What is the role of colleges and universities in forming the character of students? Should universities even attempt to cultivate virtue? If so, how can they do so effectively in a pluralistic context? Cultivating Virtue in the University seeks to answer these questions by gathering diverse perspectives on character education within twenty-first century universities. Bringing together experts from a variety of academic disciplines, this volume catalyzes a critical debate about the possibilities and limits of character education in the university while (...) offering theoretical and practical perspectives on what such education could look like in increasingly global, pluralistic, and intercultural institutions. Ultimately, by engaging insights from education, history, literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theology, the volume encourages faculty, staff, and administrators to embrace the opportunities and challenges of cultivating virtue in the university. (shrink)

Universities have long played an important role in preparing thinkers and leaders who go on to have significant impact around the world. But if the world needs wise thinkers and good leaders, then how might modern universities educate leaders of character, particularly in a pluralistic context where many educators are reluctant to see the university as a site of moral formation? This article shares insights from one specific program, the Oxford Global Leadership Initiative, an extra-curricular program that seeks to help (...) diverse cohorts of graduate students develop the ethical qualities of character needed for leaders to serve the common good. Drawing upon qualitative data collected over three years of program activity to illuminate and illustrate our argument, we address three questions: Can virtues of character necessary for good leadership be cultivated in a university setting among a culturally diverse group of students? How can a character-based leadership program meet the particular developmental needs of “emerging adults”? and How might the program’s impact translate into society and culture? We conclude that a program integrating character and leadership can make valuable contributions to the ethical and professional development of postgraduate students. (shrink)

What might we learn if the study of ethics focused less on hard cases and more on the practices of everyday life? In Everyday Ethics, Michael Lamb and Brian Williams gathered some of the world's leading scholars and practitioners of moral theology (including some Georgetown University Press authors) to explore that question in dialogue with anthropology and the social sciences. In a field largely begun by Michael Banner, contributors engage with and extend his ideas of ethics as it is (...) practiced in daily life. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, these scholars analyze the ethics of ordinary practices--from eating, learning, and loving the neighbor to borrowing and spending, using technology, and working in a flexible economy. Along the way, they consider the moral and methodological questions that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialogue and assess the implications for the future of moral theology. (shrink)

The Strange Situation procedure was developed by Ainsworth two decades agoas a means of assessing the security of infant-parent attachment. Users of the procedureclaim that it provides a way of determining whether the infant has developed species-appropriate adaptive behavior as a result of rearing in an evolutionary appropriate context, characterized by a sensitively responsive parent. Only when the parent behaves in the sensitive, species-appropriate fashion is the baby said to behave in the adaptive or secure fashion. Furthermore, when infants are (...) observed repeatedly in the Strange Situation,the pattern of behavior is said to be highly similar, and this pattern is said to predict the infants' future behavior in a diverse array of contexts. After an exhaustive review of the literature, it is shown that these popular claims are empirically unsupported in their strong form, and that the interpretations in terms of biological adaptationare misguided. There is little reliable evidence about the specific dimensions of parental behavior that affect Strange Situation behavior, although there does appear to be some relationship between these constructs. Temporal stability in security of attachment ishigh only when there is stability in family and caretaking circumstances. Likewise, patterns of Strange Situation behavior only have substantial predictive validity in similarly stable families. Implications for future research and theorizing — particularly as they relate to the use of evolutionary biology in psychological theory — are discussed. (shrink)

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an open access, dynamic reference work designed to organize professional philosophers so that they can write, edit, and maintain a reference work in philosophy that is responsive to new research. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they (...) are made public. (shrink)

This book is written for researchers, students and professionals in areas including animal welfare ethics, animal behaviourists, veterinarians, veterinary nurses, animal welfare counsellors, animal trainers, and professionals and volunteers with an interest in animal welfare ethics. Several of the main areas of ethical inquiry concerning animals are introduced, explained and analysed. Inquiries also cover cultural traditions affecting the well being of animals, and discussions concerning the role of aesthetics in practices relevant to the welfare of animals. Unlike many books which (...) feature arguments about ethical theories this book includes elements of personal experience with animals. Although the author is an academic teaching within a university structure, he is also a professional animal trainer. (shrink)

How can I give you a reason to believe what I tell you? I can influence the evidence available to you. Or I can simply invite your trust. These two ways of giving reasons work very differently. When a speaker tells her hearer that p, I argue, she intends that he gain access to a prima facie reason to believe that p that derives not from evidence but from his mere understanding of her act. Unlike mere assertions, acts of telling (...) give reasons directly. They give reasons by inviting the hearer’s trust. This yields a novel form of anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. The status of testimony as a sui generis source of epistemic warrant is entailed by the nature of the act of telling. We can discover the nature of this illocution, and its epistemic role, by examining how it functions in the real world of human relations. (shrink)

