On Doing Justice to Cosmopolitan Values and the Otherness of the Other: Living with Cosmopolitan Scepticism

Educators, not to mention philosophers of education, find themselves in a difficult position nowadays. With the disappearance of the so-called metanarratives, it seems that the secular society has made it difficult, not to say almost impossible, to justify a particular idea of the good life that can be shared by all or at least many. The paper draws attention to some of the postmodernist critiques and thus identifies how we have ended up at this point; it then argues for a different balance between the self and the other. What is offered can be seen as an extension of Benhabib’s cosmopolitan view that the self and others should iteratively and hospitably engage in deliberation. Although we agree with her that iterations (as arguing over and over again and talking back) are worthwhile in themselves, as well as with Smith’s view that spaces should be created for adaptable practical judgements in considering the other and its relation with the self, we find Cavell’s idea of ‘living with scepticism’—particularly, acknowledging humanity in the Other and oneself as apposite to extend the theoretical premises of cosmopolitanism. Such a cosmopolitanism of scepticism is different from the universalist notions of cosmopolitanism developed so far.     

Virtues,Skills, and Right Action

According to Rosalind Hursthouse’s virtue based account of right action, an act is right if it is what a fully virtuous person would do in that situation. Robert Johnson has criticized the account on the grounds that the actions a non-virtuous person should take are often uncharacteristic of the virtuous person, and thus Hursthouse’s account of right action is too narrow. The non-virtuous need to take steps to improve themselves morally, and the fully virtuous person need not take these steps. So Johnson argues that any virtue based account of right action will have to find a way to ground a moral obligation to improve oneself. This paper argues that there is an account of virtue that can offer a partial solution to Johnson’s challenge, an account where virtue is a type of practical skill and in which the virtuous person is seen as having expertise. The paper references the account of skill acquisition developed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus. Their research demonstrates that novices in a skill have to employ different strategies to act well than the strategies used by the experts, and so the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis provides support for Johnson’s claim that the actions of the non-virtuous will differ from the virtuous. On the other hand, their research suggests that there is no separating the commitment to improve yourself from the possession of expertise, and so the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis has the resources for grounding the obligation to improve oneself in an account of virtue.     

The Lessons of Artistic Creativity for Pastoral Theologians

This article applies David W. Galenson’s (2006) typology of artistic creativity to pastoral theology. Galenson identifies two types of painters—conceptualists and experimentalists—and shows that their most important innovations occur at different stages of an artist’s career, that their methods are very different, and that each type produces predictable career frustrations which may, however, be counteracted. The fact that these types are found among sculptors, poets, novelists and film directors leads Galenson to propose that they are also found among scholars, thus inviting application of the findings of the study to pastoral theology as a discipline and to individuals who identify themselves as pastoral theologians. Galenson’s work is supplemented by Thomas Dormandy’s (2000) study of older painters.     

Leadership and Organizational Culture: Linking CEO Characteristics to Cultural Values

Purpose  The purpose of this study was to empirically examine organizational culture theorists’ assertions about the linkages between leadership and the cultures that emerge in the organizations they lead. Specific hypotheses were developed and tested regarding relationships between chief executive officers’ (CEO’s) personality traits, and the cultural values that are shared among their organization’s members. Design/Methodology/Approach  Thirty-two CEOs completed measures of the Big-Five personality traits and personal values. A total of 467 employees across the 32 organizations completed a competing values measure of organizational culture. Findings  Results indicate support for several hypothesized relationships between CEO personality and cultural values. Exploratory analyses indicated that several CEO personal values were related to culture values. Implications  Organizations need to seriously consider the “fit” between the current or desired organizational culture and CEO characteristics. Organizations attempting to change fundamental aspects of its functioning may need significant behavioral—or personnel—changes at the top of the organization in order to achieve those changes. Originality/Value  This is the first empirical study to establish a link between specific CEO characteristics and the cultural values of their organizations. This study provides evidence that CEO characteristics are felt throughout the organization by impacting the norms that sanction or discourage member behavior and decision making, and the patterns of behavior and interaction among members.     

Temptation Bias: Can Self-enhancement Limit the Influence of Gender Stereotypes?

