Previous research on plagiarism has increased awareness and knowledge of the various aspects of this issue, such as contributing factors to plagiarism, students’ and teachers’ perceptions of plagiarism, and institutional policies and regulations on plagiarism. Yet much of this research, especially on the latter two aspects, has been conducted in Anglo-American contexts or English-as-a-second-language settings, while the diversity of English-as-a-foreign-language contexts remains relatively under-researched. Of those studies that did focus on EFL contexts, the majority were based on survey data (...) that were limited in the depth of information collected. To address this relative lack of in-depth understanding of how plagiarism is understood and acted against in EFL contexts, this paper reports on an interview study with 13 EFL teachers from 12 universities in mainland China. The study focused on the teachers’ knowledge and attitudes concerning plagiarism, plagiarism-related pedagogical practices, as well as perceived stances and expectations of their institutions in plagiarism prevention. Its findings contribute to the current knowledge base of EFL academics’ views and practices regarding plagiarism, add to our understanding of EFL teachers’ experiences concerning plagiarism in specific educational settings, and inform institutions’ efforts to develop and improve strategies and policies for preventing plagiarism. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Clearing Some Definitional Ground: Standards as Epistemic Objects What Counts as a Standard?: Orthodoxies and other Stories Travelling with Actor‐Network Theory: ‘It's Practice All theWay Down’6 The Project in Question: Data and Method Assemblage7 Teaching and Standards of Teaching: Performative Tales from the Field Assembling the Accomplished Teacher: Whose Assemblage Counts? The Critical Contribution of Actor‐Network Theory: Performative Politics Notes References.

Various attempts to specify the nature of professions in general and of teaching in particular in relation to the knowledge that is needed for practice are considered. It is argued that there is no epistemic or moral criterion of professionalism that will sustain the claim of teaching to be a profession. The nature of teachers' knowledge is examined and the relationship between theory and application is seen to be both crucial to and problematic in our understanding of the nature (...) of teachers' work. The implications of the discussion for teacher education are assessed. (shrink)

How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with, questions concerning plans, knowledge and intentions? At least in the case of visual experience the relation, we shall argue, is tight. Visual perceptual experience, we shall argue, is fixed by an agent’s direct unmediated knowledge concerning her poise (or apparent poise) over a currently enabled action space. An action space, in this specific sense, is to be understood not as a fine-grained matrix of possibilities for bodily movement, (...) but as a matrix of possibilities for pursuing and accomplishing one’s intentional actions, goals and projects. If this is correct, the links between planning, intention and perceptual experience are tight, while (contrary to some recent accounts invoking the notion of ‘sensorimotor expectations’) the links between embodied activity and perceptual experience, though real, are indirect. What matters is not bodily activity itself, but our practical knowledge (which need not be verbalized or in any way explicit) of our own possibilities for action. Such knowledge, selected, shaped and filtered by the grid of plans, goals, and intentions, plays, we argue, a constitutive role in explaining the content and character of visual perceptual experience. (shrink)

In the present study it has been examined how children?s creative writing tasks may contribute to teachers? understanding of children?s values. Writings of 300 elementary school children about what they would do if they were the boss of The Netherlands were obtained and seemed to reflect different types of values. Most children were concerned with charity. Also, writings concerned materialist values and socio?political topics, such as human rights, power and tolerance. Analyses of group?specific differences showed girls to write (...) more about charity and health when compared to boys. Children from low socio?economic backgrounds wrote less about environmental issues compared to children from middle and high socio?economic backgrounds. Children from ethnic minority backgrounds who wrote more about obtaining goods for themselves and less about environmental issues than Dutch?origin children. In addition, age differences were found in line with an increase in social and moral development. These differences are discussed in light of differential socialisation practices. (shrink)

Considerable research has demonstrated that teachers’ self-efficacy plays a major role in implementing instructional practices in classroom lessons. Only few studies, however, have examined the interplay between how teachers’ self-efficacy and the challenges that lie outside their influence are related to their implementation of cognitive-activation strategies (CAS), especially in science classrooms. Using the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2015 data from Grades 4, 5, 8, and 9, we explored the extent to which teachers’ self-efficacy in (...) teaching science and the perceived time constraints explained variation in the enactment of general and inquiry-based CAS. Overall, the findings revealed that highly self-efficacious teachers reported more frequent implementation of both general and inquiry-based CAS, whereas those who perceived strong time constraints reported a less frequent use of inquiry-based CAS. We further found that these relations differed significantly between primary- and secondary-school teachers and discuss these findings in light of teachers’ professional competences and the resources for science activities in primary and secondary education. We point to the theoretical implications of this study for enhancing the conceptual understanding of generic and specific aspects of CAS and the practical implications for teacher education, professional development, and educational policy. (shrink)

In this chapter, I examine the concept of vulnerability as a complex constitutive feature of human agency and argue that it is both a constraint on and a resource for practical reasoning. When discussed as an ontological feature of human agency, vulnerability is primarily understood as an aspect of embodiment, which is problematic in different respects. First, in relation to the situatedness of human agency, vulnerability indicates that human agents are subjected to contextual contingencies. Second, in relation to temporality, vulnerability (...) indicates that agents act in time and under the pressure of time. They are finite and produce finite and perishable actions, even though the longlasting effects of an action may survive the action itself. Third, in relation to corporal feature of agency, vulnerability is associated to suffering and frailty, insofar as bodily needs and desires represent both springs of and hindrances to rational action. Finally, in relation to the social nature of human animals, vulnerability indicates the susceptibility to be harmed, obstructed, undercut or manipulated by other agents These varieties of vulnerability are constituive features of human agency, which cannot be removed without removing what is peculiar and specific to human agency. Theories of practical reason are primarily concerned with constitutive vulnerability as a defect, and presume to offer normative guidance by adopting an idealized account of rational agency, which corrects or merely cancels the defective features of human agency. By contrast, theories of bounded rationality understand practical reasoning instrumentally, and thus are concerned with cognitive limitations of practical rationality, in particular with partial and perspectival information. However, the notion of “partial information” is inadequate to capture the complexities and significance of vulnerability, even in its restricted cognitive sense, which has to do with the agent’s situatedness. On the view I propose, instead, vulnerability is declined as a constitutive constraint on practical reasoning. Susceptibility to time constraints makes sense of the agents’ engagement in action and of their distinctive deliberative perspective. Susceptibility to bodily needs and desires tracks the normative relation between motivations and reasons for action, as well as the corporal roots of the agents’ efficacy in a perceived context. Susceptibility to others makes possible to broaden the scope and the modes of individual agency, by way of inter-action and shared agency. Rather than the source of problems and issues for rational agency, I take vulnerability to name the cluster of constitutive constraints that shape practical reasoning. According to the distinctive variety of Kantian constructivism I defend, practical reason is incomplete, rather than imperfect or defective. The completion of practical reason does not aim to correct or dissolve vulnerability, but deploys vulnerability as a resource to build up autonomy. This view accounts for autonomy as a normative relation among vulnerable agents, which develops in time. (shrink)

