Personality and prayer are both conceptualized as focusing on issues of connectivity with the self and beyond. Individual participants each recruited a peer to join the study . Participants rated themselves according to multi-item scales that detail five personality factors . They also responded to an instrument specifying eight foci of the inward, outward, and upward cognitive content of prayer ; these eight foci were reduced to three prayer themes: internal concerns, embracing paradox, and bold assertion. Finally, respondents reported the (...) strength of six "basic" emotions that may be experienced during their typical prayer. Using the same instruments, each peer rated her or his matched participant. Results reveal discrete patterns between self and peer ratings, with respect to links among prayer and personality variables. Both self and peer ratings emphasize a relation between prayer and the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness . Several concluding points highlight the value of the present conceptualization of personality and prayer with relation to connectivity, potential differences between personal and corporate prayers, and the potential role of sex differences in the disclosure of prayer's content and emotional influence. (shrink)

Personality and prayer are both conceptualized as focusing on issues of connectivity with the self and beyond. Individual participants each recruited a peer to join the study . Participants rated themselves according to multi-item scales that detail five personality factors . They also responded to an instrument specifying eight foci of the inward, outward, and upward cognitive content of prayer ; these eight foci were reduced to three prayer themes: internal concerns, embracing paradox, and bold assertion. Finally, respondents reported the (...) strength of six "basic" emotions that may be experienced during their typical prayer. Using the same instruments, each peer rated her or his matched participant. Results reveal discrete patterns between self and peer ratings, with respect to links among prayer and personality variables. Both self and peer ratings emphasize a relation between prayer and the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness . Several concluding points highlight the value of the present conceptualization of personality and prayer with relation to connectivity, potential differences between personal and corporate prayers, and the potential role of sex differences in the disclosure of prayer's content and emotional influence. (shrink)

Aristotle's theory of moral character focuses on developing virtues, the deep internal dispositional traits from which external actions naturally flow. Aristotle describes moral virtue as a human excellence that can be developed through practice. The morally worst person is the vicious person who does the wrong thing, desires the wrong thing, and doesn't even know the right thing to do—perhaps even mistaking the wrong thing to do for the right thing. This was the sort of person Eleanor was when she (...) entered The Good Place. One objection to the possibility of moral development is called situationism: the claim that people don't really live according to moral character but are overwhelmingly shaped by the situations around them. As Eleanor learns in The Good Place, the road to being a better person starts with caring about those close to us. (shrink)

According to comic moralism, moral flaws make comic works less funny or not funny at all. In contrast, comic immoralism is the view that moral flaws make comic works funnier. In this article, I argue for a moderate version of comic immoralism. I claim that, sometimes, comic works are funny partly in virtue of their moral flaws. I argue for this claim—and artistic immoralism more generally—by identifying artistically valuable moral flaws in relevant actions undertaken in the creation of those works. (...) Underlying this argument is the idea that such generative actions are partly constitutive of a work's identity, and, therefore, they may affect the ethical value of an artwork either positively or negatively, and they are the proper objects of ethical appraisal. (shrink)

To what extent can meaning be attributed to nature, and what is the relationship between such “natural sense” and the meaning of linguistic and artistic expressions? To shed light on such questions, this essay lays the groundwork for an “ontology of sense” drawing on the insights of phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. We argue that the ontological continuity of organic life with the perceived world of nature requires situating sense at a level that is more fundamental than has traditionally (...) been recognized. Accounting for the genesis of this primordial sense and the teleology of expressive forms requires the development of an ontology of being as interrogation, as suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s later investigations. (shrink)

Analyses of government have had little to say about the management of people within the modern corporation. This paper seeks to remedy this neglect by examining the transformation of the principles and practices for governing the factory which occurred in the USA across the last two decades of the twentieth century. This transformation included changes to the technology and physical layout of factories, changes to the concepts according to which manufacturing is organized, and changes in the public discourse concerning work (...) and the worker. The reshaping of identities for workers and managers, and the construction of new ideas of economic citizenship, represented new ways of governing economic life. “Rethinking the factory” meant both a physical reconstruction of the factory, as well as a reconstruction of ideas and practices about how to govern the actions of persons within the reengineered customer-driven factory. (shrink)

