Martin Buber is considered one of the 20th centuryes greatest thinkers and his contributions to philosophy, theology and education are testimony to this. His thought is founded on the idea that people are capable of two kinds of relations, namely I-Thou and I-It, emphasising the centrality of dialogue in all spheres of human life. For this reason, Buber is considered by many to be the philosopher of dialogue par excellence. After Buberes death the appreciation of his considerable legacy to the (...) various disciplines in which he had worked became rather muted, but was never completely forgotten. There is now a renewed and growing interest in Buberes thought, especially in his philosophy of education. This book brings together aspects of Buberes philosophy and educational practice, and explains their significance for peace dialogue and for conflict resolution, both between individuals and communities. Buber's philosophy of dialogue and views on education are pivotal in demonstrating the personal and social benefits of dialogical education as well as the dangers of non-dialogical education. The book will be valuable reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in Martin Buber, education, peace dialogue and conflict resolution. (shrink)

From the beginning of history sounds have played a fundamentally important role in humanity’s development as ways of expression and of communication. However in contemporary western society, and indeed globally, we are experiencing an excess of speech and a relentless encouragement to expression. Such excess indicates a misunderstanding about what expression and dialogue should be. This condition encourages us to think about silence, solitude and contemplation and the role they might play in restoring the realm of personal understanding of the (...) Self and of one’s authentic experience of the Other. The purpose of this article is to explore the potency of a silence that arises from our participation in the world. We present first some ideas about silence as a human phenomenon. This is followed by an examination of silence and language, an investigation of silence in dialogue, and of its educational implications. The article concludes by emphasising the value of silence as potency in itself, assisting in recovering the expressive powers of language. We argue that it is important to understand the positive status of silence in order to recognise and avoid repressive speech and to introduce its potential for reflective learning. (shrink)

The article explores E.M. Forster’s story The Machine Stops as an example of dystopian literature and its possible associations with the use of technology and with today’s cyber culture. Dystopian societies are often characterized by dehumanization and Forster’s novel raises questions about how we live in time and space; and how we establish relationships with the Other and with the world through technology. We suggest that the fear of technology depicted in dystopian literature indicates a fear that machines are mimicking (...) the roles that humans already play in relational encounters. Our relationship with machines frequently suggests a classical “I-it” situation. However, a genuine dialogue is where there is no master and where communication and understanding are achieved through the encounter and through openness to difference and to change. The article examines the ways machines and automata are imagined and become part of lived human existence, in the light of Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and otherness. The problem seems to be how everyday technological interfaces can change the way we first perceive the world and the possibility that with certain types of mediation there is a loss of connection with the Other. It is argued that understanding dialogical conditions could help turn the relationship with technology into something more humane. Literature such as Forster’s is considered as an example of such a dialogical condition, suggesting ways of dealing with human dilemmas by exploring the field of possibilities. (shrink)

The article considers what is a philosophy and its relation to education. The modern academic development of philosophy has questioned the theoretical basis of specific aspects of knowledge and human experience, including education. It is an active rather than a passive or descriptive discipline. Education is defined similarly as a process by which knowledge, skills, cultural norms, values, and beliefs are acquired. The development of the modern philosophy of education is considered with its emphasis on conceptual analysis. Education is philosophically (...) the conscious development of maturity requiring capacity for both intellectual and economic autonomy. Issues in the contemporary philosophy of education are then considered, particularly the challenges of post-modernism and post-truth for a philosophy of education in an Internet world. It identifies the need for comparative philosophical perspectives other than Occidental ones and suggests philosophical anthropology and comparative education as potential guides. It concludes that although there is now no consensus on how a coherent contemporary philosophy of education may be developed, analysis of concepts, metaphysical reasoning, and ethics may still provide a basis for a coherent and defensible philosophy of education whatever the comparative cultural setting. (shrink)

The Jewish philosopher and educator Martin Buber (1878–1965) is considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest contributors to the philosophy of religion and is also recognized as the pre-eminent scholar of Hasidism. He has also attracted considerable attention as a philosopher of education. However, most commentaries on this aspect of his work have focussed on the implications of his philosophy for formal education and for the education of the child. Given that much of Buber’s philosophy is based on dialogue, on (...) community and on mutuality, it is puzzling that relatively little has been written on the implications of Buber’s thought for the theory and practice of non-formal adult education. The article provides a discussion of the philosophy underpinning this aspect of Martin Buber’s life and work, and its implications for adult non-formal education. (shrink)

Martin Buber (1878-1965) is one of the most significant existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century and a leading scholar of the Hasidic tradition in Judaism; even more important for this article is that Buber is considered by many to be the philosopher of dialogue par excellence. This article expounds Buber’s conception of dialogue and its implications for our conception of the Other.

