Search Results (25)

God plays a central role in Spinoza’s philosophy, directly shaping his views of ethics and politics. His theology is examined in light of contemporary perspectives in process philosophy. Analysis of the claim that “The more we understand singular things the more we understand God” (E5p24), shows that Spinoza advances a participatory theology that prioritizes a developmental process that fosters loving-kindness and intellectual generosity. Religion is the virtue enabling our participation in divine power. The key characteristics of participation in divine power are that these powers are (1) non-scarce/open-source/sharable, (2) regenerative, (3) propagate from one context to another, and (4) potentiate novel, unforeseeable discovery and invention. It is through community with other singular beings and via social affects that we understand divinity: by participating in powers that are sharable and continue to intensify and evolve when made openly accessible. His ideas can inspire our current problematic in beneficial ways. Full article

In the current era, when civilizations are in constant conflict and humankind is facing a series of serious existential crises, there is an urgent need for universal love to unite humankind. As models of world religions, Christianity and Buddhism provide rich intellectual resources for the construction of such universal love. Regarding Thomistic Christianity, its philosophy of friendship has gradually achieved a dual transformation from virtue-oriented to love-oriented, and from God-centered to human-centered. In the case of Mahayana Buddhism, its philosophy of friendship has evolved with the “Humanistic Buddhism” movement, increasingly demonstrating a compassionate spirit of saving the world. By comparing Thomistic Christianity with Mahayana Buddhism, we can see that although they exhibit different models of friendship, their main developmental trends are consistent. Both are committed to demonstrating a human-centered model of friendship, both emphasize the value of self-reduction in friendship, and both demonstrate the unique and irreplaceable role of religion in friendship. The goal of the philosophy of friendship is universal love and harmonious development of civilizations, while its future development depends on the joint efforts of contemporary religious scholars and philosophers. Full article

In this study, we examined the role of intellectual humility (IH) as an antecedent of individual attitude toward sustainable tourism viewed from the lens of personality trait theory, virtue ethics theory, and regenerative tourism principles within a stakeholder framework. Data were collected via Qualtrics in an online survey of 233 adults in the United States. A series of confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were applied to the data to test the measurement model. In addition, a bifactor CFA was found to have acceptable fit and appropriate in controlling for common method variance. A series of covariance-based structural equations models (SEMs) was estimated to test the hypothesized model while controlling for common method variance in addition to individual age and gender. Using the chi-square difference test for nested model comparison, we found that intellectual humility was a significant antecedent of the negative ecological impact of tourism (β = 0.14, p < 0.01) while its relationships with economic and social impacts of travel became non-significant after controlling for common method variance. Pro-social tendency, operationalized as HEXACO Honesty–Humility, was also a significant antecedent of the negative ecological impact (β = 0.17) and positive economic impact (β = −0.34) of tourism, after controlling for common method variance. Despite its limitations due to its cross-sectional design and use of self-report data in the U.S., this study was novel in introducing intellectual humility as an important virtue to be cultivated at the individual level to achieve a holistic approach to sustainable tourism, especially in shaping destination choices. In addition, the study highlights the need to detect common method variance in self-report data via bifactor CFA to avoid erroneous reporting of significant findings, hampering our collective research efforts to address climate change and its impact. Full article

The paper examines the integration of virtue epistemology into the philosophy of science, emphasizing its potential to deepen our understanding of scientific inquiry. The article begins by considering the limitations of traditional epistemological frameworks that focus on beliefs. The discussion is set in the context of the “value turn” in contemporary epistemology. Arguments are made to move towards recognizing the significance of intellectual virtues and the nature of epistemic agents. The current gaps in definitions of intellectual virtues about reliabilist and responsibilist approaches are examined and conceptual steps are proposed to bridge these gaps. It is suggested that the local and general epistemic goals of science should be clearly distinguished and then different ways of knowing should be attributed to these goals. These ways of knowing are proposed to be seen as exemplifying the realization of reliable skills and intellectual character traits. In sum, the article argues that adopting a virtue epistemology not only enriches the discourse on scientific knowledge but also promotes a culture of responsibility and integrity in the scientific community. Full article