Temptation bias is the tendency to see oneself as better than others at resisting temptation. To understand the influence of self-enhancement and gender stereotypes on temptation bias, 215 undergraduates from a university located in the southwest region of the United States compared their ability to resist ten sexually tempting scenarios to that of others in general, and to their romantic partner (Study 1). An additional 151 undergraduates from the same university rated their own or their partner’s ability to resist seven sexually tempting scenarios compared to other men and women (Study 2). Results revealed that temptation bias was present but reduced when romantic partners were the comparison targets; and when comparing themselves to others, women displayed temptation bias regardless of the gender of the referent while men displayed temptation bias only when comparing themselves to men.     

Eluding Wilson’s “Elusive Narrators”

George Wilson has defended the thesis that even impersonal third-person fictional narratives should be taken to contain fictional narrations and have fictional narrators. This, he argues, is necessary if we are to explain how readers can take themselves, in their imaginative engagement with fictions, to have knowledge of the things they are imagining. I argue that there is at least one class of impersonal third-person fictional narratives—thought experiments—to which Wilson’s model fails to apply, and that this reveals more general problems with his argument. I further argue that there is no good reason to think that Wilson’s account applies more restrictedly to those impersonal third-person fictional narratives that feature in standard works of literary fiction.     

Was Brzozowski a “constructionist”? A contemporary reading of Brzozowski’s “philosophy of labour”

Brzozowski’s ‘philosophy of labour’—to which he devoted a number of writings starting in 1902—presents problems of interpretation. A conceptual approach to his conception shows it to be a sometimes uneasy mix of realist and anti-realist notions. Brzozowski appears to have thought that labour is not first of all about the things it supposedly transforms, but rather about itself. I suggest that Brzozowski can be read in the spirit of Nelson Goodman’s nominalist constructionalism (“worldmaking”). On this account, labour in Brzozowski’s idiom turns out to be the constitution of forms of symbolizing sufficient unto themselves and the needs they satisfy. However, that Brzozowski was not entirely consistent in the views I impute to him—he forever sought for some ‘external’ measure of the rightness of labour/symbolizing—can be explained at least in part by his ‘humanism’, that is, his commitment to the task he assigns humankind, that of creating the one meaningful world attesting to virtually unrestricted human power.     

The impact of socially projected group composition on behavior in a commons dilemma: A self-attention perspective

Socially projected group compositions, based on subjects’ expectancies about the behavior of others and the number of subjects taking part on the resource use task, were indexed using Mullen’s Additive Other-Total Ratio (Mullen, 1987) and used to predict harvesting behavior in a commons dilemma. One-hundred forty-three males took part in a resource use task in groups ranging in size from two to six members. Just prior to harvesting trials, subjects indicated the number of those taking part that they expected to overharvest and to underharvest, and indicated to which of these groups they had assigned themselves. Results indicated that harvesting behavior varied as a function of the number of others expected to behave differently from self, and conformed to patterns predicted by Self-Attention Theory. With increases in the number of others expected to underharvest, indexing an increase in self-attention, subjects who indicated they would overharvest become more conservative in resource use. However, subjects who indicated they would underharvest did not significantly decrease harvest size with increases in the number of others expected to overharvest. These subjects were already harvesting at an optimal or sub-optimal rate, and therefore had no need to reduce the size of their harvests to match their behavior to standards stressing conservatism in resource use.     

From recognition to decisions: Extending and testing recognition-based models for multialternative inference

The recognition heuristic is a noncompensatory strategy for inferring which of two alternatives, one recognized and the other not, scores higher on a criterion. According to it, such inferences are based solely on recognition. We generalize this heuristic to tasks with multiple alternatives, proposing a model of how people identify the consideration sets from which they make their final decisions. In doing so, we address concerns about the heuristic’s adequacy as a model of behavior: Past experiments have led several authors to conclude that there is no evidence for a noncompensatory use of recognition but clear evidence that recognition is integrated with other information. Surprisingly, however, in no study was this competing hypothesis—the compensatory integration of recognition—formally specified as a computational model. In four studies, we specify five competing models, conducting eight model comparisons. In these model comparisons, the recognition heuristic emerges as the best predictor of people’s inferences.     

