Kristján Kristjánsson
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 209630 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Kristján Kristjánsson |
| PRENOMES | Kristján |
| SOBRENOME | Kristjánsson |
| ASSINATURA | KRISTJÁNSSON K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8584-4178 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 82 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 102 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 81 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1992 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Practical wisdom in medicine
By defending practical wisdom ( phronesis ) as a multidimensional virtue that complements the moral virtues, we offer a critique of “practical wisdom eliminativism”, with special attention to the context of medicine, arguing that the core dimensions of practical wisdom enjoy broad consensus. As the meta-virtue that demonstrates excellence in ethical decision-making, practical wisdom recognizes and employs the best means to achieve good and worthw…
Beyond ‘pedagogic phronesis ’
This article pays tribute to Terry McLaughlin and his contributions to the field of moral education. I do so by subjecting to scrutiny one of his favourite constructs, ‘pedagogic phronesis’. More specifically, I elicit 25 questions from the recent literature on phronesis and try to evaluate, as fair-mindedly and patiently as I possibly can, in Terry’s spirit, the extent to which those questions have already been answered or part-answered, or stil…
Moral education at university
I am pleased to write a short editorial to launch this Special Issue on Moral Formation in Higher Education. I dare not claim that the unique gestation and format of this issue have never been atte
Teaching multicultural character education in the classroom
This article addresses a critical gap in the current literature on teaching character education: its relative silence on the multicultural sensitivities required for culturally diverse classrooms. The authors argue that current frameworks do not provide a clear strategy for teachers to conduct character education in a multicultural context. To resolve this, the paper proposes a five-stage teaching strategy grounded in two models: the ‘Multifacete…
Wellness versus flourishing in medical education
Contributions of neo-Aristotelian phronesis to ethical medical practice
‘There are many more gaps in moral education. We need to bridge them all’
We hereby introduce a new regular feature: an interview with the winner of the annual Kuhmerker Career Award in moral education. This is the most prestigious lifetime award in the field and dates b
Epiphanic versus incremental routes to moral growth
In this, the first of two Target Articles, written to launch the current Special Issue on Epiphanies and Moral Education, I explore the common dichotomy—represented historically by Plato and Aristotle—between fast and epiphanic versus slow and incremental moral growth. I compare and contrast Aristotle’s and Plato’s moral developmental theories, under the guiding light of epiphanies, paying special attention to the recent retrieval of Plato’s acco…
Recent developments in the field of moral education—and some prompts for authors, old and new
The field of moral education is steadily evolving, at a tidal rather than a glacial pace. Trends go in and out of fashion. Topics that were left for dead decades ago are thriving again, and battle
Flourishing, Education, and the Good Human Life
In the last few years, the concept of human flourishing (eudaimonia) – denoting predominantly objective features of human well-being – has come into vogue within various areas of the humanities and social sciences (philosophy, psychology, economics, health sciences, education) after only playing a marginal role since ancient times. This development is perhaps most noticeable within education where the biggest international policymaker in the fiel…
Richard Pring’s View of Education as a Moral Practice
Richard Pring (1938–2024) was the first holder of a Chair in Education at the University of Oxford and the Editor of the present journal from 1986 to 2001. This article pays tribute to his legacy in the field of educational philosophy. After reviewing briefly some well-known recurring themes in Pring’s educational philosophy, such as his busting of ‘false dualisms’, the article focuses on his specific view of education (and teaching) as a moral p…
Reconsidering the ‘Ten Myths’ about Character Education
Is character education flawed as an approach to values education? A 2013 article answered that question in the negative and defused ten common objections against character education as ‘myths’. The aim of the present article is to revisit those objections and consider the evidence that has accumulated since 2013. After a brief historical and conceptual rehearsal, the core section of the article is taken up with reminders of the original arguments…
Considerateness Differentiated