Although the question of human knowing and of being occupies a primary place in the history of human thought, it remains a controversial problem in philosophy. Any meanings that a thinker may assign to the three basic philosophic issues of knowing, objectivity and reality will eventually demarcate his school of thought, and fundamentally determine of cognitional theory, epistemology and metaphysics. Bernard Lonergan stands out as an innovative thinker who has handled this contentious problem in an expressive and methodical manner. His (...) philosophy of Self-Appropriation is a philosophic program that underpins the basic issues and disciplines in a way that is significant for all human inquiries. This work explores the original meanings and interrelations of the three basic philosophic disciplines of cognitional theory, epistemology and metaphysics. After a critical analysis of how the basic issues in philosophy have been handled in the course of history, it offers what are considered as the original meanings and methodical relations of these basic disciplines and issues. Cognitional theory the methodical basics of both epistemology and metaphysics. Since the human desire to know being is the parent of all human inquires, the consideration of the human conscious subject and his cognitional subject and his cognitional operations is prior to and is the ground of the metaphysical explorations. Epistemology is the critical phase that verifies and validates cognitional theory; and methaphysics is an enter-prise that deals with the character of the real. (shrink)

[The version of this paper published by Oxford online in 2019 was not copy-edited and has some sense-obscuring typos. I have posted a corrected (but not the final published) version on this site. The version published in print in 2020 has these corrections.] Which is more fundamental, assertion or testimony? Should we understand assertion as basic, treating testimony as what you get when you add an interpersonal addressee? Or should we understand testimony as basic, treating mere assertion -- assertion without (...) testimony -- as what you get when you subtract that interpersonal relation? In this chapter, I’ll argue for the subtractive approach and for the more general thesis that its treatment of the interpersonal element in assertion makes understanding that interpersonal element the key to understanding how assertion expresses belief. My theory of belief-expression in assertion treats it as internalizing the transmission of belief in testimony. How we understand that internalizing move depends on how we conceptualize the interpersonal element in testimony. Since what I’ll call the Command Model does not give us the conceptual resources to make this move, we should adopt an alternative that I’ll call the Custodial Model, on which a testifier aims not to convince her addressee but to reason with him – to give him reasons to believe what she tells him grounded in her trustworthiness in thus attempting to influence him. The subtractive approach to assertion thus rests on a key distinction between the aims of reasoning and persuasion. (shrink)

An assurance theory of trust begins from the act of assurance – whether testimonial, advisorial or promissory – and explains trust as a cognate stance of resting assured. My version emphasizes the risks and rewards of trust. On trust’s rewards, I show how an assurance can give a reason to the addressee through a twofold exercise of ‘normative powers’: (i) the speaker thereby incurs an obligation to be sincere; (ii) if the speaker is trustworthy, she thereby gives her addressee the (...) reason. Each claim is controversial; my contribution lies in how I defend them together, linking the sincerity obligation to the provision of reasons. On trust’s risks, I defend a popular thesis about the nature of trust – that trust differs from mere reliance in how it risks betrayal – against the objection that the thesis ‘moralizes’ trust. Such betrayal need not be moral, I argue, because it may derive entirely from how the assurance purports to provide a reason. (shrink)

Ideas about heredity and evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. New findings in molecular biology challenge the gene-centered version of Darwinian theory according to which adaptation occurs only through natural selection of chance DNA variations. In Evolution in Four Dimensions, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb argue that there is more to heredity than genes. They trace four "dimensions" in evolution -- four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. These systems, they argue, can (...) all provide variations on which natural selection can act. Evolution in Four Dimensions offers a richer, more complex view of evolution than the gene-based, one-dimensional view held by many today. The new synthesis advanced by Jablonka and Lamb makes clear that induced and acquired changes also play a role in evolution.After discussing each of the four inheritance systems in detail, Jablonka and Lamb "put Humpty Dumpty together again" by showing how all of these systems interact. They consider how each may have originated and guided evolutionary history and they discuss the social and philosophical implications of the four-dimensional view of evolution. Each chapter ends with a dialogue in which the authors engage the contrarieties of the fictional "I.M.," or Ifcha Mistabra -- Aramaic for "the opposite conjecture" -- refining their arguments against I.M.'s vigorous counterarguments. The lucid and accessible text is accompanied by artist-physician Anna Zeligowski's lively drawings, which humorously and effectively illustrate the authors' points. (shrink)

The first full exploration of the political thought of Jan Patocka, student of Husserl and Heidegger and mentor to Václav Havel.

