Personal Ideals Research Articles

Absolute and Personal Idealism

Research Article| July 01 2008 Absolute and Personal Idealism PHILLIP FERREIRA PHILLIP FERREIRA Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Pluralist (2008) 3 (2): 27–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/20708935 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation PHILLIP FERREIRA; Absolute and Personal Idealism. The Pluralist 1 January 2008; 3 (2): 27–46. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20708935 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressThe Pluralist Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. ©2008 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Woodrow Wilson and a World Governed by Evolving Law

It is a regrettable feature of the scholarly literature on Woodrow Wilson that so little of it relates to, or attempts to integrate, all the different phases or various aspects of his career—as an academic political scientist, as a figure in American domestic politics, and as a shaper of American foreign policy (and begetter of what has become known as “Wilsonianism”). Of course, there have been many biographies, including some fine ones, but they have generally paid more attention to Wilson's personal life and characteristics than to his thinking. There have also been some books on his work as an academic political scientist, but these have not explored in any depth its relation to his later political career. The disjunction has some justification in that Wilson's actions and utterances as a politician certainly reflected both immediate pressures and a variety of considerations apart from his own personal beliefs and ideals. Nevertheless, he remained the same man, and an appreciation of the long-established and deeply rooted views Wilson held about the nature of politics and of historical development can enhance our understanding of his approach to the problems he faced—not least with respect to foreign policy. In this essay I will attempt to make such a connection by focusing on Wilson's thought about law and constitutions—subjects central to his thinking about politics throughout his life.

A warranted performance?

Based on material consisting of interviews, we ask how this material sheds light on religion's performance regarding moral competence. Four questions structure the study: Firstly, how do informants articulate moral insights and reasons for actions, practices or personal ideals in religious terms? Secondly, how do they articulate and express religious beliefs in moral terms? Thirdly we discuss theoretically how these ways of articulating moral insights in religious terms, and vice versa, can be linked to the notion of moral competence, and as a possible indication of “religion's performance outside itself”. Finally, we ask how the connection between religion and moral competence identified through the discussion in the third point can be further interpreted in light of the informants’ perceptions of religious contexts and communities where they locate themselves and with which they identify. This provides a more nuanced understanding of how contextual embeddedness conditions moral competence, and the potential performance of religion in that respect.

Daughters Caring for Dying Parents: A Process of Relinquishing

Caring for elderly, dying parents is challenging for daughters as they try to balance other obligations and responsibilities. The purpose of this grounded theory study was to explain the domain of daughters' caregiving experiences in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The primary author interviewed 12 women whose parents had died. Three types of turmoil (emotional, relational, and societal) emerged as the central issue for these women. The authors discovered a substantive theory of Relinquishing with interdependent processes of Keeping Vigil, Navigating Systems, Facing Loss, and an end process of Coming to Terms. In moving through the process of Relinquishing, social conditions of personal ideals, family expectations, and societal demands determine strategies employed by any one daughter to manage her turmoil. The findings fill a gap in knowledge related to daughters' caregiving for dying parents by contributing a theoretical framework that will inform women, health care providers, researchers, and health policy makers.

Second-Career CNAs in Nursing Homes: Tapping an Underused Resource

The purpose of this study was to describe the characteristics, work perceptions, and factors influencing employment of second-career certified nursing assistants (CNAs) in nursing homes. The qualitative descriptive design included a purposeful sample of 17 participants from 5 nursing homes. Data generation consisted of demographic surveys and audiotaped interviews that were transcribed, coded, and analyzed for emerging themes. Four themes were identified: negative first impressions of the work did not deter second-career CNAs, second-career CNAs lived out personal ideals and values through their work, positive relationships and job benefits retained second-career CNAs, and second-career CNAs expressed hopes for transforming nursing homes. Results revealed a group of committed, mature workers to fill labor shortages in an essential health care setting.

Childhood obesity, gender, actual-ideal body image discrepancies, and physical self-concept in Hong Kong children: Cultural differences in the value of moderation.

