not correlated positively with the creative character of students in learning mathematics. The average student response score against this method is found on very good i.e. amounted to 85%. As for the observations of the creative character of the students, after this method is applied, the average score of 68% is found quite creative. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the application of learning brain-friendly through the whole brain teaching a positive effect on the character of creative students, to study the response of the students, and to determine whether the students' response to the application of learning brain-friendly through the whole brain teaching positively correlated with the character of creative students in mathematics. The research method used is quantitative. The instruments used are student questionnaire responses related to the application of (...) brain-friendly learning through the whole brain teaching and observation sheet on student creativity in the learning of mathematics after the implementation of this method. Results of research with correlation analysis show that the greater significance of the alpha value (5%), which means accepting and rejecting H0 Ha which means students' response to the application of brain-friendly learning through the whole brain teaching is not positively correlated with the creative character of students in the learning of mathematics. The average score of the students' response to this methodology very well categorized in the amount of 85%. The results of the observation of the creative character of the students after the implementation of this method, the average score of 68% were categorized quite creative. (shrink)

There has been much debate recently about the meaning, place and function of “character” and “character traits” in Virtue Ethics. For example, a number of philosophers have argued recently that Virtue Ethics would be strengthened as a theory by the omission of talk of character traits; recent neuroscientific studies have suggested that there is scope for scepticism about the existence of such traits. I will argue that both approaches are flawed and unconvincing: in brief, the first approach tends to be (...) predicated on a narrow or insufficient conception of “character” and “character traits”; the second approach tends to go well beyond the available (empirical) evidence. Finally, I will argue that it is possible to point to a philosophy of education that is deeply informed by an understanding of virtue and ethics in which the concept of character has a coherent and meaningful role. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on the role of computer simulations as exploratory strategies. I begin by establishing the non-theory-driven nature of simulations. This refers to their ability to characterize phenomena without relying on a predefined conceptual framework that is provided by an implemented mathematical model. Drawing on Steinle’s notion of exploratory experimentation and Gelfert’s work on exploratory models, I present three exploratory strategies for computer simulations: (1) starting points and continuation of scientific inquiry, (2) varying the parameters, and (3) (...) scientific prototyping. (shrink)

Moral character and ascetic practice have not been major themes in contemporary analytic religious epistemology, but they have been major themes in the religious epistemologies of several influential historical figures, including the medieval Islamic philosopher al-Ghazalı. This article will be concerned with the place of moral character and ascetic practice in both al-Ghazalı’s religious epistemology and in contemporary analytic religious epistemology. By reading al-Ghazalı alongside contemporary work, I aim to highlight some fruitful ideas about how moral character and ascetic practice (...) could play important roles in religious epistemology. I argue that the exploration of these ideas may be enriched via engagement with recent developments in mainstream epistemology and virtue theory, pointing toward future avenues for such work. (shrink)

Essential for the concept of the law of nature is not only spatio-temporal universality, but also functionality in the sense of the dependency on physical conditions of natural entities. In the following it is explained in detail that just the neglect of this functional property is to be understood as the real reason for the occurrence of the Goodman paradox – with the consequence, that the behavior of things seems to be completely at the mercy of change of unique unrepeatable (...) temporal points. It is exactly this (mis-)understanding that also generated the induction problem. From the intrinsic connection between universality and functionality, however, – that is my claim – the ontological consequence of a nature results, for which lawfulness is coupled to essentially functionally defined time sequences, thereby implying a potentiality dimension of nature, too. (shrink)

The Self-Defeating Character of Skepticism [ABSTRACT] Douglas C. Long Philosophical skepticism arises from a Cartesian first-person perspective that initially rejects as unjustified any appeal to sense perception. I argue that, contrary to the cogito argument, when a “purely subjective” epistemology cuts one off from justified beliefs about the world in this way, it undermines justified belief about one’s own existence as an individual in the world as well. Therefore, philosophical doubt expressed in the form: “I know that I exist but (...) I cannot know about the existence of anything else,” is in fact self-defeating. Philosophers have mistakenly assumed that the subjective epistemological perspective from which philosophical doubt about the existence of material objects is expressed is indeed our ordinary first person perspective on ourselves. And we of course know that the latter perspective surely provides epistemological access to ourselves as existing active subjects of experience. However, I claim that traditional wholesale epistemological skepticism in fact attempts to mandate an importantly different perspective on ourselves that we do not and cannot have. The feature of skepticism which I believe renders it vulnerable is the assumption that each of us has a right to be certain of his own existence as a subject of conscious experience even in the face of comprehensive doubt about our empirical beliefs. (shrink)

When an object looks red to an observer, the visual experience of the observer has two important features. The experience visually represents the object as having a property—being red. And the experience has a phenomenological character; that is, there is something that it is like to have an experience of seeing an object as red. Let qualia be the properties that give our sensory and perceptual experiences their phenomenological character. This essay takes up two related problem for a nonreductive account (...) of qualia. Some have argued that on such an account there is no room in a physicalist ontology for qualia. Section 1 shows how qualia might fit into a physicalist ontology. The second problem begins with the observation that there is a gap in scientific accounts of color experience; there is no explanation of why the features of the brain that determine our color experiences give those experiences their phenomenological character. Building on the results of Sect. 1, Sect. 2 develops an account of color perception that bridges this gap and shows how qualia give color perception its phenomenological character. To get a grip on the issues involved the paper begins by considering some aspects of a physicalist account of color. (shrink)

Dreaming consciousness can be quite different from waking consciousness and this difference must depend upon the underlying neurobiology. Our approach is to infer the underlying brain basis for this difference by studying dream reports and comparing them with waking. In this study we investigated mentation during dreaming by asking subjects to provide us with dream reports and by asking them to create a dream log. In the dream log, the subjects recorded all implausibility, illogicality or inappropriateness of character during the (...) dream narrative when compared to the character’s real-life waking counterpart. Thus, the dream acted as its own control in comparing waking and dreaming mentation. (shrink)