Whitehead,Confucius, and the aesthetics of virtue

The most constructive response to the crisis in moral theory has been the revival of virtue ethics, an ethics that has the advantages of being personal, contextual, and, as this paper will argue, normative as well. The first section offers a general comparative analysis of Confucian and Whiteheadian philosophies, showing their common process orientation and their views of a somatic self united in reason and passion. The second section contrasts rational with aesthetic order, demonstrating a parallel with analytic and synthetic reason, and showing that rule‐based ethics comes under the former and virtue ethics under the latter. The third and final section discusses a Confucian–Whiteheadian aesthetics of virtue, focusing on love as the comprehensive virtue. The principal goal of the paper is to propose that an appropriation of Confucian virtue ethics will enhance the otherwise slow development of a Euro–American process ethics.     

Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?

Abstract: Recent writing in ecclesiology has often focused on church practices and less on dogmatic accounts. Whilst welcoming this renewed awareness, there are problems in its development, demonstrated here through an analysis of the concept of ‘a practice’, and through readings of two examples of this tendency: Hütter's Suffering Divine Things and Hauerwas's With the Grain of the Universe. Resources from Thomas Aquinas are offered that might help the development of ecclesiology in this vein.     

The Need for a Revolution in the Philosophy of Science

There is a need to bring about a revolution in the philosophy of science, interpreted to be both the academic discipline, and the official view of the aims and methods of science upheld by the scientific community. At present both are dominated by the view that in science theories are chosen on the basis of empirical considerations alone, nothing being permanently accepted as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence. Biasing choice of theory in the direction of simplicity, unity or explanatory power does not permanently commit science to the thesis that nature is simple or unified. This current ‘paradigm’ is, I argue, untenable. We need a new paradigm, which acknowledges that science makes a hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, theories being chosen partly on the basis of compatibility with these assumptions. Eleven arguments are given for favouring this new ‘paradigm’ over the current one. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Methodological Overview of the Parents Matter! Program

We present an overview of the methodology employed in the Parents Matter! Program. Information on the following aspects of the program is presented: participant eligibility and recruitment; consenting procedures and administration of assessments; development and utilization of measures in the assessments; study design; intervention procedures; facilitator characteristics and training; procedures to assess treatment fidelity assessment; and procedures utilized to enhance retention of study participants.     

Therapist perspectives on using silence in therapy: A qualitative study

Twelve experienced therapists were interviewed about their perceptions of why they used silence in therapy. Qualitative analyses revealed that these therapists typically perceived themselves as using silence to convey empathy, facilitate reflection, challenge the client to take responsibility, facilitate expression of feelings, or take time for themselves to think of what to say. Therapists generally indicated that a sound therapeutic alliance was a prerequisite for using silence, and they typically educated their clients about how they used silence in therapy. Therapists typically believed they did not use silence with clients who were psychotic, highly anxious, or angry. They typically thought they now used silence more flexibly, comfortably, and confidently than when they began doing therapy. Therapists typically believed they learned how to use silence from their own experience as a client and from supervision.     

Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction

Children generally behave more egocentrically than adults when assessing another's perspective. We argue that this difference does not, however, indicate that adults process information less egocentrically than children, but rather that adults are better able to subsequently correct an initial egocentric interpretation. An experiment tracking participants' eye movements during a referential communication task indicated that children and adults were equally quick to interpret a spoken instruction egocentrically but differed in the speed with which they corrected that interpretation and looked at the intended (i.e., non-egocentric) object. The existing differences in egocentrism between children and adults therefore seems less a product of where people start in their perspective taking process than where they stop, with lingering egocentric biases among adults produced by insufficient correction of an automatic moment of egocentrism. We suggest that this pattern of similarity in automatic, but not controlled, processes may explain between-group differences in a variety of dual-process judgments.     

A New Task for Philosophy of Science

This paper argues that we philosophers of science have before us an important new task that we urgently need to take up. It is to convince the scientific community to adopt and implement a new philosophy of science that does better justice to the deeply problematic basic intellectual aims of science than that which we have at present. Problematic aims evolve with evolving knowledge, that part of philosophy of science concerned with aims and methods thus becoming an integral part of science itself. The outcome of putting this new philosophy into scientific practice would be a new kind of science, both more intellectually rigorous and one that does better justice to the best interests of humanity.     

The sense of incredibility in ethics

Philosophical Studies - It is often said that normative properties are “just too different” to reduce to other kinds of properties. This suggests that many philosophers find it...