Ari Kohen
Biographic Data
| ID | 177553 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ari Kohen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ari |
| FAMILY NAME | Kohen |
| SIGNATURE | KOHEN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nebraska–Lincoln |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8787-6173 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
I Am Not a Hero: How Heroic Action Divorces the Hero from the Political Community
Most people who perform a heroic act will, afterward, deny that their actions were heroic and claim that anyone would have done the same, even though that is demonstrably false (and, often, others were present who failed to act heroically at all). The literature on the psychology of heroism has never investigated why this is. This theoretical paper proposes an answer and seeks to provoke exploration of a previously unexplored topic. We note that …
Antisemitism on the Rise: The 1930s and Today
Googly eyes and yard signs: Deconstructing one professor’s successful rebuffing of a right-wing attack on an academic institution
Right-wing populism is on the rise worldwide, and political attacks against universities have increased in the United States since the election of Donald Trump. In 2017, an incident occurred at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln which resulted in accusations of hostility toward conservative students. Just over a year later, political forces again attempted to denigrate the university’s reputation, but this time they did not succeed. This (multimo…
Heroism Research: A Review of Theories, Methods, Challenges, and Trends
Heroism as an expression of self-actualization and a pinnacle social state is of fundamental interest to humanistic psychology and the field more broadly. This review places the growing discussion on heroic action in a humanistic perspective, as heroism aligns with ethical self-actualization in its highest form, personal meaning making, and social good, and can also involve profound existential costs. This review is organized in four major sectio…
The Making of a Hero: Cultivating Empathy, Altruism, and Heroic Imagination
Heroes are not born; they’re made. This article examines the commonalities in the backgrounds of people who take heroic action on behalf of others to theorize the ways in which our society can encourage citizens to prepare themselves to act heroically. In looking closely at a variety of people who have acted heroically, in a single moment or over time, we argue they have at least four crucial commonalities: They imagined situations where help was…
Tumbling Political Theory
Blogging in the classroom is not a new idea, but my students have tended to view the blogging assignment negatively, as a homework assignment that simply needed to be done each week and then forgotten until the next time they were required to visit the blog. With that in mind, I decided to employ a very different method of educational blogging – using the Tumblr platform – in which each student would take ownership of his or her own blog and whic…
Untangling Heroism: Classical Philosophy and the Concept of the Hero
"The idea of heroism has become thoroughly muddled today. In contemporary society, any behavior that seems distinctly difficult or unusually impressive is classified as heroic: everyone from firefighters to foster fathers to freedom fighters are our heroes. But what motivates these people to act heroically and what prevents other people from being heroes? In our culture today, what makes one sort of hero appear more heroic than another sort? In o…
Plato’s Heroic Vision: The Difficult Choices of the Socratic Life
Faced with charges of impiety and corruption of the youth, Socrates attempts a defence designed to vindicate the philosophic way of life. In this he seems to be successful, as Socrates is today highly regarded for his description of the good life and for his unwillingness to live any other sort of life, a position that is most obviously exemplified by his defence in the Apology. After his sentencing, Socrates’ arguments and actions—in the Crito a…
Personal and Political Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda
The personal and the political: Forgiveness and reconciliation in restorative justice
At the center of this paper are three questions: in the absence of a religious worldview, can one gain access to the concepts of forgiveness and reconciliation, can reconciliation be achieved in the absence of forgiveness or does the former depend in some way upon the latter, and can we make sense of a restorative approach to justice in the absence of either forgiveness or reconciliation? To answer these questions, I look closely at the concept o…
A Case of Moral Heroism: Sympathy, Personal Identification, and Mortality in Rwanda
The Problem of Secular Sacredness: Ronald Dworkin, Michael Perry, and Human Rights Foundationalism
The concept of human rights ultimately rests on the premise that there are some things that ought to be done for human beings and other things that ought not to be done to human beings in light of the fact that they are human. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these rights stem from the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” (Ishay 1997: 407). Some wou…
The possibility of secular human rights: Alan gewirth and the principle of generic consistency
The personal and the political: Forgiveness and reconciliation in restorative justice
At the center of this paper are three questions: in the absence of a religious worldview, can one gain access to the concepts of forgiveness and reconciliation, can reconciliation be achieved in the absence of forgiveness or does the former depend in some way upon the latter, and can we make sense of a restorative approach to justice in the absence of either forgiveness or reconciliation? To answer these questions, I look closely at the concept o…
The Making of a Hero: Cultivating Empathy, Altruism, and Heroic Imagination
Heroes are not born; they’re made. This article examines the commonalities in the backgrounds of people who take heroic action on behalf of others to theorize the ways in which our society can encourage citizens to prepare themselves to act heroically. In looking closely at a variety of people who have acted heroically, in a single moment or over time, we argue they have at least four crucial commonalities: They imagined situations where help was…
The possibility of secular human rights: Alan gewirth and the principle of generic consistency
Googly eyes and yard signs: Deconstructing one professor’s successful rebuffing of a right-wing attack on an academic institution