Childhood obesity is increasingly prevalent in Western and non-Western societies. The authors related multiple dimensions of physical self-concept to body composition for 763 Chinese children aged 8 to 15 and compared the results with Western research. Compared with Western research, gender differences favoring boys were generally much smaller for physical self-concept and body image. Objective and subjective indexes of body fat were negatively related to many components of physical self-concept, but--in contrast to Western research--were unrelated to global self-esteem and slightly positively related to health self-concept. In support of discrepancy theory, actual-ideal discrepancies in body image were related to physical self-concept. However, consistent with the Chinese cultural value of moderation, and in contrast to Western results, being too thin relative to personal ideals was almost as detrimental as being too fat. The results reflect stronger Chinese cultural values of moderation and acceptance of obesity than in Western culture and have implications for social and educational policy in China.

George Moore and Literary Censorship: The Textual and Sexual History of "John Norton" and "Hugh Monfert"

George Moore and Literary Censorship:The Textual and Sexual History of “John Norton” and “Hugh Monfert” Mark Llewellyn and Ann Heilmann "Just as I believe that the worst of all sins is bad writing," George Moore is reported to have said when questioned about his habit of rewriting, "so I believe that the highest virtue is found in corrections, in an author's revisions. If you wish to estimate the true value of an author's art, study his revisions."1 While this valorisation of the redrafting process could be seen as evidence of Moore's concern primarily with style, this essay suggests that, for Moore, rewriting or reworking an earlier version of a text constituted an attempt to reconcile his artistic vision with a form of self-imposed, though often unacknowledged, literary censorship. As Moore was an obsessive rewriter, to understand his art it is essential that the textual history of a particular work also be understood. For this reason, we will focus attention on Moore's rewritings, from the 1880s to the 1920s, of his psychological dissection of an ascetic Catholic aesthete, called John Norton in the early narratives, rechristened Hugh Monfert after the turn of the century. As a result of extensive processes of revision undertaken over the course of forty years, the original narrative undergoes a profound transformation in both its sexual and textual configurations. Presented as a naturalist case study of psychosexual aberration in the early novel A Mere Accident (1887) and in "John Norton" (1895), the central, novella-length story in Moore's collection Celibates, the text becomes a tale of expressly homosexual repression in the two versions of the story "Hugh Monfert" (In Single Strictness, 1922; revised edition, 1923). Moore's revisions provide an illuminating insight not only into his writing practice, but also into his conflicted engagement with the concept of censorship. [End Page 371] By placing his rewriting of the Norton story into the context of his anticensorship polemic Literature at Nurse, Or Circulating Morals (1885), it is also possible to examine Moore's troubled relationships with both the reading public and his personal ideals. On 10 December 1884, a young and then relatively unknown novelist published in the Pall Mall Gazette an attack on the power and moral authority of the circulating libraries. The article, which was to be only Moore's opening foray into the contemporary debate on literary censorship, grew out of his personal affront on discovering that his first novel, A Modern Lover (1883), which had been published to some acclaim but also much criticism,2 had been removed from library circulation because of the views of "two ladies in the country"3 who had objected to a particular scene involving the nudity of a female character as she posed for the artist protagonist. Focusing largely upon the fact that the circulating libraries were businesses run by tradesmen who had no understanding of and therefore no right to interfere on matters of artistic taste, Moore's stance towards censorship was unequivocally dismissive: At the head, therefore, of English literature, sits a tradesman, who considers himself qualified to decide the most delicate artistic question that may be raised, and who crushes out of sight any artistic aspiration he may deem pernicious. And yet with this vulture gnawing at their hearts writers gravely discuss the means of producing good work; let them break their bonds first, and it will be time when they are free men to consider the possibilities of formulating a new aestheticism.4 As an author with only one published novel to his name, the noncirculated A Modern Lover, and with a previously censored volume of rather mediocre poetry, Pagan Poems,5 Moore's challenge to magnates like Charles Edward Mudie and W. H. Smith might appear foolhardy. Arguably his attack was nothing new:6 from the mid-century onward writers had waged war on the circulating libraries for placing a stranglehold on the literary marketplace, colluding with publishers on the price of texts, and even prescribing their length, as was evidenced by their insistence on the overpriced triple-decker format.7 While the financial repercussions of this circulating dictatorship,8 in particular the imposition of...