Despite the prevalence of the virtue of considerateness in everyday moral discourse and the proliferation of philosophical studies of virtue language, considerateness hardly ever appears on philosophical agendas. When discussed in academia, its meaning seems fuzzy and unclear. This article makes amends for this gap by subjecting considerateness to conceptual scrutiny. The author argues that considerateness designates a cluster concept, encompassi…
Finding consensus on well-being in education
Research on well-being and concern over the well-being of students and teachers has grown dramatically in recent years. Researchers and reformers in positive psychology and education, self-determination theory, social and emotional learning, liberal-democratic political and educational philosophy, and neo-Aristotelian theories of flourishing and character education have played formative and intersecting roles in what is now an international movem…
Phronesis as moral decathlon
Phronesis or practical wisdom–Aristotle’s intellectual meta-virtue of discernment, deliberation, and arbitration–is undergoing a revival. Yet phronesis enthusiasts have recently been experiencing blowback both from philosophers and psychologists who think that phronesis has been given an inflated role in recent theorizing and that the functions it is meant to perform can more readily and parsimoniously be accorded to less complex–and better resea…
Exploring religious education teachers’ perspectives on character development and moral virtues, in state-funded, non-faith schools in England
This article details the findings of a qualitative interview study with 30 Religious Education [RE] teachers, working in state-funded, non-faith secondary schools in England. Salient findings included participants’ almost unanimous agreement about the role of RE in developing character, virtue literacy, and moral, intellectual and performance virtues. Whilst there was general agreement that RE contributes to educating moral virtues, participants …
Virtues as protective factors for adolescent mental health
This paper explores the decline in adolescent mental health and the weakening of traditional moral frameworks, positing education in the virtues as protective of mental health due to the intrinsic link between moral/existential wellbeing and psychological health. By integrating character education into school curricula, a continuous "dosage" of moral guidance may be an optimal way to ensure a gradual and ever-clearer articulation of a life worth …
The proper scope of education for flourishing
The concept of flourishing has recently come into vogue within various areas of the humanities and social sciences (e.g. philosophy, psychology, economics, health, education). This article focuses on its potential role within education, where the retrieval of flourishing has perhaps been most visible of all the recent areas of interest, setting in motion what some have called a ‘flourishing bandwagon’. This bandwagon has blazed a trail for the so…
Phronesis
A diverse bandwagon of academics is working with and celebrating the notion of phronesis, or 'practical wisdom', as a metacognitive capacity, guiding morally aspirational cognition and action. However, this new phronesis discourse is characterized by frequently unrecognized tensions, lacunae, and ambivalences. The book has five main aims: (1) to set the recently surging interest in phronesis (practical wisdom) in Psychology, Philosophy, Professio…
Assessing structure and level of virtue in the Chinese “Code” for moral education
Phrónesis, metaemociones y educación del carácter
Pese al reciente interés en la phrónesis (‘sabiduría práctica’) y a la creación de un modelo de cuatro componentes para desentrañar su naturaleza, todavía quedan por resolver algunos interrogantes (filosóficos, psicológicos y educativos) sobre estos últimos, principalmente con el propuesto sobre la «regulación de las emociones». Este artículo plantea cuatro interrogantes pendientes sobre este componente y ofrece una breve descripción de posibles …
Moral Reasoning Strategies and Wise Career Decision Making at School and University
Ofsted requires UK schools to help students understand the working world and gain employability skills. However, the aims of education are much broader: Education should enable flourishing long after leaving school. Therefore, students’ career decisions should be conducive to long-term flourishing beyond career readiness and educational attainment. In this mixed-methods study, we asked a representative sample of UK adults to reflect on their care…
Reason and intuition in Aristotle's moral psychology
This paper is about the interplay between intuition and reason in Aristotle’s moral psychology. After discussing briefly some other uses of ‘intuition’ in Aristotle’s texts, I look closely at (a) Aristotle’s notion of virtue and emotion (Section 2); (b) affinities, or lack thereof, between Aristotle’s view and the Two-System (dual-process) model of moral judgement that has made headlines in contemporary moral psychology (Section 3); and some comp…
