This cross-sectional mixed method community action study exploring the virtue of humility was conducted as part of a collaborative practical theology project at a pluralistic, ecumenical Mainline Protestant seminary. Students in a spiritual formation graduate class completed quantitative measures of humility, spiritual well-being, differentiation of self, mentalization, and mindfulness, while open-ended qualitative data captured their perspectives about the role of humility in formation. Qualitative results revealed important nuances about emerging religious leaders’ views on humility, including experiencing this virtue as facilitative (...) to their vocational growth, challenging, or some combination of both. Quantitative results documented positive associations between relational capacities and humility, and these links were mediated by mindful awareness. Implications for measuring and promoting holistic spiritual development among emerging religious leaders are discussed. (shrink)

In spite of his deep insights, Hegel fails to grasp the specific character of the war waged by the French Revolution and the Empire. His theory of limited warfare turns out to be a peculiar Sollen, but it is precisely this gap between rationality and reality what makes his classical model an appealing antithesis to postmodern violence. Keywords.

Certain scholars wish to acquit St. Thomas Aquinas of the “illicit inference from facts to norms” commonly referred to as the naturalistic fallacy. Seeing in certain passages his awareness of illegitimate ways to derive morality from natural ends, many have come to read Aquinas as agreeing with the view that knowledge of the moral order does not derive from knowledge of human nature and of the natural ends of its parts and powers. This paper aims to expose the deficiencies of (...) this reading as a way of bringing more fully into view the whole thought of Aquinas on the question. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.4 : 637–661. (shrink)

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) served as a test case for determining the role of extant vocabulary knowledge, endogenous attention, and phonological working memory abilities in cross-situational word learning. First-graders (Mage = 7 years; 3 months), 44 with typical development (TD) and 28 with DLD, completed a cross-situational word-learning task comprised six cycles, followed by retention tests and independent assessments of attention, memory, and vocabulary. Children with DLD scored lower than those with TD on all measures of learning and (...) retention, a performance gap that emerged in the first cycle of the cross-situational protocol and that we attribute to weaknesses in initial encoding. Over cycles, children with DLD learned words at a similar rate as their TD peers but they were less flexible in their strategy use, demonstrating a propose-but-verify approach but never a statistical aggregation approach. Also, they drew upon different mechanisms to support their learning. Attention played a greater role for the children with DLD, whereas extant vocabulary size played a greater role for the children with TD. Children navigate the problem space of cross-situational learning via varied routes. This conclusion is offered as motivation for theorists to capture all learners, not just the most typical ones. (shrink)

In Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity scholars reflect on politico-cultural, philosophical, and religious forms of critical conversation in the ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, Graeco-Roman, and early-Islamic world. They enquire into the boundaries between debate, polemics, and intolerance, and address their manifestations in both philosophy and religion. This cross-cultural and inclusive approach shows that debate and polemics are not so different as often assumed, since polemics may also indicate that ultimate values are at stake. Polemics can also have a positive (...) effect, stimulating further cultural development. Intolerance is more straightforwardly negative. Religious intolerance is often a justification for politics, but also elite rationalism can become totalitarian. The volume also highlights the importance of the fluency of minorities in the dominant discourses and of their ability to develop contrapuntal lines of thought within a common cultural discourse. Contributors are: Robbert van den Berg, Stefan Beyerle, George Boys-Stones, Reuven Firestone, Pieter B. Hartog, Paul Heck, Paulin Ismard, George van Kooten, Marjo C. Korpel, Dominik Markl, Steve Mason, Peter Franz Mittag, James C. Oleson, James Carleton Paget, Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, Jacques van Ruiten, Diego R. Sarrió Cucarella, Clare Wilde. (shrink)

