Promoting spiritual well-being: a quasi-experimental test of an element of Hay and Nye’s theory of children’s spirituality

This study is one of the first tests of key implicit claims of Hay and Nye’s theory of children’s spirituality and spiritual development. Two quasi-experimental studies tested two claims: that exposure to six conditions posited as fostering relational consciousness in a programme of spiritual formation promotes spiritual well-being; that the effect of the conditions continues after exposure ends. The results for Study One revealed that length of exposure to any of the six conditions was not a significant predictor of spiritual well-being, F(3, 179)?=?1.49, p = 0.22. Study Two results indicated that as the length of time since exposure increased so did spiritual well-being, r(38)?=?0.39, p = 0.01 at the bivariate level, and F(4, 35)?=?2.4, p = 0.06 in the regression. These results reveal a possible relationship between exposure to the six conditions and spiritual well-being.     

Sosa’s theory of knowledge

Synthese - This paper is a critical discussion of Ernest Sosa’s recent analysis of reflective knowledge.     

Hume’s naturalistic theory of representation

Hume is a naturalist in many different respects and about many different topics; this paper argues that he is also a naturalist about intentionality and representation. It does so in the course of answering four questions about his theory of mental representation: (1) Which perceptions represent? (2) What can perceptions represent? (3) Why do perceptions represent at all? (4) Howdo perceptions represent what they do? It appears that, for Hume, all perceptions except passions can represent; and they can represent bodies, minds, and persons, with their various qualities. In addition, ideas can represent impressions and other ideas. However, he explicitly rejects the view that ideas are inherently representational, and he implicitly adopts a view according to which things (whether mental or non-mental) represent in virtue of playing, through the production of mental effects and dispositions, a significant part of the causal and/or functional role of what they represent. It is in virtue of their particular functional roles that qualitatively identical ideas are capable of representing particulars or general kinds; substances or modes; relations; past, present, or future; and individuals or compounds.     

A repair of Frege’s theory of thoughts

Frege’s writings contain arguments for the thesis (i) that a thought expressed by a sentence S is a structured object whose composition pictures the composition of S, and for the thesis (ii) that a thought is an unstructured object. I will argue that Frege’s reasons for both (i) and (ii) are strong. Frege’s explanation of the difference in sense between logically equivalent sentences rests on assumption (i), while Frege’s claim that the same thought can be decomposed differently makes (ii) plausible. Thoughts are supposed to do work that requires that they be structured and work that requires that they be unstructured. But this cannot be! While the standard response to this problem is to reject either (i) or (ii), I propose a charitable repair in the spirit of Frege’s theory that accepts both. The key idea can be found in Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic(BL, GGA). Frege argues that the thought expressed by a sentence is determined by the truth-conditions that can be derived from the semantic axioms for the sentence constituents. The fact that the same axiomatic truth-condition can be derived in different ways from different semantic axioms suggests a Fregean solution of the dilemma: A thought is a type that is instantiated by all sequences of senses (decomposed thoughts) that have the same axiomatic truth-conditions. This allows for multiple decomposability of the same thought (for different decomposed thoughts can have the same axiomatic truth-conditions) and for a notion of containment (the decomposed thought contains those senses whose semantic axioms are needed in the derivation of the truth-conditions). My proposal combines the virtues of (i) and (ii) without inheriting their vices.     

Hume’s theory of justice and Vanderschraaf’s vulnerablity objection

Philosophical Studies -     

Religious literacy or spiritual awareness? Comparative critique of Andrew Wright’s and David Hay’s approaches to spiritual education

On the basis of a comparison of the educational approaches of Andrew Wright and David Hay this paper illustrates the persisting problem of dichotomising cognitive and trans‐cognitive aspects of spiritual development and education. Even though both Wright and Hay speak of the same topic – spirituality and spiritual education – they define these terms very differently, and as a consequence, they draw altogether different practical implications, set different priorities, and warn of different dangers in spiritual education. The main question set in this paper is whether it is possible to make room in spiritual education for both of these perspectives and how to combine them in a more holistic way. With the help of the Wilber‐Combs lattice, which is one of the main heuristic devices employed by the integral philosophy, one possible way toward integrating cognitive and trans‐cognitive aspects of spritual development and education is proposed.     

Beyond sympathy: Smith’s rejection of Hume’s moral theory

Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) has long been recognized as importantly influenced by, and in part responding to, David Hume’s earlier ethical theory. With regard to Smith’s account of the foundations of morals in particular, recent scholarly attention has focused on Smith’s differences with Hume over the question of sympathy. Whilst this is certainly important, disagreement over sympathy in fact represents only the starting point of Smith’s engagement with – and eventual attempted rejection of – Hume’s core moral theory. We can see this by recognizing the TMS’s account of moral foundations as predicated upon a rejection of Hume’s distinction between the natural and artificial virtues. Smith is in turn revealed as generating a major break with Hume – a break which, if based on a superior theory of moral foundations (as Smith thought it to be) has important consequences for how we treat Smith and Hume in both the history of philosophy and contemporary moral theory.     

Kant’s virtue theory

By focusing on human virtues rather than the general morality of rational beings, Kant’s virtue theory presents systematic arguments from the perspectives of reason and experiential emotion, norms and disposition, spirituality and humanity, etc., which is of great significance to an overall understanding of Kantian ethics, thus clarifying misunderstandings from the past decades.     

