Tag: Questions we’re asking

What is the role of friendship in human flourishing?

For our December 2016 Working Group Meeting, the question I’m asking is, What is the role of friendship in human flourishing?

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“friendship”. Photo by Mario Mancuso

In the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition, moral or ethical goodness is understood to be crucially related to the flourishing or full actualization of human persons: the idea, to a first approximation, is that a fully good human is a human who is fully carrying out a full range of human operations. This proposal could be understood in a rather individualistic way, as the thought that the good person is the one who is doing best for himself.

That this has not been the traditional understanding is fairly easy to show, if only by pointing to the fact that of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics, one is devoted to justice and two to friendship. Nonetheless, I think there is an under-explored aspect of the tradition’s non-individualistic side, and exploring it is the goal of my research for our next meeting.

I am interested in the idea that some of the activities that one can engage in as part of living excellently are, in a very strong sense, activities that cannot be engaged in individualistically. In some cases, that is, the activities that contribute to goodness are not merely activities that an individual can’t do well without others, and also not merely activities that an individual can’t do unless other individuals are doing them too, but activities that can’t be done by individuals at all, but only by two people or more.

Michael Gorman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America and a Scholar with Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

What work does anger do across moralities?

For our December 2016 Working Group Meeting , the questions I’m asking are, What work does anger do across moralities? and  What work ought anger to do in a particular morality?

 

The first is a question in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and politics. It calls for thick description and explanation. The second is a question in ethics. It calls for reasons and normative justification.  How are the two questions and their answers connected?  Here I discuss one substantive and one methodological way the questions and the answers connect.  Substantively, anger, as we do it, is neither necessary for moral life nor normal in any robust psychobiological or statistical sense.  Methodologically, the method of reflective equilibrium whereby we bring our enacted norms of anger into alignment with our ideals can work in homogeneous cultures to recalibrate our practices, and to provide internal normative justification for our ideals.

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photo by Patrik Nygren

In a culture that is Aristotelian about anger the process of reflective equilibrium permits us to remind ourselves of the kinds of anger that are justified, which abide the doctrine of the mean, and so on.  It is not clear how reflective equilibrium works in multicultural ecologies where there is disagreement about whether any kind of anger can be virtuous, unless it is performed as a method of settling on a majority norms and a common set of expressive or communicative tools.  The method of reflective equilibrium does not seem suited for radical critique, for asking questions about whether, in the present case, we should ever be angry, but only on fussing about how anger is done around here, by us, most of us.

 

Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke University Professor of Philosophy at Duke University,  and a Scholar with Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life.

Can cognitive effort be measured?

Elegant . Mixed media

My central research question for our December 2016 Working Group Meeting is, Can cognitive effort be measured?

There is growing evidence that fluctuations in brain activity may exhibit scale-free (“fractal”) dynamics. Scale-free signals follow a spectral-power curve of the form P(f ) ∝ f−β, where spectral power decreases in a power-law fashion with increasing frequency. In this study, we demonstrated that fractal scaling of BOLD fMRI signal is consistently suppressed for different sources of cognitive effort. Decreases in the Hurst exponent (H), which quantifies scale-free signal, was related to three different sources of cognitive effort/task engagement: 1) task difficulty, 2) task novelty, and 3) aging effects.

These results were consistently observed across multiple datasets and task paradigms. We also demonstrated that estimates of H are robust across a range of time-window sizes. H was also compared to alternative metrics of BOLD variability (SDBOLD) and global connectivity (Gconn), with effort-related decreases in H producing similar decreases in SDBOLD and Gconn.

These results indicate a potential global brain phenomenon that unites research from different fields and indicates that fractal scaling may be a highly sensitive metric for indexing cognitive effort/task engagement.

Marc G. Berman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and is involved in the Cognition, Social and Integrative Neuroscience programs, and a Scholar with Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life.

Questions our scholars are asking – part 2 of 2

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We’ve distilled our Scholars’ research for this semester into respective questions; click here to take a look at the questions posted yesterday. In forthcoming posts, we’ll feature in-depth look at each. For now, we thought our readers would enjoy pondering each question. Together, they can read as a kind of meditation on the inter-relatedness of virtue, happiness, and deep meaning in life.

