This chapter explores the particular vice of acedia or sloth. Sloth is a paralyzing vice, with the slothful carrying the burden of a useless self. Awareness of this condition explains occurrent moods of indolence, hopelessness, and despair. If, like Oblomov, they manage nonetheless to achieve a relatively contented state of mind then this is because they have found some mental busyness and are given to idle daydreams, which may, at least for periods of time, conceal their burden from themselves.

In this entry, DeYoung defines the seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices, as a schema for understanding and analyzing sin for Christians interested in self-examination, confession, preaching, and spiritual formation. DeYoung carefully looks at the difference between 'sin' and 'vice' and goes back to the capital vices of the Desert Fathers to draw out the tradition. She also looks at Aquinas's analysis to help articulate how the Christian tradition has used the vices.

Lust, says Simon Blackburn, is furtive, headlong, always sizing up opportunities. It is a trail of clothing in the hallway, the trashy cousin of love. But be that as it may, the aim of this delightful book is to rescue lust "from the denunciations of old men of the deserts, to deliver it from the pallid and envious confessor and the stocks and pillories of the Puritans, to drag it from the category of sin to that of virtue." Blackburn, author (...) of such popular philosophy books as Think and Being Good, here offers a sharp-edged probe into the heart of lust, blending together insight from some of the world's greatest thinkers on sex, human nature, and our common cultural foibles. Blackburn takes a wide ranging, historical approach, discussing lust as viewed by Aristophanes and Plato, lust in the light of the Stoic mistrust of emotion, and the Christian fear of the flesh that catapulted lust to the level of deadly sin. He describes how philosophical pessimists like Schopenhauer and Sartre contributed to our thinking about lust and explores the false starts in understanding lust represented by Freud, Kinsey, and modern "evolutionary psychology." But most important, Blackburn reminds us that lust is also life-affirming, invigorating, fun. He points to the work of David Hume who saw lust not only as a sensual delight but also "a joy of the mind." Written by one of the most eminent living philosophers, attractively illustrated and colourfully packaged, Lust is a book that anyone would lust over. (shrink)

Malice that cannot speak its name, cold-blooded but secret hostility, impotent desire, hidden rancor and spite--all cluster at the center of envy. Envy clouds thought, writes Joseph Epstein, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart. Of the seven deadly sins, he concludes, only envy is no fun at all. Writing in a conversational, erudite, self-deprecating style that wears its learning lightly, Epstein takes us on a stimulating tour of the many faces of (...) envy. He considers what great thinkers--such as John Rawls, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche--have written about envy; distinguishes between envy, yearning, jealousy, resentment, and schadenfreude ; and catalogs the many things that are enviable, including wealth, beauty, power, talent, knowledge and wisdom, extraordinary good luck, and youth. He looks at resentment in academia, where envy is mixed with snobbery, stirred by impotence, and played out against a background of cosmic injustice; and he offers a brilliant reading of Othello as a play more driven by Iago's envy than Othello's jealousy. He reveals that envy has a strong touch of malice behind it--the envious want to destroy the happiness of others. He suggests that envy of the astonishing success of Jews in Germany and Austria may have lurked behind the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis. As he proved in his best-selling Snobbery, Joseph Epstein has an unmatched ability to highlight our failings in a way that is thoughtful, provocative, and entertaining. If envy is no fun, Epstein's Envy is truly a joy to read. (shrink)

Contemporary culture trivializes the "seven deadly sins," or vices, as if they have no serious moral or spiritual implications. Glittering Vices clears this misconception by exploring the traditional meanings of gluttony, sloth, lust, and others. It offers a brief history of how the vices were compiled and an eye opening explication of how each sin manifests itself in various destructive behaviors. Readers gain practical understanding of how the vices shape our culture today and how to correctly identify and (...) eliminate the deeply rooted patterns of sin that are work in their own lives. This accessible book is essential for any reader interested in spiritual disciplines and character formation. Excerpt Very simply, a virtue (or vice) is acquired through practice repeated activity that increases our proficiency at the activity and gradually forms our character. . . . We often need external incentives and sanctions to get us through the initial stages of the process, when our old, entrenched desires still pull us toward the opposite behavior. But with encouragement, discipline, and often a role model or mentor, practice can make things feel more natural and enjoyable as we gradually develop the internal values and desires corresponding to our outward behavior. Virtue often develops, that is, from the outside in. This is why, when we want to reform our character from vice to virtue, we often need to practice and persevere in regular spiritual disciplines and formational practices for a lengthy period of time. (shrink)