Virtue theory has occupied a place of relative prominence within the Christian intellectual tradition. But there is a problem facing it: how one contemplates the virtues and vices will ultimately depend upon deeper accounts of the good and the right. Accordingly, virtue theory is incomplete, at least when taken by itself. Our task in this paper is to show that neither of the standard approaches to explaining the metaphysical foundations of morality within the Christian tradition—natural law theory and divine command theory—are sufficient to fix this incompleteness. We thus propose a combination of natural law theory and divine command theory to remedy the matter. The upshot of our argument, then, is this: what counts as a virtue ultimately depends upon the natural law and divine commands. Full article

Intellectual humility (IH), defined as the extent to which one is aware of one’s own intellectual limitations, is an understudied construct in organizational research. As a moral virtue, IH has been studied in philosophy and religion for decades. As a psychological and behavioral tendency construct, IH has gained significant attention among psychology researchers over the past decade due to rising extremism regarding social and political issues in the US and around the world. One reason for the increased research interest in IH includes the potential benefits from IH in terms of reducing social and political polarization and reducing stress and anxiety, which may improve individual overall well-being. This article provides an overview of IH as a multi-dimensional construct, its psychometric properties and nomological network, and its potential benefits in organizations and employee well-being. The article concludes with a call for more interdisciplinary research on improving our knowledge and theories of IH as well as its construct measurement considering the recent coming-of-age adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) models to harness the power of IH in sustaining individual well-being. Full article

Pacing strategy is a complex self-regulation process, crucial for optimising sports performance. Athletes with Intellectual Impairments (IIs) face unique challenges due to cognitive limitations that may hinder their ability to pace effectively, impacting chronometric performance. This study analysed the pacing profiles and chronometric performance across 253 event entries by elite swimmers with II, divided into three groups: 100 entries for group II1 (intellectual disability), 85 for group II2 (Down syndrome), and 68 for group II3 (autism spectrum disorder). These results were compared with 112 event entries from athletes without disabilities (AWDs). Data were collected from the 2023 Virtus Global Games and the 2023 World Aquatics Championships, focusing on middle-distance and long-distance events. Performance metrics were assessed using 50 m split times, and within-group variability was evaluated through coefficients of variation. Swimmers with IIs showed slower overall chronometric performance than AWDs, with the largest deficits observed in II2 athletes. The II1 and II3 groups displayed more comparable results, with the II1 group outperforming the others slightly. Despite the slower times, pacing profiles were largely similar across all groups, following a parabolic pacing strategy, especially for longer distances. Greater within-group variability in both chronometric performance and pacing profiles was observed in II2 and II3 athletes, reflecting higher functional heterogeneity. In contrast, II1 athletes, and even more so AWDs, exhibited more consistent performance and pacing across all events. While swimmers with II recorded slower times, their pacing strategies resembled those of AWDs, suggesting that cognitive limitations may not significantly impair pacing regulation in swimming. However, the higher variability in II2 and II3 athletes highlights the potential need for revised classification systems to ensure fair competition. Full article

In his Middle Commentary on Posterior Analytics, the great Aristotelian Commentator Ibn Rushd defines “knowledge” (scientific knowledge, epistemē, ‘ilm) as one of Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues and the faculty of reason, akin to the other virtues, in an Aristotelian way. Ibn Rushd defends the teleological argument, rooted in Aristotle’s teleological reading of nature, and supports the modal strong epistemic status of this argument, which is part of the concept of knowledge, in his early work (Short Commentary on Metaphysics), middle period work (al-Kashf) and late work (Long Commentary on Metaphysics), all in harmony with each other. Ibn Rushd, constructing the teleological argument based on the definition of knowledge, which fundamentally articulates the necessary or essential qualities inherent in objects in defense of de re modality, takes a step that seems quite radical within the context of the Aristotelian epistemic tradition to which he is affiliated: The teleological argument, strongly associated with the concept of knowledge—one of the five intellectual virtues—is presented as a form of deductive inference accessible not only to philosophers but also to ordinary public. In other words, according to him, the argument is both a philosophical and a religious way. This implies, for instance, that natural theology, typically viewed by Aquinas as an activity reserved for the higher epistemic class with talent and leisure, is seen by Ibn Rushd as a robust epistemic activity accessible to ordinary people. This new element, which can be referred to as common sense natural theology, contends that ordinary public knowledge and philosophers’ knowledge differ in details, such as whether it is a simple or complex deductive inference, while remaining the same in terms of their knowledge status. Full article

