Psychological and theological concepts of the integrative nature of healthy human personality are examined, with particular emphasis on the biblical relationships between integrated personality and shalom, or well-being. The Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS) is suggested as a general indicator of personality integration and resultant well-being. A summary of reported research that has utilized the SWBS from 1982–1990 is presented and related to physical, psychological, relational, and religious well-being. Suggestions are made for additional research and application of the SWBS.
We get to know things in a number of different ways. For instance, among the things that I know are the following: that 4 2 = 16; that the grass in my garden is green; that it rained last night; that the rosebush in the garden is an Indian Summer; that right now my baby daughter is miserable. The ways in which I might have come to know each of these things is a matter contested, but most would agree that naïve consciousness characterises the first four in something like the following way: I know that 4 2 = 16 by reason alone; I know that the grass in my garden is green because I am currently enjoying a conscious experience of it; I know that it rained last night because, although I was asleep at the time, I can see that it is wet and infer that this must have been caused by rain; I know that the rosebush in the garden is an Indian Summer because my neighbour told me, and she is something of an expert on roses. In short, knowledge can be apriori, perceptual, inferential, and testimonial.What about my knowledge that right now my baby daughter is miserable? How do I know that? Can it be assimilated to one of these four ways of gaining knowledge, or do we need a fifth category? We can straight away put aside both the apriori and knowledge by testimony. Central to my knowledge is surely a visual experience of my daughter in which no-one speaks or otherwise lets me know how she feels. So my knowledge is not apriori, nor is it based on testimony. 1 This leaves us with perception, inference and our, as yet unspecified, fifth option. The fifth option is, of course, the criterial view. 2 My purpose in what follows is not to adjudicate between these three.1 Some knowledge of others' mentality is testimonial. Indeed, arguably one of the simplest ways of finding out how it is with another is by asking and being told. The point, however, is that not all knowledge of others is gotten in this way. Nor could it be. Perhaps even some knowledge of how it is with another (right now) is apriori. I will, however, limit myself to items of knowledge of others the canonical justification of which depends essentially on experience.
I defend a perceptual account of face-to-face mindreading. I begin by proposing a phenomenological constraint on our visual awareness of others' emotional expressions. I argue that to meet this constraint we require a distinction between the basic and nonbasic ways people, and other things, look. I offer and defend just such an account.
It is commonly believed that Merleau-Ponty rejected Husserl's phenomenological reduction in favour of his existentialist account of être au monde. I show that whilst Merleau-Ponty rejected, what he saw as, the transcendental idealist context in which Husserl presents the reduction, he nevertheless accepts the heart of it, the epoché, as a methodological principle. Contrary to a number of Merleau-Ponty scholars, être au monde is perfectly compatible with the epoché and Merleau-Ponty endorses both. I also argue that it is a mistake to think that Merleau-Ponty's liberal use of the results of empirical psychology signify a rejection of the epoché. A proper understanding of his views on the relation between phenomenology and psychology shows that, at least in Merleau-Ponty's eyes, the methods of phenomenology and the empirical sciences are largely similar. I conclude that we have every reason to think that Merleau-Ponty accepted Husserl's demand that the phenomenologist place the world in brackets.
The concept of empathy has received much attention from philosophers and also from both cognitive and social psychologists. It has, however, been given widely conflicting definitions, with some taking it primarily as an epistemological notion and others as a social one. Recently, empathy has been closely associated with the simulationist approach to social cognition and, as such, it might be thought that the concept's utility stands or falls with that of simulation itself. I suggest that this is a mistake. Approaching the question of what empathy is via the question of what it is for, I claim that empathy plays a distinctive epistemological role: it alone allows us to know how others feel. This is independent of the plausibility of simulationism more generally. With this in view I propose an inclusive definition of empathy, one likely consequence of which is that empathy is not a natural kind. It follows that, pace a number of empathy researchers, certain experimental paradigms tell us not about the nature of empathy but about certain ways in which empathy can be achieved. I end by briefly speculating that empathy, so conceived, may also play a distinctive social role, enabling what I term 'transparent fellow-feeling'.
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