_Dante’s Deadly Sins_ is a unique study of the moral philosophy behind Dante’s master work that considers the _Commedia_ as he intended, namely, as a practical guide to moral betterment. Focusing on _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_, Belliotti examines the puzzles and paradoxes of Dante’s moral assumptions, his treatment of the 7 deadly sins, and how 10 of his most powerful moral lessons anticipate modern existentialism. Analyzes the moral philosophy underpinning one of the greatest works of world culture Summarizes (...) the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_, while underscoring their moral implications Explains and evaluates Dante’s understanding of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ and the ultimate role they play as the basis of human transgression. Provides a detailed discussion of the philosophical concepts of moral desert and the law of _contrapasso_, using character case studies within Dante’s work Connects the poem’s moral themes to our own contemporary condition. (shrink)

Tenenbaum and Griffiths's article continues three disturbing trends that typify category learning modeling: (1) modelers tend to focus on a single induction task; (2) the drive to create models that are formally elegant has resulted in a gross simplification of the phenomena of interest; (3) related research is generally ignored when doing so is expedient. [Tenenbaum & Griffiths].

The two slaves, Xanthias and Sosias, posted by their master's son to guard his ‘sick’ father Philocleon, challenge the audience to guess the nature of the mysterious and strange disease &nuó&sgr&ogr&nu &lambda&lambdaó&kappa&ogr&tau&ogr&nu, 71) on account of which the father must be kept inside the house. When the correct answer to the riddle is finally disclosed, Philocleon is revealed to beis revealed to be φιληλιαστσ , namely a man ‘who loves to be a juror’ and to spend his days in the (...) law-courts passionately pursuing the infatuation of which his son tries to cure him by locking him up away from the law-courts and from his fellow jurors. The joke owes its comic effect to incongruity, termed the ‘humour of inappropriateness’ by MacDowell, who writes: ‘It is funny when addiction to being a juror is called a disease , because “disease” is a word which is not generally applied to such conditions’. It should, however, be stressed that in order to create this sense of incongruity the previously mentioned diseases must form a class with certain common characteristics fundamentally different from those of Philocleon's, thus gradually moulding the audience's expectations and channelling them in a completely different direction. (shrink)

Grasping. Avarice. Covetousness. Miserliness. Insatiable cupidity. Overreaching ambition. Desire spun out of control. The deadly sin of Greed goes by many names, appears in many guises, and wreaks havoc on individuals and nations alike. In this lively and generous book, Phyllis A. Tickle argues that Greed is "the Matriarch of the Deadly Clan," the ultimate source of Pride, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, Lust, and Anger. She shows that the major faiths, from Hinduism and Taoism to Buddhism and Christianity regard (...) Greed as the greatest calamity humans can indulge in, engendering further sins and eviscerating all virtues. As the Sikh holy book Adi Granth asks: "Where there is greed, what love can there be?" Tickle takes a long view of Greed, from St. Paul to the present, focusing particularly on changing imaginative representations of Greed in Western literature and art. Looking at such works as the Psychomachia, or "Soul Battle" of the fifth-century poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, the paintings of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymous Bosch, the 1987 film Wall Street, and the contemporary Italian artist Mario Donizetti, Tickle shows how our perceptions have evolved from the medieval understanding of Greed as a spiritual enemy to a nineteenth-century sociological construct to an early twentieth-century psychological deficiency, and finally to a new view, powerfully articulated in Donizetti's mystical paintings, of Greed as both tragic and beautiful. Engaging, witty, brilliantly insightful, Greed explores the full range of this deadly sin's subtle, chameleon-like qualities, and the enormous destructive power it wields, evidenced all too clearly in the world today. (shrink)

