While some of Paulo Freire's readers understand his pedagogy as a rejection of any and all directive teaching methods, there are many scholars who do recognise Freire's emphasis on teacher directiveness in its appropriate form. In light of this tension between directiveness and dialogue, it seems that students of Freire must inevitably come to a crossroads: is Freire's pedagogy directive or is it not? However, even this question does not get at the more critical dilemma: if Freire's pedagogy is directive, (...) is such directiveness incompatible with Freire's overwhelming emphasis on egalitarian dialogue? This paper establishes three readings of the issue of directiveness in Freire and ultimately provides an exegetical defence of what is termed the compatibilist reading—that directive teaching, properly construed, is compatible with dialogic teaching in Freirean pedagogy. The question this paper seeks to answer is how Freire can have it both ways. In sum, Freire undeniably supports teacher directiveness and philosophically justifies directiveness as compatible with problem-posing education through his concepts of virtue education, utopia and criticality. (shrink)

From the late eighteenth through the end of the nineteenth century, educational philosophers and practitioners debated the benefits and shortcomings of the use of emulation in schools. During this period, “emulation” referred to a pedagogy that leveraged comparisons between students as a tool to motivate them to higher achievement. Many educationists praised emulation as a necessary and effective motivator. Other educationists condemned it for its tendency to foster invidious competition between students and to devalue learning. Ultimately, by the late nineteenth (...) century emulation as a specific pedagogical practice had disappeared in American educational culture. In this article, Mark Jonas and Drew Chambers ask whether the disappearance of emulation is something to be celebrated or lamented. To answer this question they examine the historical concept of educational emulation and analyze the bases on which proponents and opponents argued. Parties on both sides of the debate framed their arguments in close relation to the way emulation was being used at that time, which prioritized actual competitions and prizes. In that context, the opponents made a better case, which presumably contributed to emulation's disappearance in schools afterwards. However, as earlier proponents of emulation argued, emulation need not be restricted to competitions and prizes. Instead, these proponents offered a philosophically and psychologically rich defense of emulation, but these were not carried through to an appropriate degree. The authors conclude that, construed appropriately, emulation not only had tremendous educational potential then, but still does today. With intentional effort on the part of teachers, emulation can greatly enrich students' lives and act as a powerful learning motivator. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 3, Page 371-388, June 2021.

Higher education is seeing renewed calls for strengthening ethics education, yet there remains a dearth of research on the state of ethics education across undergraduate curricula. Research about ethics in higher education tends to be localized and often isolated to fields of graduate study. In contribution to a contemporary, landscape understanding of ethics education, we collected data on the placement and prevalence of ethics instruction within the general education curricula at 507 major U.S. colleges and universities. Our findings suggest that (...) 1) most schools in our study’s population do not explicitly require ethics as a part of their general education curricula; and 2) a school’s religiosity and research status are positively associated with explicitly requiring ethics instruction for its undergraduate student body. (shrink)

The extensive community use of complementary medicine can no longer be overlooked in the practice of hospital medicine. Protocols need to be developed and implemented so that health professionals can deal with the issues surrounding the use of CM. Policy development has generally focussed on the supply of CM in hospital but another approach, which is based on consideration of the ethical and legal context, is presented here. Such an approach demands clarification of institutional policy for individuals who are competent (...) and those who are incapable of self-administration or non-competent. (shrink)

Building the Moral Community is an exploration of naturalistic ethics, offering a modified classical analytic philosophy exploration of morality that is consistent with emerging thinking in psychology, neurobiology, game theory, and self-adjusting systems.