As we envision constructive undertakings in the field of religion and science for the next decade, the emerging agenda of astrotheology is opening up a new theater for enquiry. Astrotheology provides a critical theological response to the field of astrobiology while critically assessing exciting new research on life in our solar system and the discovery of exoplanets. This article proposes four tasks for the astrotheologian: deliberate on (1) the scope of creation: is God's creation Earth-centric or does it include the (...) entire cosmos? (2) the question whether a single divine incarnation on Earth suffices for the cosmos or whether multiple incarnations—one for each inhabited planet—is required; (3) whether astrobiologists and other space scientists are sticking to their science or smuggling in ideology; and (4) readying terrestrial life for contact with extraterrestrial life by enumerating issues to be taken up by astroethics. (shrink)

In this preliminary study, the authors extend Swanson's concept of normative myopia (the propensity of executives to downplay or ignore the values at stake in their decision making) by using it as a point of reference for studying executives' preference for high pay dispersion. Specifically, the authors designed a survey to examine hypothesized relationships among myopia, personality, and executives' preference for highly stratified organizational pay structures. Data from 133 executive respondents suggest that myopic executives tend to prefer top-heavy compensation (...) systems. In addition, the findings point to an inverse relationship between the personality factor Agreeableness and normative myopia, with the former offsetting the latter. The authors reject the alternative hypothesis that gender influences both agreeableness and myopia and conclude with some implications for business and society, including Swanson's proposition that normative myopia at the top contributes to a neglectful form of corporate social performance. (shrink)

Phenomenology’s attention to the theme of animality has focused not on animal life in general but rather on the animal dimension of the human and its contested relation with humanity as such. Phenomenology thereby reproduces Agamben’s “anthropological machine” by which humanity is constructed through the “inclusive exclusion” of its animality. The alternative to this “inclusive exclusion” is not a return to kinship or commonality but rather an intensification of the constitutive paradox of our own inner animality, understood in terms of (...) the anonymous, corporeal subject of perception that lives a different temporality than that of first-person consciousness. Consequently, non-human others speak through our own voices and gaze out through our own eyes. We first consider the proximity of Merleau-Ponty’s early work with that of Max Scheler, who paradigmatically reduces human animality to bare life. Merleau-Ponty differentiates himself from Scheler, in The Structure of Behavior, by insisting that life cannot be integrated into spirit without remainder. Merleau-Ponty’s later work thinks this remainder as the ineliminable gap and delay in the auto-affection of the body and as a chiasmic exchange that anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal.” This remainder of life within consciousness is the immemorial past of one’s own animality. It follows that our “inner animality” is neither singular nor plural but a kind of pack that speaks through the voice that I take to be mine. Furthermore, in the exchange of looks between myself and a non-human other, the crossing of glances occurs at an animal level that withdraws from my own reflective consciousness. (shrink)

Motivated by analogous applications to sonoluminescence, neutron stars mergers are examined in the context of Schwinger's dynamical Casimir effect. When the dielectric properties of the QED vacuum are altered through the introduction of dense matter, energy shifts in the zero-point fluctuations can appear as photon bursts at gamma-ray frequencies. The amount of radiation depends upon the properties and amount of matter in motion and the suddenness of the transition. It is shown that the dynamical Casimir effect can convert sufficient energy (...) of neutron star mergers into gamma rays. Using information extracted from simulations of matter flow in neutron star mergers by Ruffert and Janka, we estimate that the total Casimir energy released can exceed 10 53 ergs in gamma-ray frequencies. The Casimir energy approach is capable of explaining the most energetic gamma-ray bursts. (shrink)