L'Autore ritiene che la critica vichiana delle borie non si riferisca solo a nazioni, culture e teorie filosofico-teologiche concentrate a discutere sull'origine oscura e favolosa dei tempi e sulla relazione tra storia sacra e storie profane. Ma è anche un dispositivo etico-filosofico che invita l'umanità, ormai al culmine del processo di incivilimento, a guardarsi da ogni forma di boria delle nazioni , così come da ogni manifestazione boriosa da parte dei dotti . The author argues that Vico's critique of conceit (...) does not refer only to nations and cultures, and to philosophical-theological theories focused on origins in ancient and mythical times and on the relationship between sacred and profane history. Vico's critique is also an ethical-philosophical device that invites humanity, now at the height of the civilizing process, to guard against any form of conceit by nations , as well as any self-important manifestations by intellectuals. (shrink)

The author analyses the problem of the communication from the epistemological point of view, noting that the interest to the theme is obviously determined by the enormous ambiguity and by the disciplinary vagueness of the communication's notion itself. It is argued that it is the philosophical conceptualization of the communication that allows in a certain sense to «save» philosophy itself. The author notes that the philosophical studies of communication as if return the relevance to the classical philosophical problems: to the (...) (communicative) sphere, (communicative) time, (social) causality, (collective) subject and object, filling them with the meaningful characteristics and testing their concepts by the experience of the functioning of real society and communication. He concludes that the epistemological content of the concept of communication is comes together with several aspects of human cognition. The first aspect has to do with the dimensions for defining the adequacy for determination of the statement made by the Other (i.e. the other participant), given that the content of the Other's consciousness is unavailable. The second aspect is related to the principle of a double purpose of any communication: on the one hand, integration and mutual understanding and, on the other, informational description of the subject of the message. The third aspect is that communication is based on the most important epistemological distinction between knowledge and ignorance, i.e. on the predominance of any information to one participant of the communication and of its uncertainty to the other participant, and that such a situation actually conditions the formation of communication systems, as well as of a wide variety of forms of sociality. The author also addresses the problem of whether contemporary media make communication at all possible since they decrease the impact that the secrecy of the Other's consciousness has on communication by triggering a communicative act. (shrink)

Using relevant encyclicals issued over the last 100 years, the author extracts those principles that constitute the underpinnings of Catholic Social Teaching about the employment relationship and contemplates implications of their incorporation into human resource policy. Respect for worker dignity, for his or her family's economic security, and for the common good of society clearly emerge as the primary guidelines for responsible human resource management. Dovetailing these three Church mandates with the economic objectives of the firm could, in essence, alter (...) the firm's nature because profit motivations would be constrained by consideration for worker and societal welfare. Integration of Church teaching with current corporate goals should therefore impact greatly on a variety of human resource policies. (shrink)

My goal is to define intending. I defend the view that believing and desiring something are necessary for intending it. They are not sufficient, however, for some things we both expect and want (e.g., the sun to rise tomorrow) are unintendable. Restricting the objects of intention to our own future actions is unwarranted and unhelpful. Rather, the belief involved in intending must be based on the desire in a certain way. En route, I argue that expected but unwanted consequences are (...) not intended, examine the two senses of "desire," distinguish intending from being willing, and relate intending to a variety of other propositional at? titudes. (shrink)

Whether it is fair to use personal responsibility of patients for their own health as a rationing criterion in healthcare is a controversial matter. A host of difficulties are associated with the concept of personal responsibility in the field of medicine. These include, in particular, theoretical considerations of justice and such practical issues as multiple causal factors in medicine and freedom of health behaviour. In the article, personal responsibility is evaluated from the perspective of several theories of justice. It is (...) argued that in a healthcare system based on both equality of opportunity and solidarity, responsible health behaviour can—in principle—be justifiably expected. While the practical problems associated with personal responsibility are important, they do not warrant the common knee-jerk refusal to think more deeply about responsibility for health as a means of allocating healthcare resources. In conclusion, the possibility of introducing personal responsibility as a fair rationing criterion is briefly sketched. (shrink)