Corresponding correlations is a method that allows us to infer formal causation from correlational data. In this paper, causal terms are traced to their philosophical and etymological roots. It is argued that causes are parts of their mutual whole . Nominalism, normal distributions and disjunctive causes are linked. Causal manifolds and sampling by potential are used to model conjunctive causes. Corresponding correlations are then demonstrated through simulations, in which causal relations are differentiated from spurious correlations. An algebraic method for unraveling (...) confounded variables is presented. Distinctions between laws and causes are made and related to corresponding correlations. The conclusion is that corresponding correlations should be a significant advance in causal inference. (shrink)

A beautiful gift edition of the supernatural horror cult classic that inspired H.P. Lovecraft and the HBO hit series True Detective The weird tales in this slim volume are all linked by a play, the second act of which reveals truths so terrible and beautiful that it drives all who read it to despair: The King in Yellow. These four macabre, uncanny and unsettling stories are some of the most thrilling ever written in the field of weird fiction, and since (...) their first publication in 1895 have become a cult classic, influencing many writers from the renowned master of cosmic horror H.P Lovecraft to the creators of HBO's True Detective. (shrink)

Current empirical studies of moral behavior of healthcare professionals are almost entirely focused on self-reports, usually collected under the assumption that an ethical disposition characterizes individuals across various contexts. It is well known, however, that individuals adjust their behavior to what they see being done by those in their peer group. That presents a methodological challenge to traditional research within a community of peers because the behavior of each individual is both the result of norms and a contributor to the (...) norms of others. Computer simulations can be used to address this methodological challenge. A Markov replicator model that runs on an Excel spreadsheet was used to investigate a community with four agent types in the dental community: devious practitioners, ethical practitioners who avoid involvement in the poor ethics of others, ethical practitioners who accept it as part of their professional responsibility to challenge colleagues who act unprofessionally, and those who enforce ethical standards. A panel of leaders in the profession independently estimated parameters for the model and criteria for a possible distribution of agent types in the community. The simulation converged on distributions of the agent types that were very similar to the expectations of the panel. The simulation suggests the following characteristics of such moral communities: The structure of such communities is robust across a wide distribution. It appears that reduction in unethical behavior is more sensitive to the way ethical practitioners interact with each other than to sanctions the enforcement community imposes on unethical practitioners, and that large external interventions will be short lived. (shrink)

Despite its several variations, the central position of equipoise is that subjects in clinical experiments should not be randomized to conditions when others believe that better alternatives exist. This position has been challenged over issues of which group in the medical or research community is authorized to make that determination, and it has been argued that informed consent provides sufficient ethical protection for participants independent of equipoise. In this paper I frame ethical participation in clinical research as a two-party decision (...) process involving offering and accepting participation under informed consent. Nine conditions are identified in which it is possible that potential participants and researchers or care professionals can rationally choose divergent actions based on identical understandings of the situation. Under such circumstances, researchers or care professionals cannot ethically substitute their understanding of equipoise in the situation for the patients’ choices, or vice versa. (shrink)

This volume explores how Catholicism began and continues to open its doors to the wider world and to other confessions in embracing ecumenism, thanks to the vision and legacy of the Second Vatican Council. It explores such themes as the twentieth century context preceding the council; parallels between Vatican II and previous councils; its distinctively pastoral character; the legacy of the council in relation to issues such as church-world dynamics, as well as to ethics, social justice, economic activity. Several chapters (...) discuss the role of women in the church before, during, and since the council. Others discern inculturation in relation to Vatican II. The book also contains a wide and original range of ecumenical considerations of the council, including by and in relation to Free Church, Reformed, Orthodox, and Anglican perspectives. Finally, it considers the Council’s ongoing promise and remaining challenges with regard to ecumenical issues, including a groundbreaking essay on the future of ecumenical dialogue by Cardinal Walter Kasper. (shrink)

According to Quentin Meillassoux, one of the principal aims of speculative philosophy “must be the immanent inscription of values in being.” In this regard, the return to speculation in contemporary philosophy is in many ways a deeply ethical project. This “inscription of values” can only be successful, however, if it can somehow assert an absolute ethical value without, on the one hand, resorting to the kind of dogmatism laid to rest by the Kantian critique; or, on the other, by falling (...) into some form of ethical relativism incapable of grounding universal ethical judgments. Unfortunately, too many of these attempts have failed. The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to explore the structure and failures of two such attempts through an analysis of the ethical projects of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, respectively; and then, secondly, to show how both of these thinkers, and the project of speculative ethics in general, could benefit by turning to the work of F.W.J. Schelling on the concept of good and evil as absolute ethical values. (shrink)

