Children,traditionalism in the division of family work,and marital satisfaction: “What's love got to do with it?”

This research examines several of the factors related to the frequently cited finding that the presence of children in the home is related to lower marital satisfaction. Structural equation modeling was used to test whether the number of children at home and the length of marriage predicted traditionalism in the division of family work, which, in turn, was differentially associated with erotic, ludic, friendship-based, and agapic love as well as marital satisfaction for 530 married men and women. For both men and women, the greater the number of children at home and the longer the marriage, the more traditional the division of family labor. Traditionalism predicted lower levels of erotic and friendship-based love for women, which ultimately were related to lower marital satisfaction. For men, however, traditionalism was associated with stronger erotic and friendship-based love, a phenomenon linked to higher marital satisfaction. These findings clarify the connection between the number of children at home and reduced marital satisfaction for the women in the sample and suggest that, for both men and women, it is how family work is divided, rather than the presence of children per se, that has meaning for the affective quality of the marriage.     

Specific and Generic Objects in Cavell and Thomas Aquinas

Here I establish a parallel between modern epistemology and traditional metaphysics: between the way we know an object, on the one hand, and the way an object's causes cause it to exist, on the other. I show that different efficient causes in the Thomistic system correspond to different questions of knowledge, as analyzed by Stanley Cavell, and that in particular the question the Cavellian skeptic asks corresponds to God's causation in creation. As I have explained in detail elsewhere, and discuss briefly here, this parallel represents far more than a formal analogy between a series of issues in epistemology and a series of issues in metaphysics. It helps to explain, in fact, why modern philosophers (e.g., Husserl) were ultimately driven to put the human ego in the place of God, as creating (or "positing") the objects of its knowledge, thereby denying the very distinction between epistemology and ontology.