Covers the last century of the school’s activity, including lesser-known figures such as Euphrates, Hierocles, Cleomedes, Philopator and Aurelius Heraclides, as well as Marcus Aurelius. Emphasizes the amount of activity in physics and logic as well as in ethics.

The chapter is devoted to the work of Posidonius in all its aspects and argues that he created a second major synthesis of Stoic thought, expanding the school’s attention to the sciences and history while making innovations in logic, physics and ethics. Argues that Posidonius was a more conservative Stoic than is often thought.

The Elmhirsts emerged from the First World War feeling that orthodox Christianity was no longer adequate as a guide either to belief or to conduct. Like others of their era, they looked for new forms of spiritual meaning, a new guide to moral behaviour, new sources of affective or social fulfilment and different frameworks for understanding the nature of society as a whole. Collectively, this chapter terms these searches ‘socio-spiritual questing’. It considers four approaches taken at Dartington to filling the gap left by Christianity. The Elmhirsts tried re-shaping the Church with the help of the arts, explored the possibilities of Eastern spirituality, worked to advance humankind’s unity through group spiritual exploration and experimented with a planned regime of ‘psycho-physical hygiene’. Interwar socio-spiritual questing was so wide-ranging and amorphous that it defies comprehensive survey. Dartington Hall provides an alternative way of drawing together its various strands: an unusual convergence in a diffuse landscape of seeking.

Auden’s poetry and ideology were shaped by each era and circumstance in which he lived and worked and by those by whom he was surrounded. His early views on politics, religion, sexuality, and the importance of art, music, and poetry to society – all of which defined the poet as Britten knew him in the 1930s and early 1940s – underwent some form of revision thereafter, providing fodder for those critics who sought to conscript him to the turbulent period leading up to and including the Second World War, hailed by many as the ‘golden age’ of his poetry. In England, particularly, some scholars have posited that Auden’s rejection of his ‘age’ – and his country in 1939 – did damage to both his contemporary and posthumous reputations, going so far as to posit that he had squandered his opportunity to be considered that nation’s greatest poet of the twentieth century. As this chapter explores, Auden’s outlook on the varying matters that crept into his poetry was complex and often contradictory.

Democracies provide civic education in order to support young people as they emerge as responsible, well-informed and effective citizens. In this chapter, we critically assess the idea of civic efficacy as it pertains to young people in an era characterised by ongoing economic, political, social and environmental crises, as well as uncertainty, precarity and inequality. Civic education proposes an optimistic, progressive perspective at a time when young people may well be pessimistic about their future prospects and sceptical about the likelihood of positive political change. In this chapter, the authors explore ways in which young people make sense of the future through dystopic and pessimistic imaginaries. Drawing on comparative fieldwork in the UK and Greece to illustrate the concepts, we examine how the social construct of imaginaries can inform our concept of the role young people play in contemporary democracies in crisis. We argue that civic education, and democracy more widely, can empower young people during times of crisis through a new civic approach that accommodates critical – and sceptical – thinking among young people, and supports a wider repertoire of young people’s civic and political action.

Democracy is under attack. Whether from those within its systems who seek to gain at the expense of others, or from without by rival forms of rule. Yet the crises we face as a species demand not only that we recognise the perils of a changing planet, but that we address them together. Democracy may imply an imperfect form of government, but its purported advantages lie in seeking to give voice to all people, political parties and perspectives, in hopes that the common good is served and citizens not only represented, but respected. The challenge of a pandemic, finding nations divided in their responses, underlines the pressing need for a genuine understanding of what democracy can and does deliver. This necessitates a clearer focus on our own roles as citizens – and thereby politicians in our daily lives – and on occupational politicians, as well as the political institutions and influences that shape our experiences of democracy. In opening ‘Psychology of Democracy: Of the people, by the people, for the people’, the editor points to the power of harnessing multidisciplinary and cutting-edge knowledge from psychology, political and allied social sciences. The opening chapter maps out the design and potential impact of the book, examining the psychology ‘of the people’ who are elected, the political institutions and processes created ‘by the people’ and the influences from broader societies that shape the context of democracy ‘for the people’. Its message is clear: the future is ours if we can better harness all human talents.

