Place of Virtue Ethics within the Post-Classical Discourse on ḥikma

Preserved in what seems to be a unique manuscript at the Bodleian Library, al-Nafs wa-l-rūḥ wa-sharḥ quwāhumā (The Soul and the Spirit together with an Explanation of Their Faculties) of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) is a curious book. At the beginning, the author decribes the text as part of the philosophical sciences (as opposed to the religious ones) and clarifies that it deals with ʿilm al-akhlāq, meaning Aristotelian virtue ethics. The text is divided into two parts, the first explaining subjects of philosophical psychology, such as the nature of the soul, its faculties, and its survival after the death of the body. The second part explains how one can “treat” or “heal” the soul from certain negative character traits or vices. In both parts, the book makes liberal use of quotations from the Qur’an, from prophetical ḥadīth, and from sayings by other prophets and sages. This is quite unlike any other “book on philosophy” that Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī wrote.The article explains the distinction between philosophical and non-philosophical books in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and what it means for a book to belong to the former group. Al-Rāzī’s works in the theoretical fields of philosophy (logic, the natural sciences, metaphysics, and theology) do not use evidence derived from revelation and hardly ever refer to it. The relationship between revelation and the practical disciplines of philosophy (among them ethics), however, is different from the relation between revelation and theoretical philosophy. This difference leads in Avicenna to an almost complete abandonment of the practical disciplines. In authors who follow Avicenna in his Farabian approach to the relationship between philosophy and revelation, it leads to hybrid works such as al-Nafs wa-l-rūḥ wa-sharḥ quwāhumā that follow a philosophical agenda but employ means and strategies that mimic and imitate revelation.

Comprehensive meta-analysis of associations between temperament and character traits in Cloninger’s psychobiological theory and mental disorders

Objective To explore the relationship between temperament and character traits in Cloninger’s psychobiological theory and mental disorders. Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted of five international databases for all articles published in English between January 1990 and April 2019 (PROSPERO-CRD42019133214). Owing to heterogeneity, pooled estimates of correlations for personality disorders and standardized mean differences for case–control studies related to other mental disorders were calculated using the random-effects method. Results The pooled effect sizes obtained from 149 studies showed that high harm avoidance (related to 22/24 diagnostic categories), low self-directedness (21/23), low cooperativeness (17/23), high self-transcendence (14/23), low reward dependence (11/24), high novelty-seeking (10/24), low novelty-seeking (7/24), high persistence (2/23), low persistence (2/23) and high reward dependence (2/24) were related to psychopathology. Conclusions All traits provided unique psychobiological tools for differential diagnosis of mental disorders. However, high harm avoidance and low self-directedness played a canonical role in psychopathology. Despite the study limitations, additional studies are warranted to evaluate the differential diagnoses suggested by the present model.

National Specificity of Dominance in Politicians’ Speech Behavior

The aim of the article is to analyze the dominant speech behavior of groups of parliamentarians, depending on the national and cultural specifics of the sender of the text, using the methodology adopted in Implicit Pragmalinguistics. The text of each speech is divided into small syntactic groups, which in Implicit Pragmalinguistics are considered the standard units of the analysis. In total, more than three thousand such units were analyzed during the study period. The material for the study of the politicians’ speech behavior was the texts of the speeches of 20 politicians speaking in English and Russian, presented in the period from 2019 to 2020 in their national parliaments, the British Parliament and the State Duma. The analysis shows that the majority of politicians are distinguished by a dominant type of behavior, which is expressed in the manifestation of a bright individuality. A successful politician is always a talented leader and organizer who has the prevalence of character traits that are associated with independence, decisiveness, authoritarianism and focus not only on himself/herself, but also on the audience. All selected groups of the politicians showed great confidence in what they are talking about, which indicates the signs of a successful and professional leader. In the course of a comparative analysis, we came to the conclusion that dominance in the speech of the politicians is manifested differently and depends on the nationality of the parliamentarians. Thus, the Russian-speaking politicians of both sexes confirm their collectivist cultural orientation in speech behavior, and the British generally follow the principles of individualism; the Russian-speaking female politicians are a little more categorical and confident in their speeches than the English-speaking ones.

“My Honor is My Life”: Sturm Brightblade of the Dragonlance Saga and Middle English Arthurian Knighthood

Arthuriana has a long history of adaptation and appropriation in medieval and contemporary works, and the tradition of such textual borrowing and reworking continues in contemporary “genre” novels, particularly those that invoke associations with knights, honor, and codes of chivalry. One such example are the novels and short stories of the Dragonlance setting. Sturm Brightblade is positioned as a knight who adheres to a code of honor and is given Arthurian character traits, narrative arcs, and a backstory by the various authors that have fleshed out his history. The texts in the Dragonlance setting knowingly use appropriated elements from Middle English Arthurian works and assign them to Sturm Brightblade to give him proper positioning as a knight that would fit in with Arthur’s legendary Round Table.

