In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Making the Best of Things: Character Skepticism and Cross-Cultural PhilosophyJohn M. Doris (bio)With your spirit settled, accumulate practice day by day, and hour by hour.—Miyamoto MusashiLike many of my colleagues in moral psychology, I’ve focused almost exclusively on Western philosophy, so I was pleasantly surprised when practitioners of cross-cultural and comparative philosophy responded to character skepticism with resources drawn from Eastern traditions.1 [End Page 571]As a reminder: the (...) character skeptic asserts a descriptive claim, to the effect that traditional conceptions of character are empirically inadequate, accompanied by a prescriptive claim to the effect that, as a result of this inadequacy, traditional notions of character should receive considerably diminished emphasis in ethical thought (e.g., Doris 2022, p. 2).2 The antiskeptic rejects both claims: a suitably nuanced conception of character has nothing to fear from empirical moral psychology and may safely retain its focal role in ethical thought.Near as I can see, cross-cultural philosophers commenting on the issues have generally been anti-skeptical. This anti-skepticism might be either contrastive or complementary in tenor. In a contrastive approach, Eastern conceptions of character, while bearing some affinities to Western conceptions (if there are no affinities, we’d have a change of subject), are supposed to be substantially different than Western notions, so defending the West by way of the East marks a departure from the Western characterological tradition. In a complementary approach, the Eastern and Western conceptions are substantially similar, so defending the West by way of the East is fundamentally a continuation of the Western characterological tradition. (Though continuation can’t be quite the right word, since the referenced Eastern traditions are often older than the Western.)While this dichotomy, like most dichotomies, oversimplifies, my sense is that cross-cultural philosophy’s contributions have tended to be complementary: consideration of Eastern traditions, often times Confucian, is said to illuminate what’s valuable in Western, frequently Aristotelian, traditions.3 This circumstance is both surprising to, and convenient for, me. Surprising, for my reading of the one Eastern text I have studied closely,4 over my thirty-five-year avocation as a martial artist, the legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings (Musashi/Harris 1974), suggests a contrastive reading: courage seems nearly invisible in Musashi’s treatment of success in combat, while martial valor is central to Aristotle’s understanding of courage. In any case, that those with vastly more scholarly credibility than I have favored complementary projects is a welcome convenience for me, since it allows me to enter discussion of cross-cultural philosophy and character along my usual pathways in contemporary Western moral psychology.Paul Condon, Seth Robertson, and Matthew Spencer, the gracious and insightful commentators for this symposium on my essay collection, Character Trouble (2022), seem generally to favor a complementary approach: while careful to note the existence of differences, they find in Eastern traditions resources to blunt the force of character skepticism as applied to its usual target, virtue ethics in a broadly Aristotelian tradition.5 Quite expectedly, in my responses, I’ll beg to differ. The essays in question span over twenty years, and on the main points of character skepticism, I’ve failed to change my mind in the face of (sometimes strident) criticism, so it’s [End Page 572] unlikely I would do so now, despite my commentators’ astute recommendations. In fact, I’m now more convinced of character skepticism than when I started, or at least have better arguments for it (more on this below). Nevertheless, my commentators have done much to enrich the issues; in this unavoidably and regrettably incomplete response, I’ll attempt to enrich things a bit more.Framing the Rhetorical SpaceI take it my commentators and I are united in thinking that the kind of empirical moral psychology embodied in character skepticism and celebrated in Character Trouble (CT) has important implications for how philosophers and psychologists should think about character and virtue.6 This makes refreshing contrast with early responses to character skepticism from the 2000s, which often insisted that things could go on pretty much as they had before interdisciplinary moral psychologists set to work... (shrink)