The paper explores the current rationale for primary science in England with a focus on how competing perspectives arising from perceptions of educational ideology and policy discourse have helped to shape current practice. The aim will be to provide a conceptual understanding of this by focusing specifically on how policy has influenced practice. In particular it will consider the way in which discourse and policy text have contributed to the emergent rationale for primary science which in many ways reflects conflicting (...) influences, views and policies. Data were collected over a year from a regional survey and from four case-study primary schools. The findings suggest that teachers in primary schools face tensions between promoting both an educational and a political rationale for learning primary science. The paper will conclude by suggesting that the justification for primary science should be based on what we already know about how children learn science as well as helping them to develop an understanding of science and how it influences and is intrinsically linked to the needs of society. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that, contrary to what most scholars are inclined to believe, there are important tensions between the later Wittgenstein’s views on language and Michael Tomasello’s usage-based theory of language acquisition. On one hand, Wittgenstein characterises the first steps into the acquisition of a first language as a matter of acquiring practical abilities, which, in an anti-intellectualistic vein, do not require any kind of knowledge. On the other hand, Tomasello employs a Gricean model of (...) communication to describe pre-linguistic children’s communicative interactions, thus taking an intellectualist stance. According to this model, children are supposed to acquire the meanings of words because they are able to infer communicators’ intentions on the basis of the common ground (mutual knowledge) they establish with them. Eliciting this tension is of uttermost importance because: (i) it bears crucial implications for the explanatory relationships between language and thought; (ii) it is central to the heart of Tomasello’s project of explaining linguistic competency as based on communicative abilities. In the conclusion, I will argue that there are ways to ease the main tension if, following Richard Moore, basic communicative acts are conceived of as Minimally Gricean. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Adoro Te Devote of St. Thomas AquinasSr. Lucia Marie of the Visitation Langford O.P.The Adoro te devote is perhaps the most well-beloved Eucharistic hymn of our time, popularly attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Dominican friar known for his theological treatises as well as his Eucharistic hymnography. Unlike most of Aquinas's work, the poem reveals the intensely personal side of his faith. Rich in theological content and (...) inspiring deep Eucharistic devotion, this poem amply repays a closer investigation. We will look first at the questions of authorship, background, and structure before moving on to a discussion of the text itself.The "Disputed Question" of AuthorshipWhile the Adoro te has traditionally been attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, the Thomistic authorship of the text was contested in the twentieth century, with two main objections being raised. The first claims that the content of the poem contradicts Thomas's own teachings and cannot have flowed from the same pen. The second objection is historical, claiming that a lack of evidence makes Thomistic authorship improbable.The first objection, claiming that the content of the poem is irreconcilable with Thomistic authorship, takes objection to a line in the poem which seems to claim that sense perception is unreliable and inaccurate, at least with regard to the Eucharist. The text of the Adoro te uses the word fallitur (deceived) with reference to the senses: "Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur"—"Sight, touch, taste in you are deceived." Some scholars have claimed that this line contradicts the teaching of Aquinas that the senses are [End Page 365] infallible in regard to their proper sensibles.1 Robert Wielockx addresses this charge in his study of the Adoro te, arguing that "the text does not contradict the continuous teaching of Thomas according to which the senses are not wrong when they judge their proper object, which as far as the Eucharist is concerned, is only the sacramental species."2 The substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a mystery which is not knowable by the senses, and as Paul Murray, O.P., observes: "That's surely the point St. Thomas is making."3 However, the Thomistic insistence that all knowledge comes through our senses is not missing even here. While sight, touch, and taste fall short of comprehending the truth before them, the Adoro te itself proclaims that it is another sense—hearing—which reveals the mystery: "sed auditu solo tute creditur"—"but by hearing alone it is safely believed."4Thus there is no solid objection to Thomistic authorship based on the poem's content. But what about the historical evidence? Dom André Wilmart published a comprehensive study of the manuscript tradition in 1929. Noting that there were no extant copies of the text dating to Aquinas's lifetime and that the biography of Aquinas written by his own Dominican confrere and contemporary, William of Tocco, made no mention of the Adoro te, he considered it most probable that the poem was authored at a later date and ascribed to Aquinas.5However, Dom Wilmart did not know that he was not working with William of Tocco's final version of his work. The publication of a critical edition of William of Tocco's Ystoria Sancti Thome de Aquino in 1996 demonstrated that Tocco published his work in four successive redactions. The fourth and final version of his text (unknown to Dom Wilmart) was finished just before his death in 1323, and in this final version, Tocco includes the text of the Adoro te, attributing its authorship to St. Thomas.6 [End Page 366] Furthermore, Wielockx published a study of the Adoro te in 1998; his investigation of the manuscript tradition found that, of fifty-one sources, forty-four explicitly cite St. Thomas as their author. The remaining sources simply lacked any attribution. We may thus conclude with Wielockx: "External evidence, which must be given priority in sound criticism, wholly favors Thomas Aquinas's authorship of the poem."7BackgroundWith the attribution of the poem to St. Thomas Aquinas on secure footing, we now move to the background of the poem. Unlike Aquinas's Eucharistic hymns such as... (shrink)

Last year saw the 20th anniversary edition of JECP, and in the introduction to the philosophy section of that landmark edition, we posed the question: apart from ethics, what is the role of philosophy ‘at the bedside’? The purpose of this question was not to downplay the significance of ethics to clinical practice. Rather, we raised it as part of a broader argument to the effect that ethical questions – about what we should do in any given situation (...) – are embedded within whole understandings of the situation, inseparable from our beliefs about what is the case, what it is that we feel we can claim to know, as well as the meaning we ascribe to different aspects of the situation or to our perception of it. Philosophy concerns fundamental questions: it is a discipline requiring us to examine the underlying assumptions we bring with us to our thinking about practical problems. Traditional academic philosophers divide their discipline into distinct areas that typically include logic: questions about meaning, truth and validity; ontology: questions about the nature of reality, what exists; epistemology: concerning knowledge; and ethics: how we should live and practice, the nature of value. Any credible attempt to analyse clinical reasoning will require us to think carefully about these types of question and the relationships between them, as they influence our thinking about specific situations and problems. So, the answers to the question we posed, about the role of philosophy at the bedside, are numerous and diverse, and that diversity is illustrated in the contributions to this thematic edition. (shrink)

I explore some of the reasons why, under specific circumstances, it may be rational to make-believe or imagine certain religious beliefs. Adopting a jargon familiar to certain contemporary philosophers, my main concern here is to assess what reasons can be given for adopting a fictionalist stance towards some religious beliefs. My understanding of fictionalism does not involve solely a propositional attitude but a broader stance, which may include certain acts of pretence. I also argue that a plausible reason (...) to be fictionalist about a specific set of religious beliefs and practices has to do with the value of some artistic creations; namely, those that require the adoption of a religious point of view for their understanding. (shrink)

The question concerning the meaning of life is important, but it immediately confronts the present authors with insurmountable obstacles from a philosophical standpoint, as it would require us to define not only what we hold to be life, but what we hold to be meaning in addition, requiring us to do both in a properly researched context. We unconditionally surrender to that challenge. Instead, we offer a vernacular, armchair approach to life’s origin and meaning, with some layman’s thoughts (...) on the meaning of origins as viewed from the biologist’s standpoint. One can observe that biologists generally approach the concept of biological meaning in the context of evolution. This is the basis for the broad resonance behind Dobzhansky’s appraisal that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Biologists try to understand living things in the historical context of how they arose, without giving much thought to the definition of what life or living things are, which for a biologist is usually not an interesting question in the practical context of daily dealings with organisms. Do humans generally understand life’s meaning in the context of history? If we consider the problem of life’s origin, the question of what constitutes a living thing becomes somewhat more acute for the biologist, though not more answerable, because it is inescapable that there was a time when there were no organisms on Earth, followed by a time when there were, the latter time having persisted in continuity to the present. This raises the question of where, in that transition, chemicals on Earth became alive, requiring, in turn, a set of premises for how life arose in order to conceptualize the problem in relation to organisms we know today, including ourselves, which brings us to the point of this paper: In the same way that cultural narratives for origins always start with a setting, scientific narratives for origins also always start with a setting, a place on Earth or elsewhere where we can imagine what happened for the sake of structuring both the problem and the narrative for its solution. This raises the question of whether scientific origins settings convey meaning to humans in that they suggest to us from what kind of place and what kinds of chemicals we are descended, that is, to which inanimate things we are most closely related. (shrink)