George Holmes Howison: "The City of God" and Personal Idealism

American Personalism is sometimes referred to as having East and West Coast varieties: Boston Personalism, founded by Bordan Parker Bowne and carried on by Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Peter Bertocci, and Martin Luther King, Jr. among others, and California Personalism, founded by George Holmes and carried on by Ralph Tyler Flewelling.1 But like so many shorthand notions it doesn't quite work. No one really carried on Howison's multi-personalitarian ism. created a radically democratic notion of personal idealism that extended all the way to God, who was no more the ultimate monarch, no longer the only ruler and creator of the universe, but the ultimate democrat in eternal relation to other eternal persons. It is no wonder found no disciples among the religious, for whom his thought was heretical, or the non-religious, who thought his proposals too religious; only McTaggart's idealist atheism or Thomas Davidson's Apeirionism seem to resemble Howisons personal idealism. By all accounts George Holmes was one of the great philosophical teachers of his age. He helped create the philosophy department at the University of California at Berkeley, started the Library with the gift of his books, and participated in one of the great philosophical debates of his age. But himself believed he had discovered a great truth and preached it. Ralph Tyler Flewelling called him a Prophet of Freedom (1957, 5). His biographers John Wright Buckham and George Malcolm Stratton, who compiled a selection of his articles, described him as an Old Testament prophet. William Ernest Hocking, who had been a younger colleague of at Berkeley, said Howison comes as near to Elijah the prophet, and in some ways to Simon Peter, as any human being I expect to meet in my time (quoted in Buckham and Stratton 1936, 13). This prophet label captures two aspects of Howison's life and character: his absolute belief in the person and, like Abraham, his wanderings from St. Louis to Boston, and to Germany, his one year appointments, and work as a philosophical tutor, until finally settling in California while discovering and securing a place to preach his doctrine. For Howison, personal idealism was more than a philosophical posi tion, it was the Truth. But he created no school and had no disciples. This was a

George Holmes Howison: “The City of God” and Personal Idealism

George Holmes Howison: “The City of God” and Personal Idealism

George Holmes Howison: “The City of God” and Personal Idealism

George Holmes Howison: “The City of God” and Personal Idealism

The social nature of saintliness and moral action: a view of William James's Varieties in relation to St Ignatius and Lawrence Kohlberg

This article argues that William James's thinking in The Varieties and elsewhere contains the view that social institutions, such as religious congregations and schools, are mediators between the private and public spheres of life, and are necessary for transforming personal feelings, ideals and beliefs into moral action. The Exercises of St Ignatius and the Just Community moral education approach serve as examples. Criticisms of the more commonly held view that James recognised only individual personal experiences as valid religious expressions are marshalled. Furthermore, we argue that moral action or saintliness, the ultimate expression of religious faith according to James, is fundamentally social. The commonalities that the phenomenologies of moral action of St Ignatius and Lawrence Kohlberg have with William James's view are used to support the argument.

Translated and Adapted – The Influence of Time on Translation

In this paper I will examine how the fairytales written by Zachris Topelius, the famous 19th century Finnish storyteller, were translated into Finnish and into English at different times. The fairytales contain Topelius’ personal ideals of upbringing, biblical and religious as well as moral and educational elements, for instance. The authors of the more recent translations have considered it necessary to modify the source texts so that they would be more accessible to today’s children than the earlier Finnish translations. In my analysis, I focus on the translational choices made by the translators.

From Heaven to Earth: A Comparison of Ideals of ITE Students

This article describes and discusses the outcomes of an open‐ended questionnaire completed by Initial Teacher Education (ITE) students about their personal and professional ideals, that is, ideals they would like to pass on to their pupils, their ideal teacher and ideal school. We compared five groups of students that were formed on the basis of their personal ideals: a religious ideals group, a moral ideals group, a vocational ideals group, a materialistic ideals group and a remainder group. We found that those in the materialistic ideals group were more focused on their own ideal situations, like being married or being happy, than the others and that those in the vocational and moral ideals groups were less focused on these ideals. We also found that the moral and religious ideals groups had comparable personal and professional ideals, whereas the materialistic ideals group was clearly inconsistent. No clear picture emerged as to whether or not the vocational ideals group had distinctive professional ideals.