God counts for children’s spiritual well-being

Over the last three decades, qualitative studies of children’s spirituality have variously mentioned God. During this time, nearly 300 quantitative measures of spirituality and well-being have been developed and employed with youth and adults. However, very little similar work has been done with children. An article in this journal reported development of a purported spiritual sensitivity scale. That paper is critiqued here on the basis of its statistical methods as well as its failure to mention God in a study with Australian Catholic school students. In this paper, spiritual well-being (SWB) is taken as being reflected in the quality of relationships that people have with themselves, with others, with the environment and/or with God. Empirical evidence derived from extensive studies with primary school children in State, Catholic, Christian community and other independent schools in Australia reveals that an instrument called Feeling Good, Living Life is a statistically sound spirituality measure for children. Of the four sets of relationships reflecting SWB, relationship with God explains greatest variance in SWB overall. In this respect, relationship with God is most important for SWB among primary school students, just as other studies have shown it to be among youth and adults.     

Jameson and Hurvich’s theory of brightness contrast

Jameson and Hurvich’s theoretical model, formulated to account for perceived brightness under conditions of simultaneous brightness contrast, was shown to predict linear brightness functions with (I) slopes of.33, ?.33, or 0 on a log-log plot, where apparent brightness is plotted against illuminance, contrast ratio is the parameter, and spatial arrangements are constant; and (2) y-intercepts that shift monotonically as contrast ratio is increased. Predicting the value of a y-intercept and which of the three possible slopes of a function would occur was shown to depend on empirically evaluating a constant k. Because k was found unsolvable, the model as presently defined was rejected. The evidence for a general class of similar models was found to be fragmentary.     

Kant’s coherent theory of the highest good

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - In the second Critique, Kant argues that for the highest good to be possible we need to postulate the existence of God and the...     

Lifshits’ ontognoseology as a version of Lenin’s theory of reflection

In Soviet philosophy, two versions of Lenin’s theory of reflection are represented respectively by Mikhail Lifshits and Todor Pavlov. They both isolate and juxtapose two dialectical elements: reflection and creativity. Within this methodological dilemma, Lifshits’s ontognoseology is an original doctrine of our “mirror” attitude to the world whereby material being is the true subject, while man is a tool of its self-reflection.     

A further analysis of Zhu Xi’s theory of mind

Mind was the oneness of form and function. The change from an old theory to a new one about zhong 中 (the mean) and he 和 (harmony) was a shift from the idea of the separate form of nature and function of mind to one about both form and function of mind. Form was both the form of the spirit of the mind and of the substantiality of nature (not the same as substantial realities in substantialism); it was the integration of vacancy and substantiality, the integration of mind and nature. In contrast, function meant both feelings and perceiving action. It was infeasible to interpret function without reference to form; likewise, it was impractical to talk about perception without mentioning nature. On the other hand, a knower represented nature through concrete things and his actions, and a perceiver enlightened himself, realizing the self-consciousness of nature as a whole. Mind, nature, and perception could be interpreted as a whole, and these three could be separated too. Viewed in general, mind, nature, and principles were oneness; observed separately, nature differed with principles: nature meant principles, but perception was the quintessence of qi. The unfolding of perception, however, had its independence, and could be easily influenced by qi; thus, it was necessary to transform and cultivate qi-related temperament. Realistically, a man needs to face up to himself and to transform himself, and this sentiment is inspiring for today.     

Schilder and Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity

In the late 1920s, the Viennese psychoanalyst Paul Schilder, after performing a conditioning experiment with human subjects, criticized I. P. Pavlov’s concept of “experimental neurosis.” Schilder maintained that subjective reports by conditioned human subjects were more informative than the objectively observed behavior of conditioned dogs. In 1932, Pavlov published a rejoinder to Schilder’s critique in theJournal of the American Medical Association. Pavlov maintained that Schilder misunderstood the value and implications of the scientific, objective method in the study of experimental neurosis. In 1934, Schilder subjected Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity to an incisive critique in a 1935 article inImago. Schilder objected to Pavlov’s narrow, reductionist conceptualization of the conditional reflex. Schilder reiterated his view that the psychological, subjective explanation of the conditional reflex is preferable to the physiological, objective explanation, and that the inference of cortical phenomena from experimental findings might be improper. Neither Pavlov nor any of his disciples replied to Schilder. The author provides an apology for the Pavlovian position, suggesting that Schilder was unfamiliar with early and late writings of Pavlov.     

On justifying one’s acceptance of divine command theory

It has been alleged against divine command theory (DCT) that we cannot justify our acceptance of it without giving it up. For if we provide moral reasons for our acceptance of God’s commands, then those reasons, and not God’s commands, must be our ultimate moral standard. Kai Nielsen has offered the most forceful version of this objection in his book, Ethics Without God. My principal aim is to show that Nielsen’s charge does not succeed. His argument crucially relies upon the assumption that the moral judgments one employs to justify acceptance of a normative theory are more fundamental to one’s moral outlook than the theory itself. I argue that this assumption presupposes a questionable foundationalist view of theory justification, and if we instead adopt a coherentist reflective equilibrium stance, we can thoughtfully evaluate DCT without abandoning it.     

A critique of Thad Metz’s African theory of moral status

Thad Metz defends what he considers to be a novel theory of moral status, i.e. an account about what beings are owed direct duties in virtue of their moral significance. Metz claims that his account is African, it is plausible and that it is worth taking seriously like other competing accounts in the Western philosophical tradition. In this article, I give four reasons why we should doubt, if not reject, these claims of plausibility. Firstly, I show how a theory that accounts for moral status by relying solely on some facet of human nature ultimately fails to grant intrinsic value to non-human components, and as such it will always prefer human interests over those of nonhuman components, and further it won’t have a moral-theoretical basis to assign intrinsic value to non-human components. Secondly, I hope to demonstrate that this theory will not be able to account for the moral status of Martians and in turn show that it does not secure the standing of animals from such beings. I also argue that his account does not give credible evidence for the intuition that severely injured human persons have greater moral status than animals with similar internal properties. Finally, I briefly indicate that this theory does not have the corpus to explain our duties to people who have died, or at least, their bodies.