The biggest obstacle to understanding Aquinas's account of the soul may be the word “soul”. On hearing it, many people are prone to think of ghosts, ectoplasm, or Rene Descartes's notion of res cogitans. None of these has anything to do with the soul as Aquinas understands it. But even the standard one‐line Aristotelian‐Thomistic characterization of the soul as the form of the living body can too easily mislead. As is well known, the word “soul” is in Aristotelian‐Thomistic philosophy essentially (...) a technical term for the substantial form of a living thing. Material substances can be destroyed by other natural objects because they do have an inherent tendency toward corruption. A human being is the kind of substance which, in its mature and normal state, exhibits both the properties and causal powers characteristic of animality and those characteristic of rationality. (shrink)

In the famous Correspondence with Clarke, which took place during the last year of Leibniz's life, Leibniz advanced several arguments purporting to refute the absolute theory of space and time that was held by Newton and his followers. The main aim of this book is to reassess Leibniz's attack on the Newtonian theory in so far as he relied on the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. The theological side of the controversy is not ignored but isolated and discussed in (...) the last three chapters, which deal with problems connected with the notions of omnipotence and omniscience. (shrink)

In this powerful new study Edward Baring sheds fresh light on Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential yet controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Reading Derrida from a historical perspective and drawing on new archival sources, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy shows how Derrida's thought arose in the closely contested space of post-war French intellectual life, developing in response to Sartrian existentialism, religious philosophy and the structuralism that found its base at the École Normale Supe;rieure. In a (...) history of the philosophical movements and academic institutions of post-war France, Baring paints a portrait of a community caught between humanism and anti-humanism, providing a radically new interpretation of the genesis of deconstruction and of one of the most vibrant intellectual moments of modern times. (shrink)

'...a challenging and useful book, both because it provokes a careful scrutiny of one's own basic ideas regarding evolutionary theory, and because it cuts across so many biological disciplines.' -The Quarterly Review of Biology 'In my view, this work exemplifies Theoretical Biology at its best...here is rampant speculation that is consistently based on cautious reasoning from the available data. Even more refreshing is the absence of sloganeering, grandstanding, and 'isms'.' -Biology and Philosophy 'Epigenetics is fundamental to understanding both development and (...) gene expression, and not surprisingly, evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated with its proper place in evolutionary theory...Enter Jablonka and Lamb, who provide a thoughtful review of the recent molecular literature and suggest a number of potential consequences.' -EvolutionSince first publication of this controversial book, much of the initial opposition to the ideas it contained has been replaced by a general, although often grudging, acceptance of them. Advances in knowledge, especially at the molecular level, have enhanced general awareness and interest in epigenetics and the evolution of systems that store and transmit information and put any of the authors' speculations on a more solid basis. This paperback edition contains a new Preface that sets out the major changes in the scientific world and in the authors' own thinking that have occurred since the book was published. A new Appendix provides a selected bibliography of the many books and articles about epigenetic inheritance and its role in evolution that have appeared since first publication. (shrink)

Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as a radical "holistic" other, which saw no qualitative difference between mind and body. Drawing on knowledge and techniques from the sciences and digital humanities, Edward Slingerland demonstrates that seeing a difference between mind and body is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. This book has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities (...) integration. (shrink)

What happens when we glance around a room? How do we trust what we see in fleeting moments? In The World at a Glance, Edward S. Casey describes how glancing counts for more of human perception than previously imagined. An entire universe is perceived in a glance, but our quick and uncommitted attention prevents examination of these rapid acts and processes. While breaking down this paradox, Casey surveys the glance as an essential way by which we acquaint ourselves with (...) the world. This experiential tour-de-force reveals what happens in a blink of an eye. It will become a landmark study in phenomenology, philosophy, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This article traces the development of Sartre's metaphysics with three interrelated aims in mind. The first is to situate Sartre's metaphysical views in relation to those of his predecessors, his contemporaries, and current continental philosophy. The second is to show that Sartre's project informs some of the key changes he makes to his existentialism during his career. The third is to bring Sartre the metaphysician into dialogue with key thinkers in the current realism/antirealism debate in Continental philosophy by showing that (...) the defense of materialism he offers in his later work preserves many hard-won insights of phenomenology and has significant advantages over many contemporary articulations of realism. (shrink)

Misunderstandings often develop when scientists from different backgrounds use the same words (e.g., “selection”) when they mean different things by them. Theorists must therefore choose and define their terms carefully. In addition, proponents of “new” theories need to demonstrate empirically that theirs are more powerful than the existing theories they wish to supplant. Wilson & Sober have not yet done this.