Predictors of Health Locus of Control in Older Adults

Health locus of control has been shown to influence how individuals approach their health and health-related decisions. The present study examined the variables predictive of older adults’ health locus of control. A total of 261 adults aged 54–84 years completed a questionnaire about their health, approach to health, and background information about themselves. The results revealed that demographic indicators, health-related variables, and psychological variables—particularly health risk tolerance, future time perspective, health self-efficacy, and emotional instability—were related to older adults’ health locus of control. Findings have implications for programs aimed at modifying older adults’ health locus of control.     

Abravanel in Italy: the critique of the kabbalist Elijah Hayyim Genazzano

Among many uncharted vistas of scholarship on Isaac Abravanel, a comprehensive account of his scholarly afterlife seems especially distant. This essay illustrates the possibilities latent in the study of Abravanel’s reception-history by investigating a sharp critique of Abravanel composed in his lifetime. Its author was a Tuscan kabbalist, Elijah Hayyim ben Benjamin of Genazzano (c. 1440–c. 1510), who studied with the renowned talmudist and kabbalist, Benjamin of Montalcino, and engaged in a disputation with a Franciscan friar, Francesco d’Acquapendente. The critique, which appears in Elijah’s ’Igeret ḥamudot (an epistolary tract sent to Benjamin of Montalcino’s son David), comprises such central themes of medieval and early modern Jewish thought as aggadic authority, prophecy’s relationship to human perfection, and philosophy’s relationship to Kabbalah. It unexpectedly serves as the main exhibit in Elijah’s larger argument regarding the limits of the human intellect and of truths arrived at by way of philosophic “speculation.” After surveying Abravanel’s exegetical monograph ‘Aṭeret zeqenim, the immediate object of Elijah’s wrath, the essay investigates the conceptual components of Elijah’s critique. It concludes by seeking to explain the thoroughly baneful image of Abravanel that Elijah presents despite the significant spiritual sensibilities and intellectual points of contact these two thinkers shared. The key appears to be differences between Elijah’s Italian religious-intellectual context and the Ibero-Jewish tradition that shaped Abravanel. The essay argues that differences in their formative intellectual contexts, coupled with the genuinely elusive character of Abravanel’s religious thought, are among the things that kept the type of Sephardic traditionalism that Abravanel represented—elements of which Elijah ought to have applauded—hidden from Elijah’s view.     

Agonistic Recognition in Education: On Arendt’s Qualification of Political and Moral Meaning

Agonistic recognition in education has three interlinked modes of aesthetic experience and self-presentation where one is related to actions in the public realm; one is related to plurality in the way in which it comes into existence in confrontation with others; and one is related to the subject-self, disclosed by ‘thinking. Arendt’s conception of ‘thinking’ is a way of getting to grips with aesthetic self-presentation in education. By action, i.e., by disclosing oneself and by taking initiatives, students and teachers constitute their being. The way Arendt theorizes action (vita activa) makes it essentially unpredictable and destabilizing, which does not seem to fit into what should be expected from education. In the article I will argue that it should have a place by virtue of the debate, challenge and contest it offers. But education should also be defined from a specific kind of contemplation called ‘thinking’ to become the cultivation of a faculty of judgment in education—thinking (vita contemplativa) as a common virtue in education. Arendt’s demarcation between truth and meaning does from the point of view of agonistic recognition in education call for ‘thinking’ as a qualification of political and moral meaning–the ‘taste’ to be established in the individual, by individual judgements but always judged in relation to members of a community.     

Aquinas on the Role of Another in Perfect Self-Knowledge

Aquinas is clear that human intellect can only know itself through knowing others. Yet he seems to treat this need for others as a mark of imperfection: both angels and God can know themselves through themselves, and their intellects seem therefore to be more perfect than ours. In this article, however, I focus first on Thomas’s teaching on angels’ morning and evening knowledge, where he suggests that angels only know themselves perfectly if they know themselves in Another. Second, I turn to his theology of the Word, where he suggests that the Father only ever knows Himself in knowing another Person. By exploring these areas of Thomas’s thought, I argue that to know oneself perfectly is to know oneself in another.     