Plato is associated with the idea that the body holds us back from knowing ultimate reality and so we should try to distance ourselves from its influence. This sentiment appears is several of his dialogues including Theaetetus where the flight from the physical world is compared to becoming like God. In some major dialogues of Plato's later career such as Philebus and Laws, however, the idea of becoming like God takes a different turn. God is an intelligent force that tries (...) to create order in the physical world. I argue that likeness to God in these dialogues involves imitating God's effort by trying to order our bodies, souls, and societies as intelligence directs. Becoming like Plato's God is not to abandon the world. It is to improve it. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently revived the study of the ancient Greek topics of virtue and the virtues—justice, honesty, temperance, friendship, courage, and so on as qualities of mind and character belonging to individual people. But one issue at the center of Greek moral theory seems to have dropped out of consideration. This is the question of the unity of virtue, the unity of the virtues. Must anyone who has one of these qualities have others of them as well, indeed all of (...) them—all the ones that really do deserve to be counted as virtues? Even further, is there really no set of distinct and separate virtuous qualities at all, but at bottom only a single one—so that the person who has this single condition of “virtue” is entitled also to the further descriptions “honest” and “well-controlled” and “just” and “friendly” and “courageous” and “fostering” and “supportive,” and so on, as distinguishable aspects or immediate effects of his unitary “virtue”? (shrink)

The essays in this book offer an in-depth exploration of value theory. Portions examine the theoretical foundations of values and valuation exploring the rational groundwork for judgments. Other aspects, appealing to value distinctions of inherent, intrinsic, and instrumental, bring to light matters of aesthetic, social political, ethical, and ontological issues.

The HIPAA Rules continue to support and bolster the importance of protecting the privacy and security of patients' protected health information. The HIPAA training requirements are at the cornerstone of meaningful implementation and provide a ripe opportunity for critical education.

The ancient Stoics notoriously argued, with thoroughness and force, that all ordinary “emotions” (passions, mental affections: in Greek, pãyh) are thoroughly bad states of mind, not to be indulged in by anyone, under any circumstances: anger, resentment, gloating; pity, sympathy, grief; delight, glee, pleasure; impassioned love (i.e. ¶rvw), agitated desires of any kind, fear; disappointment, regret, all sorts of sorrow; hatred, contempt, schadenfreude. Early on in the history of Stoicism, however, apparently in order to avoid the objection that human nature (...) itself demands and indeed justifies—under certain circumstances at any rate—emotional attachments to or aversions from, and reactions to, some persons, things, and happenings, they introduced a theory of what came to be called eÈpãyeiai, good and acceptable ways of feeling or being affected. For short I will render these in English by “good feelings.”1 They divided these into three generic kinds, which they dubbed “joy” (xarã), “wish” (boÊlhsiw) and “caution” (eÈlãbeia). They ranged these alongside, and set them in sharp contrast to, three of the four highest genera into which they divided the normal human emotions: “pleasure” (≤donÆ), i.e., being pleased about something,2 “appetitive desire” (§piyuµ€a), and “fear” (fÒbow), respectively. The Stoics maintained that, though ordinary, familiar human emotions such as these last-named ones were always bad, the three sorts of “good feeling,” and their more specific variations (since these three are only the basic genera into which lots of other good ways of feeling will fall), were not merely free from the grounds of criticism on which ordinary emotions were rejected, and so were perfectly acceptable. The fully perfected human being (the “wise person”) would indeed regularly be subject to them.3 Their theory of the perfect human life did not, then, they could claim, require any outrageously unnatural demand, presumably unrealizable in any case, for a life completely without all feelings of involvement in the sweep and flow of life.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of Interpreting ReligionJohn M. Najemy*No aspect of Machiavelli’s thought elicits a wider range of interpretations than religion, and one may wonder why his utterances on this subject appear to move in so many different directions and cause his readers to see such different things. One reason is of course his famous challenge to conventional piety in the advice to princes (...) (in chapter 18 of The Prince) that, while it is important to appear to be “all compassion, faith, integrity, humanity, and religione, and there is nothing more necessary for a prince than to appear to have the last of these,” these “qualities” can actually be “damaging” if a prince insists on observing them at all times. For it is sometimes necessary to act “against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religione.” 1 Machiavelli probably never wrote more famous or infamous words than these, even though they express an obvious, and hardly original, truth about all politics. But the world of the later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reformations and religious absolutisms could not tolerate such honesty, and Machiavelli’s reputation was quickly tarred with accusations of devilish immorality by the very societies that thought it was godly to burn heretics. On the issue of religion Machiavelli became, and to some extent remains, a convenient scapegoat often blamed for the decline of religion in the modern world, all of which has no doubt intensified the polemical and ideological nature of the debates surrounding his views of religion in general and Christianity in particular. [End Page 659]The polar positions in the interpretation of Machiavelli’s ideas about religion are represented by Leo Strauss and Sebastian de Grazia. For Strauss, Machiavelli was a “teacher of evil,” a “blasphemer,” and a purveyor of lessons of a “diabolical” and “soulless character” whose purpose was to sabotage the heritage of thought and morality inherited from both Christianity and Greek philosophy. 2 De Grazia, by contrast, has recently given us a Machiavelli who “discourses about God always in the conventional reverent attitude,” who “never questions that there is good and evil,” and who, “by associating virtuous political action with grace and glory... argues that through this kind of active and political virtue men conform to God’s desire.” “Behind Niccolò’s insistence on political action,” says de Grazia, “stands God. He grants His grace when it is earned—in political coin.” 3 Part of the fascination of Machiavelli scholarship is the mystery of how this most outspoken and direct of political thinkers—a writer who pulled no punches and minced no words—could be the common referent of such wildly different readings. But it is equally curious to observe how uncannily these extreme positions mirror each other. Both give us true believers, one in the Word, the other in the subversion of the Word; and in both cases a believer who is always of a piece, true to himself, and possessed of an unshakeable commitment—whether positive or negative—toward the transcendent truth of Christianity. In short, for all the obvious differences, the similarities between Strauss’s “diabolical” Machiavelli and de Grazia’s reverent “friend of God” remind one of the old myth that devils are after all only fallen angels.The papers in this forum should certainly remove any doubt about the importance of religion in Machiavelli’s thought. They remind us of the prominence of religious language and examples in Machiavelli’s texts: his call for the “redemption” of Italy in the last chapter of The Prince; the esteem in which he holds the heads and founders of religions, whom he declares, in Discourses 1.10, to be the most praised of all famous men; the crucial appeal to the figure of Moses as the prototype of both founders of states and liberators of enslaved peoples; the central role that Machiavelli attributes to religion among the factors responsible for Rome’s power, unity, and political success; and his provocative critique of Christianity, which leads him, in a number of places, to blame the Christian faith for the relative weakness of both modern states and the modern ethic of citizenship. 4 The authors... (shrink)

