Is Satan a Lover of the Good?

There are, apparently, two inherited stories of intentional action. On the motivational story, intentional agents are pursuers of goals. On the evaluative story, intentional agents are pursuers of value. In a spirit of unification, we might try to supplement the motivational story with the evaluative one – or even collapse the former into the latter. The problem with such moves is that they cannot accomodate certain pathologies of agency. Thus, they convert apparently perverse agents – like Satan and self-haters – into closet lovers of the good. I argue that pathological agents like Satan and self-haters are not lovers of the good. They are just lovers of success in action. We can make sense of such agents as practical reasoners because the cares that constitute us as practical reasoners are plural.     

Good God?!? Lamentations as a Model for Mourning the Loss of the Good God

This article will address the devastating psychological and social effects due to the loss of one's primary love-object, namely God in the case of faith communities and religious individuals. By using Melanie Klein's Object Relations Theory (Klein in Envy and gratitude and other works 1946/1963. The Free Press, New York, 1975a) as a way to enter the text of Lamentations, I will articulate an alternative reading that can serve as a model for Pastors and Educators to use when walking with individuals and communities through unspeakable losses. I will argue that Lamentations may be used as a tool for naming confounding depression and anxiety that stems from a damaged introjected object (one's personal God). This tool may provide individuals and communities a framework for placing anger and contempt upon God in order to re-assimilate this loved yet hated object, eventually leading toward healing and restoration of the self.     

In the Name of the Spirits -- A Reading of Solov'ëv's Justification of the Good

In this contribution, the author analyzes Vladimir Solov'ëv's intention to study the idea of the Good as something relatively independent from religion and metaphysics. Some implications of Solov'ëv's definition of moral philosophy in The Justification of the Good are investigated, and illustrated with his applied ethics of war in chapter 18 of this book. It appears that Solov'ëv's moral philosophy and his account of war must be understood in connection with the central place of the cult of ancestors in his ethics. The idea of the Good and the idea of God spring from a religious origin and appear in our efforts to conjure up and exorcize the spirits of our forefathers. The author explains this ethics by referring to Solov'ëv's article China and Europe. There, Solov'ëv assumes that the Christian mind is treatened by the danger of a cultural order in which the cult of ancestors is most purely preserved. In the future war against China, however, Christian civilization must show itself superior to its enemy without betraying its loyalty to its own ancestors. The author concludes that in Solov'ëv's ethics, the moral subject is divided between the confirmation of its own autonomy and its being haunted by the spirits of its forefathers, a haunt which results in relentless wars against others     

The Meaning of ‘Good’ and the Possibility of Value

Philosophical Studies - Moore held that to call something good is to ascribe a property to it. But he denied that the property could be expressed in non-evaluative terms. Can one accept this view...     

Confucius’ Complaints and the Analects’ Account of the Good Life

The Analects appears to offer two bodies of testimony regarding the felt, experiential qualities of leading a life of virtue. In its ostensible record of Confucius’ more abstract and reflective claims, the text appears to suggest that virtue has considerable power to afford joy and insulate from sorrow. In the text’s inclusion of Confucius’ less studied and apparently more spontaneous remarks, however, he appears sometimes to complain of the life he leads, to feel its sorrows, and to possess some despair. Where we attend to both of these elements of the text, a tension emerges. In this essay, I consider how Confucius’ complaints appear to complicate any clean conclusion that Confucius wins a good life, particularly where we attend to important pre-theoretical sensibilities regarding what a “good life” ought to include and how it ought to feel for the one who leads it.     

Nursing Home Residents' Perception of the “Good Death”

ABSTRACT

Little is known about the concept of the “good death” and its relationship to formal Christian religious belief. In this research, 15 nursing home residents participated in a semi-structured open-ended interview in which they were asked to describe their beliefs about the good death experience. This paper summarizes the most distinctive themes of one study of the impact, of formal religious belief on attitudes regarding the good death. The majority of interviewees defined a good death in terms of freedom from pain and suffering, and indicated that religious faith and prayer were important to them in coping with death and dying.     

