Born the illegitimate son of a priest, and plagued throughout life by illness and poverty, Erasmus of Rotterdam was sought everywhere for his wit and erudition. No man in Europe had so many friends in high places: a lifelong cosmopolitan, he moved from country to country, lodging in palaces and in the households of public printers, a friend of Thomas More and Henry VIII and a correspondent of Luther and the pope. A true man of letters, Erasmus wrote and translated (...) tirelessly; arguing, teaching, campaigning for the purification of the church. He ridiculed worldly prelates, but deplored Reformers who broke from Rome. On all occasions he spoke for moderation in thought and action, for classical humanism and a Christianity of the inward spirit. Still, he lived to see many of his friends imprisoned, beheaded, or burned for their beliefs, and he himself was accused of heresy. Through charming and frequently humorous glimpses of the people and scenes of Erasmus s life, Professor Bainton suggests the amplitude of his hero s nature. An affectionate appreciation "Time Magazine" calls "Erasmus of Christendom." In Bainton s view, the current revolution in the church makes the Erasmian message even more pertinent and perhaps more poignant than ever before. Woodcut images and illustrations throughout. Hendrickson Classic Biographies feature enduring stories about real people whose lives have been touched and transformed by God, and who in turn have touched others with God s love. Each story has been carefully selected, gently edited if necessary, and freshly typeset, making every account be it ancient or contemporary a compelling read. Great lives reaching across the ages to touch lives today, encouraging, challenging, and inspiring.". (shrink)

This volume describes the current "main contenders," including neo-Piagetian, neo-connectionist, neo-innatist and sociocultural models.

Une approche philosophique de la prière à des fins politiques est possible dans le cas où les deux substantifs sont mis en relais inconditionnel. Le premier élément responsable de cette filature des liens c’est la présence de l’autre. Prier et faire de la politique sont deux activités humaines trop humaines qui exigent l’ouverture à l’autre, pour l’autre comme pour l’édification de sa propre identité individuelle et collective. Comme les rites et les cultes, la liturgie, notamment la prière collective, a un (...) effet thérapeutique, et pédagogique, disons didactique et sociopolitique. Elle calme les esprits, la volonté, apaise l’angoisse et solidifie les liens sociaux. L'Eglise, par exemple, est née du rassemblement du peuple de Dieu en prière et c'est dans son sein que toute célébration liturgique trouve perpétuellement son accomplissement aussi bien que sa régénération dans l’invocation du nom du Christ-Vérité, Rédempteur, Fondateur, Roi et Prêtre. La présente étude sur « Vérité et Royauté » focalise l’attention sur l’essence même du politique qui se nourrit du religieux tout en lui fournissant gloire, pouvoir et moyens d’existence. (shrink)

Introduction to Engineering Ethics provides the background for discussion of the basic issues in engineering ethics. Emphasis is given to the moral problems engineers face in the corporate setting. It places those issues within a philosophical framework, and it seems to exhibit both their social importance and their intellectual challenge. The primary goal is to stimulate critical and responsible reflection on moral issues surrounding engineering practice and to provide the conceptual tools necessary for pursuing those issues. As per new ABET (...) 2000 guidelines, more and more introductory engineering courses cover engineering ethics as part of their instruction. Students preparing to function within the engineering profession need to be introduced to the basic issues in engineering ethics. This book places those issues within a wider philosophical framework than has been customary in the past and aims to stimulate critical and responsible reflection on the moral issues surrounding engineering practice and to provide the conceptual tools necessary for pursuing those issues. (shrink)

The experimental philosophy movement advocates the use of empirical methods in philosophy. The methods most often discussed and in fact employed in experimental philosophy are appropriated from the experimental paradigm in psychology. But there is a variety of other (at least partly) empirical methods from various disciplines that are and others that could be used in philosophy. The paper explores the application of corpus analysis to philosophical issues. Although the method is well established in linguistics, there are only a few (...) tentative attempts of philosophers to utilise it. Examples are introduced and the merit of corpus analysis is compared to that of using general internet search engines and questionnaires for similar purposes. (shrink)

What does it mean to ‘calculate’—today? The pause introduced by the dash in this question marks the inescapable necessity of historicizing the problem of calculation. In his provocative essay, ‘Toward a Critique of the Ineffectual: Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle and the Construction of an Action without Ends’, Dimitris Vardoulakis proposes a philosophical and political programme in order to counter the negative effects of ‘Heidegger’s mistake’ (the conflation of causality and instrumentality through a mistranslation of Aristotle) that has led to the (...) theoretical fetishization of the ‘ineffectual’ (action without ends) in continental philosophy. In his conclusion, Vardoulakis advocates for a return to a politics and ethics of practical judgment that avoids the twin pitfalls of asserting either the impossibility or the absolute possibility of calculation. As he puts it, we need to acknowledge today ‘the exigency to calculate in the face of the provisional ends of instrumentality, or to perform the judgment that the Greeks called phronesis’ [2022: 244]. This is why we should keep in mind that Heidegger’s critique of technology in the 1950s was articulated in the context of the early Cold War, atomic warfare, and the rise of cybernetics. But, as many have recently argued, in the age of so-called ‘Big Data’, neoliberal rationality has increasingly replaced the epistemology of ‘causality’ with epistemologies of ‘correlation’: the algorithmic calculation of probabilistic relations between clusters of variables (based on information harvested by digital technologies designed for the total surveillance of human life). As Chris Anderson notoriously announced in his 2008 editorial, ‘The End of Theory’, ‘correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all’. He calls this epistemology ‘dimensionally agnostic statistics’ (the amount of data available can no longer be visualized in its totality). This worldview, however, functions as a basic attack on one of the fundamental (and still often repeated) ground-truths of modern science: correlation is not causation. As Anderson puts it: ‘There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough”’. In other words, the stakes of Vardoulakis’s argument must be tested against the rise of this neoliberal elimination of causality from corporate epistemologies that has led to an inversion of the terms of the Heideggerian critique of technology: as it turns out, technology has produced an ideology of pure instrumentality without causation. Today, there are only ends without causes. (shrink)