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum advocate that a person’s quality of life and equal standing in society should be evaluated in terms of capabilities rather than utility, income or resources.In this article, I critically examine the concept of the person that underpins the capability approach. I argue that the ideal of equality of capability articulates a ‘non-utilitarian’ and ‘non-liberal’ view of the self.

On Sartre's own admission, his account of the emotions discloses them as functional. As such, the emotions aim to serve a particular purpose for which he provides the phenomenology. Sartre's phenomenology discloses consciousness as being-in-the-world in two ways, actually as having two worlds. One is a deterministic world, the other magical. Emotion is the drop from the deterministic world to the magical. In order for emotion to perform the function Sartre has in mind it performs, it is crucial there be (...) a certain tension between the deterministic world and the magical world. I argue that given what Sartre himself says about the magical world, the necessary tension can never arise; hence, no functional thesis of emotion is possible if it is formed along Sartre's lines. (shrink)

Being is simultaneously knowing and unknown, rooted in man's spirit-matter composition. The dynamic unity in diversity provides the fundamental _Schwebe (oscillation, tension) of thought. In it sensibility is one with and diverse from intellection. In intellection form is diverse from and identical with _esse. Being's grade of self-presence grounds objective analogy to which corresponds the subjective analogy of sensibility, abstraction, and judgment. These operations reflect the ways of affirmation, negation, and eminence. A unity in diversity exists among sensibility, abstraction, and (...) judgment. Rahner emphasizes identity or diversity according to need, but stressing judgment, he risks relativizing formal abstraction. (shrink)

