Gregory of Nyssa on the Reciprocity of the Virtues

Readers of Gregory of Nyssa have often remarked on the significanceof the virtues to his theology. However, a central aspect ofhis understanding of the virtues has received insufficient attention:the notion that the virtues reciprocally entail one another.It is argued that Gregory uses a single theory to describe theinterrelations between the virtues both as they exist in humansand as they exist in God. This theory is the reciprocity thesis,which posits that if one virtue is present, all the virtuesmust be present. The possible philosophical sources for Gregory'sview and some problems with it are examined.     

Origen and Gregory of Nyssa on The Lord's Prayer

The aim of this article is twofold. Both Origen and Gregory of Nyssa treat of the Lord's Prayer, the former in his own treatise On Prayer , the latter in the course of five sermons on the same prayer. By means of an analysis of the methods of both writers and of the results at which they arrive I hope to illustrate their respective treatments of the same text and so to show how what began life as an eschatological prayer became in the course of three or four centuries something rather different. A major difficulty faced by both writers is how to understand the coming of the kingdom, if it is already there.
My second intention, beyond that of comparison is to assess what influence, if any, was exercised by Origen on Gregory. The answer arrived at is rather disappointing, above all for those who believe in a strong influence on Gregory of his predecessor, by way of his grandmother, Macrina. Not only are the styles of the two men quite different, but also, apart from a sort of common Platonism, their answers are often quite distinct.     

Person versus Individual, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa

This article argues that, despite claiming that his own ontology of personhood is patristic–based, John Zizioulas has not convincingly exegeted the Cappadocian theology of person, especially that of Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea. This is unfortunate, given the fact that there are dozens of patristic quotations from, or references to, various Greek Fathers (especially the Cappadocians) throughout Zizioulas's works. Instead, he uses nineteenth– and twentieth–century insights which he then foists on the Cappadocians. This methodology leads him to misleading conclusions. Zizioulas is therefore in error when he contends that the Cappadocians did not understand a person as an individual or when he credits them with having had the same concerns we moderns have when combating individualism today.     

'Whereof We Speak': Gregory of Nyssa, Jean-Luc Marion and the Current Apophatic Rage

Recent postmodern discussions of the Christian apophatic tradition level a noteworthy criticism: after all its negations doesn't Christian apophatic discourse in fact slip back into kataphatic assertions about God? This article seeks to address this claim by bringing into concert two important Christian apophaticists (Gregory of Nyssa and Jean‐Luc Marion) in order to designate a type of discourse that emerges from apophatic union, a discourse that is not kataphatic but logophatic.     

Re–thinking Gregory of Nyssa: Introduction—Gender, Trinitarian Analogies, and the Pedagogy of The Song

This paper serves first as an introduction to the essays gathered in this collection on Rethinking Gregory of Nyssa. The critique of the so–called de Régnon paradigm for Nyssa's Trinitarianism is laid out, and the significance for a new ecumenical rapprochement between East and West indicated. Some new principles are then outlined for reading Nyssa's spiritual and exegetical corpus in tandem with his more polemical and apologetic writings on the Trinity, such that the Trinitarian themes in The Commentary on the Song of Songs , especially, along with their novel messages about gender, become seen as an intrinsic part of Nyssa's contribution to Trinitarian theology.     

On Faithfully Knowing an Infinite God: Humility as an Intellectual Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa's Contra Eunomium II

This article explores the concept of intellectual humility, a crucial but undertreated dimension of Gregory of Nyssa's thought, first by focusing on a key section of Contra Eunomium II, and then by contrasting this account with contemporary versions of Kantian humility. While Gregorian and Kantian humility share similarities on the surface (e.g. both dwell on our inability to know the ‘essence’ of a thing), Gregory's vision of the virtue is formed through engagement with the biblical text and in the quest to know an infinite, self‐revealing God. In contrast to the flat resignation that characterizes Kantian versions of epistemic humility, Gregory's account of humility not only restrains but also empowers its practitioners in theological reflection. 1     

The Scope of Deflationism: Reply to Gregory

Paul Gregory's careful and insightful response to "Carnap and Two Dogmas of Empiricism" highlights a number of points which were underdeveloped in that paper. I think that he has brought into relief a central issue between Camap and Quine by supplying a crucial distinction. However I still maintain that Quine's assault is less than successful and that Gregory's further analysis of the debate sheds light on why this is so.     

Mirror Mirror: The role of self-monitoring and sincerity in emotional manipulation

This study examined for the first time the relationships between self-monitoring, sincerity, and emotional manipulation, by investigating whether sensitivity to social cues and to appropriate emotional expression would facilitate the use of emotion in malevolent contexts. Participants (N = 170 student and community members) completed online measures of self-monitoring, sincerity, and emotional manipulation in a cross-sectional, correlational design. As predicted, high self-monitoring (of self-presentation) and low sincerity were significantly associated with emotional manipulation. Lower levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness also predicted emotional manipulation. Although the current research is exploratory, it is concluded that attention to, and control of, emotional expression, in combination with an insincere approach, are central to emotional manipulation.     

The Relatively Infinite Value of the Environment

Some environmental ethicists and economists argue that attributing infinite value to the environment is a good way to represent an absolute obligation to protect it. Others argue against modelling the value of the environment in this way: the assignment of infinite value leads to immense technical and philosophical difficulties that undermine the environmentalist project. First, there is a problem of discrimination: saving a large region of habitat is better than saving a small region; yet if both outcomes have infinite value, then decision theory prescribes indifference. Second, there is a problem of swamping probabilities: an act with a small but positive probability of saving an endangered species appears to be on par with an act that has a high probability of achieving this outcome, since both have infinite expected value. Our paper shows that a relative (rather than absolute) concept of infinite value can be meaningfully defined, and provides a good model for securing the priority of the natural environment while avoiding the failures noted by sceptics about infinite value. Our claim is not that the relative infinity utility model gets every detail correct, but rather that it provides a rigorous philosophical framework for thinking about decisions affecting the environment.     

The Alienating Mirror: Toward a Hegelian Critique of Lacan on Ego-Formation

This article brings out certain philosophical difficulties in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage, the initial moment of the subject’s development. For Lacan, the “original organization of the forms of the ego” is “precipitated” in an infant’s self-recognition in a mirror image; this event is explicitly prior to any social interactions. A Hegelian objection to the Lacanian account argues that social interaction and recognition of others by infants are necessary prerequisites for infants’ capacity to recognize themselves in a mirror image. Thus mutual recognition with another, rather than self-recognition in a mirror, is what makes possible subsequent ego-formation and self-consciousness. This intersubjective critique suggests that many of the psychoanalytic consequences that Lacan derives from the mirror stage (e.g., alienation, narcissism, and aggressivity) may need to be rethought.

The Aesthetics of Mirror Reversal

Philosophical Studies -