When Stanford M. Lyman authored The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil in 1978 it was hailed by Alasdair MacIntyre as 'a book of absorbing interest and importance_[that] places us all in his debt.' By Nelson Hart as 'a masterful and thought-provoking book_[that] is the only scholarly treatment of sin that is so well-informed by the best of ancient through modern perspectives.' By James A. Aho as a work whose 'abstract hardly does justice to the scholarly and detailed (...) analysis of sin.' And by Harry Cohen as a 'book_[that] stands as a beautiful illustration of what holistic, idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary, and creative thinking and writing can bring to bear on the age-old problem of society and evil.' The American Sociological Association's section on the Sociology of the Emotions selected this book as one of the works that laid the foundations for the study of pride, lust, envy, and anger—basic sentiments embedded in the social process. For this revised and expanded edition Lyman has written a new chapter, 'Sentiments, Sin, and Social Conflict: Toward a Sociology of the Emotions.' The new edition will be a valuable work for courses in social psychology, ethics, deviance, and the sociology of morals and of religion. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil. By Stanford M. Lyman. The Seven Deadly Sins Today. By Henry Fairlie.

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on three central premises: that the function of language is to convey meaning, that linguistic description must rely on constructs that are psychologically real, and that grammar emerges from usage. Over the last 40 years, this approach to studying language has made enormous strides in virtually every aspect of linguistic inquiry, achieving major insights as well as bringing about a conceptual unification of the language sciences. However, it has also faced problems, (...) which, I argue, must be addressed if the approach is to continue to flourish. Some of these are shared with generative linguistics, while some are peculiar to the cognitive approach. The former include excessive reliance on introspective evidence; paying only lip service to the Cognitive Commitment; too much focus on hypothesis formulation (and not enough on hypothesis testing); ignoring individual differences; and neglecting the social aspects of language. The latter include assuming that we can deduce mental representations from patterns of use and equating distribution with meaning. I conclude by sketching out how these pitfalls could be avoided. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 479-491.

In this article, we describe four theoretical and methodological problems that have impeded implicit attitude research and the popular understanding of its findings. The problems all revolve around assumptions made about the relationships among measures, constructs, cognitive processes, and features of processing. These assumptions have confused our understandings of exactly what we are measuring, the processes that produce implicit evaluations, the meaning of differences in implicit evaluations across people and contexts, the meaning of changes in implicit evaluations in response to (...) intervention, and how implicit evaluations predict behavior. We describe formal modeling as one means to address these problems, and provide illustrative examples. Clarifying these issues has important implications for our understanding of who has particular implicit evaluations and why, when those evaluations are likely to be particularly problematic, how we might best try to change them, and what interventions are best suited to minimize the effects of implicit evaluations on behavior. (shrink)

You will typically write a paper or an essay in answer to a prompt or a question. The sin of the Minimal Answer is to write the absolute minimum that could possibly be considered a complete answer to the question you have been asked. This strategy might be perfectly appropriate for exams that test factual recall, for example, because providing extra information is just an extra opportunity to be wrong about something, but essay writing (in papers or exams) is not (...) like that. An essayÕs quality is determined in large part by the depth of understanding of the issues that it exhibits, the comprehensiveness with which it treats them (within the limits specified by the assignment), and by how thorough and convincing a case the essay makes for its thesis. Thus, essay writing is always an open-ended affair in which the quality of the finished product is determined by how much you are able to do with the question or prompt, not how little you can put down that technically constitutes an answer to it. Always take the question or prompt as an opportunity to show how.. (shrink)

Schimmel, a practicing psychologist, maintains that psychologists and psychotherapists must incorporate many of the ethical and spiritual values of religion and moral philosophy if they are effectively to address the emotional problems faced by modern men and women. The book draws on the psychological insights provided by the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, Aristotle, Maimonides, Aquinas and others to show what we can learn from their teachings about the relationship between virtue and psychological well-being and vice and emotional distress.

Dyson explores the fate of pride from Christain theology to the social responsibilities of self-regard and regard for the society as a whole. Also discusses pride in black communities.

