Culture,Contexts, and Directions in Russian Post-Soviet Philosophy

Studies in East European Thought - The author examines, historically and theoretically, issues related to the state and current tendencies of post-Soviet Russian philosophy. The accent falls on the...     

Centering prayer’s effects on psycho-spiritual outcomes: a pilot outcome study

Centering prayer is a spiritual and religious form of meditation grounded in the history of Christian contemplative prayer. Despite its popularity, empirical research investigating centering prayer’s effects on psycho-spiritual outcomes is relative sparse. This pilot outcome study explored the effect of a centering prayer workshop on participants’ (N?=?9) depression, anxiety, stress, spiritual transcendence, religious crisis, faith development, and mindfulness. Several significant changes were noted over the course of the six-week study, including decreased anxiety and stress, and increased faith development and mindfulness. Interestingly, we noted that participants likely also experienced a spiritual or religious struggle that follows the established spiritual development paradigm called the Dark Night of the Soul. The study did not include a control group, and so did not account for effects related to history, maturation, or regression to the mean. Nevertheless, the initial results prove promising to develop more sophisticated research programmes that replicate the study’s findings.     

The Place of Purpose in Life in Women’s Positive Aging

Purpose in life is an orientation associated with energy, effectiveness, and optimism. A general trend is for purpose to decline in the later years, with unclear implications for positive aging. This article, however, takes a new approach to exploring the role of purpose. Using data from the Mills Study, a 55-year study of women’s adult development, we examine four sharp patterns of change in purpose on Ryff’s scale (1995 Ryff, C. D. (1995). Psychological well-being in adult life. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 4, 99–104. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.ep10772395[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) between ages 61 and 70: high at both times, low at both times, and changes from high to low or low to high. Guiding ideas are advanced about each kind of change and findings examined for each group. Looking at individual women's lives since childhood provides illustrative examples of each pattern. These lives show the impact of depression, inner resources, personality traits (especially Conscientiousness), attachment (secure and avoidant/dismissive styles), life situations (e.g., retirement), and events (e.g., early parental loss or widowhood), and of a motivation in one's 60s to grow or to transform regrets. Women differed in how traditional their lives were and in how much they associated purposiveness and goal attainment with life satisfaction. Implications for therapists include both helping women find the energy and commitment associated with purpose in life, and helping them value more process-oriented experiences such as appreciation, wonder, connection, and relationship. Emphasis on appreciation may become more common as women age. Positive aging is manifested in these ways, but also in acceptance and the courageous and steadfast coping with painful situations.     

Still Doing Fine? The Interplay of Negative Life Events and Self‐Esteem During Young Adulthood

This longitudinal study investigated the bidirectional relationship between negative life events and self‐esteem during the transition from adolescence to young adulthood (N = 2272). Drawing on theories of human development over the lifespan and just‐world theory, we analyzed age‐graded changes in self‐esteem and their interplay with negative life events at three measurement points over a 12‐year period. We addressed both the short‐term and the longer term effects of single as well as multiple negative life events on changes in self‐esteem (socialization effects). We further investigated whether the pre‐event level of self‐esteem affected the likelihood of negative life events occurring (selection effects) and, finally, whether it had protective effects in terms of helping people adjust to negative events. Latent change models yielded four main findings: (i) self‐esteem increased during young adulthood; (ii) socialization effects were observed over shorter and longer timespans, but (iii) selection effects were only found for multiple negative life events, with low self‐esteem predicting a high number of negative life events; (iv) high pre‐event self‐esteem acted as a protective factor, attenuating declines in self‐esteem after experience of multiple negative life events. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Anselm's Quiet Radicalism

It is characteristic of Anselm to adopt the formulations of his authorities while giving them meanings of his own, hiding conceptual disagreement by means of verbal echoes. Anselm's considerable originality sometimes goes unnoticed because readers see the standard Augustinian language and miss the fact that Anselm uses it to state un-Augustinian views. One striking instance of Anselm's quiet radicalism is his understanding of free choice and the fall. He seems to uphold standard Augustinian privation theory when he affirms that injustice is merely an absence of justice where justice should be; he seems also to be committed to the standard Augustinian view that everything that has being is created by God. A closer examination, however, shows that Anselm clearly has qualms about whether privation theory can do all of the work to which Augustine had tried to put it; and Anselm actually affirms that every free choice has being and yet is not created by God. I begin by showing that Anselm regards unjust acts as being ontologically on a par with just acts. Injustice itself is nothing, a privation; but an unjust volition is something, and indeed no less something than a just volition. Moreover, creatures have their volitions solely from themselves, not from God. So Anselm must deny that God is the creator of everything that has being: free choices have being, and creatures are the sole causes of those choices. Anselm explicitly draws this radical conclusion, but he does so quietly, without fanfare, taking care to provide ways in which he can still say all the traditional things but mean something radical.     