A theory of what we should believe should include a theory of what we should believe when we are uncertain about what we should believe and/or uncertain about the factors that determine what we should believe. In this paper, I present a novel theory of what we should believe that gives normative externalists a way of responding to a suite of objections having to do with various kinds of error, ignorance, (...) and uncertainty. This theory is inspired by recent work in ethical theory in which non-consequentialists 'consequentialize' their theories and then use the tools of decision-theory to give us an account of what we ought (in some sense) to do when we're uncertain about what we ought (in some primary sense) to do. On my proposal, because what we ought to do is acquire knowledge and avoid ignorance, we ought to believe iff the probability of coming to know is sufficiently high. This view has a number of important virtues. Among them, it gives us a unified story about how defeaters defeat (a theory developed with Julien Dutant), explains puzzling intuitions about the differences between lottery cases, preface cases, and cases of perceptual knowledge, and provides externalists (and internalists!) with a general framework for thinking about subjective normativity. It's also relatively brief. (shrink)

The question whether the study of education and teacher education belong at a liberal arts college deserves careful consideration. In this essay Bruce Kimball analyzes and finds unpersuasive the three principled rationales that are most often advanced on behalf of excluding educational studies, teacher education, or both from a liberal arts college. Specifically, Kimball argues that no principled definition of the conventional liberal arts disciplines excludes the study of education without barring other fields now regarded as legitimate, and consistency demands (...) that all such fields be excluded if any are. In addition, teacher education, even if considered as merely “craft know-how” or as professional training, cannot be excluded from liberal arts colleges without arbitrarily classifying it as suspect and subjecting it to strict scrutiny. But the question of whether educational studies or teacher education fit any asserted definition of liberal education does not finally resolve the question of whether they belong in a liberal arts college. Kimball concludes by suggesting that there are moral and prudential reasons for liberal arts colleges to offer teacher education and, concomitantly, the study of education, even apart from the unpersuasive objections that they do not fit a definition of liberal education. (shrink)

_Co-Published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group and the Association of Teacher Educators._ The_ Handbook of Research on Teacher Education_ was initiated to ferment change in education based on solid evidence. The publication of the First Edition was a signal event in 1990. While the preparation of educators was then – and continues to be – the topic of substantial discussion, there did not exist a codification of the best that was known at the time about teacher education. Reflecting the needs (...) of educators today, the Third Edition takes a new approach to achieving the same purpose. Beyond simply conceptualizing the broad landscape of teacher education and providing comprehensive reviews of the latest research for major domains of practice, this edition: stimulates a broad conversation about foundational issues brings multiple perspectives to bear provides new specificity to topics that have been undifferentiated in the past includes diverse voices in the conversation. The Editors, with an Advisory Board, identified nine foundational issues and translated them into a set of focal questions: What’s the Point?: The Purposes of Teacher Education What Should Teachers Know? Teacher Capacities: Knowledge, Beliefs, Skills, and Commitments Where Should Teachers Be Taught? Settings and Roles in Teacher Education Who Teaches? Who Should Teach? Teacher Recruitment, Selection, and Retention Does Difference Make a Difference? Diversity and Teacher Education How Do People Learn to Teach? Who’s in Charge? Authority in Teacher Education How Do We Know What We Know? Research and Teacher Education What Good is Teacher Education? The Place of Teacher Education in Teachers’ Education. _The Association of Teacher Educators is an individual membership organization devoted solely to the improvement of teacher education both for school-based and post secondary teacher educators. For more information on our organization and publications, please visit: www.ate1.org _. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 13.1 (2005) 104-108 [Access article in PDF] A Response to Estelle R. Jorgensen, "Four Philosophical Models of the Relationship Between Theory and Practice" Randall Everett Allsup Teachers College, Columbia University Each of the four philosophical models that Estelle Jorgensen has put forth contests, adheres to, or adjusts the hierarchical relationships between dualities, specifically the theory and practice of musical learning. The dichotomy model (...) faces binary associations head on, splitting existence however defined into dualisms like "this/that," "us/them," and "mind/body." Models of polarity, according to Jorgensen, accommodate dualities by buffering edges, emphasizing the interconnectedness of binary relationships. The fusion metaphor is exemplified by Paulo Freire's notion of praxis in which action and reflection are welded together to create hope for a new world, one free of the oppression and conflict that is inherent in binary relationships. The dialectical model is contrapuntal by nature, Edward Said would say.1This relationship highlights our postmodern devotion to différence by embracing the tension created through inclusion so that "this is with that," "we are with them and they are with us," and "mind is with body, just as body is with mind."2Perhaps there is a fifth model, a new kind of relationship where the oppositional or hierarchical nature of binaries co-exists peacefully without tension. [End Page 104] Such an arrangement is, I think, an outgrowth of capitalist democracy—it is, most especially, representative of our global, information age. This type of relationship is problematic philosophically, we will see, lacking as Jorgensen has outlined "logic evidenced in principles," "internal consistency," and "coherence within a unity or whole." Likewise for Bennett Reimer, this new mind-set fails the test of philosophical scrutiny, unconcerned as it is with a "reasoned, structured set of propositions."3 Whether philosophy or mind-set, this new arrangement has as much to do with freedom and free markets as it does with the particular conditions of both modernity and postmodernity.In the novel, White Noise, by Don DeLillo, the postmodern condition is represented in part by an "Airborne Toxic Event," a cloud of gas, Nyodene D, which floats above a tranquil All-American college town.4 A sense of crisis is felt, but felt obliquely and no one knows exactly what harm has been done. In Albert Camus' The Plague, by contrast, the disease that infests the North African town of Oran acts to awaken its citizenry, confronting the populace with the moral imperatives to fight or flee.5 Perhaps the metaphor of quarantine symbolizes the hard boundaries of modernism.Capitalism seeks to dissolve conflict. It operates silently, in the realm of social production, like a cloud of gas. Denise, Jack Gladney's daughter in White Noise, mumbles over and over in her sleep, "Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida...."6 There is a sense of ontological change, that the expanding reach of media, information, and technology rewires the way we think, the way we dream. Tensions are willed away. The expansion and survival of market shares, after all, depend on the peaceful erosion of boundaries—boundaries that demarcate what we learn, what we buy, and who we are.Questions about what this new system means—this new mind-set—are explored in a book called Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.7 These writers posit a global world of communication, cooperation, and affect, where an increase in hybrids creates a kind of "omniversality" where the virtual, natural, and ideological converge.8 In the dialectical relationship that Jorgensen shares with writers like Paulo Freire and Maxine Greene, there is no acceptable synthesis, no peaceful co-existence, between oppressors and oppressed. While according to Freire, the oppressed may internalize or house characteristics of the oppressor. In the global world of capital, the oppositional nature of the Other is replaced by niches or fragments, dissolving differences into marketing opportunities, really. That the avant-garde no longer exists is proof of this new state.As the essentialist nature of the Other fades away... (shrink)

