Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Learning To Love: Philosophy And Moral Progress, Phil Smith

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Love is a crucially important notion in morals. Moral philosophy, then, should give attention to this notion, and some of that attention should be concerned with how people might develop or improve as lovers. However, when the author tried to think through some rather obvious suggestions relating to love and becoming a lover, it became clear that much moral theory gives love short shrift. Assumptions inherent in rationalistic moral theory prevent most moral philosophers from letting love be the central concept in their work.

This dissertation has two aims: to suggest four things which may contribute to moral progress by …

An Existential-Phenomenological Investigation Of The Psychotherapeutic Interpretive Process Enabling Immediate Insight, Paul Murray Ph.D.

Dr. Paul Murray

An Existential-Phenomenological Investigation Of The Psychotherapeutic Interpretive Intervention Process Enabling Immediate Insight: Theoretical and technical preoccupations with the value of interpretation in the psychotherapeutic process have established a formal understanding in the literature that has given only oblique reference to the actual experience of the therapist in practice. "Interpretation" has for the most part been left dangling above and beyond the immediate grasp of the novice therapist as an objectified ideal of great importance. Practical application of this intervention has suffered due to a mystification of its lived nature in the traditional literature. The current qualitative research study is a …

Reduction, Elimination, And The Mental, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

The antireductionist arguments of many philosophers for example, Fodor and Davidson, are motivated by a worry that successful reduction (whatever that would be) would eliminate rather than conserve or explain the mental. This worry derives from an misunderstanding of the classic deductive nomological empiricist account of reduction. Although this account does not, in fact, underwrite "cognitive suicide," it should be rejected as positivist baggage. Philosophy of psychology and mind needs to have more detailed attention to issues of reduction on philosophy of sciences and natural scientific analogies that serve as models for reduction. I consider a range of central cases …