Part of a series of highly entertaining books on the history of sinning. Eating too much is one of the Western world's greatest problems, but relatively few people would consider it a crime against God. Yet even as gluttony has ceased to be an evil, food and dieting have become a cultural obsessions, with millions of pounds expended on mortifying the flesh with punishing diet and exercise regimes. This brief history of gluttony traces the changing cultural attitudes towards food and (...) pleasure, scarcity and abundance. It reveals how notions of saintliness and purity have helped form modern views of enjoyment, self-mortification, and ultimately nutrition. Restaurant-goers and readers of gourmet magazines rationalize their pursuit of too much food in many ways, but does a slight tinge of guilt makes your meal taste that much better? This book provides the answer, thoroughly exploring humankind's attempts to quell its chief survival strategy - eating. (shrink)

The seven deadly sins have provided gossip, amusement, and the plots of morality plays for nearly fifteen hundred years. In Wicked Pleasures, well-known philosopher, business ethicist, and admitted sinner Robert C. Solomon brings together a varied group of contributors for a new look at the old catalogue of sins. Solomon introduces the sins as a group, noting their popularity and pervasiveness. From the formation of the canon by Pope Gregory the Great, the seven have survived the (...) sermonizing of the Reformation, the Inquisition, the Enlightenment, the brief French reign of supreme reason, the apotheoses of capitalism, communism, secular humanism and postmodernism, the writings of numerous rabbis and evangelical moralists, two series in the New York Times, and several bad movies. Taking their cue from this remarkable history, the contributors, including Thomas Pynchon, allowed one sin apiece, provide a non-sermonizing and relatively light-hearted romp through the domain of the deadly seven. (shrink)

This work is a "prolegomena to the study of evil," the beginning of a more ambitious project designated by the author an "ideational critique of society." Such an endeavor would include a "rhetoric that grasps the structures of consciousness, the phenomenology of history, and the dramaturgy of contemporary scenes." The bulk of the present study constitutes an essay in phenomenological sociology. Each of the seven deadly sins is insightfully described in terms of its dominant features as well as (...) in relation to and distinction from allied or similar phenomena. Significantly, the presiding intellectual presences are as often Homer, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Aquinas as more contemporary ones such as Simmel, Marx, Weber, and Freud. The scope and sensitivity of the author is further manifested in his illuminating use of literary figures including Dante, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Artaud. Lyman maintains that "sin has been neglected by sociology" and views this work as a first step in remedying such neglect. At the outset he states that he is not offering a way out of or elimination of evil nor the promise of good. Fortunately, much of the book and in particular its concluding chapter serves as at least a strong qualification of this posture. Though holding out no hope for redemption or a final release from sin and evil, Lyman’s effort would seem to have a commendable melioristic aim. He is concerned, however, to avoid what is for him the besetting sin of contemporary sociology—the attempt to present a sociological blueprint for earthly happiness. Lyman would like to see sociology respect "the social visions that the reason of ordinary people produces," while neither applauding nor opposing them. "The sociological task would then be to describe the processes of social architectonics, and not to build the new society in advance of them." It is evident that Lyman wishes to avoid explaining away sin or reducing it to psychological or societal deviance but it would have been helpful to have had some suggestion of his ontology or metaphysics of sin. The "reality" of sin and evil remains unclarified throughout these analyses. The citations from Homer, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Dante, and other such figures are presented without irony or condescension. Now it may be possible to distill psychological and sociological insights from these thinkers while rejecting or ignoring their theological dimensions. To do so, however, involves a process of abstraction and a contextualism which hardly leaves the phenomena as presented by these thinkers untouched and unchanged. Hence, it would seem that some justification for the "sin" character of these actions in their contemporary milieu is called for. Lyman hints that he is unhappy with the neutralization of sin resulting from contemporary social science. What is not clear is whether he rejects the naturalistic assumptions which undergird and indeed make inevitable such neutralizing interpretations. The background assumption of Lyman’s study is a Nietzschean-like "sociology of the absurd" which presupposes "a world that is ultimately and essentially without meaning" but is made meaningful "by the actions and beliefs of the people who participate in it." This is, of course, a radically different world than the one within which the sin-evil language emerged and gave this language its depth and significance. One aspect of Lyman’s continuing task, therefore, would be to show how it is possible to speak meaningfully of sin and evil when the belief in a transcendent which constituted these phenomena in their classical modes is absent. Nietzsche’s challenge must be faced: after the "death of God" we can still speak of "good and bad" but can we any longer speak of "good and evil"?—E.F. (shrink)

A review of Rebecca DeYoung's book, "Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies", 2nd ed.