In Chapter 10, I discuss the moral context of research interpretation and reporting. I describe interpretation as the constitution of evidence within an epistemic frame characterized by the totality of (always at least partly moral) commitments underlying analytic choices. These analytic choices include those concerning what is worthy of study, what kinds of methods and forms of evidence are considered acceptable, and what kinds of claims are warrantable. I also emphasize the ways that evidence is not merely gathered nor reported, but constituted within a rhetorical and political context. In the latter half of the chapter, I discuss the moral affordances of research reporting, focusing on questions of fairness, honesty, representation, and other considerations involved in report authoring. I focus specifically on questions of: collaboration and credit; style and representation; venue, availability, and audience; submission, editorial, and revision; and the dissemination and use of research reports.

In Chapter 4, I draw on social science, historical, and philosophical studies of science to describe the everyday activities involved in science. I characterize the core scientific task as the production of accounts which legitimate, organize and mobilize scientific labor. These accounts are shaped by a complex network of social constraints and processes. Through the main body of the chapter, I describe some of these constraints and processes, including those cultural and political (e.g., national funding priorities), professional and disciplinary (e.g., disciplinary norms concerning methods, equipment, writing conventions, etc.), institutional (e.g., managing the requirements of bureaucracies and budgets), local and interpersonal (e.g., lab politics and professional rivalries), and dispositional and personal (e.g., personal talents and capacities for science work). I argue that these various social constraints and processes constitute the moral geography of science and that to navigate them well and responsibly is the substance of good science.

In Chapter 3, I discuss scientific instrumentalism, or the notion that scientific findings are morally neutral and that scientific activities are justified primarily in terms of their pragmatic utility. I argue that an instrumentalist approach to psychology disguises the moral and political agendas of those who deploy psychological research, conflating these with a neutralist account of “what works.” I provide a broad historical sketch of those for whom psychology has worked – primarily, large institutions – and of those for whom psychology has not worked – principally, those in disenfranchised social positions. I detail some of the most egregious examples of harm, exploitation, and injustice in the history of psychology, providing a general analysis of the ways that psychologists have encoded racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice under seemingly neutral categories like intelligence. Concluding Part I, I outline how scientism, objectivism, and instrumentalism combine to undermine the moral responsiveness of psychology.

In Chapter 11, I summarize the book as a whole, arguing that the dilemmas, decisions, relational and institutional commitments, and other moral considerations described here are the essence of good science. I also argue that, because a social and moral account of science does not ignore or hide the human and moral contexts of research, it subjects scientific claims to a more rigorous scrutiny than does an objectivist account and so strengthens the warrant for those claims. Finally, I discuss how the account offered in this book impacts everyday psychological practice, acknowledging the inevitably local and contextual ways that a moral accounting of psychology might be realized within specific research communities. This caveat notwithstanding, I suggest that anyone could begin by asking, in their own communities, the kinds of questions posed here as well as by participating in an epistemic activism aimed at transforming disciplinary structures and practices.

In Chapter 5, I extend the social and moral account of scientific work with a similarly social and moral account of scientific justification. My argument is that scientific justification should consist, not simply in the construction of evidentiary rationales, but in the refinement of the whole moral architecture of science. I insist that the “core competency” in training and oversight for psychological inquiry should be the justification – that is, the making just, right, and true – of research practices. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Helen Longino (among others), I argue that two forms of practice essential to such justification are an open disciplinary politics, or an institutionalized openness to uncertainty, critique, and correction by the widest possible range of qualified contributors, and a committed research praxis, or an approach to research where everyday scientific practices are interrogated and refined to become consistent with explicit values.

In Chapter 8, I discuss some of the most salient moral questions, dilemmas, and duties involved in choosing a research community (and conversation) in which to participate. Conducting research in some area, I argue, is not so much a solitary domain choice as a process of becoming socialized to a particular community and to its values, languages, traditions, institutions, and ways of thinking, writing, and working. In some measure, this also means becoming responsible for those traditions and values. I also discuss the ways that participating in a research community involves building the relationships of trust and good faith upon which all science rests, a relational process requiring honesty, the nurturing of cooperative relationships, and other duties. I also emphasize the political, institutional, and economic forces that structure research communities and the necessity of active epistemic citizenship to transform these in ways that serve the collective values of those communities.