The Need for Phronesis
This chapter explores the state of public and academic discourse about socio-moral issues elicited by the Covid-19 pandemic, through two informal case studies of Facebook statuses and columns in two leading UK newspapers. The Facebook statuses tended to focus on performance virtues as remedies rather than moral virtues, whereas a survey among the general public highlighted the role of moral virtues. Divisions of opinion among columnists in the Gu…
Justifying Emotions
Dedication, Contents, Preface, Chapter 1. Mapping out the Field: 1.1 Introduction, 1.2 Cognitive theories and their precursors, 1.3 Taking stock: some critical comments on cognitivism 1.4 Preliminary remarks on responsibility, moral justification, and the higher emotions. Chapter 2. Justifying Emotions: The Need for Moral Theory: 2.1 Human Nature as the foundation of moral theory 2.2 The shortcomings of virtue ethics: moral and emotional conflict…
Ten Myths About Character, Virtue and Virtue Education – Plus Three Well-Founded Misgivings
Initiatives to cultivate character and virtue in moral education at school continue to provoke sceptical responses. Most of those echo familiar misgivings about the notions of character, virtue and education in virtue – as unclear, redundant, old-fashioned, religious, paternalistic, anti-democratic, conservative, individualistic, relative and situation dependent. I expose those misgivings as ‘myths’, while at the same time acknowledging three bet…
Sustainability, virtue ethics, and the virtue of harmony with nature
This article argues that the dominant sustainable development approach fails to acknowledge the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of social and environmental issues, and that sustainability requires a ‘transformational’ approach, involving a fundamental change in how humans relate to each other and to nature. The authors propose that virtue ethics, grounded in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, provides a framework with which to tackle such a …
Smoothing It
A kind of ‘neo‐Aristotelianism’ that connects educational reasoning and reflection to phronesis, and education itself to praxis, has gained considerable following in recent educational discourse. The author identifies four cardinal claims of this phronesis‐praxis perspective: that a) Aristotle's epistemology and methodology imply a stance that is essentially, with regard to practical philosophy, anti‐method and anti‐theory; b) ‘producing’, under …
On the Very Idea of “Negative Emotions”
As attention has shifted towards the emotions in general, the notion of so‐called negative emotions has come in for renewed interest. The author explores this notion and argues that its invocation cannot be done without cost to our understanding since it obscures all sorts of relevant complexities. There are thus no emotions around to which we can helpfully refer collectively as “negative,” although there are of course painful emotions, emotions …
Is There Something Wrong with `Free Action
This article gives an overview of traditional accounts of social freedom (`negative' and `positive') as noninterference with action, and defends their conceptual common ground against recent attacks. Philip Pettit claims that freedom would be better understood as antipower than noninterference. However, it is so far from being the case that accounts of freedom as noninterference and as antipower are necessarily antithetical, that they can in fact…
Ten un‐Aristotelian reasons for the instability of Aristotelian character friendships
Aristotle claims that friendship of the highest kind – ‘character friendship’ – is stable and enduring, once established. He is sensitive to one limitation placed upon such friendships: that, owing to their extreme closeness, devotion and intimacy, they can only be actualised with a small number of people. However, Aristotle is otherwise surprisingly cavalier about the formation and sustaining of character friendship, as if those are relatively u…
An Aristotelian Virtue of Gratitude
Can We Teach Justified Anger
The question of whether there is such a thing as teachable justified anger encompasses three distinct questions: (1) the psychological question of whether the emotions in general, and anger in particular, are regulatable; (2) the moral question of whether anger can ever be morally justified; and (3) the educational question of whether we have any sound methods at our disposal for teaching justified anger. In this paper I weave Aristotelian respon…
Reconsidering the ‘Ten Myths’ about Character Education
Is character education flawed as an approach to values education? A 2013 article answered that question in the negative and defused ten common objections against character education as ‘myths’. The aim of the present article is to revisit those objections and consider the evidence that has accumulated since 2013. After a brief historical and conceptual rehearsal, the core section of the article is taken up with reminders of the original arguments…