This article develops a theory of reasons that has strong similarities to Peter Klein's infinitism. The view it develops, Framework Reasons, upholds Klein's principles of avoiding arbitrariness (PAA) and avoiding circularity (PAC) without requiring an infinite regress of reasons. A view of reasons that holds that the “reason for” relation is constrained by PAA and that PAC can avoid an infinite regress if the “reason for” relation is contextual. Moreover, such a view of reasons can maintain that skepticism is false (...) by the maintaining that there is more to epistemic justification than can be expressed in any reasoning session. One crucial argument for Framework Reasons is that justification depends on a background of plausibility considerations. The final section of the article applies this view of reasons to Michael Bergmann's argument that any nonskeptical epistemology must embrace epistemic circularity. (shrink)

Cutler et.al. declare themselves opposed to the epistemological privileging of any level of discourse, but prefer, instead, to engage in discursive analyses of specific problems. Nevertheless, their critique of specific laws of tendency in Marx's texts - concentratlon and centralisation of capital, the falling rate of profit, etc. - relies almost exclusively on a single epistemological argument: there can be no such 'thing' as a law of tendency.

In order to better understand the individual-level motives for ticket-splitting, Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study has since 2001 included a question aimed at measuring respondents’ preferences for checks and balances. We argue that this set of questions, designed to measure a combination of Fiorina's policy-balancing hypothesis and Ladd's cognitive Madisonianism, is inconsistent with principles of survey methodology and thus produces data that are suboptimal. Following a method developed by Carsey and Layman, we propose an alternative concept, the policy-balancing index derived (...) from the perceived ideological distance between respondent and political parties, which both avoids methodological violations and provides us with a more precise concept to work with. We test the index and find it to be a significant determinant of ticket-splitting behavior. (shrink)

Ted Benton has had a long and distinguished career and made important contributions in realist philosophy, ecology and Marxism. In part 1 of this wide-ranging interview he discusses his formative years and education, how he came to have an enduring interest in ecology and natural history, and his early work and career. In particular he discusses two matters of special interest to realists. First, how he came to write, and the key arguments contained in, Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies. (...) This book is one of the earliest works in modern realism and deserves wider recognition today. Second, his early and influential critique of Bhaskar's The Possibility of Naturalism. The critique pinpoints several important issues with the original formulation of naturalism and is indicative of the line of reasoning that would enable Benton to connect together natural and social science. In part 2, the discussion turns to this later work. (shrink)

Jill North argues that Hamiltonian mechanics provides the most spare -- and hence most accurate -- account of the structure of a classical world. We point out some difficulties for her argument, and raise some general points about attempts to minimize structural commitments.

Ted T. Aoki, the most prominent curriculum scholar of his generation in Canada, has influenced numerous scholars around the world. Curriculum in a New Key brings together his work, over a 30-year span, gathered here under the themes of reconceptualizing curriculum; language, culture, and curriculum; and narrative. Aoki's oeuvre is utterly unique--a complex interdisciplinary configuration of phenomenology, post-structuralism, and multiculturalism that is both theoretically and pedagogically sophisticated and speaks directly to teachers, practicing and prospective. Curriculum in a New Key: The (...) Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki is an invaluable resource for graduate students, professors, and researchers in curriculum studies, and for students, faculty, and scholars of education generally. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that many intriguing features of indicative conditionals aren’t shared by subjunctive conditionals. Subjunctive morphology is common in discussions of wishes and wants, however, and conditionals are commonly used in such discussions as well. As a result such discussions are a good place to look for subjunctive conditionals that exhibit features usually associated with indicatives alone. Here I offer subjunctive versions of J. L. Austin’s ‘biscuit’ conditionals—e.g., “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them”—and subjunctive (...) versions of Allan Gibbard’s ‘stand-off’ or ‘Sly Pete’ conditionals, in which speakers with no relevant false beliefs can in the same context felicitously assert conditionals with the same antecedents and contradictory consequents. My cases undercut views according to which the indicative/subjunctive divide marks a great difference in the meaning of conditionals. They also make trouble for treatments of indicative conditionals that cannot readily be generalized to subjunctives. (shrink)