This book brings together ten seminal European philosophers to critically discuss their socio-political and dialogical views, and the implications of these for education. Chapters explore the work of modern philosophers, including Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky and Hannah Arendt, positioning their contributions within the European tradition of dialogical philosophy, reflecting on their continuing theoretical relevance to the field of education and critical pedagogy, and offering an analysis of key extracts and points of discussion.

Martin Buber (1878–1965) is one of the most significant existentialist philosophers and educationalists of the twentieth century, and a leading scholar of the Hasidic tradition. His philosophical and educational views are dominated by the concept of dialogue and, in virtue of this, he is often called the philosopher of dialogue. Throughout his life, Buber advocated dialogue as a way of establishing peace and resolving conflicts, and therefore he is often referred to in both the academic and general literature as an (...) advocate of pacifism. But is this the case? If so, what sort of pacifism was Buber defending? (shrink)

Education has two distinct but interconnected layers. There is an outer layer concerned with knowledge transfer and skills and an inner layer concerned with the development of character and relationships with others, both individually and socially. This inner layer provides the individual with the capacity to influence and to change society. In that sense, such an inner layer is ‘political’. In this article we argue that the ‘political’ in education can take two distinct forms: either that of dialogue or of (...) defiance. We claim that the former is epitomised by the philosophy of Martin Buber and the latter by the philosophy of Frantz Fanon. Our analysis contrasting these two philosophies clarifies the implications for education, and thereby for the individual and for society. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci is one of the major social and political theorists of the 20th century whose work has had an enormous influence on several fields, including educational theory and practice. Gramsci and Education demonstrates the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's thought for contemporary educational debates. The essays are written by scholars located in different parts of the world, a number of whom are well known internationally for their contributions to Gramscian scholarship and/or educational research. The collection deals with a broad range (...) of topics, including schooling, adult education in general, popular education, workers' education, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, multicultural education, and the role of intellectuals in contemporary society. (shrink)

Most of what has been written about Buber and education tend to be studies of two kinds: theoretical studies of his philosophical views on education, and specific case studies that aim at putting theory into practice. The perspective taken has always been to hold a dialogue with Buber's works in order to identify and analyse critically Buber's views and, in some cases, to put them into practice; that is, commentators dialogue with the text. In this article our aims are of (...) a different kind. First and fundamentally, we demonstrate the political and social ontological basis of Buber's thought; that is, we show that Buber, the philosopher of dialogue, held an authentic dialogue with his time, and demonstrate that Buber's work, in this case I and Thou, holds a dialogue with its Zeitgeist; that is the text dialogues with its Zeitgeist. This approach leads us to our second aim, which is to demonstrate that Buber's thought remains relevant to our times, particularly when it serves as a dialogical educational tool with which to resolve conflict of all types and to aid dialogue towards peace in inter‐community relations. (shrink)

Art as communication, by L. Tolstoi.--Art, intuition, and expression, by B. Groce.--Art as expression, by R. G. Collingwood.--The Groce-Collingwood theory of art, by J. Hospers.--The act of expression, by J. Dewey.--Art and the language of the emotions, by C. J. Ducasse.--Music as impressive and music as expressive, by E. Gurney.--Expression, by G. Santayana.--The expressiveness of colors, by W. Kadinsky.--Expression and association, by C. Hartshorne.--Expressiveness, by R. Arnheim.--The expression theory of art, by O, K. Bouwsma.--The concept of expression in art, by (...) V. Tomas, D. Morgan and M. Beardsley.--Musical expression, by M. Beardsley.--Expressive predicates of art, by G. Sircello. (shrink)