The proper scope of education for flourishing
The concept of flourishing has recently come into vogue within various areas of the humanities and social sciences (e.g. philosophy, psychology, economics, health, education). This article focuses on its potential role within education, where the retrieval of flourishing has perhaps been most visible of all the recent areas of interest, setting in motion what some have called a ‘flourishing bandwagon’. This bandwagon has blazed a trail for the so…
Phronesis
A diverse bandwagon of academics is working with and celebrating the notion of phronesis, or 'practical wisdom', as a metacognitive capacity, guiding morally aspirational cognition and action. However, this new phronesis discourse is characterized by frequently unrecognized tensions, lacunae, and ambivalences. The book has five main aims: (1) to set the recently surging interest in phronesis (practical wisdom) in Psychology, Philosophy, Professio…
Friendship for Virtue
Voluminous bodies of literature continue to be published on Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics within philosophy and social science. No less than two of the ten books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are devoted to the topic of friendship, in particular its ‘complete’ or most developed type as ‘friendship for character or virtue’. Yet the salience accorded to friendship within the current virtue ethics literature is not proportionate to the import…
Adolescent moral judgement
Despite a recent world‐wide upsurge of academic interest in moral and character education, little is known about pupils’ character development in schools, especially in the UK context. The authors used a version of the Intermediate Concept Measure for Adolescents, involving dilemmas, to assess an important component of character—moral judgement—among 4053 pupils aged 14–15. Data were generated in 33 UK schools of varying types between February 20…
Is Shame an Ugly Emotion? Four Discourses—Two Contrasting Interpretations for Moral Education
Justified Self-Esteem
This paper develops a thread of argument from previous contributions to this journal by Richard Smith and Ruth Cigman about the educational salience of self-esteem. It is argued - contra Smith and Cigman - that the social science conception of self-esteem does serve a useful educational function, most importantly in undermining the inflated self-help conception of self-esteem that has commonly been transposed to the educational arena. Recent find…
Measuring Self‐Respect
Can “self‐respect” supplant the now much‐maligned “global self‐esteem” in psychological research and therapy? The aim of the present paper is to examine this suggestion and develop it further. It is argued that there are two distinct philosophical concepts of self‐respect abroad in the literature, Kantian and Aristotelian, between which psychologists need to choose. The main components of Aristotelian self‐respect are then worked out. The paper c…
Virtues as protective factors for adolescent mental health
This paper explores the decline in adolescent mental health and the weakening of traditional moral frameworks, positing education in the virtues as protective of mental health due to the intrinsic link between moral/existential wellbeing and psychological health. By integrating character education into school curricula, a continuous "dosage" of moral guidance may be an optimal way to ensure a gradual and ever-clearer articulation of a life worth …
Adolescents’ application of the virtues across five cultural contexts
Little is known about adolescent applications of the virtues such as honesty, responsibility and courage across different cultural contexts. Using the Adolescent Intermediate Concepts Measure we analyze samples of adolescents (ages 12 to 20; N = 9,112) from 5 contexts: North Macedonia, Mexico, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across samples, adolescents provide evidence of developmental growth in the ability to apply virtue conc…
Facilitation of a Person-Centered Approach in Health Assessment of patients with chronic pain
A phenomenologically derived assessment tool, Hermes, was developed in a rehabilitation setting for adopting the central ideals of person-centered care and patient participation into health-assessment practices in nursing. This focused ethnographic study aimed at exploring the feasibility of using Hermes for enabling the application of these ideals into assessment of patients with chronic pain upon admission to a rehabilitation center. Participan…
Shining light into dark shadows of violence and learned helplessness
The paper illustrates how a culture of violence is perpetuated and reproduced in South Korea through schooling and argues that peace education could help transform a culture of violence to a culture of peace. Critical ethnographic methods and a framework of peace education were applied to a sample of secondary schools in South Korea to argue that a disturbing culture of violence and learned helplessness were present; this comprises themes of dire…