Initial Study on COMT and DRD2 Gene Polymorphisms as Well as the Influence of Temperament and Character Trait on the Severity of Alcohol Craving in Alcohol-Dependent Patients

The main aim of this work was to determine the impact of COMT and DRD2 gene polymorphisms together with temperament and character traits on alcohol craving severity alcohol-dependent persons. The sample comprised of 89 men and 16 women (aged 38±7). For the sake of psychological assessment various analytic methods have been applied like the Short Alcohol Dependence Data Questionnaire (SADD), Penn Alcohol Craving Scale (PACS) or Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) test. The SNP polymorphism of the analyzed genes was determined by Real Time PCR test. The results showed, that the COMT polymorphismmay have an indirected relationship with the intensity and changes in alcohol craving during abstinence. The DRD2 receptor gene polymorphisms are related with the intensity of alcohol craving. It seems that the character traits like “self-targeting”, including “self-acceptance”, are more closely related to the severity of alcohol craving and polymorphic changes in the DRD2 receptor than temperamental traits. Although this is a pilot study the obtained results appeared to be promising and clearly indicate the link betweengene polymorphisms alcohol craving and its severity.

The Effect of Gender on the Relationship between Critical Thinking and Pattern Recognition: Students’ Perspectives

In this qualitative study, individual interviews were conducted on 11 private school students to seek their opinions about the effect of gender on the relationship between critical thinking and cognitive pattern recognition. The participants, age 16 to 19 inclusive with six males and five females, were students recruited from three private schools in Singapore. All the interviewees have enrolled in the General Certificate of Education (GCE) 'O' level preparatory courses. The interview transcripts were analyzed using Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) Miner software. The majority (64%) of the interviewees agreed that gender influence the relationship between critical thinking and pattern recognition. Two primary themes were identified that affect the effect of gender: the internal character traits of a person and society's influences. Two recommendations were to examine the impact of various internal character traits in more detail and to include interviews from school teachers and administrators to obtain more professional insights.

Agent-Based Modeling of Collaborative Work

In the modern world, it is no longer enough to simply create a product that performs its function, but it should perform it better than thousands of competitors. However, the problem is that human intellectual abilities are limited and many complex tasks are beyond the capabilities of a single person. The natural way of raising our intellectual level is to build teams to share our experience, knowledge, and worldview to create something beyond the capacity of the individual.Thus it is not surprising that according to a recent ranking, collaborative skills are considered most essential in the 21st century [2]. To cope with all challenges and create high-quality products, there should be a team whose members are experts in communication, discussion, problem-solving, and critical thinking. In addition, it is important to manage the team effectively. To do so, it is necessary to know more about the social processes which take place inside a team. Agent-based modeling can be an effective tool to gain such insights.Agent-based modeling is a powerful instrument for simulating different processes, including social ones. This technology was formed under the influence of many other fields such as artificial intelligence, sociology, game theory, and so on.In this article, a model which simulates human interaction in the framework of «Wilderness Survival: A Consensus-Seeking Task» is used to demonstrate the core principle of agent-based modeling. The group of agents complete a test by themselves and afterwards discuss their answers to reach a consensus and achieve the best score.It will be analyzed which human character traits are more important for successful collaborative work. Situations in which some team members are not interested in the team success will be identified. Also, a user interface is provided to enable running custom experiments to better understand how specific character traits impact the team results.

REASONABLE DISPOSITIONS: A RESPONSE TO THE SITUATIONIST CRITIQUE OF VIRTUE ETHICS

<p>In The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle presents a theory of ethics as the development of character, specifically the cultivation of particular character traits lying on the mean between two vices which he calls the virtues. Since the revival of virtue ethics in the mid-20th century, the virtues have often been interpreted as stable, broad-based dispositions to act in virtue appropriate fashion in response to eliciting conditions. In more recent years virtue ethics has come under a sustained attack known as the ‘situationist critique’, which argues that experiments in social psychology show no evidence of broad-based dispositions in the general population. If there are no broad-based dispositions, there are no virtues – virtue ethics is therefore empirically inadequate. My analysis of the evidence the situationists present in favour of their critique will show that it fails to unambiguously support the conclusion that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. An investigation into the causes of the ethical failings identified in those experiments allowed me to propose remedies that are perfectly consonant with Aristotelian virtue ethics, requiring dedicated and disciplined reflection on past actions with an ongoing commitment to bringing our thoughts and emotions into harmony with our values. In the process I show that the situationists’ evidence supports the “cognitive-affective” theory of virtue over the broad-based dispositional theory, that this cognitive-affective theory is also supported by a careful reading of Aristotle, and therefore that the situationist critique simply helps to replace an inadequate virtue theory with a more robust one.</p>