Introduction. Higher education plays a particularly important role in the development of a country. The goal of the article is to describe the development of concepts about education in general and higher education in particular to explain the role of education in social life. Humboldt sees higher education as a process toward freedom and the search for true truth. Humboldt's philosophy of higher education is an indispensable requirement in the context of people struggling to escape the influence of the state (...) and church forces. The purpose is to find out the content and principles of higher education, especially meaningful suggestions for building an autonomous education in Vietnam today. Materials and Methods. The article uses materialist dialectic to analyze Humboldt's philosophy of higher education. In addition, the article also uses methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison and contrast to clarify views on education in the history of human thought from ancient, medieval, modern and modern times, from which to draw the basic contents and principles in the philosophy of higher education of Humboldt. Results and Discussion. Humboldt is the founder of the University of Berlin - known as the mother of modern universities. It is a new university model based on the philosophy of upholding freedom in learning and teaching, upholding the scientific spirit to seek and discover the truth, and at the same time, combining teaching with scientific research. His liberal education philosophy has contributed to affirming the strength and position of universities. He criticized state intervention in university institutions. Based on the anthropological foundation of emphasizing human diversity, Humboldt's higher education philosophy is truly liberating when it comes to bold views. Humboldt believes that a university is a pure place of science and research, so it is not influenced by any outside force, even from the state. A university is where academic freedom, scientific freedom and other autonomy are guaranteed so that the institution can run smoothly. Universities must have unity between research and teaching. However, Humboldt's philosophy of higher education still contains many issues that need to be considered thoroughly. Specifically, the promotion of internal self-determination requires financial autonomy while the state's investment capital in universities is still quite large; Calling for education to be privatized is still inadequate. The elitist spirit in the Humboldt model is no longer fully relevant in the context of a market economy that tends to lead to the pursuit of targets, which are often related to quality. Practical significance. Humboldt's liberal philosophy of higher education has a strong influence, dominates and becomes a reality in many countries with advanced education. For Vietnam, Humboldt's higher education philosophy is a meaningful suggestion to build an autonomous education under the country's socio-historical conditions. (shrink)

The primary concern of this paper is to outline an explanation of how Kant derives morality from reason. We all know that Kant thought that morality comprises a set of demands that are unconditionally and universally valid. In addition, he thought that to support this understanding of moral principles, one must show that they originate in reason a priori, rather than in contingent facts about human psychology, or the circumstances of human life. But do we really understand how he tries (...) to establish that moral principles originate in reason? In at least two passages in the second section of the Groundwork, Kant insists upon the importance of grounding the moral law in practical reason a priori, and subsequently states a conception of practical reason from which he appears to extract a formulation of the Categorical Imperative. The reasoning employed in these passages would appear to be of central importance to the overall argument of the Groundwork, but in each case the route travelled from the definition of practical reason to the ensuing formulation of the moral law is obscure. My goal is to work out a plausible reconstruction of this portion of Kant’s argument. At the very least, I hope that my interpretation will illuminate the distinctive structure of the Kantian approach to questions of justification in ethics. What I understand of Kant’s view leads me to believe that its aims and overall shape are different in important respects from what is often assumed. It also represents an approach to foundational issues in ethics, which provides an alternative to many contemporary attempts to ground morality in reason. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 13.1 (2005) 104-108 [Access article in PDF] A Response to Estelle R. Jorgensen, "Four Philosophical Models of the Relationship Between Theory and Practice" Randall Everett Allsup Teachers College, Columbia University Each of the four philosophical models that Estelle Jorgensen has put forth contests, adheres to, or adjusts the hierarchical relationships between dualities, specifically the theory and practice of musical learning. The dichotomy model (...) faces binary associations head on, splitting existence however defined into dualisms like "this/that," "us/them," and "mind/body." Models of polarity, according to Jorgensen, accommodate dualities by buffering edges, emphasizing the interconnectedness of binary relationships. The fusion metaphor is exemplified by Paulo Freire's notion of praxis in which action and reflection are welded together to create hope for a new world, one free of the oppression and conflict that is inherent in binary relationships. The dialectical model is contrapuntal by nature, Edward Said would say.1This relationship highlights our postmodern devotion to différence by embracing the tension created through inclusion so that "this is with that," "we are with them and they are with us," and "mind is with body, just as body is with mind."2Perhaps there is a fifth model, a new kind of relationship where the oppositional or hierarchical nature of binaries co-exists peacefully without tension. [End Page 104] Such an arrangement is, I think, an outgrowth of capitalist democracy—it is, most especially, representative of our global, information age. This type of relationship is problematic philosophically, we will see, lacking as Jorgensen has outlined "logic evidenced in principles," "internal consistency," and "coherence within a unity or whole." Likewise for Bennett Reimer, this new mind-set fails the test of philosophical scrutiny, unconcerned as it is with a "reasoned, structured set of propositions."3 Whether philosophy or mind-set, this new arrangement has as much to do with freedom and free markets as it does with the particular conditions of both modernity and postmodernity.In the novel, White Noise, by Don DeLillo, the postmodern condition is represented in part by an "Airborne Toxic Event," a cloud of gas, Nyodene D, which floats above a tranquil All-American college town.4 A sense of crisis is felt, but felt obliquely and no one knows exactly what harm has been done. In Albert Camus' The Plague, by contrast, the disease that infests the North African town of Oran acts to awaken its citizenry, confronting the populace with the moral imperatives to fight or flee.5 Perhaps the metaphor of quarantine symbolizes the hard boundaries of modernism.Capitalism seeks to dissolve conflict. It operates silently, in the realm of social production, like a cloud of gas. Denise, Jack Gladney's daughter in White Noise, mumbles over and over in her sleep, "Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida...."6 There is a sense of ontological change, that the expanding reach of media, information, and technology rewires the way we think, the way we dream. Tensions are willed away. The expansion and survival of market shares, after all, depend on the peaceful erosion of boundaries—boundaries that demarcate what we learn, what we buy, and who we are.Questions about what this new system means—this new mind-set—are explored in a book called Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.7 These writers posit a global world of communication, cooperation, and affect, where an increase in hybrids creates a kind of "omniversality" where the virtual, natural, and ideological converge.8 In the dialectical relationship that Jorgensen shares with writers like Paulo Freire and Maxine Greene, there is no acceptable synthesis, no peaceful co-existence, between oppressors and oppressed. While according to Freire, the oppressed may internalize or house characteristics of the oppressor. In the global world of capital, the oppositional nature of the Other is replaced by niches or fragments, dissolving differences into marketing opportunities, really. That the avant-garde no longer exists is proof of this new state.As the essentialist nature of the Other fades away... (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

Plato and Aristotle each present traditional forms of religious practice (e.g., sacrifice, choral performance, prayer, and temple cult) as activities that are worth performing. Because these philosophers advocated such unconventional theological views, their endorsement of conventional religious practice strikes some readers as surprising. This dissertation examines why Plato and Aristotle defended traditional religious practice. Specifically, it investigates their views on its efficacy (i.e., what benefits religious practice produces and how it is thought to produce them). Chapters 1-2 provide the (...) intellectual background necessary to appreciate Plato and Aristotle’s individual contributions. Chapter 1 outlines a view of efficacy that was common in the archaic period (the “Traditional View”). It shows that the literature from that period consistently promoted the idea that, through the performance of traditional religious practice, humans can influence the gods to effect change in all spheres of life: in the cosmos, the city, and the individual psyche. Chapter 2 shows that this view was destabilized in the dawn of the classical period, in the fifth century BCE. The pre-Socratic philosophers and Sophists of this period introduced several theological innovations that forced their proponents to reevaluate the traditional story about what traditional Greek religious practices accomplished and how they accomplished it. Plato both expands and narrows the understanding of efficacy that is set forth in the archaic age. He argues that, for a token religious practice to be successful, it must be performed according to certain ethical standards. Chapter 3 outlines Plato’s ethical criteria and argues that, while the philosopher, like proponents of the Traditional View, denies the efficacy of “illegitimate” performances that contravene these standards, he believes that religious practice can influence all realms of human life theogenically through the instrumentality of the gods. It also shows that Plato expands the modes of efficacy by introducing the possibility that religious practices produce benefits anthropogenically, without the assistance of the gods. Chapters 4-5 each detail a specific religious practice and articulate how Plato thought they could be executed according to his standards. Chapter 4 investigates Plato’s identification of choral performance and sacrifice as forms of play in the Laws, arguing that he imagined them to function as games do elsewhere in that work, when pursued in accordance with the laws and reason, and when performed for pleasure’s sake. Chapter 5 evaluates the role of petitionary prayer in Plato’s dialogues and shows that the philosopher valued the practice for its ability to facilitate intellectual achievement and integrated petitionary prayer into his psychology. Chapters 6-7 focus on Aristotle’s treatment of efficacy. Chapter 6 examines Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ and argues that, in contrast to Plato, Aristotle discards the Traditional View entirely by denying the ability of religious practices to move the gods to action or to effect change in the cosmos. It reconciles passages from the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, which seem prima facie to endorse conventional attitudes towards the gods, with the philosopher’s metaphysical views, which appear to contradict them. Chapter 7 examines the social and psychological benefits of religious practice in Aristotle’s Politics, where the philosopher claims that the institution of religion forms a necessary part of the city. It demonstrates that, for Aristotle, religious practice provides residents with rest and leisure, obligates them to observe laws, and promotes the development of friendship between residents. (shrink)