Introduction: Science and Victorian Poetry

THE PHILOSOPHICAL... CONTRADISTINCTION BETWEEN POETRY AND MATter of Fact, or Science made by William Wordsworth in his famous 1802 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads has been enormously influential in discussions of the relations between and Victorian poetry. (1) The understanding of this particular interface was, for very long time, dominated--and distorted--by rigid and historical contrast between abstract poetic idealism and empirical scientific positivism which, in its insistence on sharp divide between the subjective and the objective, pitted the metaphysical and imaginative values of poetry against the dispiriting, but increasingly authoritative, creeds of and industry. Poetry, claimed John Stuart Mill echoing Wordsworth, act[s] upon the emotions; and therein is... distinguished from... its logical opposite, namely ... (2) Such hierarchical distinction, of course, takes no account of the enormous diversity of scientific and poetic discourses produced durin g the Victorian age, or of the different ways in which they negotiated the meaning of the natural world and the value of human life, but it has proved remarkably, and frustratingly, enduring. Even when, in the 1970s and 1980s, it came increasingly to be recognized that formed fundamental and integral part of Victorian culture and that its growing importance was registered in variety of literary forms, scholarly attention tended to focus almost exclusively on the interplay of and the novel. The heavy silence surrounding Victorian poetry, as Isobel Armstrong observes, is a striking phenomenon, but nowhere has this critical reticence been more conspicuous than in scholarship on the relations between and literary culture. (3) While George Levine argued that the realist novel's aesthetic ideals of detachment and self-abnegation were the cultural twin to the project of Victorian the more expressive and personal ideals of poetry continued to be regarded by many critics as the opposite of science. (4) Lionel Stevenson's pioneering Darwin Among the Poets had set marker for the study of and Victorian poetry as far back as 1932, but it i s only in the last decade or so that sustained attention has begun to be paid to the subject by distinguished scholars such as Gillian Beer, Isabel Armstrong, Patricia O'Neill, Helen Groth, and Daniel Brown, whose splendid Hopkins' Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (1997) was one of the first monographs on the subject to appear for many years. As the work of these scholars has shown convincingly, Victorian poetry and frequently employed the same metaphors, themes, images, and ideological orientations, and, far from being antithetical, the two forms were intimately related in the development of new philosophies of nature such as the German Naturphilosophie. (5) This special number of Victorian Poetry is intended as an addition to this new direction in what Stefan Collini terms the sub-field or 'interdiscipline' of science and literature scholarship, and it is the hope of the editors that it will deepen our understanding of the range and variety of the creative interpenetrations of poetry and across the Victorian period. (6) It is not, though, in any sense an overview--exhaustive or otherwise--of the interrelations of and Victorian poetry. Rather, the principal aim is to re-examine the relations between and poetry in the light of recent developments in literary studies and the history of science, which have both emphasized that science, no less than poetry, is mode of discourse that, rather than being objective and value-free, is always to some extent conditioned by the social, linguistic, and contexts in which it is produced--a cultural formation equivalent to any other, according to Michel Serres. (7) In this view, e merges as another form of practice, constructed in specific local contexts out of the available and material resources. …

The Arabic Constituents ofAfricanit�: Senghor and the Queen of Sheba

Léopold Sédar Senghor's "Elégie pour la Reine de Saba" (Elegy for the Queen of Sheba) first appeared in 1976, and in 1978, it was placed at the end of an edition of previously uncollected works entitled Elégies majeures (Major Elegies), Senghor's last book of poetry. In 1973, the Senegalese poet had published a cycle of love poems entitled Lettres d'hivernage (Letters in the Season of Hivernage) and between 1973 and 1978, some of the elegies had come out separately, but the 1978 volume stands as his first major collection of new poems since Nocturnes (1961) to be written on themes that were more public than personal. The period between the two collections spans almost all of Senghor's presidency (1960-81), and as one might expect, the new elegies reflect important developments in the writer's thinking. Several of the elegies also have obvious political implications and deal with such topical subjects as the deaths of a French coopérant, Georges Pompidou, and Martin Luther King, and the achievements of Senegal's francophone neighbor Tunisia. "Elégie pour la Reine de Saba," describing the narrator's wooing and winning of a black princess, recalls the earlier Negritude poetry in many respects and carries the imprint of the more lyrical inspiration characteristic of Chants d'ombre, published in 1945, or the other romantic poems to be found throughout Senghor's opus, but in its way, this elegy too bears a political message, one that reflects the increasing importance of the Arab world in international affairs. It represents as well a significant evolution in Senghor's use of the Negritude concept, broadened under the impact of political reality to include Arab-Berber Africa within the concept of Africanité. This paper proposes to examine two literary sources on which Senghor has drawn in the composition of the poem and to show how these intertextual references might be construed to reflect the new political and philosophical elements. As the last piece architecturally in what the poet calls the definitive version of his work, the elegy was designated by him to stand as the ultimate expression of his poetic, political, and personal ideals, and whatever messages it conveys must be considered in the light of the additional value accorded to it by virtue of its privileged position.

Patterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China

While the customary path to achievement in traditional China was through service to the state, from the earliest times certain individuals had been acclaimed for repudiating an official career. This book traces the formulation and portrayal of the practice of reclusion in China from the earliest times through the sixth century, by which time reclusion had taken on its enduring character. Those who decided to withhold their service to state governance fit the dictum from the Book of Changes of a man who does not serve a king or lord; he elevates in priority his own affairs. This characterization came to serve as a byword of individual and voluntary withdrawal, the image of the man whose lofty resolve could not be humbled for service to a temporal ruler. Men who eschewed official appointments in favor of pursuing their own personal ideals were known by such appellations as hidden men (yinshi), disengaged persons (yimin), high-minded men (gaoshi), and scholars-at-home (chushi). What distinguished these was a particular strength of character that underlay their conduct: they received approbation for maintaining their resolve, their mettle, their integrity, and their moral and personal values in the face of adversity, threat, or temptation. This book reveals that those who opted for a life of reclusion had a variety of motivations for their decisions and conducted widely divergent ways of life. The lives of these epitomize the distinctive nature of substantive reclusion, differentiating them from those of the intelligentsia who, on occasion, voiced their desire for disengagement or for retreat, but who nevertheless found or retained their places in government office. Throughout, the author places the recluse and reclusion within the social, political, intellectual, religious, and literary contexts of the times.

On St. Sava’s (svetosavski) redaction of Holy Monks images in Mileseva church narthex: Contribution to research in iconographic common places in the Nemanjics’ church foundation

On St. Sava’s (svetosavski) redaction of Holy Monks images in Mileseva church narthex: Contribution to research in iconographic common places in the Nemanjics’ church foundation

Political Involvement in Nursing—Politics, Ethics, and Strategic Action

Political apathy in the nursing profession can be attributed to numerous factors, including a perceived ethical conflict between professional values and political involvement, as well as a lack of strategy for political action. Differences in personal and professional ethics, conflicting loyalties, and a negative image of politics create ethical tension for nurses. Political-ethical conflicts can mean choosing between job, patient care, and personal ideals. Many nurses never have considered it their place to challenge the structure of the health care system or the rules guiding that system. Supporting political action that demands change in the system, therefore, can cause tension among nurses. The political-ethical dilemma for nurses is related to outdated images of nursing, repression, fear of power, and lack of knowledge. Many guidelines exist to help nurses understand why they should get involved in the political process. By using these guidelines, nurses can evaluate issues and use a valid method to assess problems, plan for action, and evaluate the effectiveness and benefits of specific strategies. In the second of this two-part series on political involvement in nursing, political-ethical conflict is explored, along with strategies for political action.

Matti Saraste (1949-2001)

Matti Saraste (1949-2001)

Teachers' Visions: The Role of Personal Ideals in School Reform

This paper explores how the concept of ``teachers' vision'' – or, teachers' images of ideal classroom practice – may be used to help us better understand the development of teachers' work and their careers. Drawing upon data from surveys and interviews with high school teachers, the author describes four different types of visions. By examining differences in the focus, range and distance of those visions, she shows how vision can serve as a guide for directing practice as well as a means of measuring how far teachers may be from their ideals. In the process, she suggests that teachers' visions can help explain what assumptions teachers make; what they learn about those assumptions; why and how they may choose to change their practice; and even whether or not they elect to remain in the profession. In conclusion, the paper considers how vision might function as a powerful tool for helping teachers surface and interrogate their beliefs as well as to imagine and elaborate pathways to promising new practices.