 

When and why are people accurate or inaccurate predictors of their own future feelings?

~Heather C. Lench, Texas A&M University

 

What roles do stories, social identities, and value pursuits play in the ways people understand their lives to have meaning?

~Dan P. McAdams, Northwestern University

 

How do we get people to abandon the notions of human separation from, and superiority to, nature?

~ Darcia Narvaez, University of Notre Dame

 

Do the fundamental human capacities for desire and aversion possess a rational structure, and can a Thomistic understanding of virtue help us understand it?

~Jean Porter, University of Notre Dame

 

Is it better to put the existence of evil out of our minds, or focus on how to respond to it?

~David Shatz, Yeshiva University

 

Should one die for God, and if so, under what conditions?

~Josef Stern, University of Chicago

 

What is the role of religious freedom in the context of the modern, non-confessional state?

~Father Thomas Joseph White, Thomistic Institute, Dominican House of Studies

 

How do we differentiate between positive and negative varieties of self-transcendence?

~Paul T.P. Wong, Trent University

Questions our scholars are asking – part 1 of 2

We’ve distilled our Scholars’ research for this semester into respective questions; tomorrow we’ll post eight more. And in forthcoming posts, we’ll feature in-depth look at each. For now, we thought our readers would enjoy pondering each question. Together, they can read as a kind of meditation on the inter-relatedness of virtue, happiness, and deep meaning in life.

Herbst Wald Panorama im goldenen Sonnenschein
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Can cognitive effort be measured?

~Marc Berman, University of Chicago

 

What good are the humanities?

~ Talbot Brewer, University of Virginia

 

What work does anger do across moralities?

What work ought anger to do in a particular morality?

~ Owen Flanagan, Duke University

 

How can Thomistic notions of of Temperance enlarge and enrich our understanding of that virtue?

~ Jennifer Frey, University of South Carolina

 

What is the role of friendship in human flourishing?

~Michael Gorman, The Catholic University of America

 

Given my circumstances, can I do what befits a human being? 

~Matthias Haase, University of Chicago

 

Can we achieve happiness without an understanding of the ultimate finality of the human soul?

~Reinhard Huetter, Duke Divinity School

 

Can human character experience sudden moral change?

~Angela Knobel, The Catholic University of America

 

How is Aristotle’s meta-virtue of megalopsychia, or magnanimity, useful to us today?

Can immoral people undergo sudden moral conversions?

~Kristján Kristjánsson, Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham

Questions our scholars are asking – round two

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This coming week (June 6-10, 2016, at the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago) is the second of four meetings for our  scholars (the first was December 2015 at the University of South Carolina). These meetings are immersive experiences for these scholars, who are philosophers, theologians, and psychologists; the meetings are aimed at generating systematic and integrated knowledge, including ultimately a new construct for empirical research on self-transcendence, new instruments of assessment, and new data.

 

Here are summaries of the questions and research our scholars will be discussing with each other in the coming week.

 

Matthias Haase: Can virtue be cultivated like a habit?

 

Tahera Qutbudden: Can one enjoy a happy and pleasurable life in this world while also preparing for the next?

 

Jennifer A. Frey: Is selfishness a particular kind of vice, or the nature of vice?

 

David Schatz: Is ignorance always a vice, or can it also be a virtue?

 

Heather C. Lench: Can boredom lead us to virtue?

 

David Carr: Does spirituality have a material dimension, and if so, can it be developed and educated?

 

Mari Stuart: Can the indigenous knowledge reflected in a moral ecology worldview teach things that climate science cannot?

 

Jean Porter: Can malice, like virtue, also give meaning to life?

 

Erik Angner: Is social well-being the same thing as happiness?

 

Paul Wong: Is it possible to measure Self-Transcendence?

 

Katharine Kinzler: Can infant food preferences teach us about the social world?

 

Mark Berman: Do ugly surroundings encourage criminal behavior?

 

Angela Knobel: Can the notion of virtue as a gift from God have broad appeal?

 

Father Thomas Joseph White: Can Aquinas help us understand Nietzsche’s ideas about truth and moral freedom?

 

Michael Gorman: Is a meaningful life also necessarily a good life?