From the late 17th to the early 18th century, Europe witnessed various intellectual debates, and it undeniably received help from places outside Europe such as China. When Chinese history, culture and thought, especially the Confucian classics translated into Latin, were introduced to Europe, they provided resources for comparison and reference for Europe’s ideological crisis. Confucius ou la Science des Princes, the Confucian classic translated by François Bernier, is a typical example. From the perspective of the cross-cultural history of ideas, after carefully analyzing the terminology used in Bernier’s translation and his understanding of Confucius’s thought, this paper will show that Bernier accepted, through the Jesuit translation, the non-religious dimension of politics and ethics in Confucianism, but unlike the Jesuits, he did not see Confucianism as needing Christianity; on the contrary, he believed that politics and ethics could be based on a purely secular philosophy. Based on his secular understanding of Confucius’s thought, Bernier reconstructed Confucius’s texts as a manual to teach European princes, regarding the prince’s virtue, reason and benevolence as the foundation of a country’s good government. Full article

Ancrene Wisse describes the medieval devotional concern on work as a valid means for spiritual salvation. Depicting women’s domestic chores as imageries to be used for confession and penance, Ancrene Wisse demonstrates that the intellectual labors of the anchoresses maintaining their enclosure are indebted to manual labor. More importantly, the maidservants’ work enables the practice of enclosure and contributes to the spiritual goal of anchoritism. The servants’ work visualizes the virtues of the anchoress to the community, promotes enclosure to the public, and enables teaching as a shared form of work between the servants and the anchoress. Thus, Ancrene Wisse opens up a discussion of the relation between women, work, and spiritual development in medieval England. Full article

Open-mindedness appears as a potential intellectual virtue from the beginning of the rise of the literature on intellectual virtues. It often takes up a special role, sometimes thought of as a meta-virtue rather than a first-order virtue: as an ingredient that makes other virtues virtuous. Jason Baehr has attempted to give a unified account of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue. He argues that the conceptual core of open-mindedness lies in the fact that a person departs, moves beyond, or transcends a certain default cognitive standpoint. Two of his main aims are to show that (1) one does not need to assume a doxastic conflict or disagreement to be at the heart of open-mindedness—that is, there are also instances where the virtue of open-mindedness is needed when there is no opposing view to be considered—and (2) that not all forms of open-mindedness include rational assessment—that is, sometimes being open-minded is not about weighing evidence for and against a claim. So, his main aim is to show that there are various situations that afford open-mindedness, in each of which a slightly different kind of open-mindedness is called for. To unify all these different kinds of open-mindedness is then the goal of his work. He arrives at the following definition of open-mindedness (OM): an open-minded person is characteristically (a) willing and (within limits) able (b) to transcend a default cognitive standpoint (c) in order to take up or take seriously the merits of (d) a distinct cognitive standpoint. In this article, I take seriously Baehr’s suggestion of how to understand open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue and argue that the crux lies in formulating how we can be able to transcend a default cognitive standpoint. This is not as obvious as it has been taken to be in the literature on open-mindedness. Biases, overconfidence, and wishful thinking are difficult exactly because we don’t know that we are engaging in them. That is, they are systematically hidden from our consciousness, otherwise they would not be a bias, overconfidence, or wishful thinking. Hence, the crux of making open-mindedness open-minded is to see how it is possible to make something of one’s own mind visible that is systematically hidden from oneself. I argue that this problem can be solved by looking at research on attention. I base my considerations in this article on Sebastian Watzl’s account of attention, which essentially holds that paying attention is an activity of foregrounding and backgrounding mental contents. That is, attention is the activity of structuring mental contents into a priority structure of foreground and background. If I pay attention to the scene in front of me, I foreground the black letters on my screen, and I background the coffee cup next to them. In this way, I create a priority structure between the letters (as they appear to me) and the coffee cup (as it appears to me). I argue that what allows us to make something of our own mind visible that is systematically hidden from us is a special way of paying attention, hence a special way of foregrounding and backgrounding the involved mental contents. That is, the crux of what enables us to transcend a default cognitive standpoint, the conceptual core of open-mindedness, is a special kind of attention, which I will call ‘open-minded attention’ (OMA). The claim of this article is not that open-minded attention fully describes the virtue of open-mindedness (OMA is not sufficient for open-mindedness). Rather, what I try to show is that in all cases of open-mindedness it turns out that open-minded attention is the necessary component that ensures that we can indeed get rid of prior biases, that is, transcend also those implicit beliefs and expectations that are systematically hidden from us (OMA is necessary for open-mindedness). Full article