W.K.C. Guthrie has written a survey of the great age of Greek philosophy - from Thales to Aristotle - which combines comprehensiveness with brevity. Without pre-supposing a knowledge of Greek or the Classics, he sets out to explain the ideas of Plato and Aristotle in the light of their predecessors rather than their successors, and to describe the characteristic features of the Greek way of thinking and outlook on the world. Thus The Greek Philosophers provides excellent background material for the (...) general reader - as well as providing a firm basis for specialist studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Beautiful Soul:From Hegel to BeckettDrew Milne (bio)The "beautiful soul," lacking an actual existence, entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself and change itself into an actual existence, and dwelling in the immediacy of this firmly held antithesis—an immediacy which alone is the middle term reconciling the antithesis, which has been intensified to its pure abstraction, and is pure (...) being or empty nothingness—this "beautiful soul," then, being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is disordered to the point of madness, wastes itself in yearning and pines away in consumption.—G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of SpiritThe figure of the beautiful soul marks out a limit of representation. Its persistence is that of a literary fiction which cannot be actualized, but whose imaginative lure is no less powerful for being so resistant to embodiment. The beautiful soul emerges in a shift from philosophical reflections on moral beauty into the romantic novel, but for Robert E. Norton, the history of the beautiful soul is brought to a close by Hegel [139]. Nevertheless, the way this figure stands between philosophy and literature, and between moral agency and the literary imagination, casts shadows over contemporary thought. Unreconciled immediacy, disordered by consciousness of its contradiction and proximity to pure abstraction, becomes the sign of modern art, perhaps most explicitly in the writings of Samuel Beckett. In The Broken Middle, Gillian Rose projects the beautiful soul out of Hegel and Goethe into a speculative account of modern thought's ethical equivocations. For Allen Speight, Hegel's recourse to the awkward literary and novelistic status of the beautiful soul reveals how "inescapable questions discernible in the products of modern literary artists are ones that concern the account we give of our freedom as modern agents" [135]. This essay seeks to unravel some of the contemporary relevance of the beautiful soul, exploring the instability of this figure as a mediation between philosophy and literature, in particular as a tension in the interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.The difficulties posed by the beautiful soul for interpreting Hegel can be gleaned from Terry Pinkard's impressively lucid survey German Philosophy, 1760-1860. Pinkard notes how Hegel's discussion of the beautiful soul in the Phenomenology of Spirit "makes oblique reference to Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte, Fries, Novalis, perhaps Rousseau, and maybe even Hölderlin" [240n19] before ascribing centrality in Hegel's discussion to Jacobi's novel Waldemar. Oblique reference folds into a structure whose indeterminacy concerns both the freedom claimed by literary representations of the beautiful soul, and the inability of this freedom to amount to more than a confession of conceptual paralysis or impotence. The beautiful soul proves resistant to interpretation, a literary-philosophical compound that destabilizes conventions of referentiality. The beautiful soul threatens to dissolve philosophy from the perspective of an inward delicacy of moral feeling, claiming [End Page 63] [Begin Page 65] the authenticity of a subjectivity that will do no wrong and knows no other as an object on which to act. Philosophical interpretations are often too brusque with the reflexive irony through which the beautiful soul is represented, or insufficiently literal-minded to capture its content as form. In turn, the self-critical claims of literary representation often dissolve into an ironic indifference to determinate consequences.The beautiful soul, however, can hardly be said to have existed outside its representation in writing. It recurs in manifold guises more as an aspiration to be, or appear, morally sensitive but incapable of action. Donald Phillip Verene sketches its background in the Romantic movement but suggests that: "The beautiful soul is not difficult to understand, as Hegel sketches it in the several pages he devotes to it. We are familiar in ordinary experience with types of persons that approximate to the stance of the beautiful soul, that is, if we keep polite company and associate from time to time with delicate people" [100-01]. Anyone who has spent time with aesthetes or poets who claim a delicacy of moral insight without feeling the need of justification or labor to actualize their insights knows the ills this shape of... (shrink)