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) is the most famous and controversial figure in the history of political thought and one of the iconic names of the Renaissance. The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli brings together sixteen original essays by leading experts, covering his life, his career in Florentine government, his reaction to the dramatic changes that affected Florence and Italy in his lifetime, and the most prominent themes of his thought, including the founding, evolution, and corruption of republics and principalities, class conflict, liberty, (...) arms, religion, ethics, rhetoric, gender, and the Renaissance dialogue with antiquity. In his own time Machiavelli was recognized as an original thinker who provocatively challenged conventional wisdom."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Broadening participation in early science, technology, engineering and math learning outside of school is important for families experiencing poverty. We evaluated variations of the Teaching Together STEM pre-kindergarten program for increasing parent involvement in STEM learning. This informal STEM, family engagement program was offered in 20 schools where 92% of students received free/reduced lunch. The core treatment included a series of family education workshops, text messages, and family museum passes. The workshops were delivered at school sites by museum outreach educators. (...) We randomly assigned schools to business-as-usual control or one of three additive treatment groups. Using an additive treatment design, we provided the core program in Treatment A, we added take-home STEM materials in Treatment B, and added materials + parent monetary rewards in Treatment C. The primary outcome was parent involvement in STEM. There were no significant impacts of any treatment on parent involvement; however, the groups that added take-home materials had larger effect sizes on parent involvement at posttest and later, kindergarten follow-up. Adding parent monetary rewards only produced short-term improvements in parent involvement that faded at follow-up. We discuss implications for other community-sponsored family engagement programs focused on informal STEM learning, including considering characteristics of families who were more versus less likely to attend. These null findings suggest that alternatives to in-person family education workshops should be considered when parents are experiencing poverty and have competing demands on their time. (shrink)

Recent policy debates in the US over access to mental health care have raised several philosophically complex ethical and conceptual issues. The defeat of mental health parity legislation in the US Congress has brought new urgency and relevance to theoretical and empirical investigations into the nature of mental illness and its relation to other forms of sickness and disability. Manifold, nebulous, and often competing conceptions of mental illness make the creation of coherent public policy exceedingly difficult. Referencing a variety of (...) approaches to ethical reflection on health care, and drawing from the empirical literature on therapeutic efficacy and economic efficiency, we argue that differential rationing, ‘disparity,’ is unjustifiable. (shrink)

I review this fine collection of articles on ancient ethics ranging from the Presocratics to Sextus Empiricus. Eight of the nine chapters are published here for the first time. Contributors include Charles H. Kahn on "Pre-Platonic Ethics," C. C. W. Taylor on "Platonic Ethics," Stephen Everson on "Aristotle on Nature and Value," John McDowell on "Some Issues in Aristotle's Moral Psychology," David Sedley on "The Inferential Foundations of Epicurean Ethics," T. H. Irwin on "Socratic Paradox and Stoic Theory," Julia (...) Annas on "Doing Without Objective Values: Ancient and Modern Strategies," and Susan Sauvé Meyer on "Moral Responsibility: Aristotle and After." There is also an introductory essay by the editor, Stephen Everson. I summarize and then critique each chapter in this rather lengthy review. (shrink)

The purpose of Sheffield’s careful study is to increase scholarly appreciation of the Symposium as a ‘substantive work in Platonic ethics’ (3). Among the book’s highlights are a persuasive response to Vlastos’ criticism of Plato on love for individuals, an eminently reasonable assessment of the evidence for and against the presence of tripartite psychology in the Symposium, and a delightful interpretation of Alcibiades’ speech at the dialogue’s end—one that reveals elements of satyr play and corroborates rather than undermines Diotima’s account (...) of erôs. My review focuses on Sheffield’s account of Socrates’ speech. She devotes four of seven chapters to it. After summarizing her main argument, I raise two concerns: one about her account of immortality, the other about her interpretation of Plato as a rational eudaimonist. (shrink)