The impact of the crisis on the Orthodox Church of Greece: a moment of challenge and opportunity?

This article explores the impact of the economic crisis on the Orthodox Church of Greece (OCG). The first three parts of the article set the current stage by offering a short overview of the crisis and the response of the OCG through its charitable social welfare activities. The fourth part looks at church–state relations in Greece, covering more particularly its financial aspects. The fifth and final part discusses how the economic crisis has affected the OCG itself, including its own finances and governance, and sustainability and mission in the long term. Although the OCG provides social assistance to the Greek population during the economic crisis, it also finds itself very much affected by the same crisis. The economic crisis has forced the OCG to reduce its operating costs while at the same time continue its extensive social work. The crisis has also prompted public debates and questions about the finances of the OCG. This situation may gradually force either the Greek state or the OCG, or perhaps both, to rethink their relationship in the future.     

Deleuze and Naturalism

Abstract

Against the tendency to regard Deleuze as a materialist and a naturalistic thinker, I argue that his core philosophical writings involve commitments that are incompatible with contemporary scientific naturalism. He defends different versions of a distinction between philosophy and natural science that is inconsistent with methodological naturalism and with the scientific image of the world as a single causally interconnected system. He defends the existence of a virtual realm of entities that is irreconcilable with ontological naturalism. The difficulty of reconciling Deleuze’s philosophy with ontological naturalism is especially apparent in his recurrent conception of pure events that are irreducible to their incarnation in bodies and states of affairs. In the last section of this essay, I canvass some of the ways in which Deleuze’s thought might be reconciled with a more liberal, pluralist and ethical naturalism that he identified in an early essay on Lucretius.     

Cognitive events in a problem-solving task: a qualitative method for investigating interactivity in the 17 Animals problem

Outside the cognitive psychologist's laboratory, problem-solving is an activity that takes place in a rich web of interactions involving people and artefacts. This interactivity is constituted by fine-grained action–perception cycles, and it allows a reasoner's comprehension of the problem to emerge from a coalition of internal and external resources. Taking an ecological approach to problem-solving, this paper introduces a qualitative method, Cognitive Event Analysis, for studying the fine-grained interactivity between a problem-solving agent and his/her environment. To demonstrate the potential of this method, it is used to study a single subject solving the so-called 17 Animals problem using a material model. The fine-grained procedure allows tracking the solution to a serendipity that was brought about because of the participant's aesthetic considerations and a change in her perceptual figure-ground configuration. While a qualitative single-case method cannot prove specific models of problem-solving, it questions prevalent mentalist models, and it generates new hypotheses on insight problem-solving, because it allows the researcher to attend to outliers and to variability on a fast and fine-grained between-measurement timescale.     

TheOperational Code of John F. Kennedy During the Cuban Missile Crisis: A Comparison of Public and Private Rhetoric

This study examines the manner in which the Cuban missile crisis affected the belief system of President John F. Kennedy. The analysis uses data derived from primary source materials that have become available only in the last 2 years, in addition to well-known public statements by the president. The Verbs in Context System (VICS) was used to generate insights into how Kennedy's operational code differed across sources and changed during the period of the crisis. The results provide evidence of Kennedy's initial private belligerence and provisional support for the 'Gettysburg thesis' while calling into question some other potential interpretations of the effects of the crisis on the president's beliefs.     

No personality change following unemployment: A registered replication of Boyce,Wood, Daly,and Sedikides (2015)

The involuntary loss of paid employment represents an adverse life event that has been suggested to lead to personality change. However, previous research has reported highly contradictory findings. Therefore, a replication of Boyce et al. (2015) is presented. These authors originally identified nonlinear changes in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Using data from the German National Education Panel Study (N = 5005), we examined the impact of unemployment on personality change across three years. Latent change analyses indicated no effect of job loss on any Big Five trait. Moderating effects of unemployment duration or gender were not found. Even analyses accounting for potential selection effects led to comparable results. Thus, personality seemed invariant despite changes in employment status.