Drawing on centuries of wisdom from the Christian ethical tradition, this book takes readers on a journey of self-examination, exploring why our hearts are captivated by glittery but false substitutes for true human goodness and happiness. The first edition sold 35,000 copies and was a C. S. Lewis Book Prize award winner. Now updated and revised throughout, the second edition includes a new chapter on grace and growth through the spiritual disciplines. Questions for discussion and study are included at the (...) end of each chapter. Contents 1. Why Study the Vices? 2. Gifts from the Desert: The Origins and History of the Vices Tradition 3. Vainglory: Image Is Everything 4. Envy: Feeling Bitter When Others Have It Better 5. Sloth (Acedia): Resistance to the Demands of Love 6. Avarice: Possession and Mastery 7. Wrath: Holy Emotion or Hellish Passion? 8. Gluttony: Feeding Your Face and Starving Your Heart 9. Lust: Sexuality Stripped Down 10. The Rest of the Journey: Self-Examination, the Seven Capital Vices, and Spiritual Formation Epilogue Index. (shrink)

You have heard of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Each is a natural human weakness that impedes happiness. In addition to these vices, however, there are economic sins as well. And they, too, wreak havoc on our lives and in society. They can seem intuitively compelling, yet they lead to waste, loss, and forgone prosperity. In this thoughtful and compelling book, James Otteson tells the story of seven central economic fallacies, (...) explaining why they are fallacies, why believing in them leads to mistakes and loss, and how exorcizing them from our thinking can help us avoid costly errors and enable us to live in peace and prosperity. (shrink)

There are many similarities between the Christian concept of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Stoic concept of internal events, the Hebrew concept of 'awon (sin, punishment), and the existential concept of bad faith. All of these evidence a concern for an internalization of sin or bad faith, which is more common in Eastern than Western religions. These four views are contrasted with the English concept synne which represents the Western extemalization of sin or bad faith. This existential interpretation (...) includes an exploration of 'awon in the Cain and Abel story as well as several reflections concerning the difference between bad faith and good faith. (shrink)

Gabriele Taylor presents a philosophical investigation of the "ordinary" vices traditionally seen as "death to the soul": sloth, envy, avarice, pride, anger, lust, and gluttony. In the course of a richly detailed discussion of individual and interrelated vices, which complements recent work by moral philosophers on virtue, she shows why these "deadly sins" are correctly so named and grouped together.

The underreporting of suspected adverse drug reactions remains a primary issue for contemporary post-market drug surveillance or ‘pharmacovigilance.’ Pharmacovigilance pioneer W.H.W. Inman argued that ‘deadly sins’ committed by clinicians are to blame for underreporting. Of these ‘sins,’ ignorance and lethargy are the most obvious and impactful in causing underreporting. However, recent analyses show that diffidence, insecurity, and indifference additionally play a major role. I aim to augment our understanding of diffidence, insecurity, and indifference by arguing these (...) class='Hi'>sins are underwritten by value judgments arising via epistemic risk. I contend that ‘evidence-based’ medicine codifies these sins. (shrink)

THE ESSAY DEMONSTRATES THE SUBTLETY OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS on sin and addiction. It suggests a parallel between Aquinas's understanding of acedia and invidia as the two vitia capitalia most directly undermining of God's caritas and AA founder Bill Wilson's understanding of two contemporary deadly sins, self-pity and resentment, as the "root" of alcoholics' troubles. I argue that AA's understanding of sin and addiction is relevant far beyond the lives of alcoholics. Indeed, its understanding could help the Christian tradition (...) rediscover the "soul" of its sin-talk, aiding all of us in discerning our sin and in recovering from sin in our lives. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil. By Stanford M. Lyman. The Seven Deadly Sins Today. By Henry Fairlie.