Commuting Conversions vs. the Standard Conversions of the “Good” Connectives

Commuting conversions were introduced in the natural deduction calculus as ad hoc devices for the purpose of guaranteeing the subformula property in normal proofs. In a well known book, Jean-Yves Girard commented harshly on these conversions, saying that ‘one tends to think that natural deduction should be modified to correct such atrocities.’ We present an embedding of the intuitionistic predicate calculus into a second-order predicative system for which there is no need for commuting conversions. Furthermore, we show that the redex and the conversum of a commuting conversion of the original calculus translate into equivalent derivations by means of a series of bidirectional applications of standard conversions. Presented by Heinrich Wansing and Jacek Malinowski     

Exploration of “Good Mother” Stereotypes in the College Environment

This study extends research on the good mother stereotype by examining students’ perceptions of other students who return to school after having a child. Undergraduate students attending either community college or a 4-year southeastern university within the United States were asked to review a vignette in which a mother’s decision to return to college and her role satisfaction were manipulated. The 205 participants rated the woman who elects to continue her education shortly after the birth of a child as significantly less feminine, more dominant, more arrogant-calculating and cold-hearted, and less warm-agreeable than the mother who discontinued her education. The impact of these results is discussed in the context of Tinto’s (Review of Educational Research 45, 89–127, 1975) classic theory of student retention and Eagly and Steffen’s (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46, 735–754, 1984) theory of gender stereotypes.     

What is the Good Life? Positive Psychology and the Renaissance of Humanistic Psychology

Positive and humanistic psychology overlap in thematic content and theoretical presuppositions, yet positive psychology explicitly distances itself as a new movement, despite the fact that its literature implicitly references its extensive historical grounding within humanistic psychology. Consequently, humanistic psychologists both celebrate diffusion of humanistic ideas furthered by positive psychology, and resent its disavowal of the humanistic tradition. The undeniably close alignment of these two schools of thought is demonstrated in the embracing of eudaimonic, in contrast to hedonic, conceptions of happiness by positive psychology. Eudaimonic happiness cannot be purely value-free, nor can it be completely studied without using both nomethetic and idiographic (i.e., quantitative and qualitative) methods in addressing problems of value, which identifies positive psychology clearly as a humanistic approach, despite its protestations.     

Good Grief—What Becomes of the Lost Relationship: Reply to Commentaries

In replying to the discussions of Gilbert Cole and Stefanie Solow Glennon, I focus on several issues raised, including the continuing intrapsychic relationship with a dead parent who may have been destructive to the patient; the analyst's facilitating role in enabling the patient to connect with, and construct the future of, the lost relationship; the potential meaning of an enactment with a bereaved patient; and some thoughts on the dyad's needs to work creatively postloss in multiple affective time zones.     

A Life with Roots: Narrative Pastoral Care and Communities of Identity in the Parable of the “Good Soil”

This article interprets the parable traditionally known as the parable of the sower by arguing that it is actually a parable focusing on good soil. It analyzes the parable??s placement next to Gospel narratives in which Jesus redefines his kin network and maintains that the good soil metaphor suggests ideal conditions of growth in which persons surround themselves with consciously chosen communities of support that help them to live out God??s purposes in their lives. Using Michael White??s re-membering conversations, I indicate how pastoral caregivers and psychotherapists can help persons use their previous mentorship relationships as a source of support and motivation. Finally, I argue, using Donald Capps??s psychological reconstructions based on historical Jesus scholarship, that Jesus?? emphasis on his new relationships in the Kingdom of God is best understood in relationship to his struggles with father absence.     

For the Good of the Group? Balancing Individual and Collective Risks and Benefits in Community Psychology Research

Balancing risks and benefits is a necessary ethical task for social science researchers. Community psychologists must often consider risks and benefits not just for individual participants, but also for the group, system, or society that those individuals inhabit. Little ethical guidance currently exists for how to navigate this ethical challenge across these multiple levels. In this article, we use a case example of social network research incorporating multiple levels of analysis to identify common risks and benefits and understand their relationship to each other. We conclude by discussing distinctive ethical considerations revealed by this case example.     