In this chapter we explore two important questions that we believe should be central to any discussion of the ethics and politics of cultural heritage: What are the harms associated with appropriation and commodification, specifically where the heritage of Indigenous peoples is concerned? And how can these harms best be avoided? Archaeological concerns animate this discussion; we are ultimately concerned with fostering postcolonial archaeological practices. But we situate these questions in a broader context, addressing them as they arise (...) in connection with the appropriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, both past and present. (shrink)

Over the centuries the term “talent” has changed semantically and slowly transformed itself into a floating signifier or become an accidental designator. The term “talent” no longer has one single meaning and a “referent” in real life, but instead a multiplicity of meaning and references to something beyond real life, something indefinite and indefinable. In other words, today we do not know specifically what the term “talent” in talent management really means or refers to. Indeed, this is problematical, because (...) in late modernity the term “talent” has become a popular and frequently used key term among business consultants and, within the science of human resource management, a cornerstone in the discipline of “talent management”, and not knowing what the term really means will turn any talent discussion, talent identification and talent recruitment into a question of subjectivity and belief in talent rather than objectivity and knowledge of talent. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe held that acting intentionally entails knowing (in a distinctively practical way) what one is doing. The consensus for many years was that this knowledge thesis faces decisive counterexamples, the most famous being Donald Davidson’s carbon copier case, and so should be rejected or at least significantly weakened. Recently, however, a new defense of the knowledge thesis has emerged: provided one understands the knowledge in question as a form of progressive judgement, cases like Davidson’s pose no threat. In (...) this paper, I argue that this neo-Anscombean maneuver fails because it is founded on an untenable conception of the difference between intentional and merely lucky success. More specifically, the neo-Anscombean view conflates merely lucky success with subjectively surprising success. Unlike the former, subjectively surprising success may well be intentional, for it may well be the result of an exercise of knowledge-how. After sketching an alternative view that better captures the intuitive contrast between lucky and intentional success, I argue that the conflation of surprising and merely lucky success owes to a tacit commitment to the thesis that knowing how entails knowing that one knows how. This thesis is not only false, but distortive of the explanatory role of knowledge-how. This result, in turn, tells us something important about what practical knowledge cannot be. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Storytelling and Narrative Knowing:An Examination of the Epistemic Benefits of Well-Told StoriesSarah E. Worth (bio)IntroductionPeople love to tell stories. When something scary, or funny, or out of the ordinary happens, we cannot wait to tell others about it. If it was really funny, etc., we tell the story repeatedly, embellishing as we see fit, shortening or lengthening it as the circumstances prescribe. When people are bad storytellers we tend (...) not to pay as close attention to their stories; our minds drift, and we hope for a swift conclusion. We tend not to remember those stories as well as the ones that were carefully constructed and skillfully delivered. Storytelling is one of our primary forms of communication with other people. Narrativity is the principle way that human beings order their experience in time. It is also one of the primary ways that humans make coherent sense out of seemingly unrelated sequences of events. Thus, an account of how this ordering works is essential to understanding one of the many ways of knowing used by humans, one that has been widely unaccounted for, I believe. What I will argue in this article is that reading, telling, and hearing well-constructed narratives are not just idle pastimes that we have created for entertainment purposes or even as a mere means of communication. Rather, there are epistemological benefits to reading, hearing, and telling well-constructed narratives. In particular, by practicing what I call narrative reasoning, we develop this skill, just as by practicing discursive reasoning we develop discursive reasoning skills. In turn, we develop an enhanced reasoning ability that arises from narrative reasoning and narrative meaning construction. Ultimately, I will argue that those who are able to develop the capacity to reason narratively will be able to have a more comprehensive understanding of the human experience. [End Page 42]Defining NarrativeTo begin, I will go into some detail about what I mean when I talk about narratives since the reasoning skills that will ultimately come from engaging with narratives will be related to the way that we come to understand and make sense of them. Since I do not intend to posit a theory of narrative, I will talk about what constitutes narrativity and what sort of features contribute to increasing the narrativity of a story. To begin, narrative is generally the representation of an event or sequence of events. It is closely tied to description, but it goes beyond description. "My cat has fleas" is a description of a state of affairs. "My cat was bitten by a flea" is a narrative about my cat, which includes a description. Some theorists (such as Barthes and Rimmon-Kenan) argue that a narrative must consist of more than one event or state of affairs in order to be minimally considered a narrative. For my purposes, the change in states of affairs from one to another will be essential for understanding the cognitive aspects that can be gained from engaging with narrative. Although I do not advocate a minimal requirement for something to be considered a narrative, at least two, if not multiple, states of affairs increase narrativity significantly. Narratives also have a unified subject and some relatively easily understood temporal structure. Although many narratives do not order all of their events sequentially, good narratives will have a temporal order that can be gleaned by its reader.1An annal might be something that is temporally ordered and likely have more than two events or states of affairs, and for this reason it might be put into a category of "story form." The primary principle of organization of an annal, however, is merely a temporal list of events. It cannot count as a full-fledged narrative since it may be a temporal list of events that has no unified subject. For example,A: "The Space shuttle Challenger explodes in 1988, the Berlin wall comes down in 1989, there is a massacre at Srebenica, Bosnia in 1995."B: "The Space Shuttle Columbia blows up upon reentry to Earth; the Space Shuttle Challenger explodes upon take off."A is a temporally ordered list of events and is an annal; B, however, is... (shrink)

New methods to analyse social media data provide a powerful way to know publics and capture what they say and do. At the same time, access to these methods is uneven, with corporations and governments tending to have best access to relevant data and analytics tools. Critics raise a number of concerns about the implications dominant uses of data mining and analytics may have for the public: they result in less privacy, more surveillance and social discrimination, and they provide (...) new ways of controlling how publics come to be represented and so understood. In this paper, we consider if a different relationship between the public and data mining might be established, one in which publics might be said to have greater agency and reflexivity vis-à-vis data power. Drawing on growing calls for alternative data regimes and practices, we argue that to enable this different relationship, data mining and analytics need to be democratised in three ways: they should be subject to greater public supervision and regulation, available and accessible to all, and used to create not simply known but reflexive, active and knowing publics. We therefore imagine conditions in which data mining is not just used as a way to know publics, but can become a means for publics to know themselves. (shrink)

The concept of ‘resistance’ has turned into a critical tool in different areas of political, philosophical and sociological thought. At the same time, the notion seems to be as productive as it is diffuse. ‘Resistance’ is used in very specific contexts in scientific or technical disciplines, and with extreme flexibility in social and cultural studies. In the latter two areas, the concept is often used without prior reflection on its characteristics and limitations. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze provides a (...) possible framework for conceiving cultural and political practices of resistance as positions of force, when he defines contraction as ‘a contemplation that preserves the preceding in the following’. The purpose of this article is to understand political ecologism in its activist and poetical dimensions, in light of a Deleuzian interpretation of resistance. (shrink)