Jacob (history, New School for Social Research) proposes that the science of the 17th and 18th centuries was eventually accepted because it was made compatible with larger political and economic interests. A celebration of the recently concluded 33 volume edition of the Collected works of John Stuart Mill, produced over a period of nearly 30 years, the last 20 under the guiding genius (and hand) of general editor Robson. Following a tributary history of the project itself, essays cover Mill's (...) career as a thinker and as a bureaucrat and public servant, exploring the effects of the various milieu--domestic, political, administrative, religious, and cultural--in which he moved. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character that date back to Aristotle. John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. More often than not it is the situation not the nature of the personality that really counts. The author elaborates the philosophical consequences of this research for (...) a whole array of ethical theories and shows that, once rid of the misleading conception of motivation, moral psychology can support more robust ethical theories and more humane ethical practices. (shrink)

So, on 22 July 1865, under the title ‘Philosophy and Punch’, did England's premier comic weekly greet the election of J. S. Mill as MP for Westminster. Mill held his seat for only one term, until the general election of 1868, when his Whig-Liberal colleague Robert Wellesley Grosvenor was re-elected, but Mill was replaced by the loser in 1865, the Conservative W. H. Smith, Jr., who, though he never went to sea, became the ruler of the Queen's navy. The reasons (...) for that reversal have engaged the attention of many, including Mill himself; I should like to introduce into the discussion material from an ignored source, the comic weeklies, which took a continued and close look at Mill's behaviour during his parliamentary years. While this evidence generally does not disconfirm earlier judgments—including my own— it does more than merely add to the induction. First, it shows how different political stances led journals to focus on different aspects of Mill's parliamentary career, and to adopt different rhetorical strategies in portraying him in picture and word. Second, it demonstrates how the hardening of party allegiances during the parliament of 1865–68, which accelerated in the preparatory campaigns for the general election of 1868, affected Mill adversely. Third, it suggests strongly that it was not his ‘crotchets’ or ‘whims’, especially women's suffrage and proportional representation, that damaged his chances for re-election, but his advocacy of causes unpopular with the majority of Liberals as well as with Conservatives. (shrink)

The Heirs of Plato is the first book exclusively devoted to an in-depth study of the various directions in philosophy taken by Plato's followers in the first seventy years or so following his death in 347 BC--the period generally known as 'The Old Academy'. Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Polemon, the three successive heads of the Academy in this period, though personally devoted to the memory of Plato, were independent philosophers in their own right, and felt free to develop his heritage in (...) individual directions. Dillon's clear and accessible book fills a significant gap in our understanding of Plato's immediate philosophical influence, and will be of great value to scholars and historians of ancient philosophy. (shrink)

This paper assesses Michael Brady’s claim that the ‘capture and consumption of attention’ in an emotion facilitates evaluative understanding. It argues that emotional attention is epistemically deleterious on its own, even though it can be beneficial in conjunction with the right epistemic skills and motivations. The paper considers Sartre’s and Solomon’s claim that emotions have purposes, respectively, to circumvent difficulty or maximize self-esteem. While this appeal to purposes is problematic, it suggests a promising alternative conception of how emotions can be (...) teleological. The fact that emotional attention manifests dispositions, which have been habituated by repeated association with pleasure or relief, explains how the emotion can acquire the function of producing pleasure or relief. Hence, the emotion can have ‘non-cognitive function,’ in which its patterns of attention reliably produce beliefs that disregard or distort the truth. Not only is non-cognitive function the default condition of emotion prior to any training, but even those who have successfully trained their emotions often revert back to non-cognitive function when faced with trauma or stress. (shrink)

The Road to Reality John M. Rist. 13 THE ORIGINALITY OF PLOTINUS ' It is necessary to take the notable opinions of the ancients and consider whether any of them agree with ours.' (Enneads 3.7.7.15) It will not have escaped the reader's  ...

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill took thirty years to complete and is acknowledged as the definitive edition of J.S. Mill and as one of the finest works editions ever completed. Mill's contributions to philosophy, economics, and history, and in the roles of scholar, politician and journalist can hardly be overstated and this edition remains the only reliable version of the full range of Mill's writings. Each volume contains extensive notes, a new introduction and an index. Many of (...) the volumes have been unavailable for some time, but the Works are now again available, both as a complete set and as individual volumes. (shrink)