I examine the Kierkegaardian intellectual vice of thoughtlessness (Tankeløshed) and its opposite, the Aristotelian intellectual virtue of phronēsis, or practical wisdom. I argue that thoughtlessness is primarily an intellectual problem rather than a moral one. My emphasis on intellectual virtue in Kierkegaard contrasts with more typical characterizations of passion, will, and action as Kierkegaard’s main concerns and reliance on intellect as an obstacle to be overcome. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of phronēsis as the intellectual virtue related to action, I show that Kierkegaard offers a rich account of practical wisdom and a critique of its opposite, thoughtlessness. I conclude that, since there are different kinds of wisdom, Kierkegaard can say that faith is not a form of knowledge in the sense of epistēmē, or scientific knowledge, while preserving a central role for intellect in the task and life of faith. Full article

There is a great deal of academic literature, much of it coming from the social sciences and from social epistemology, which presents itself as addressing a very general problem: the problem of excessive falsehood. Falsehood comes in two general forms: false statements and false beliefs. Of course, falsehood, in both these forms, has always been with us, but it is often supposed to be on the rise. I will argue that there is no new or growing problem of excessive falsehood (variously referred to as the problem of “misinformation” or “fake news”). Furthermore, we should reject the very idea that falsehood as such is a problem, and hence we should reject the idea of coming up with public policy responses to this so-called problem. I argue that the idea that falsehood is a problem is a natural consequence of the idea that it is virtuous to love truth and hate falsehood. I argue that, although there are several virtues related to truth (such as the intellectual virtue of curiosity and the moral virtue of honesty), a love of truth and hatred of falsehood are not themselves virtues. Full article

On what I will call the standard view, the distinction between the moral and the epistemic realms is both psychologically and conceptually prior to the distinction between any two given virtues. This widespread view supports the claim that there are moral and intellectual (or epistemic) virtues. Call this the fundamental distinction. In this paper, I raise some questions for both the standard view and the fundamental distinction, and I propose an alternative view on which virtues regain priority over the moral/epistemic divide. I suggest understanding them as normatively complex, distinctive sensitivities to both theoretical and practical reasons. Full article

This paper defends a neo-Aristotelian conception of practical wisdom as a virtue that enables human agents to reflect on and direct their lives toward virtuous ends over time. This view is sometimes assumed to require a commitment to an intellectualist Grand End or blueprint view. On that view, practical wisdom would require philosophical insight and an implausibly well worked out set of weighted preferences. In this paper, I aim to show that particularists can and should take on much of what was thought to belong to the Grand End view. I argue for a conception of practical wisdom as a virtue of extended action that accounts for overarching ends without the need to appeal to an unrealistic, intellectualized blueprint for life. Further, on the view advocated here, as in Aristotle, practical wisdom is a virtue of substantial rationality and a different capacity from instrumental rationality in that it requires reflection on what constitutes a good human life. This is not high-minded philosophical reflection and is, in fact, something rather mundane that draws on the same rational capacities we deploy to assess the goodness of actions. Full article