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has posed different kinds of challenges to society and churches over the past months. With various ‘normal ministry practices’ not permitted under lockdown regulations, as well as people starting to fear the effect of coronavirus disease 2019, a sense of crisis can easily prevail. However, a small congregation in Bloemfontein, South Africa, responded by engaging their children and teenagers through reflection, content and outreach. Various methods, including virtual and face to face, were utilised to minister to and (...) with children and teenagers. This response can now be analysed to find answers to the following questions: How did the pandemic influence specific methods chosen for faith formation? What made it different from ‘ministry as usual’? What role did the Bible play in the methods and content used? Within the framework of the qualitative research, reflective practice from a hermeneutic perspective was utilised as theoretical approach to analyse the response of the pastors and Sunday school teachers. Reflection occurs on three levels, namely, technical, practical and critical. A literature study was also conducted on the influence of a pandemic on faith formation. Recommendations were made regarding different ways to engage with children and teenagers and involving them in ministry.Contribution: This research contributes to knowledge as to how and why pastors and congregations react the way they do in a pandemic and how this impacts upon faith formation among children and youth in the faith community. (shrink)

Magic takes many forms. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used in order to explain the world before they developed the scientific method. The ancient Egyptians explained the night by suggesting the goddess Nut swallowed the sun. The Vikings believed a rainbow was the gods’ bridge to earth. The Japanese used to explain earthquakes by conjuring a gigantic catfish that carried the world on its back—earthquakes occurred each time it flipped its tail. These are magical, extraordinary tales. But there (...) is another kind of magic, and it lies in the exhilaration of discovering the real answers to these questions. It is the magic of reality—science. Packed with clever thought experiments, dazzling illustrations and jaw-dropping facts, The Magic of Reality explains a stunningly wide range of natural phenomena. What is stuff made of? How old is the universe? Why do the continents look like disconnected pieces of a puzzle? What causes tsunamis? Why are there so many kinds of plants and animals? Who was the first man, or woman? This is a page-turning, graphic detective story that not only mines all the sciences for its clues but primes the reader to think like a scientist as well. Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous evolutionary biologist and one of science education’s most passionate advocates, has spent his career elucidating the wonders of science for adult readers. But now, in a dramatic departure, he has teamed up with acclaimed artist Dave McKean and used his unrivaled explanatory powers to share the magic of science with readers of all ages. This is a treasure trove for anyone who has ever wondered how the world works. Dawkins and McKean have created an illustrated guide to the secrets of our world—and the universe beyond—that will entertain and inform for years to come. (shrink)

Proponents of the rule of law argue about whether that ideal should be conceived formalistically or in terms of substantive values. Formalistically, the rule of law is associated with principles like generality, clarity, prospectivity, consistency, etc. Substantively, it is associated with market values, with constitutional rights, and with freedom and human dignity. In this paper, I argue for a third layer of complexity: the procedural aspect of the rule of law; the aspects of rule-of-law requirements that have to do with (...) "natural Justice" or "procedural due process." These I believe have been neglected in the jurisprudential literature devoted specifically to the idea of the rule of law and they deserve much greater emphasis. Moreover procedural values go beyond elementary principles like the guarantee of an unbiased tribunal or the opportunity to present and confront evidence. They include the right to argue in a court about what the law is and what its bearing should be on one's situation. The provision that law makes for argument is necessarily unsettling, and so this emphasis on the procedural aspect highlights the point predictability should not be regarded as the be-all and end-all of the rule of law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nietzsche’s Rhetoric on the Grounds of Philology and HermeneuticsAdrian Del Caro"The philosopher believes the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure: posterity finds it in the stone with which he built."Human, All Too Human, 1.201"All science only achieved continuity and constancy when the art of correct reading, that is philology, reached its height."Human, All Too Human, 1.270The complexity of Nietzschean rhetoric demands first a basic (...) working definition of rhetoric. In the etymological sense of Greek rhe¯torike¯, the art of oratory, and extrapolated to include the art of communicating effectively through writing, Nietzsche's rhetoric is a highly stylized, deeply self-aware manner of expression designed to convey meaning and to appeal. In the more limited sense of my essay, Nietzschean rhetoric is furthermore a discourse whose communicative and appealing aspects are aimed at the earth for the purpose of grounding human beings. By "rhetoric" I do not mean the negative connotation associated with "insincere or grandiloquent language" (Webster's), though it is certainly the case that Nietzsche's rhetoric frequently takes flight and requires grounding. It is to be expected that a classical philologist by training, and both a teacher and a writer by profession, would have a close understanding and practiced application of rhetoric; the particular challenge in explicating Nietzsche's rhetoric lies in the task to which his rhetoric is put, as well as in the zeal with which he pursued his task. I am not primarily concerned with what Nietzsche had to say about rhetoric while lecturing at the University of Basle, though I agree that Gilman, Blair, and Parent are right to emphasize the importance of rhetoric for the interpretation of Nietzsche's writings and in its own right as a competitor with philosophy (1989, xii, xvi, xx), rather, I am concerned [End Page 101] with the practice of rhetoric that distinguishes Nietzsche's writings from the early 1870s until the so-called Wahnsinnszettel (postcards and letters of madness) written in early January 1889. I also agree with Moore, who analyzes the specifically biological and medical idiom of Nietzsche and concludes "that new light can be thrown on [Nietzsche's] thought by situating it within the historical context of nineteenth-century theories of evolution and degeneration" (Moore 2002, 1-2).1In an early aphorism entitled "Origin of faith" Nietzsche concluded: "Habituation of spiritual principles [Grundsätze] without grounds [Gründe] is called faith."2 I provide the German to demonstrate that whenever possible, Nietzsche drew on the Germanic Grund in his discussions of grounding, even though he was keenly aware of Greek and Latin alternatives and could have used them. So for example Nietzsche's translator (say Holling-dale) could have chosen to use English "grounds" for German Gründe, but chose instead to use "reasons," which is also correct though not exactly in the spirit of Nietzsche's etymological nuance.3 Grundsätze, literally "grounding propositions," given idiomatically as "principles," has no comparable etymology in English. What one becomes accustomed to or adopts as a habit based on faith versus grounds, cannot by definition be grounded, whether or not it is a principle. Based on this example, living with grounds or reasons is living with foundation, with base and support. Living without grounds is simply acquiring habits, living by faith, living groundlessly. A similar usage is involved in English "grounds for dismissal," whereby "grounds" equals "reasons." Even the words founded and unfounded preserve some of the strength of "grounded" and "ungrounded" as I use them. In German "unfounded" is unbegründet or grundlos, participle and adjective respectively, and Nietzsche availed himself whenever possible of German expressions based on ground.The aphorism immediately following "Origin of faith" relies even more on Grund, and its translation into English deserves close attention. "Aus den Folgen auf Grund und Ungrund zurückgeschlossen" becomes "Reasons judged a posteriori on the basis of consequences,"4 which I would render as "grounds and ungrounds retroactively concluded from consequences." Nietzsche uses Grund twice already in the title, and in the body of this "aphorism" of thirty lines a variation of Grund occurs six more times (Gründe, Gr... (shrink)

