This article focuses on a method of moral self-cultivation advocated by the Chinese Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi: deep reading. To Zhu Xi, reading is not only an intellectual activity of learning knowledge, but also a spiritual exercise. Through meticulous, thorough, and unbiased reading, people can gradually cultivate their minds to have three virtues,…

From a "prima facie" point of view, Nietzsche's use of virtue may appear to be a form of virtue ethics. Certainly, this is one position that has been established within the secondary literature; however, I argue that a more fruitful philosophical reading is to view his use of virtue as a part of his "drive" psychology. Indeed,…

Digital technologies are changing our understanding of ethical emulation. In this article, Matthew Dennis proposes that some social media technologies have given rise to a strikingly new set of ethical ideals, often concerned with the ideal of self-cultivation. While there is relatively little philosophical discussion of these kinds of ideals,…

Psychological research has revealed that there is a strong tendency for people to believe that they have a 'true self', and to believe that this true self is inherently morally good. This would seemingly be very good news for virtue theorists, since this may help to promote virtue development. While there are some obvious benefits to people having…

This article identifies theoretical and practical resources for practitioners and researchers working toward cultivating character and moral judgment in youth. In doing this, the article draws on a 3-year study on character education in U.K. schools completed by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham and…

This study examines how secondary-school students recognize and relate to artificial intelligence (AI) and the meanings they attribute to it in their everyday lives. Using a quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional design, we explore the subjectivities of a purposive sample of 576 students from both public and private schools. The analysis…

In this article, we introduce the four component model (FCM), which describes both the internal processes that play distinct roles in the production of moral behavior and their associated sets of relevant, teachable skills. We use this model as an analytic framework to examine college students' moral character experiences reported in the Wabash…

Stories of civilization and progress tell us that humans cannot help being destructive, selfish, and aggressive, which are side effects of progress requiring sanctions and engineering. It can be argued that this approach has brought about the ecological collapse we face today. The older, more widespread view--that human personality and behavior…

Life without interaction and communication cannot exist, neither without choices. In communication, firstly every source and then every message has a value; likewise, every choice humans are to make each and every second is a result of an e'value'tion. Because there exists no moment or field without 'value' and e'value'tion, they end up in a…

In this article, the "Bild" or image of the sculptor used by Plotinus and adapted by his Christian follower Meister Eckhart forms the basis of a reflection on the religious or otherworldly dimension in ethics (as opposed to a reductionist or functionalist conception of ethics with its focus on human happiness in the sense of worldly…

This study aims to find answers to the question: What kind of person should the Turkish education system raise? To evaluate the participants' responses thoroughly, the phenomenology method has been used. The study group includes 185 teachers and school administrators working in Sivas city centre. To reach out to more participants, the data have…

In this article, I present a model of four dimensions for the idea of learning in the classical Confucian perspective. This model is intended to capture the most essential four aspects of learning which explain why self-cultivation of a human person toward an end of self-fulfillment and social transformation of humanity is possible. I shall also…

This article provides a critical and theoretical exploration into teacher performance dispositions (orientations towards performance). The article explores research literature on dispositions, highlighting the representation of teachers in education policy and standards documents across several nations of the OECD: Australia, the USA and the UK.…

The aim of this paper is to explore the history of Finnish religious education (RE) from the perspective of civic education. The research is based on a historical and content analysis of the data, which consist of written pedagogical and curricular material on Lutheran RE from the last 150 years. The analysis, which employs the Foucauldian concept…

The contribution focuses on Neo-Confucian texts as collected by Zhu Xi (?? 1130-1200) and Lü Zuqian (1137-1181) and is a look from the "outside", from the perspective of German theories of Bildung ("self-cultivation"). It aims at demonstrating that among other insights that today's readers may gather from Neo-Confucian…