 

Nancy Snow: Is magnificence—expenditure for the public good—virtuous, or vicious? Can it be both?

 

Tal Brewer: Are human beings irreplaceable, and due special forms of regard and good treatment?

 

Dan McAdams: What is the difference between habit and character? Do we narrate these things about ourselves in different ways?

 

Reinhard Hütter: How do we overcome the lure of self-sovereignty that surrounds us and attain true self-transcendence?

 

Father Kevin Flannery: What is the relationship between intention, choice, and virtue?

 

 

23 questions our scholars are asking

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The guiding idea of our research is that virtue is the cultivation of a self-transcendent orientation that is necessary for deep happiness and a sense of meaning in one’s life. Our project constructs self-transcendence through collaborative scholarly work in 3 fields: Religious Studies & Theology, Empirical Psychology, and Philosophy.

One key innovation of our project is that rather than bringing independently conceived and executed projects into conversation at large conferences, our scholars will investigate their topics together.

Here are some of the questions many of our scholars will investigate over the course of this 28-month project:

3877063268Religious Studies & Theology

How are our ideas about what it means for Christ to become human shaped and influenced by the divine personhood of Christ?
      – Michael Gorman (Catholic University of America)

What is the relationship between Aquinas’ idea of human flourishing—and its integral component of happiness—and academic enterprise?
– Reinhard Huetter (Duke University)

What is the relationship, according to Thomas Aquinas, between the virtues we acquire on our own and virtues given to us by God?
– Angela Knobel (Catholic University of America)

How does Aquinas understand the relationship between the moral emotions and justice?
      – Jean Porter (Notre Dame University)

How does classical Arabic oratory influence contemporary preachers and politicians?
      – Tahera Qutbuddin (University of Chicago)

Should one cultivate the virtue of humility, or is it a “weak” virtue, encouraging dependence and obedience?
– David Shatz (Yeshiva University)

How do prophecy and martyrdom focus the person on that which is greater than the self?
– Josef Stern (University of Chicago)

What is the relationship between the human moral condition and the condition of the environment?
      – Mari Stuart (University of South Carolina)

Does the human search for truth also make someone open to religious questions?
– Fr. Thomas Joseph White (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception)

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Empirical Psychology

How do people understand virtue, happiness, and the meaning of life when they are stretched thin by work and family obligations?
– Marc Berman (University of Chicago)

What influence does a child’s early ideas of virtue have on the understanding of purposeful and socially just acts across her lifetime?
     – Katherine Kinzler (Cornell University)

Can the so-called negative emotions actually lead us to happiness?
– Heather C. Lench (Texas A&M University)

Why are some generative narratives involving commitment to future generations culturally favored over others?
      – Dan McAdams (Northwestern University)

Are we fixed adults with little capacity to change, or are we beings who can use experience to increase wisdom and human flourishing?
– Howard Nusbaum (University of Chicago)

Can we measure happiness and meaning empirically?
– Paul Wong (Emeritus, Trent University)

3877093547       Philosophy

What virtues shape aesthetic inspiration and the actions that follow from it?
– Talbot Brewer (University of Virginia)

What can poetry teach us about spirituality?
      – David Carr (Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh)

Should intention factor into the way we look at those who cooperate in evil?
     – Fr. Kevin Flannery (Pontifical University Gregorian)

How does happiness operate as the constitutive aim of human life?
– Jennifer A. Frey (University of South Carolina)

What are the norms inherent in the ethical study of human behavior?
      – John Haldane (Baylor University and St. Andrews University)

How do the ways that we learn not to wrong someone influence our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the social context we share?
      – Matthias Haase (University of Leipzig)

How does awe help us understand the human capacity for moral change?
– Kristján Kristjánsson (University of Birmingham)

How do ordinary people become virtuous, and how does virtue shape them?
– Nancy Snow (University of Oklahoma)

By fostering intensive collaboration between philosophers, religious thinkers, and psychologists, we will investigate whether self-transcendence helps to make ordinary cultivation and exercise of virtue a source of deep happiness and meaning in human life.

For more information about our scholars, and the topics they’ll discuss at our December Working Group Meetings, visit our website here.

Continue reading “23 questions our scholars are asking” →