In Chapter 7, I describe a committed research praxis where scientists strive to articulate the community-level value commitments that define good science, and to evaluate the degree to which particular scientific activities and products reflect those commitments. I argue that one primary way for psychologists to engage in this sort of committed praxis is by asking questions together in a place. That is, we can subject our work to insistent moral attention through collective and locally situated forms of reflection and responsibility. I suggest that these forms could include reflexivity, transparency, participatory and community-oriented research practices, political, historical, and material analyses of our research traditions and products, resistance to overgeneralized and “scaled” forms of neo-liberal management, and other practices that help anchor research work to the local and communal commitments that justify it.

In Chapter 1, I discuss scientism, or the belief that scientific knowledge is the most (or only) legitimate form of knowledge. My argument is that scientism mischaracterizes science as an epistemically privileged and unified method. Actual scientific practice, however, has demonstrated tremendous variability in theory and method across time, place, and disciplinary context, and can best be understood as a historically contingent human activity. Drawing on historical and philosophical critiques, I characterize scientism as a kind of science fundamentalism that insulates scientists from social and moral critique and so contributes to the institutionalization of exceptionalism and privilege. I discuss elements of scientism in professional psychology, using historical and contemporary examples to show that it is a common (perhaps even a majority) position.

Aristotle's De Anima discusses the psychological causes of what he calls locomotion – i.e, roughly, purpose-driven behavior. One cause is desire. The other is cognition, which falls into two kinds: thought (nous) and imagination (phantasia). Aristotle’s discussion is dense and confusing, but I argue that we can extract from it an account that is coherent, compelling, and that in many ways closely anticipates modern psychological theories, in particular Dual Processing theory. Animals and humans are driven to pursue objects that attract us. Objects take on that power when we cognize them as valuable. If we rely on imagistic, automatic, uncontrolled processing mechanisms – Aristotle’s phantasia, which closely anticipates the modern notion of Type 1 processing – our resulting desires and actions will be impulsive. If we rely instead on rational, critical, deliberative capacities – Aristotle’s thought, which closely anticipates the modern notion of Type 2 processing – our resulting desires and actions will be reflective. Animals are capable only of the first kind of behavior; the human psyche is constituted of an animal psyche united with an intellectual one, so we are capable of both.

In Chapter 9, I outline some of the most important moral considerations involved in the design and conduct of research. I first discuss research funding, emphasizing conflicts between resource limitations and epistemic and moral values. I then discuss research space considerations, framing these in terms of dwelling practices that express our commitments (to hospitality, conservation, etc.) and that shape our communities and environments. Next, I discuss the moral affordances of research equipment, arguing that such equipment is not just a set of neutral tools but a way of extending and transforming our individual and collective embodiment. I then discuss how organizing research entails a moral ordering (of priorities and persons) set amid a micro-politics of local power relationships. Finally, I discuss some of the moral dilemmas involved in soliciting and managing research participation, focusing on the duties to cultivate the choice, voice, and safety of all who participate in research.

In Chapter 6, I discuss the practices conducive to an open disciplinary politics. I critique rhetorics of certainty in science (and psychology), characterizing these as dogmatic and antithetical to good science, and contrasting them with the humility, skepticism, and openness required for healthy scientific inquiry. My claim is that such openness can only occur when the broadest possible range of qualified contributors have equal standing to challenge scientific claims and practices, particularly those reflective of historical and structural inequalities. I discuss some practices conducive to such openness, focusing on recommendations from decolonizing and feminist traditions, including the centering of historical and cultural critiques of science and the privileging of marginalized and oppressed perspectives in publishing, governance, and hiring decisions. Practices like these, I argue, are integral to an open disciplinary politics, but they only become possible through active epistemic citizenship aimed at transforming disciplinary structures and practices.