In order to be able to raise the question of the “world” today in an effective way, we have to reactivate the Goethean categories of Weltliteratur and Weltschmerz for a critique of our own historical moment. We need to understand the phenomenon of Weltschmerz as a symptom of the impossibility of Weltliteratur. Going beyond the context of the original formulation of these categories, we could argue that something akin to the historical phenomenon of Weltschmerz emerges every time the ideological constitution (...) of the world threatens to fail. Today, we live in an age of a generalised state of cultural disorientation that has produced its own Weltliteratur, which includes a wide range of discourses about the “world” – from officially endorsed theories of economic globalisation, to scientific treatises on the Anthropocene, environmental protest movements, philosophical pamphlets, all the way to world-historical conspiracy theories. Yet, an anxiety concerning the impossibility of world-formation in general is also recorded in these documents. In order to be able to capture our contemporary Weltschmerz, the article turns to the young Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the task of this age is to produce an “objective” Weltschmerz. However, the most effective tools to conceptualise this objective Weltschmerz come from the traditions of philosophical acosmism. It is a notable philosophical development of our times that some elements of the acosmic tradition have recently resurfaced in speculative realism. Thus, speculative realism could be described as a possible site of our contemporary Weltschmerz: its acosmic metaphysics is repeatedly tamed by a mournful longing for the world. (shrink)

We investigate strong versions of enumeration reducibility, the most important one being s-reducibility. We prove that every countable distributive lattice is embeddable into the local structure $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ of the s-degrees. However, $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ is not distributive. We show that on $\Delta^{0}_{2}$ sets s-reducibility coincides with its finite branch version; the same holds of e-reducibility. We prove some density results for $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ . In particular $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ is upwards dense. Among the results about reducibilities that are stronger than s-reducibility, (...) we show that the structure of the $\Delta^{0}_{2}$ bs-degrees is dense. Many of these results on s-reducibility yield interesting corollaries for Q-reducibility as well. (shrink)

Although postmodernist thought has become prominent in some educational circles, its influence on science education has until recently been rather minor. This paper examines the proposal of Michalinos Zembylas, published earlier in this journal, that Lyotardian postmodernism should be applied to science educational reform in order to achieve the much sought after positive transformation. As a preliminary to this examination several critical points are raised about Lyotard's philosophy of education and philosophy of science which serve to challenge and undermine Zembylas’ (...) project. Subsequently, the three main theses of Lyotard that Zembylas considers beneficial and wishes to transpose onto science classrooms and pedagogy are scrutinized and found to be more of a hindrance than a help to curriculum reformers. (shrink)

The 2015 Disneyland outbreak of measles in the US unequivocally brought to light what had been brewing below the surface for a while: a slow but steady decline in vaccination rates resulting in a rising number of outbreaks. This can be traced back to an increasing public questioning of vaccines by an emerging anti-vaccination movement. This article argues that, in the face of diminishing vaccination rates, childhood vaccinations should not be seen as part of the domain of parental choice but, (...) instead, as a non-negotiable legal obligation. The first part of the article formulates and defends two arguments in favour of unqualified mandatory childhood vaccination laws. First, government should not permit parents to put their children at avoidable risk of death and suffering; second, government should guard the common good of herd immunity to protect vulnerable persons. The second part rejects legal and pragmatic objections against such mandatory vaccination laws. (shrink)

Although postmodernist thought has become prominent in some educational circles, its influence on science education has until recently been rather minor. This paper examines the proposal of Michalinos Zembylas, published earlier in this journal, that Lyotardian postmodernism should be applied to science educational reform in order to achieve the much sought after positive transformation. As a preliminary to this examination several critical points are raised about Lyotard's philosophy of education and philosophy of science which serve to challenge and undermine Zembylas’ (...) project. Subsequently, the three main theses of Lyotard that Zembylas considers beneficial and wishes to transpose onto science classrooms and pedagogy are scrutinized and found to be more of a hindrance than a help to curriculum reformers. (shrink)

Roland Reichenbach; On Irritation and Transformation: A–teleological Bildung and its Significance for the Democratic Form of Living, Journal of Philosophy of Ed.

In this article Roland Sintos Coloma argues for the relevance of empire as an analytical category in educational research. He points out the silence in mainstream studies of education on the subject of empire, the various interpretive approaches to deploying empire as an analytic, and the importance of indigeneity in research on empire and education. Coloma examines three award-winning books, Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957, John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World: Education (...) at Empire's End, and David Wallace Adams's Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928, in order to delineate the heuristic spectrum of the use of empire in educational research. These texts are put in conversation with the interdisciplinary fields of American, postcolonial, race/ethnic, and indigenous studies where questions of empire have received considerable attention. Ultimately, mobilizing empire as an analytical category will enable researchers, policymakers, and educators to establish new connections and dispute long-standing views about discursive, structural, and affective dynamics at local, national, and global levels. (shrink)

Roland Reichenbach; On Irritation and Transformation: A–teleological Bildung and its Significance for the Democratic Form of Living, Journal of Philosophy of Ed.