This essay revisits the topic of how we should measure the things that matter, at a time when we continue to mismeasure our lives, as we hold fast to outworn myths of usefulness, popularity, and the desire to influence others. /// Three central, unquestioned presumptions have come to govern much of contemporary society, education, and the professions. They are: the high value placed on usefulness, on the passion to achieve popularity, and on the desire to influence others. In this essay, (...) the psychologist-philosopher author makes the case against these presumptions, presumptions which lead to exclusionary commitments that stand in the way of human cultural development. (shrink)

This paper examines a largely unrecognized mental disorder that is essentially a disability of values. It is their daily contact with this pathology that leads many university liberal arts faculty to demoralization. The deeply rooted disparity between the world of the traditional liberal arts scholar and today’s college students is not simply a gulf across which communication is difficult, but rather involves a pathological impairment in the majority of students that stems from an exclusionary focus on work, money, and the (...) acquisition of things. It is argued that this state of mind constitutes a self-disabling mental illness, which for a society becomes pathological ideology, and for the individual takes the form of clinical narcissism. (shrink)

A study of the psychology of demoralization affecting university faculty in the liberal arts. This form of demoralization is not adequately understood in terms of the concept of career burnout. Instead, demoralization that affects university faculty in the liberal arts requires a broadened understanding of the historical and psychological situation in which these professors find themselves today.

Whether truth, morality, and beauty have an objective basis has been a perennial question for philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, while for a great many relativists and skeptics it poses a problem without a solution. In this essay, the author proposes an innovative approach that shows how cognitive intelligence, moral intelligence, and aesthetic intelligence provide the basis needed for objective judgments about truth, morality, and beauty.

Pre-publication certification through peer review stands in need of philosophical examination. In this paper, philosopher-psychologist Steven James Bartlett recalls the arguments marshalled four hundred years ago by English poet John Milton against restraint of publication by the "gatekeepers of publication," AKA today's peer reviewers.

RÉSUMÉ De l'avis de plusieurs, il existe une tension entre le modèle « naturaliste » des émotions qui inspire les psychologues évolutionnistes et le modèle des constructionnistes sociaux. D'un côté, il semble que les émotions sont innées, rigides et panculturelles ; de l'autre, elles sont conçues comme des artefacts culturels, changeant au gré des arrière-plans culturels. Nous examinons chacune des deux approches et montrons que l'approche naturaliste n'est pas incompatible avec une forme de constructionnisme faible, en ce que la première (...) peut tenir compte d'un certain degré de plasticité. Nous soutenons qu'en fait les deux courants devraient être vus comme offrant des points de vue différents, mais complémentaires, sur les mêmes phénomènes. Cependant, une part du domaine des émotions étudiée par les constructionnistes échappe aux efforts d'intégration. Une façon de remédier à la situation est de proposer un réaménagement conceptuel du domaine. Par exemple, Griffiths propose que la solution passe par l'élimination du concept d’« émotion ». Quoique notre investigation des différentes formes d'émotions suggère un certain scepticisme concernant l'utilité théorique du concept d’« émotion », nous croyons qu'il est trop tôt pour en annoncer la mort. ABSTRACT According to many, there is an incongruity between the naturalist's model of emotions that inspired the evolutionary psychologists and the social constructionist's model. In brief, the naturalists propose that emotions are innate, rigid and pancultural ; whereas the social constructionists believe that emotions are cultural artefacts without any biological reality. We examine each approach and show that the naturalists' view is not incompatible with a weak form of constructionism. We argue that in fact the two positions should be considered as offering different but complementary views of the same phenomena. However, a part of the domain of emotions studied by the social constructionists escapes the attempt at integration. One way to solve this problem is to reconfigure the domain. Griffith proposed to do so by eliminating the concept of “emotion”. Our investigation of different forms of emotions suggests that if scepticism concerning the theoretical utility of the concept of “emotion” is grounded, it is still too early to proclaim its death. (shrink)