BackgroundThe Mental Capacity Act was enacted in 2007 in England and Wales, but the assessment of mental capacity still remains an area of professional concern. Doctors’ compliance with legal and professional standards is inconsistent, but the reasons for poor compliance are not well understood. This preliminary study investigates doctors’ experiences of and attitudes toward mental capacity assessment.MethodsThis is a descriptive, cross-sectional study where a two-domain, study-specific structured questionnaire was developed, piloted and digitally disseminated to doctors at differing career stages employed (...) in a large, multi-site National Health Service Trust in London over 4 months in 2018. Descriptive statistics and frequency tables adjusted for missing data were generated and secondary analysis was conducted.ResultsParticipants were predominantly UK trained, female and between the ages of 30 and 44 years. Less than half of the participants reported receiving formal MCAx training. Only one-third of the participants self-rated themselves as very competent or extremely competent. Self-reported MCA confidence was significantly affected by career stage with Consultants with over 10 years of experience reporting lowest confidence.ConclusionsThis study describes significant variation in practice by doctors and low self-confidence in the practice of MCAx. These results raise concerns that MCAx continues to be inconsistently performed by doctors despite appropriate awareness of the law and professional guidance on best practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mikhail Bakhtin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and the Rhetorical Culture of the Russian Third RenaissanceFilipp SapienzaAlthough Mikhail Bakhtin figures centrally in multiculturalism, community, pedagogy, and rhetoric (Bruffee 1986; Welch 1993; Zebroski 1994; Zappen, Gurak, and Doheney-Farina 1997; Mutnick 1996; Halasek 2001, 182; see also Bialostosky 1986) many of his major ideas remain enigmatic and controversial. The elusive aspects of Bakhtin's theories exist in part because rhetoricians know little about Bakhtin's own (...) rhetorical culture. Theorists recognize this problem and call for a reworking of Bakhtin more on his own terms. This call has been made to resolve concerns about Bakhtin's ambivalence toward rhetoric. Since Bakhtin disliked rhetoric, any use of Bakhtin in rhetorical theory is largely a hybrid synthesis of his distinct ideas on poetics, prose, satire, the epic, the novel, and so forth. John Murphy proposes a reconception of Bakhtin closely built around his ambivalence and guided by the question, "what do we [rhetoricians] mean by the concept of a rhetorical tradition?" (2001, 259). The suggestion encourages rhetoricians to take Bakhtin more on his own terms than has been done in the past. Unfortunately, as the word "we" indicates, Murphy reworks Bakhtin primarily in terms of Western ideas about rhetoric. Slavists and "Bakhtinologists" in Russia argue that when talking about Bakhtin, "we" has often meant Western, obscuring the Russian cultural roots of his theories (Kozhinov 1993; Miller and Platter 1993, 118). The privileging of Western perspectives has also been criticized by scholars of other discourse cultures. Discussing American Indian rhetoric, Malea Powell argues that "we" means a Rhetorical Tradition that begins "with the Greeks, goes Roman, briefly sojourns in Italy, then shows up in England and Scotland, hops the ocean to America and settles in" (2002, 397). Differences in interpreting Bakhtin also proceed from translation difficulties between Russian and English. The Russian reader views Bakhtin in more essentialist ways as opposed to the "post-modern give-and-take" theorist of many Western [End Page 123] interpretations (Emerson 1990, 113). Read in the Russian language and from that cultural context, Bakhtin's vocabulary contains "conspicuous" elements of Orthodox Christianity and Slavic nationalist ideas (Kozhinov 1993; Mihailovic 1997) that reveal a Russian theological subtext to his ideas about community and dialogue.In this essay, I provide a reading of Bakhtin against the background of his own rhetorical culture. More specifically, I offer an analysis of an intertextual dialogue about language and community between Bakhtin and the symbolist writer Vyacheslav Ivanov. Scholars identify Ivanov as a poet, philosopher, and teacher who profoundly impacted Bakhtin (Mal'chukova 1992, 55). The Russian symbolists upheld strong nationalist ideals and a linguistic theory rooted in metaphysics (Mirsky 1972, 188). Many Slavists and Russian readers of Bakhtin suspect that Ivanov strongly influenced Bakhtin's rhetoric even though, for reasons unknown but that are suspected to be political, Bakhtin understates his debt to him (Ivanov 2001, 3). Bakhtin was not unlike his contemporaries in sharing an interest and vocabulary that addressed the major threads of symbolism. Read side by side with Ivanov's essays in Russian, Bakhtin's rhetoric displays a mixture of the European, Slavic, and Christian ideals that were in parlance among many Russian theorists in early twentieth-century Russia. Bakhtin and Ivanov give us a glimpse of this rhetorical culture. More specifically, they help us to better understand our appropriations of Bakhtin based on an elucidation of the meaning of specific terms as they existed among Bakhtin's contemporaries.The method that I use requires translation of specific Russian passages into English. Terms and phrases are interpreted against the usage background of others in early twentieth-century Russia. Bakhtin's Slavic-theological connections become evident through the elucidation of these intertextual references. Through this method, a common and accepted practice in Slavic literary studies, the use of key words and phrases are traced in and among texts to identify a discourse among authors and explicate its meaning.1 As Steven Mailloux points out, a "rhetorical hermeneutics" focuses on "the historical sets of topics, arguments, tropes, ideologies, and so forth" that give meaning to rhetoric (1988, 15-16). The approach is necessary due to the unique political and artistic circumstances during the early... (shrink)

The aim of the present study was to explore the use and understanding of the concepts ‘placebo’ and ‘placebo effect’ in 12 empirical studies that have addressed the prescription of placebos by doctors in clinical practice. There were great differences in the general methodology and in the definitions (or lack of any definition) of the basic concepts in these 12 studies. Therefore, the results reflect different things. They tell us a little about the use of ‘pure placebos’, more about the (...) use of ‘impure placebos’, but most of all, they tell us about the conceptual confusion in this area. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ritual and Reverence in Ancient China and TodayStephen C. AngleReverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. By Paul Woodruff. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 248.It is a sad commonplace that works in moral philosophy rarely do much to make their readers more moral. Unusually gifted classroom teachers can sometimes make a difference in students' lives, though, and now and again there appears a piece of philosophical (...) writing that makes a similar impact. Paul Woodruff has written an extraordinary book that has a chance of joining this select company. Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue wears its scholarship and philosophy lightly; in addition to lucid exposition and argument, it employs anecdotes, readings of a range of poems, and in one chapter a question-and-answer format in order to engage readers in the very real, very contemporary concerns that motivate the book. Woodruff believes that we have largely forgotten how to talk about reverence, even though its practice has not disappeared, so his sources for the theory of reverence are largely ancient-both Greek (his specialty) and Chinese. He weaves together classical text and contemporary issue in masterful fashion, producing a book that is both philosophically challenging and potentially transformative. I will comment mainly on its philosophical themes, but I urge one and all to experience the book's power.Reverence, says Woodruff, is a virtue: indeed, one of the most important of virtues. It is the "well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have" (p. 8). He characterizes the "belief in human imperfection" as the "central belief of reverence" (p. 199), and this makes sense, even though reverence is not primarily about beliefs. The idea that we are limited or imperfect informs each of the three feelings through which reverence is expressed. It is easy to see how this works with awe, but respect and shame are more complicated, requiring further discussion below. Woodruff offers the following initial formulation of the interrelationship among the three:Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe to be outside our control—God, truth, justice, nature, even death. The capacity for awe, as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting human beings, flaws and all. This in turn fosters the ability to be ashamed when we show moral flaws exceeding the normal human allotment,(p. 3)He continues by saying that this syndrome was recognized by the Greeks before Plato, and that "the immediate followers of Confucius thought much the same." [End Page 471]Woodruff's tying of reverence to specific thinkers immediately makes one wonder what word or words he is translating as reverence, if it was known in Greece and China. Comparative philosophers will also ponder the words "much the same": is there really a single virtue called "reverence" that, without our previously realizing it, can be found in both the Greek and Chinese traditions? Or are there two, more loosely related, ideas?Woodruff's answer is that there is a single virtue, but that it is realized and theorized somewhat differently in different contexts. Indeed, he does not insist that the concept of reverence that he finds in ancient Confucianism is the only Confucian concept of reverence. He relies only on the Analects and Mencius as sources, and readily acknowledges that his picture is partial and simplified (p. 230). He makes similar qualifications with respect to his Greek sources. His "reverence," then, is in the first instance a rational reconstruction built upon the ideas/terms of different traditions as well as his own philosophical reasoning. In the Greek case, he says that the concept he is exploring is "named both by hosiotēs and its near synonym eusebia, which is frequently translated as 'piety'" (pp. 225-226). Once we know this, it is easy to see that his topic was discussed in Greek texts and to ask how these texts fit the awe-respect-shame schema he has identified.Rather than pursue this topic—on which see particularly Woodruff's chapter 5—I am going to spend some time... (shrink)

