We challenge Gallagher’s distinction between the sense of ownership (SO) and the sense of agency (SA) as two separable modalities of experience of the minimal self and argue that a careful investigation of the examples provided to promote this distinction in fact reveals that SO and SA are intimately related and modulate each other. We propose a way to differentiate between the various notions of SO and SA that are currently used interchangeably in the debate, and suggest a more gradual (...) reading of the two that allows for various blends of SO and SA. Such an approach not only provides us with a richer phenomenology but also with a more parsimonious view of the minimal self. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFor centuries, universities have supported the pursuit of knowledge through the academic disciplines while also preparing students for the professions. These two purposes are frequently in...

This paper proposes a problem-based approach to theorizing about global justice as opposed to what I call a paradigm-based approach. The latter confronts questions of global justice from an established ideal of justice normally constructed for the domestic context. The problem-based approach engages global justice issues without the presumption that that they must be accessible from an established (domestic) framework of justice. One advantage of the problem-based approach is that it does not foreclose engagement with practical matters (by defining some (...) issues, such as global equality, as non-problems); another is that it has a more reflective and revisionary approach to theorizing about justice (as when new challenges compel re-examination of our established theories of justice). (shrink)

A 20th-century discipline in American universities, communication has struggled with questions of academic identity: generically, as to whether it is a 'humanities' or a 'social science', a 'practice' or a 'technology', and theoretically, as to what sorts of axioms, theorems, research methods or logics, and problems should form its core. This article explores some of the frames that have been borrowed and built to guide theorization of and research on communication practices. It then examines briefly the efforts to institutionalize communication (...) studies academically, professionally, and economically as an American case-study of the rhetoric of inquiry: the ways in which the knowledge industries form species, divide the intellectual universe, and defend knowledge claims. (shrink)

This article considers moral philosophers’ responses to French existentialism at Manchester, Oxford, U.C.L.A., and Harvard after 1945. French existentialism was a philosophy of freedom that rose to...

In recent decades, the shift towards the “learnification” of educational discourse has de facto reframed educational purposes and schooling practice, thus reframing what students should know, strive for, and, in a sense, be. In this paper, given the efforts to disrupt the dominance of learning discourse, I seek to engage regarding a specific concern, namely, the progressive removal of imagination within educational official framework. Indeed, imagination has virtually disappeared from the documents, publications, web pages and recommendations of major educational agencies (...) and institutions worldwide, with important and potentially damaging consequences for schooling, teaching and learning. Employing a Deweyan perspective, I argue that imagination plays a crucial role in the creation of pivotal educational features and phenomena, such as knowledge, inquiry, choice and deliberation, critical agency, meaning creation, and, importantly, the openness of possibilities. Therefore, the eclipse of imagination becomes, at the very same time, the eclipse of education; nurturing imagination is about nurturing education. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyse the Deweyan account of thinking and subject and discuss the educational consequences that follow from such an account. I argue that despite the grouping of thinking and reflective thought that has largely appeared in the interpretation of Deweyan work, Dewey discloses an inescapable uncertainty at the core of human thinking. This move is even more challenging given Dewey's firm faith in the power of intelligent action, and in education as the means by which human beings (...) grow and create meaningful existence. I argue that throughout his work, Dewey dismantled the understanding of the subject as a detached and self-assured centre of agency. In Deweyan understanding, on one hand, the subject is empowered to reflect on experience and to use this reflection to evolve new ways of acting, thus pushing experience forward. On the other hand, by acting, the subject can create new points of interaction within experience. This understanding of thinking and subject has far-reaching consequences for education, which must be conceived not so much as the attempt to master and control experience but as the means to create new, unpredictable experience by putting new points of interactions into our relationship with the environment, changing our being-embedded-in-the-world. Dewey repositions educational, intentional agency away from control and mastery and in the direction of growth and openness. (shrink)

In his article Potentialism and the experience of the new, Jasinski argues for the use of a potentialist approach in education by relating it to a line of thought that starts with Dewey and is fulfilled by Agamben and Lewis. Although the reading that Jasinski offers on potentialism is interesting, his understanding of Dewey is problematic. In this paper, I argue that much of what Jasinski claims as worthy of pursuit in education is already contained in the Deweyan questions of (...) newness, openness, and radical possibility. Even the Agambenian notion of ‘coming community’ falls under a Deweyan understanding of society and democracy, which, in Deweyan thought, always exist in suspension and connectedness. Given such premises, the idea of education that emerges from Deweyan thought is that of a leap. The question regarding what education is and entails is left radically open by Dewey, for education belongs to the not-yet. (shrink)

Philosophers view themselves as critical thinkers par excellence. But they have overlooked the institutional arrangements that govern their lives. The early twentieth-century research university disciplined philosophers, placing them in departments, where they wrote for and were judged by their disciplinary peers. Oddly, this change has been unremarked upon, or has been treated as simply part of the necessary professionalization of an academic field of research. The department has been tacitly assumed to be a neutral space from which thought germinates; it (...) is not itself an object of reflection. We find no explorations of the effects that departmentalization might have on philosophical theorizing, or speculations about where else philosophers could be housed, or how, by being located elsewhere, they might develop alternative accounts of the world or have come up with new ways of philosophizing. (shrink)