Validity, the Squeezing Argument and Alternative Semantic Systems: the Case of Aristotelian Syllogistic

We investigate the philosophical significance of the existence of different semantic systems with respect to which a given deductive system is sound and complete. Our case study will be Corcoran’s deductive system D for Aristotelian syllogistic and some of the different semantic systems for syllogistic that have been proposed in the literature. We shall prove that they are not equivalent, in spite of D being sound and complete with respect to each of them. Beyond the specific case of syllogistic, the goal is to offer a general discussion of the relations between informal notions—in this case, an informal notion of deductive validity—and logical apparatuses such as deductive systems and (model-theoretic or other) semantic systems that aim at offering technical, formal accounts of informal notions. Specifically, we will be interested in Kreisel’s famous ‘squeezing argument’; we shall ask ourselves what a plurality of semantic systems (understood as classes of mathematical structures) may entail for the cogency of specific applications of the squeezing argument. More generally, the analysis brings to the fore the need for criteria of adequacy for semantic systems based on mathematical structures. Without such criteria, the idea that the gap between informal and technical accounts of validity can be bridged is put under pressure.     

Humor and the coronary-prone behavior pattern

The belief is widely held that humor is related to recovery from, and perhaps an increased resistance to, coronary and other stress-related diseases. Such generalizations do not typically distinguish between benign and hostile humor. In the present research, the relationship between a measure of proneness to coronary heart disease (CHD) and appreciation of hostile and nonhostile humor is examined. In two studies, one with college students and one with patients suffering from CHD, the relationship between humor preferences and the coronary-prone (Type A) behavior pattern was examined. Each subject was given the Jenkins Activity Survey as a measure of the coronary-prone personality type, and aggressive and nonaggressive jokes to rate for funniness. Hostile humor was preferred to nonhostile humor by all groups, but among those suffering from CHD, those who could be classified as “Type B’s” preferred nonhostile humor. The results indicate that those less prone to CHD appreciate both hostile and nonhostile humor, while Type A’s seem to enjoy hostile humor only.     

Towards a Religiously Adequate Alternative to OmniGod Theism

Theistic religious believers should be concerned that the God they worship is not an idol. Conceptions of God thus need to be judged according to criteria of religious adequacy that are implicit in the ‘God-role’—that is, the way the concept of God properly functions in the conceptual economy and form of life of theistic believers. I argue that the conception of God as ‘omniGod’—an immaterial personal creator with the omni-properties—may reasonably be judged inadequate, at any rate from the perspective of a relationship ethics based on the Christian revelation that God is Love. I go on to suggest that a conception of God as the power of love within the natural universe might prove more adequate, with God’s role as creator understood in terms of final rather than efficient causation.     

Similarity as threat: A motivational explanation of self–other similarity judgment asymmetry

People tend to judge others to be more similar to themselves than themselves are to others. This self–other similarity judgment asymmetry was often explained by a cognitive model. However, some findings were inconsistent with this model, implying that there might be complementary processes underlying such asymmetry. Although a motivational explanation has been proposed to account for the asymmetry, little evidence has been accumulated to verify this explanation and differentiate it from the cognitive model. The current research tested both the core assumption of the motivational explanation as well as a hypothesis derived only from it. Results suggest that the perception of oneself as being similar to others was more threatening to people's uniqueness than the perception of others as being similar to oneself. Individuals with high need for uniqueness exhibited greater asymmetry than did individuals with low need. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Impact of Behaviors upon Burnout Among Parish-Based Clergy

Burnout has an important impact upon the professional satisfaction of clergy. Identifying protective behaviors that may prevent against burnout is important for the long-term emotional health of individual clergy as well as the wider church. This research reports findings among 358 parish-based clergy that identifies the prevalence of burnout and correlates this data with demographic risk factors and protective behaviors. Clergy who met criteria for burnout were younger, identified themselves as being depressed and unsatisfied with their spiritual life, and have endured a traumatic church placement. This research also suggests that having a variety of interests and activities outside of one’s vocation may protect against burnout. In particular, behaviors that enhance relationships—such as seeking mentors and attending retreats—as well as pursuing outside activities—such as regular exercise and scholarly reading—protect against burnout. Further implications for the wider church are discussed.