“I often said before starting, that I had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking.” So wrote Charles Darwin aboard The Beagle , bound for the Galapagos Islands and what would arguably become the greatest and most controversial discovery in scientific history. But the theory of evolution did not spring full-blown from the head of Darwin. Since the dawn of humanity, priests, philosophers, and scientists have debated the origin and development of life on earth, and with modern (...) science, that debate shifted into high gear. In this lively, deeply erudite work, Pulitzer Prize–winning science historian Edward J. Larson takes us on a guided tour of Darwin’s “dangerous idea,” from its theoretical antecedents in the early nineteenth century to the brilliant breakthroughs of Darwin and Wallace, to Watson and Crick’s stunning discovery of the DNA double helix, and to the triumphant neo-Darwinian synthesis and rising sociobiology today. Along the way, Larson expertly places the scientific upheaval of evolution in cultural perspective: the social and philosophical earthquake that was the French Revolution; the development, in England, of a laissez-faire capitalism in tune with a Darwinian ethos of “survival of the fittest”; the emergence of Social Darwinism and the dark science of eugenics against a backdrop of industrial revolution; the American Christian backlash against evolutionism that culminated in the famous Scopes trial; and on to today’s world, where religious fundamentalists litigate for the right to teach “creation science” alongside evolution in U.S. public schools, even as the theory itself continues to evolve in new and surprising directions. Throughout, Larson trains his spotlight on the lives and careers of the scientists, explorers, and eccentrics whose collaborations and competitions have driven the theory of evolution forward. Here are portraits of Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace, Haeckel, Galton, Huxley, Mendel, Morgan, Fisher, Dobzhansky, Watson and Crick, W. D. Hamilton, E. O. Wilson, and many others. Celebrated as one of mankind’s crowning scientific achievements and reviled as a threat to our deepest values, the theory of evolution has utterly transformed our view of life, religion, origins, and the theory itself, and remains controversial, especially in the United States (where 90% of adults do not subscribe to the full Darwinian vision). Replete with fresh material and new insights, Evolution will educate and inform while taking readers on a fascinating journey of discovery. (shrink)

ArgumentIn the United States, scientific knowledge is brought before the courts by way of testimony – the testimony of scientific experts. We argue that this expertise is best understoodfirstas related to the quality of the underlying scienceand thenin terms of who delivers it. Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA), a contemporary forensic science, serves as the vaulting point for our exploration of objectivity as a metric for the quality of a science in judicial contexts. We argue that BPA fails to meet the (...) minimal standard set by Helen Longino’s social-procedural account of objectivity (1990, 2002). In light of some pressing issues for social-procedural accounts, we offer an infrastructural account of objectivity. This account offers what amounts to a friendly amendment to Longino’s account and adds to the ways in which we might analyze social-procedural objectivity. Finally, we address an issue that is pressing in the legal context: given that scientific knowledge is delivered by individuals, not communities, at least in U.S. courts, we (may) need a way to evaluate individual scientific and epistemic agents. We suggest a means for making this evaluation that is derived from our infrastructural account of objectivity. (shrink)

This paper details how ghost hunting, as a set of learning activities, can be used to enhance critical thinking and philosophy of science classes. We describe in some detail our own work with ghost hunting, and reflect on both intended and unintended consequences of this pedagogical choice. This choice was partly motivated by students’ lack of familiarity with science and philosophic questions about it. We offer reflections on our three different implementations of the ghost hunting activities. In addition, we discuss (...) the practical nuances of implementing these activities, as well the relation of ghost hunting to our course content, including informal fallacies and some models for scientific inference. We conclude that employing ghost hunting along-side traditional activities and content of critical thinking and philosophy of science offers a number of benefits, including being fun, increasing student attendance, enhancing student learning, and providing a platform for campus wide dialogues about philosophy. (shrink)

There has been a recent explosion of undergraduate philosophy conferences across the United States. In this paper, we explore undergraduate conferences along three lines. First, we argue that, as a well-designed learning activity, undergraduate conferences can serve to increase gender parity in philosophical spaces—a widely accepted and important goal for our discipline. Second, we argue that this increase in parity is due, at least in part, to the proper design of undergraduate conferences as High-Impact Practices. Our empirical work on our (...) own undergraduate conference demonstrates that properly designing the conference as a High-Impact learning activity does, as expected, benefit underserved student populations, including women. Additionally, the study also revealed unexpected opportunities to intervene on student learning. Third, we argue, also in line with our data, that undergraduate conferences occupy a previously taxonomically unrecognized grouping among recognized High-Impact Practices. (shrink)