Right-wing populism is on the rise worldwide, and political attacks against universities have increased in the United States since the election of Donald Trump. In 2017, an incident occurred at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln which resulted in accusations of hostility toward conservative students. Just over a year later, political forces again attempted to denigrate the university’s reputation, but this time they did not succeed. This (multimo…
Tumbling Political Theory
Blogging in the classroom is not a new idea, but my students have tended to view the blogging assignment negatively, as a homework assignment that simply needed to be done each week and then forgotten until the next time they were required to visit the blog. With that in mind, I decided to employ a very different method of educational blogging – using the Tumblr platform – in which each student would take ownership of his or her own blog and whic…
A Case of Moral Heroism: Sympathy, Personal Identification, and Mortality in Rwanda
The Problem of Secular Sacredness: Ronald Dworkin, Michael Perry, and Human Rights Foundationalism
The concept of human rights ultimately rests on the premise that there are some things that ought to be done for human beings and other things that ought not to be done to human beings in light of the fact that they are human. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these rights stem from the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” (Ishay 1997: 407). Some wou…
The possibility of secular human rights: Alan gewirth and the principle of generic consistency
The Problem of Secular Sacredness: Ronald Dworkin, Michael Perry, and Human Rights Foundationalism
The concept of human rights ultimately rests on the premise that there are some things that ought to be done for human beings and other things that ought not to be done to human beings in light of the fact that they are human. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these rights stem from the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” (Ishay 1997: 407). Some wou…
A Case of Moral Heroism: Sympathy, Personal Identification, and Mortality in Rwanda
The personal and the political: Forgiveness and reconciliation in restorative justice
At the center of this paper are three questions: in the absence of a religious worldview, can one gain access to the concepts of forgiveness and reconciliation, can reconciliation be achieved in the absence of forgiveness or does the former depend in some way upon the latter, and can we make sense of a restorative approach to justice in the absence of either forgiveness or reconciliation? To answer these questions, I look closely at the concept o…
Plato’s Heroic Vision: The Difficult Choices of the Socratic Life
Faced with charges of impiety and corruption of the youth, Socrates attempts a defence designed to vindicate the philosophic way of life. In this he seems to be successful, as Socrates is today highly regarded for his description of the good life and for his unwillingness to live any other sort of life, a position that is most obviously exemplified by his defence in the Apology. After his sentencing, Socrates’ arguments and actions—in the Crito a…
Personal and Political Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Untangling Heroism: Classical Philosophy and the Concept of the Hero
"The idea of heroism has become thoroughly muddled today. In contemporary society, any behavior that seems distinctly difficult or unusually impressive is classified as heroic: everyone from firefighters to foster fathers to freedom fighters are our heroes. But what motivates these people to act heroically and what prevents other people from being heroes? In our culture today, what makes one sort of hero appear more heroic than another sort? In o…
Tumbling Political Theory
Blogging in the classroom is not a new idea, but my students have tended to view the blogging assignment negatively, as a homework assignment that simply needed to be done each week and then forgotten until the next time they were required to visit the blog. With that in mind, I decided to employ a very different method of educational blogging – using the Tumblr platform – in which each student would take ownership of his or her own blog and whic…
The Making of a Hero: Cultivating Empathy, Altruism, and Heroic Imagination
Heroes are not born; they’re made. This article examines the commonalities in the backgrounds of people who take heroic action on behalf of others to theorize the ways in which our society can encourage citizens to prepare themselves to act heroically. In looking closely at a variety of people who have acted heroically, in a single moment or over time, we argue they have at least four crucial commonalities: They imagined situations where help was…
Heroism Research: A Review of Theories, Methods, Challenges, and Trends
Heroism as an expression of self-actualization and a pinnacle social state is of fundamental interest to humanistic psychology and the field more broadly. This review places the growing discussion on heroic action in a humanistic perspective, as heroism aligns with ethical self-actualization in its highest form, personal meaning making, and social good, and can also involve profound existential costs. This review is organized in four major sectio…
Googly eyes and yard signs: Deconstructing one professor’s successful rebuffing of a right-wing attack on an academic institution
Right-wing populism is on the rise worldwide, and political attacks against universities have increased in the United States since the election of Donald Trump. In 2017, an incident occurred at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln which resulted in accusations of hostility toward conservative students. Just over a year later, political forces again attempted to denigrate the university’s reputation, but this time they did not succeed. This (multimo…
Antisemitism on the Rise: The 1930s and Today
I Am Not a Hero: How Heroic Action Divorces the Hero from the Political Community
Most people who perform a heroic act will, afterward, deny that their actions were heroic and claim that anyone would have done the same, even though that is demonstrably false (and, often, others were present who failed to act heroically at all). The literature on the psychology of heroism has never investigated why this is. This theoretical paper proposes an answer and seeks to provoke exploration of a previously unexplored topic. We note that …
Sociology (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies (4 works)