西方马克思主义宗教论说的六个问题领域

宗教在当代社会的"私人化",使基督教不仅作为一种信仰传统、也作为一种文化叙事引起诸多学科的关注,进而在基督教与马克思主义的关系方面形成了新的论说模式。马克思主义与基督教神学是否存在着可能交合的问题领域?这应该对中国目前的宗教学研究具有重要的借鉴价值。本文作者就此归纳为六个方面,并提出相关讨论。     

Virtues and ethics within Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku

ABSTRACT

In the second volume of Rinrigaku, Watsuji Tetsurō focuses on developing his notion of betweenness (aidagara 間柄) through the ethical organisations (jinrinteki soshiki 人倫的組織) of family, local community, economics, cultural community, and the state. Although those who have commentated on the later volumes have focused on the controversy which surrounds Watsuji’s account of the state, very little attention has been paid to the role of virtues within his thought. It is precisely this academic lacuna which this enquiry is intended to address. In this paper, there are two particular aims which I hope to achieve: firstly, I will seek to explicate the role which virtues play within Watsuji’s ethical system, and secondly, I will attempt to evaluate how the virtues inform Watsuji’s normative approach.     

Positive psychology,the classification of character strengths and virtues,and issues of measurement

ABSTRACT

This essay raises concerns about positive psychology’s classification of character strengths and virtues and issues of measurement. Part I examines the process whereby the classification was compiled. Part II turns to issues of measurement and questions about positive psychologists’ sensitivity to variations in the meanings of the constructs they purport to measure, both within and across cultures. I argue that attempts to find a ‘deep structure’ of the character strengths and virtues should proceed hand in hand with efforts to render positive psychology and its measurement tools more sensitive to variability in character strengths and virtues across and within cultures. The essay concludes with suggestions for future research.     

Refining our understanding of the VIA Classification: Reflections on papers by Han,Miller, and Snow

ABSTRACT

Han, Miller, and Snow have written three thoughtful critiques of the VIA Classification of Strengths and Virtues. In this response, I emphasize five points. First, I suggest the concept of practical wisdom may be understood in terms of three VIA strengths: prudence, judgment, and perspective. Second, recognizing that the VIA Classification is a structural model of individual traits, rather than a moral theory, can address some concerns about the model, including its failure to account for the unity of the virtues. Third, I review a three-virtue model that has emerged in recent research on the VIA strengths may provide essential elements for a taxonomy of virtue. Fourth, I raise several issues associated with the application of the VIA Classification to moral education. Finally, though the model demonstrates substantial generalizabilty across Westernized populations, research in traditional indigenous cultures remains insufficient. I conclude with a series of questions for future research.     

EDUCATING PHYSICIANS FOR MORAL EXCELLENCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Medical professionals are a community of highly educated individuals with a commitment to a core set of ideals and principles. This community provides both technical and ethical socialization. The ideal physician is confident, empathic, forthright, respectful, and thorough. These ideals allow us to define broadly "the excellence" of being a physician. At the core of these ideals is the ability to be empathic. Empathy exhibits itself in attributes of an individual's moral character and also in actions that actualize and support communal life. Empathy, however, can be diminished or even lost and must be nurtured on an ongoing basis. The development of ethical physicians is strongly linked to experiences in the training period. Moral traits are situation-sensitive psychological and behavioral dispositions. The clinical environment of medical training programs can be so intense as to lead to conditions that may actually deprofessionalize trainees. Creating a clinical environment that is ethically nurturing and sustaining is an indispensable component of practicing medicine.     

Being an Intelligent Slave of God

How did premodern Muslim thinkers talk about living authentically as a Muslim in the world? How, in their view, could selves transform themselves into ideal religious subjects or slaves of God? Which virtues, technologies of the self and intersubjective relations did they see implicated in inhabiting or attaining what I shall call ?abdī subjectivity? In this paper, I make explicit how various discursive, ethical strategies formed, informed, and transformed Muslim subjectivity in early Muslim thought by focusing on the writings of an important ninth century Muslim moral pedagogue, al‐Mu?āsibī (d. 857). This study illustrates the advantages of approaching early Muslim texts and discourses through the tools and methods made available by comparative religious ethics in order to reexamine our understanding of Muslim subject formation and the role of ethical and theological discourses in the same.     

Comparing theories of consciousness: Object position,not probe modality,reliably influences experience and accuracy in object recognition tasks

People often claim seeing images completely despite performing poorly. This highlights an issue with conscious representations. We introduce an experimental manipulation aiming to disentangle two prevalent positions: Rich views posit that people virtually represent the external world with unlimited capacity; Sparse views state that representations are reconstructed from expectations and information. In two experiments using the object recognition task, we tested two probe types: Images, which should aid reconstruction more, and Words, which should aid it less. From a sparse view, one should expect that Images lead to greater accuracy and reported experience. We found no reliable differences in accuracy and reported experience across probe types; however, we observed that the object positions influenced both accuracy and reported experience, which is surprising from a Rich view as it seemingly requires assumptions of different access across the visual field. Both theoretical positions thus currently need further development to explain our results.