There is Something About Aristotle
The aim of this article is to pinpoint some of the features that do-or should-make Aristotelianism attractive to current moral educators.At the same time, it also identifies theoretical and practical shortcomings that contemporary Aristotelians have been overly cavalier about.Section II presents a brisk tour of ten of the 'pros': features that are attractive because they accommodate certain powerful and prevailing assumptions in current moral phi…
Emotion Education without Ontological Commitment
In Defence of ‘Non–Expansive’ Character Education
I first put the notion of non-expansive character education in context by locating its place within recent trends in values education and, in particular, by distinguishing it from more expansive accounts such as civic education and critical postmodernism. I argue that the essential characteristics of non-expansive character education are, on the one hand, moral cosmopolitanism and, on the other, methodological substantivism. In the second part of…
Twenty‐two testable hypotheses about phronesis
The concept of phronesis enters educational discourse at various levels of engagement, and it continues to fascinate and frustrate educational theorists in equal measure. This article begins by charting the vagaries of three educational discourses on phronesis, and by eliciting insights from the recently burgeoning wisdom research within psychology. Mindful of the fact that making progress in the educational study of phronesis is not only a conce…
Seeking the Common Good in Education Through a Positive Conception of Social Justice
Many Faculties of Education in the UK and elsewhere have ‘social justice’ written into their mission statements. But are they concerned by questions of social justice in education, or has the term become somewhat vacuous and devoid of substantive meaning? The present article subjects recent discourses about social justice in education to scrutiny and finds them wanting in various respects, in particular when juxtaposed with historical accounts of…
What Is Wrong with Positive Liberty
Social Freedom
When is it correct to say that a person's freedom is restricted? Can poverty constrain freedom? Can you constrain your own freedom, for instance through weakness of the will or self-deception, and are you not truly free unless you act on a rational choice? Kristján Kristjánsson offers a critical analysis of the main components of a theory of negative liberty: the nature of obstacles and constraints, the weight of obstacles and the relation of fre…
Self‐respect, Megalopsychia, and Moral Education
Self‐respect is widely and rightly considered an important value in moral education. There seems at first sight less agreement on what exactly constitutes self‐respect. However, I show that once terminological differences have been set aside, there emerges a substantial concordance of opinion in philosophical circles on the specification of this concept. Unfortunately, this common specification is marred by two major shortcomings. I argue that bo…
Reply to Pettit and Norman
Is There Something Wrong with `Free Action
This article gives an overview of traditional accounts of social freedom (`negative' and `positive') as noninterference with action, and defends their conceptual common ground against recent attacks. Philip Pettit claims that freedom would be better understood as antipower than noninterference. However, it is so far from being the case that accounts of freedom as noninterference and as antipower are necessarily antithetical, that they can in fact…
Social Freedom
Pridefulness
In Defence of ‘Non–Expansive’ Character Education
I first put the notion of non-expansive character education in context by locating its place within recent trends in values education and, in particular, by distinguishing it from more expansive accounts such as civic education and critical postmodernism. I argue that the essential characteristics of non-expansive character education are, on the one hand, moral cosmopolitanism and, on the other, methodological substantivism. In the second part of…
Fortunes-of-Others Emotions and Justice
Despite the resurgent interest in the emotions, not much attention has focused specifically on those emotions that relate to others' deserved or undeserved fortunes. In this essay, I explore such emotions, logically and morally, with special emphasis on indignation and Schadenfreude. I argue that, when Aristotle's treatment of this family of emotions is stripped of certain anomalies, it gives a logically satisfying and morally suggestive, if perh…
Justice, Desert, and Virtue Revisited
On the Very Idea of “Negative Emotions”
