In Search of a Good Death

Spirituality and storytelling can be resources in aging successfully and in dying well given the constraints of modern day Western culture. This paper explores the relationship of aging to time and the dynamic process of the life course and discusses issues related to confronting mortality, including suffering, finitude, spirituality, and spiritual closure in regard to death. And, finally, the role of narrative in this process is taken up.     

Do unto others as they do unto you: reciprocity and social identification as determinants of ingroup favoritism

Predictions from the bounded and unbounded reciprocity hypotheses and from social identity theory (SIT) were examined in a minimal group experiment in which ingroup outcome dependence, outgroup outcome dependence, and the strength of social identity were orthogonally manipulated. Both ingroup and outgroup outcome dependence affected reward allocations. Participants made more ingroup-favoring reward allocations across all conditions. The identification manipulation produced hypothesized effects on social identification measures and marginal effects of identification on reward allocations in the no-dependence condition. Support was found for both an unbounded and bounded version of the reciprocity hypothesis and marginal support for a SIT approach to intergroup discrimination. The study highlights insufficiencies of both theoretical approaches and suggests possibilities for integration and elaboration.     

Death Unto Life: The Power of the Incarnation

Black families traditionally print photographs, poems, songs and sayings in funeral programs as a tribute to the deceased. These artistic expressions, which are part of the black funeral tradition, communicate a theology of death and the afterlife. Yet, the contributions of black, feminist, womanist and pastoral theologies are conventionally ignored in the development of theologies of death. This essay explores the practical implications of using elements of these theologies—black, feminist, womanist and pastoral—to effectively minister to a person with fears, doubts, and questions, and who is facing death. These theologies reveal that death is not the enemy of the dying person who taps into the power of the Incarnation—the “erotic power” housed in human flesh that overcomes and triumphs over death.     

In Search of Understanding: Re-reading The Theaetetus

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - The article is an attempt to interpret Plato’s Theaetetus, with a view to show that a crucial distinction between knowledge and...     

The aesthetic as mirror of faith in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

One of the most intractable issues in Kierkegaard scholarship continues to be the question of what one is to make of the relation between infinite resignation and faith in Fear and Trembling. Most commentators follow Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author in claiming that progression to faith is a “linear” process that requires infinite resignation as a first step. The problem with such a reading is that it leads to paradox: It seems to require attributing to the “knight of faith” two inconsistent belief‐attitudes simultaneously—on the one hand, the willingness to resign one's heart's desires (infinite resignation) and, on the other, the conviction that one will somehow receive back what one has resigned. But this is a confused way of thinking about faith. I will show that faith's alleged paradoxicality is only apparent and that the element of resignation that constitutes an aspect of it actually bears some striking similarities to what the aesthete has in mind when he speaks, in Either/Or, of throwing hope overboard in order to make possible a truly artistic way of life. Hence, on my interpretation, the knight of faith does not need to adopt two contradictory attitudes at the same time (or constantly to “annul” one of them), but must rather practice a form of spiritual discipline in many ways analogous to the aesthete's endeavour to become a “poet of possibility.”     

Kierkegaard's Mirrors: The Immediacy of Moral Vision

This paper explores Kierkegaard's recurrent use of mirrors as a metaphor for various aspects of moral imagination and vision. While a writer centrally concerned with issues of self‐examination, selfhood and passionate subjectivity might well be expected to be attracted to such metaphors, there are deeper reasons why Kierkegaard is drawn to this analogy. The specifically visual aspects of the mirror metaphor reveal certain crucial features of Kierkegaard's model of moral cognition. In particular, the felicity of the metaphors of the “mirror of possibility” in Sickness Unto Death and the “mirror of the Word” in For Self‐Examination depend upon a normative phenomenology of moral vision, one in which the success of moral agency depends upon an immediate, non‐reflective self‐referentiality built into vision itself. To “see oneself in the mirror” rather than simply seeing the mirror itself is to see the moral content of the world as immediately “about” oneself in a sense that goes beyond the conceptual content of what is perceived. These metaphors gesture towards a model of perfected moral agency where vision becomes co‐extensive with volition. I conclude by suggesting directions in which explication of this model may contribute to discussions in contemporary moral psychology.     

In Search of True Causes:

The present investigation sought to obtain empirical data that either directly supports or refutes the popular assumption that communication is an essential element of effective decision making. Specifically, it reports three phases of study that attempt to determine whether the variance in group decision making is best accounted for by noninteraction or interaction sources. Phase 1 examines the relationship among group member ability, communication opportunity, and decision performance. Phase 2 examines the relationship among group member ability, qualities of group communication, and decision performance. Phase 3 examines the relationship among fulfillment of communication functions requisite to decision-making efficacy, group member ability, and decision performance. In Phase 1, a strong independent main effect for communication opportunity was found; whereas in Phase 2 we discovered classification and explanatory effects for three facets of interaction quality—“evaluation of task-relevant issues,”“goal-directed communication,” and “idea development”—and in Phase 3 no classification or explanatory effects for either of the communication functions examined was found. Open channels of communication and high quality task-oriented discussion that focused on issue evaluation and task accomplishment facilitated group performance in light of the effects of group potential.     

In Search of the Caliphate

“In Search of the Caliphate” discusses the historic split between Sunni and Shi'ite Islams in religious studies textbooks, general reference resources, multi-volume reference works on Islam, and briefly suggests other resources (monographs and articles). In analyzing textbooks, the article uses a template taken from the Encyclopedia of Religion (2005) and looks for the following characteristics in the discussion: the question of authority and succession in Islam after the death of the Prophet Mohammad; esoteric knowledge and the role of the Imam (particularly in Shi'a); the assassination of Husayn (the grandson of Mohammed); and the appearance of the eschatological figure of the Madhi in Twelver Shi'a. “Twelver Shi'ism” is used as a search term to analyze the information in reference works (both general works and those devoted to Islam). The conclusion highlights the challenges in researching this topic in a university library.     

Moving Forward: The Existential Motion of the Self in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works

Each of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authors address the question of the existing individual and what it truly means to be a self. This article discusses the existing individual as depicted by the pseudonymous authors, focusing on motion, activity, and repetition. In particular, this article seeks to pinpoint the motion and activity of the self through Kierkegaard's notion of repetition, contending that repetition is a decisive action brought forward discontinuously through a breach in time's succession. I address the self's movement forward in four sections. In the first I introduce the overarching distinction between the motion of existing individuals and empirical objects, distinguishing the character of my investigation. After clarifying this distinction, the second section focuses on Anti-Climacus’ conception of the self as activity (a positing of the synthesis), revealing that for an existing individual the self is not given but a task to be actualized. The final section first details the positing of the synthesis as repetition and second contends that, through repetition, the inner workings of the self reveal its activity as a discontinuous breach in time that occurs by virtue of the eternal.