Our purpose in this essay is twofold: to explore John Deely’s “semiotic” or “contextualized animal” as also a “contextualizing animal”, one that not only responds in context but one that changes first the context so as later to change itself—as all living things do; and to explore how this context-shifting “semiotic animal” has caused to emerge the very “signs upon which”, as Deely writes, “the whole of life depends”. Environmental ethics are inseparable from personal ethics, then, because (1) we (...) are in fact ourselves environments for others, (2) we carry models of our environments within us (our genetic / ontogenetic selves), and (3) even our free will (the basis of ethical choice) is an “environmental” phenomenon, as Martin Heisenberg argues in Nature (14 May 2009: 164–165) and as Deely writes in Semiotic Animal: “signs do not fall strictly among the things objectified by perceptions of sense but act prior to that perception to enable it to reconstruct the physical environment along objective lines that are meaningful to the species” (Semiotic Animal: A Postmodern Definition of Human Being Transcending Patriarchy and Feminism [2010]: 119). (shrink)

Nanotechnology, as with many technologies before it, places a strain on existing legislation and poses a challenge to all administrative agencies tasked with regulating technology-based products. It is easy to see how statutory schemes become outdated, as our ability to understand and affect the world progresses. In this article, we address the regulatory problems that nanotechnology posses for the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) classification structure for ‘‘drugs’’ and ‘‘devices.’’ The last major modification to these terms was in 1976, with (...) the enactment of the Medical Device Amendments. There are serious practical differences for a classification as a drug or device in terms of time to market and research. Drugs are classified, primarily, as acting by ‘‘chemical action.’’ We lay out some legal, philosophic, and scientific tools that serve to provide a useful, as well as legally and scientifically faithful, distinction between drugs and devices for the purpose of regulatory classification. These issues we raise are worth the consideration of anyone who is interested in the regulation of nano-products or other novel technologies. (shrink)

In this article, we defend the view that problematic epistemological extremism, which presents puzzles for many learners new to philosophy, is a result of earlier learning at the K–12 level. Confirming this hunch serves as a way of locating the problem and suggesting that recent learning interventions proposed by Christopher Edelman (2021) and Galen Barry (2022) are on the right track. Further, we offer that this extremism is plausibly described as what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls an epistemic injustice. This suggests (...) that disrupting the problem is a boon for learners, the discipline, and good citizenship. In our discussion we introduce work by Derek Muller suggesting that it is important to address the misconceptions involved in epistemological extremism (and its precursors) lest we simply reinforce these problematic misconceptions for the worse—inhibiting student learning, reproducing challenges to good citizenship, and leading to a discounting of many ways of knowing. (shrink)

This volume is based to a large extent on the understanding of biosemiotic literary criticism as a semiotic-model-making enterprise. For Jurij Lotman and Thomas A. Sebeok, “nature writing is essentially a model of the relationship between humans and nature” ; biosemiotic literary criticism, itself a form of nature writing and thus itself an ecological-niche-making enterprise, will be considered to be a model of modeling, a model of nature naturing. Modes and models of analysis drawn from Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel (...) Danesi’s Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis as well as from Timo Maran’s work on “modeling the environment in literature,” Edwina Taborsky’s writing on Peircean semiosis, and, of course, Jesper Hoffmeyer’s formative work in biosemiotics are among the most important organizing elements for this volume. (shrink)

A central thesis of Louise Westling’s highly accomplished and provocative The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language is that “human language and aesthetic behaviors emerge from our animality” . What is perhaps most compelling about her thesis is that she supports it by exploring how an evolutionary continuity between an always already languaged world and human being-in-the-world can be understood without having to employ the dangerous logic of social Darwinism or some schools of evolutionary psychology and without (...) having to serve as yet another iteration of a naïve “metaphysics of presence”. Indeed, Derrida’s “fear of continuism” is based in fact on a “false dilemma” . As Westling writes, citing Matthew Calarco and Mary Midgley , “(to say that everything is composed of atoms and molecules is to assert material continuism, but no one would then cl .. (shrink)