As attention has shifted towards the emotions in general, the notion of so‐called negative emotions has come in for renewed interest. The author explores this notion and argues that its invocation cannot be done without cost to our understanding since it obscures all sorts of relevant complexities. There are thus no emotions around to which we can helpfully refer collectively as “negative,” although there are of course painful emotions, emotions …
Beyond Democratic Justice
This paper begins by rehearsing some commonly heard conservative and radical objections to the idea of citizenship education. I then explore another potentially radical objection, implicit in the tenets of 'character education' and 'socio-emotional learning' but rarely stated explicitly. According to this objection, citizenship education, with its overarching ideal of democratic justice, politicises values education beyond good reason by assuming…
Children and the Belief in a Just World
Can We Teach Justified Anger
The question of whether there is such a thing as teachable justified anger encompasses three distinct questions: (1) the psychological question of whether the emotions in general, and anger in particular, are regulatable; (2) the moral question of whether anger can ever be morally justified; and (3) the educational question of whether we have any sound methods at our disposal for teaching justified anger. In this paper I weave Aristotelian respon…
Smoothing It
A kind of ‘neo‐Aristotelianism’ that connects educational reasoning and reflection to phronesis, and education itself to praxis, has gained considerable following in recent educational discourse. The author identifies four cardinal claims of this phronesis‐praxis perspective: that a) Aristotle's epistemology and methodology imply a stance that is essentially, with regard to practical philosophy, anti‐method and anti‐theory; b) ‘producing’, under …
Agreeableness
Justified Self-Esteem
This paper develops a thread of argument from previous contributions to this journal by Richard Smith and Ruth Cigman about the educational salience of self-esteem. It is argued - contra Smith and Cigman - that the social science conception of self-esteem does serve a useful educational function, most importantly in undermining the inflated self-help conception of self-esteem that has commonly been transposed to the educational arena. Recent find…
Measuring Self‐Respect
Can “self‐respect” supplant the now much‐maligned “global self‐esteem” in psychological research and therapy? The aim of the present paper is to examine this suggestion and develop it further. It is argued that there are two distinct philosophical concepts of self‐respect abroad in the literature, Kantian and Aristotelian, between which psychologists need to choose. The main components of Aristotelian self‐respect are then worked out. The paper c…
Hiltonism, hedonism and the self
In her 2006 bestseller about the rise of ‘raunch culture’ and of such self-ascribed ‘Female Chauvinist Pigs’ as the tawdry socialite Paris Hilton, Ariel Levy describes these phenomena as being indicative of a drastic cultural shift. Serious concerns have been raised, most recently by the American Psychological Association, about the effects of this culture on young girls. Recent Web sources have coined a term for the self-concept embodied and pro…
Suicide bombings and the self
The failure to locate a unifying psychological profile of suicide bombers should prompt moves to a more extended and interdisciplinary front, availing itself of insights from disciplines such as sociology, philosophy and history of ideas, as well as from psychology. This paper aims in that direction by exploring ‘traditional’ versus ‘western liberal’ conceptions of the self, with special emphasis on their possible pathologies; and by integrating …
Does Moral Psychology Need Moral Theory
Much has been written lately about the issue of fence mending versus fence crossing between moral philosophy and experimental social science. I focus on a specific manifestation of this issue, as instantiated in the recent debate between moral psychologists and philosophers on how the former should react to the fall of Kohlbergianism. Is it perhaps advisable to react by focusing on “psychologized morality” rather than, as Kohlberg did, on “morali…
Response to Bruce Maxwell
Realist Versus Anti‐Realist Moral Selves—and the Irrelevance of Narrativism
This paper has three aims. The first is to subject to critical analysis the intractable debate between realists and anti‐realists about the status of the so‐called (moral) self, a debate that traverses various academic disciplines and discursive fields. Realism about selves has fallen on hard times of late, and the second aim of this paper is to get it back on track. Traditional substantive conceptions of the self contain ontological baggage that…
Social Freedom
Desert and Virtue
Epistemology (60 obras) · Sociology (59 obras) · Philosophy (56 obras) · Psychology (52 obras) · Social Psychology (38 obras) · Political science (29 obras) · Virtue (25 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Philosophy (24 obras) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (19 obras)