Constructing the “Good Mother”: The Experience of Mothering Ideologies by Work Status

The purpose of this study was to explore how mothers construct their worker–parent identity within a cultural context of competing mothering ideologies. We used narrative data from interviews with 95 married mothers with at least 1 child under the age of 5 to compare the construction of intensive mothering expectations by middle-class full-time employed mothers, part-time employed mothers, and at-home mothers. Although previous research has shown that mothers alter work status to live up to intensive mothering expectations, our results show that mothers also alter their construction of intensive mothering expectations to reconcile these demands with their work status choices. The results also suggest that mothers with different employment decisions differ in their construction of Y. Elvin-Nowak and H. Thomsson's (2001) 3 discursive positions—accessibility, happy mother/happy child, and separation of work and home.     

Good writers,bad Jews: the “Jewish Question” among Hungarian Jewish intellectuals of the interwar period

This paper investigates the perceived place of the Jewish writer in interwar Hungarian Jewish literature. Post-World War I Hungary suffered from the effects of a short-lived communist regime, and the Trianon Treaty by losing two-thirds of its territories and more than half of its population. Though previously Jewish communities had thrived in the country, these events caused resentment that manifested itself in the creation of anti-Semitic laws in 1920. Within this new context, assimilated liberal young Jewish writers posed the question of “what is a Jew,” reflecting on their Jewishness and Hungarianness at the same time and pondering about the value of each. They answered the question in their creative works, where they indirectly explored issues such as whether Jews are able to write Hungarian novels or whether only a Hungarian can do so; whether Jewish Hungarians could write Hungarian Jewish novels; whether Hungarianness and Jewishness are compatible or whether writing literature is preconditioned on identity. Through the lens of Aladár Komlós, this paper examines the way in which liberal and assimilated young Hungarian Jewish writers interpreted their place in Hungarian culture and society within the framework of these questions.     

Preparing the Ground for Kant’s Highest Good in the World

Philosophia - In his new book, Rossi (2019) emphasizes the prominent role of enlightened religion in the political project of establishing perpetual peace. My paper discusses Rossi’s stance...     

Was Life Better in the “Good Old Days”? Intertemporal Judgments of Life Satisfaction

Intertemporal judgments are paired comparisons between the present time and some other time (e.g. “How satisfied are you with your life these days compared to five years ago?”). These judgments can provide evidence on the question, “Is life satisfaction in developed nations increasing, decreasing, or remaining constant?” This paper provides the first review of intertemporal judgments of life satisfaction, and reports a meta-analysis of 71 such studies from 9 developed countries. Results show that in every survey that asks people how happy their own lives are now compared to some past time, a majority says they are happier now than in the past. The meta-analysis also shows that this question must be carefully distinguished from asking about quality of life of the average person, which shows a majority believing that life was better for the “average person” in the past. These two beliefs are logically inconsistent, since the average respondent actually says their satisfaction is higher now. We consider several sources of bias that may influence these results, including cognitive processing heuristics, self-appraisal (desirability) bias, and information bias in media news.     

On Ideas of “the Good” and “the Ideal” in George Eliot's Novels and Post-Kleinian Psychoanalytic Thought

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

A case study of ‘The Good School:’ Examples of the use of Peterson’s strengths-based approach with students

This applied case study centers on two aspects of Peterson’s research as introduced into a large K-12 school in Australia: (i) creating enabling institutions and (ii) applications of character strengths. The paper describes five character strengths initiatives. Four of the strengths initiatives have been integrated into existing school experiences such as English curriculum, school sport, student leadership, and counseling. The fifth initiative involved a brand new program which introduced a Positive Education Curriculum for years?K-10. We describe these five initiatives and then explain how students at the school may experience these in a more holistic and integrated way. We hope that this article will act as a fitting tribute to the legacy of Christopher Peterson.