This paper addresses problems related to transferring market concepts to non-market domains. More specifically it is about fallacies following from the use of the commodity concept in environmental valuation studies. First of all, the standard practice tends to misconstrue the ethical aspects related to environmental choices by forcing them into becoming ordinary trade-off problems. Second, the commodity perspective ignores important technical interdependencies within the environment and the relational character of environmental goods. These are all properties that have made many such (...) goods escape the commoditisation pressure of markets in the first place. Further, it is shown that these interdependencies are the source of some of the ethical dilemmas observed. Finally, inherent characteristics of the environment tend to make the concept of the margin, so indispensable to economic calculus, either difficult or irrelevant to define. The commodity 'fiction' twists the perception of the environment from systems preservation to items use or transformation. This is a problem of increased importance as we approach potential systems perturbations. (shrink)

The ongoing controversy about sweatshop labor has mainly focused on economic, on the one, and ethical aspects, on the other side. While proponents of sweatshop labor have argued that low wages would attract foreign investments, would create new workplace opportunities and thus improve economic welfare in less-developed countries, opponents of sweatshop labor argue that such treatment of laborers would violate their dignity, and they prompt western buyers to stop this kind of exploitation. However, the arguments in this debate are not (...) new. As we will show, they can be traced back to the early “sweatshop” debate between social reformers and classical liberals in the 19th century. Interestingly, the 19th century debate identified sweatshop labor not as an industrial system but as a social phenomenon which becomes more likely when several social preconditions are fulfilled. It will be shown that the social preconditions identified in this debate determine working conditions till today and can be used to identify industries were sweatshop labor is more likely than in others—even in western countries. (shrink)

Moral education through service learning at post-secondary level is an important but under-researched field. Most existing studies center on its learning outcomes like academic progress, personal development, communication, and leadership skills, with only a few evaluating the moral development of college students participating in service-learning projects. The lack of study on moral development in service learning indicates a need for clarification of the theoretical underpinnings of service learning, John Dewey's ideas on moral growth, in particular his model of moral imagination (...) and the implications thereof, for current service-learning research and practice. We argue that Dewey's work here can help strengthen .. (shrink)

Because metaphysics aims for absolute generality, its primary job is to tell us what are the fundamental particulars, of which one may say that is ultimately all there is, and yet be assured of an unabridged version of reality. It should be clear that such a search for the fundamental particulars is totally different from the enterprise of determining which particulars are basic from the point of view of particular-identification, which though it has recently been labeled "metaphysics," albeit "descriptive metaphysics," (...) might less confusingly be called "descriptive epistemology.". (shrink)

From the diverse work and often competing insights of women's human rights activists, Brooke Ackerly has written a feminist and a universal theory of human rights that bridges the relativists' concerns about universalizing from particulars and the activists' commitment to justice. Unlike universal theories that rely on shared commitments to divine authority or to an 'enlightened' way of reasoning, Ackerly's theory relies on rigorous methodological attention to difference and disagreement. She sets out human rights as at once a research ethic, (...) a tool for criticism of injustice and a call to recognize our obligations to promote justice through our actions. This book will be of great interest to political theorists, feminist and gender studies scholars and researchers of social movements. (shrink)

Background This pilot study evaluated the speaking book ‘What it means to be part of a clinical trial’. The book aims at empowering populations with information on their rights and responsibilities when enrolled in clinical research. Wide publication of the book—at significant cost—is anticipated. It is important that the book is evaluated within the communities for whom it is intended, and the necessary changes (if any) are made, before translation and large-scale publication takes place. Objective The objective of the study (...) was to measure the efficacy and ease of use of the book. Methods Participants were recruited from a catering company. Participants were questioned on their knowledge of clinical trials and were then given the book. Instructions for use of the book were given to one group (‘experimental’ group). The other group (‘control’ group) was not given any instructions. A week later, the investigators returned, repeated the knowledge questions and asked ‘ease of use’ questions. Results A two-way repeated measure of covariants showed a statistically significant positive increase in knowledge of clinical trials among the intervention group (p=0.02). Results for the control group displayed trends that were not statistically significant. Percentage analysis of ‘ease of use’ questions proved that the book is easy to use, although some changes would be beneficial. Conclusion This study revealed that the speaking book is easy to use. It significantly increased knowledge of clinical trials among the study sample if instructions on use of the book were provided. (shrink)