Embodiment and Virtue in a Comparative Perspective

Self Cite

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confidence: 98%

Virtues and Vices of Relativism

Schofer

2008

Self Cite

“… Discussions and criticisms of forms of ethical inquiry similar to what Schofer calls “procedural ethics” can be found in Antonaccio ; Mahmood ; Miller ; Prasad ; Schofer ; and Slingerland .…”

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confidence: 99%

Pierre Hadot on Habit, Reason, and Spiritual Exercises

Nido¹

2018

This essay is a reappraisal of Pierre Hadot's concept of spiritual exercises in response to recent criticisms of his work. The author argues that contrary to the claims of his critics, Hadot articulates a compelling argument that spiritual exercises that employ imaginative, rhetorical, and cognitive techniques are both necessary for and successful at producing a subject in which reason is integrated into human character. Such exercises are critical for overcoming the effects of habit, as a result of which everyday conduct resists rational control, and Hadot provides a nuanced account of how particular practices affect different aspects of emotion, behavior, and thought. The concept of spiritual exercises remains a viable component of theoretical frameworks for the study of religious ethics, though the author concludes that Hadot's position on habit and its role in ethical practice requires further investigation.

“…For prime examples of such ethnographic scholarship, see Prasad 2007, Mahmood 2005, and Gade 2004. For an important discussion of their broader significance for religious ethics, see Schofer 2007.…”

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confidence: 99%

ETHNOGRAPHY, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND COMPARATIVE RELIGIOUS ETHICS: Or Ethnography and the Comparative Religious Ethics Local

Lewis¹

2010

Recent ethnographic studies of lived ethics, such as those of Leela Prasad and Saba Mahmood, present valuable opportunities for comparative religious ethics. This essay argues that developments in philosophical and religious ethics over the last three decades have supported a strong interest in thick descriptions of what it means to be human. This anthropological turn has thereby laid important groundwork for the encounter between these scholars and new ethnographic studies. Nonetheless, an encounter it is. Each side brings novel questions to the other. The second part of the essay focuses on one of these questions: How, exactly, are these ethnographic studies to inform normative reflection on ethical questions? KEY WORDS: comparison, ethnography, Mahmood, normativity, philosophical anthropology, Prasad, Schofer IN ITS FOCUS on what Bernard Williams identifies as the Socratic question, "How should one live?" a great deal of ethical reflection has paid little attention to how most people actually do live. 1 Recently, 1 See Williams 1985, 1-21.Of course, such a generalization requires many qualifications. A great deal of the Aristotelian ethical tradition, for instance, claims to reflect on how we do live, though even here the focus is ultimately not on how people in general live but on how the best people live. Within the relatively recent history of comparative religious ethics, David Little and Sumner B. Twiss 1978 make extensive use of anthropological studies. Yet they use this material to very different ends than the works I have in mind in this piece: as they note precisely in discussing the need for further work, there is the need to compare the normative practical teaching of groups like the Christians, Theravadins, and Navajo [on which they have focused, even when drawing upon anthropological studies] with the lived teaching in those traditions. It is a truism in the study of the history of religions that there is likely to be a discrepancy between the ideal beliefs of a tradition and the day-by-day operational beliefs of practitioners. We have made no contribution to studying that discrepancy, since we have explicitly restricted ourselves to the normative tradition [1978, 252]. JRE 38.3:395-403.