North by Northwest -- Metaphor and the cultivation of intimacy -- Notes on metaphor -- What's special about photography? -- Sports and art -- Clay for contemplation -- There are no ties at first base -- A driving examination -- Objects of appreciation -- And what if they don't laugh? -- Liking what's good: why should we? -- Language games -- Ethics class -- Kings and salesmen -- One way to think about popular art -- Caring -- The idea of (...) absolute gin -- Playing by the rules -- Freedom from rules. (shrink)

When moral or religious teachings have public and political effects, analysis usually focuses on the message, but attention to the manner in which the teachings are communicated is equally important in understanding their power to influence the course of events. Oscar Romero's particular style of moral discourse was remarkably effective for three reasons: First, his moral reasoning resonated with Salvadoran identity. It was intelligible within those reigning assumptions about national history and territory that could actually move a public to action. (...) Second, his moral judgments were timely. Romero sought to discern what was possible for the Salvadoran public at a given moment. Third, Romero had integrity as a public figure. He lived in such a way that his life, and especially his death, became an exemplary embodiment of the larger religious narrative that both grounded his ethics and gave meaning to the nation. (shrink)

Hallucination: the perception of an impossible image. That which can never appear suddenly does so anyways - a private world that appears only to the eye of the one imagining it... until now. Ted Serios, psychic photographer, claimed he could project images directly from his mind onto photographic film. Under the sign of the psychic photograph, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” is a theorization of the dominant forms of uncertainty that persist in postmodern evaluations of representation, interpretation and identity. The central thesis (...) of this paper is that the imaginary and the real have collapsed into the spectral hallucination of one another, rendering impossible the rhetorical separation of hallucination from image. With the collapse of the boundary between the fictive and the real, the world of representation becomes intelligible only as an imaginary phenomenon; with the collapse between the object and the observer, interpretation is rendered deceptively magical; and, with the collapse between the self and its anonymous double, identity itself is relegated to a state of impossibility. Consequently, under the persisting signs of the imaginary, the magical and the impossible, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” asserts that in our contemporary world there no longer exists the possibility of failed performativity – psychic, imaginary or otherwise. (shrink)

This chapter begins by outlining several kinds of relativism in the two fields that concern us here: philosophy of art and moral philosophy. It then turns to a brief review of the recent literature in experimental folk moral psychology which suggests the folk are meta-ethical pluralists—objectivists in some contexts and relativists in others. Taking the case of ancient Greek art that celebrates pederasty as a touchpoint, the author suggests that empirical work on the moral appraisal of art is likely to (...) mesh with and lend additional support to this idea. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Bernard Williams’s “relativism of distance,” and the argument that there are, independent of the empirical findings, good meta-ethical reasons for considering a limited form of relativism about the moral standing of artworks. (shrink)

My dissertation asks how we affect conversational context and how it affects us when we participate in any conversation—including philosophical conversations. Chapter 1 argues that speakers make pragmatic presuppositions when they use proper names. I appeal to these presuppositions in giving a treatment of Frege’s puzzle that is consistent with the claim that coreferential proper names have the same semantic value. I outline an explanation of the way presupposition carrying expressions in general behave in belief ascriptions, and suggest that substitutivity (...) failure is a special case of this behavior. Chapter 2 develops a compositional probabilistic semantics for the language of subjective uncertainty, including epistemic adjectives scoped under quantifiers. I argue that we should distinguish sharply between the effects that epistemically hedged statements have on conversational context, and the effects that they have on belief states. I also suggest that epistemically hedged statements are a kind of doxastic advice, and explain how this hypothesis illuminates some otherwise puzzling phenomena. Chapter 3 argues that ordinary causal talk is deeply sensitive to conversational context. The principle that I formulate to characterize that context sensitivity explains at least some of the oddness of ‘systematic causal overdetermination,’ and explains why some putative overgenerated causes are never felicitously counted, in conversation, as causes. But the principle also makes metaphysical theorizing about causation rather indirectly constrained by ordinary language judgments. (shrink)