There is an apparent contradiction within Levinas’s work: on the one hand, Levinas upholds an account of existence that seemingly requires a creation narrative, while maintaining, on the other hand, that an account of the ethical import of that existence needs no recourse to the divine. This seeming contradiction results from a fundamental misunderstanding concerning Levinas’s account of creation and its logical consequences concerning the divine. This paper aims to clarify this misunderstanding by exploring the similarities between and influence of (...) F. W. J. Schelling’s work on Levinas’s thereby providing a more complete picture of both author’s respective accounts of genesis and the existence of God. (shrink)

Plato's views on the nature of the soul, by W.K.C. Guthrie.--Die Erneuerung der Philosophie in der Zeit Ciceros, von O. Gigon.--Gott und Seele im kaiserzeitlichen Denken, von W. Theiler.--Interprétations néo-platonisantes du livre VI de l'Énéide, par P. Courcelle.--Der Platonismus und die altchristliche Gedankenwelt, von J.H. Waszink.--Humanisme et christianisme chez Clément d'Alexandrie d'après le "Pédagogue," par H.I. Marrou.--Some aspects of Platonism in Islamic philosophy, by R. Walzer.

Identification of those who have the potential to become knowledgeable, skilled, and compassionate physicians, and determining how best to prepare them for medical education has been an on ongoing challenge since the mid-1800s (Ludmerer 1985). When medical education was almost exclusively proprietary, the primary consideration for admission was having adequate financial resources. However, in the late 1800s, two men became the driving forces for structuring medical and premedical education in the United States. Daniel Coit Gilman, of Yale and the University (...) of California, later the founding President of Johns Hopkins University, and Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard, articulated two radical objectives that .. (shrink)

Teodor Adorno's work Philosophy and Teachers was first read as a report at the Frankfurt Studenthome in November 1961. In this report Adorno continued the topic of criticism of those factors of the then formation of West Germany, which made impossible a personal fight intellectual to with the cultural remnants of a totalitarian society. Adorno drew attention an exam in philosophy, important element of the educational process. This exam should pass composed of future teachers, candidates for the work of (...) the teacher of gymnasium. This exam should be composed by future teachers, candidates for the work of the teacher of gymnasium. Adorno noticed the tendency of formalistic adherence to the Rules of Examination by some future teachers who are unable to understand the humanistic, emancipatory and spiritual essence of philosophy, and therefore do not understand the purpose of conducting this exam. Adorno honored the long tradition of academic freedom of the German University and noticed the figure of the German philosopher, describing him as the man whose intellectual activity influenced the humanization of the German University, which directly influenced to the corresponding cultural transformations. But in post-war universities in the Federal Republic of Germany there is a trend to the principles of scientific knowledge. This tendency is coupled with the attitude of some future teachers to knowledge as appropriation to the consumer way, was due to the absence of personal love for their own specialty and to their students. Adorno was convinced that such teachers are indifferent to their specialty and do not have a calling to him. Adorno defined as a sign to the absence of calling in these people is intellectual negligence, provincial speech and provincial inability to understand human freedom as a spiritual value. Such teachers are incapable of offering new knowledge to their students by way of perfekt speech and by way of perfekt written presentation. As completely different Adorno offered to see a person who is capable to appropriation of the knowledge that is needed to understand hemseif and his professional obligation. This person can will use self-understand and self-reflection, and therefore she can will independently to understand of the sense of their pedagogical work. This person will be faithful and patient in carrying out his work for the practical introduction of humanistic ideals of prior philosophical knowledge into society. (shrink)