This paper is a critique of forgiveness therapy that focuses on the cultural contexts in which forgiveness therapy arose, with a special focus on the movement to address the victimization of women. I describe forgiveness as described by forgiveness therapy advocates and the moral and non-moral benefits claimed on its behalf. I then describe the cultural context that may explain the popularity of this form of therapy at this historical moment; the first context is a broad cultural context, looking at (...) ideologies and practices that support forgiveness as a therapeutic intervention; the second context is the more narrow context of a movement within the field of psychology called "positive psychology" that also supports forgiveness interventions; and the third context, is the ideologies and narratives around victimization and in particular victimization against women that have led to an application of forgiveness therapy for victims of abuse . After describing these three contexts in which forgiveness therapy arose, I present a critique from a feminist as well as a broader humanistic/psychodynamic perspective. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Deleuze and jurisdiction : expressionism in jurisprudence -- Personal jurisdiction : the "method of dramatization" in the law of persons -- Minority and personal jurisdiction : judging sex in re alex -- Persons of animal law -- Deleuze, the law of things and subject-matter jurisdiction -- To put to flight : the right of possession -- The activity of judgment : law of actions and the procedural genre of jurisprudence -- Jurisdiction of control : judgment and procedural forms in Thomas (...) v Mowbray -- The locality of law : jurisdiction in Deleuze. (shrink)

Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has tended to either dismiss the foundational role of metaphor or to see it as a uniquely Chinese mode of apprehending the world. This article argues that, while human cognition is in fact profoundly dependent on imagistic conceptual structures, such dependence is by no means a unique feature of Chinese thought. The article reviews empirical evidence supporting the claims that human thought is fundamentally imagistic; that sensorimotor schemas are often used to structure our understanding (...) of abstract concepts; that these schemas can be selectively combined to result in novel structures; and that there are inextricable connections between body, emotion, and thought in both everyday and philosophical cognition. It also provides a review of a recent trend where, explicitly or not, scholars from a variety of backgrounds have begun to take metaphor more seriously as a foundational bearer of philosophical meaning in early China. (shrink)

RésuméL'authenticité et la diversité font aujourd'hui figure de slogans dans les sociétés contemporaines de part et d'autre de l'Atlantique nord. En revanche, on a peu exploré les liens entre ces deux idées. À cette fin, cet article aborde les écrits tantôt convergents, tantôt divergents de Charles Taylor et Martin Heidegger pour prolonger leurs réflexions respectives sur l'authenticité et montrer en quoi elles peuvent servir defondement à une nouvelle forme de diversité culturelle. Pour tous deux, l'être-au-monde authentique nous permet d'accider au (...) tréfonds du matériel culturel dont nous devons disposer pour que se nouent des rapports fructueux avec les autres cultures. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discuss whether the political thought of the late eighteenth-century British philosopher William Godwin--as expressed in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published in three different editions during the 1790s--is best described as utilitarian. The significance of this issue and its resolution are threefold. First, it is important within Godwin scholarship. My objective is to rehabilitate the utilitarian reading. Second, attention to this issue informs understandings of late eighteenth-century utilitarianism. Third, it speaks to a methodological (...) problem in the history of ideas because ascribing a utilitarian moral theory to Godwin involves a rejection of the claim, associated with the work of Quentin Skinner, that we cannot ascribe to past thinkers concepts that they lack the linguistic means to express. (shrink)

Der Verfasser legt einen Kommentar vor, der allen Lesern von Humes erkenntnistheoretischen Schriften hilfreich sein wird; auch werden zentrale Aspekte seiner Moral- und Religionsphilosophie vorgefuhrt und diskutiert. Dabei wird ein Gesamtbild der Philosophie Humes entwickelt und in den Zusammenhang des zeitgenossischen europaischen Denkens gestellt. Hier bekampft der Verfasser die gelaufige Interpretation, derzufolge Hume als der konsequente Zerstorer des Empirismus gilt; Humes Ziel sei eher die Widerlegung einer Weltauffassung, die fast allen Philosophen seiner Epoche, Empiristen und Rationalisten, gemeinsam war. In einem (...) Anhang wird sein Verhaltnis zur kritischen Philosophie Kants eingehender behandelt. Auf diese Weise soll nicht nur Studenten eine Einfuhrung in die Philosophie Humes, sondern auch Spezialisten grundsatzlich neues Material geboten werden. (shrink)

This article offers suggestions for categorizing combat-related moral injuries, highlights possible causes of these injuries in veterans, and touches upon broadly-conceived measures to prevent and repair them. The first part identifies three prevailing definitions – lost trust, guilt, and harm to one’s capacity for right action and moral virtue – and argues for an emphasis on the latter. In service of highlighting areas for future empirical research and clinical awareness, the second part outlines possible veteran-related causes associated with these three (...) definitions, including unwarranted distrust of authorities, misapplying the theodicy problem to human acts, undue survivor’s guilt, wars that fail to meet ad bellum criteria, causing permissible collateral damage, and killing combatants without regret and for pleasure. The third part mentions strategies for preventing character harm, and then discusses the cognitive, rehabituative, and psychological aspects of moral repair. (shrink)

Explores "why we find spontaneity so elusive and shows how early Chinese philosophy points the way to happier, more authentic lives"--Dust jacket flap.