Reading Henry Greely's wonderful book, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, while riding public transport sparked awkward looks and equally awkward discussions. I thought of removing the dust jacket, yet I was reminded that Greely's stated purpose in writing the book was to spark conversation. The title is, of course, intentionally provocative. Greely does not, in fact, believe that humans will stop having sex for the multitude of reasons that we do already. Quite the contrary; (...) he proposes that sex for reproduction will become a technical endeavor, while sex for pleasure or other purposes beyond reproduction will remain as it is. In a not-too-distant future, advances in genomics and assisted reproduction, especially preimplantation genetic diagnosis, will allow us to control the genetic makeup of embryos. To a limited degree, PGD already makes this possible, but what Greely proposes is slightly different. His vision of the future depends on the potential for further advances of today's already fairly complex biotechnology. Greely does an excellent job of making this cutting-edge science easy to understand. (shrink)

This work has its origin in a master's research about Brazilian Education. The approach that we present in this text reveals the perspectives of caring perceived in a five-year-olds classroom in the daily life in a municipal center for Early Childhood Education in Fortaleza. The theoretical discussions on the theme involved a dialogue between Pedagogy and Philosophy of Education based on the contributions of Kramer, Pagni, Foucault, Rancière, Kohan and Boff. It was a qualitative research of phenomenological inspiration, which method (...) of data creation was participant observation. The analysis revealed that: in the interactions occurred in pedagogical practices, teachers and children take care of each other; the meaning of caring for children can be perceived in the minutia of their daily actions, as well as in affective involvement, in playing together, in speaking and listening to others, in sharing life on a daily basis; as for the meaning of caring for the adults, it is influenced by the way they were cared for, by their subjectivation and their choices in their way of being; caring humanizes teaching practices, inspiring emancipation; the policy on results that has aimed at "improving educational indices" may represent a danger to Early Childhood Education by minimizing the sharing of specific childhood experiences to training in order to achieve expected results. The study emphasized the need to reflect on the meaning of education and therefore proposes that caring be valued as an ethical decision and as an option for reflection on the way of living and interacting. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent., was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention. The editors recommend that to experience the drifiting thought (...) that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terror Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage * * * * Instead of beginning with radical doubt, we start from naiveté. —Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. —Jack London, The Call of the Wild The figure of the feral remains a perpetual enigma, but the parameters remain relatively consistent. A person, usually a child, enters civilization after having been raised by wolves or kept in some kind of cruel captivity. The outsider perspective on domestication ensuing in an edge of a culture's self-recognition of its clumsier attributes, what has been taken for granted becomes apparent, is brought to the foreground with the stranger and made questionable. Amusement follows naïve questions or observations such as Kaspar Hauser in the Herzog film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, when Kaspar notes that while in his room he is engulfed by it, but when he looks at the tower he can turn away and it disappears. Ergo, the room is larger than the tower. How entertaining. The aberrant one destabilizes the comforting cultural normative. Places become seen as mere impressions out of space, a patterning, a rut that not everyone lives in like us. This is one figure of the feral. The naiveté that begs all the questions. As a figure for a certain philosophical disposition, the rapidity of one’s saccade scans the environment, intuits it’s space, not from an initial thaumazein or a Critchlean sense of disappointment, but from a child-like naiveté bent on survival. To serve the naïve is merely one form of critique, and it is not nearly used enough in lieu of the critique that provides answers. How dull. It is not necessary to be an outsider to entrench a critique with naiveté. After having forced to suffer in the most parched and rocky terror, itself for so long rooted upwards of fifty feet into the ground upon which it grows, even a grapevine can spontaneously produce a white grape on a red vine. The curious feral can arise from within, and like pinot grigio, it adds variety without admonishing its roots. There is also the feral dog. Not raised by wolves, but humans. Founded in place the figure of this feral denies this place. The trajectory of this feral roves from the cultivated to uncultivated, or in speaking of plants from controlled to volunteer, finding the necessary nutrients and survival patterns on its own. Finding other places, reaching out into space testing its fertility. And when introduced into a foreign environment, it withers or flourishes. We would like to attempt a thesis at this juncture and to accept neither feral figure in its entirety, but to argue for the intimate conjunction between a cultivated place and its resonance with the space it procures for its nest and kin. I'm not a biter, I'm a writer for myself and others. —Jay-Z, What More Can I Say? I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers. —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans There is no subjective disposition outlining an unambiguous individual of the para-academy. There is no para-academic. We all have day jobs. 'Para-academic' seeped through the cracks as an adjective in the call to frame publishing dedicated to the critical rigor expected by academic publishing, but to deny the limitations of guarded legitimation through capital means. Open-access holds hands with this parasitic descriptor. Para-academic publishing's refusal to adhere to the valuation of locked access of a site, the site “of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value,” 1 seeks to recognize not merely an inclusive interpretation of significance, but the significance of thinking practice. The practice inside the paywalls of academic 'education' is held in a deathgrip by its infatuation with value and information, both empty without the apprehension of human experience, the barbaric yawp. “I can't breathe in here.” It is not that a para-academic practice leads one to the childish wonder of Kaspar Hauser who wonders about the spatiality of his room. It is the academic legitimation that distorts that one can hold the understanding of both in a constellation of place and space. Led to believe there is only a place for things, we are led to disillusionment. It is also not that a para-academic practice relinquishes itself to the invasive growth outside of careful cultivation, an abandonment of pleasantries for the toothy growl of a predator. It is the academy's fear that thought does not require capital to signify value. Some of the most nutritious meals can be foraged. Defining a para-academic practice is not outlining a place of accreditation of the practice, it is the recognition that any place is subject to modulation by the space it inhabits as well as creates. The para-academic practice keeps an eye of the creation of spaces, follows those paths that eat themselves in the name of academia. This is not unlike Red Peter's report to the academy, only successful if we report in idle idiosyncratic banalities that we have once again become victorious in our acculturation and nullification within the confines of accredited mush and our trajectory of wild rigor is defeated in our desire for recognition as recognizable in this place. Weeds are integral to the functioning of a large ecosystem. The manicured garden is entirely reliant on its keeper. The pansy can also go wild once neglected, the daisy definitely does.... a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please. At this stage the universe cannot be distinguished from how we act upon it, and the world may seem like shifting sand beneath our feet. —George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge, and another edge, mobile, blank, which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two edges, the compromise they bring about, are necessary. —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text Between these two epigraphs, interminable questions of where and questions of happening, gesture, and interface. To stay buoyed between a site of visible happening and haptic perspicacity. Bounded by one or the other leads to a desiccation of potential knowledge. The tumbleweed tumbles until met with mud, a bare structure moving but not movement. A tumbleweed tumbleweeds, propagates only at a place. It becomes significant again, continues. Significance, the site where meaning is made known through kinesthetic apprehension. 2 The feral founds a gestural horizon; an outsider’s scrawl-becoming-law; Deleuze teaching Meno’s dog geometry. Place as marked, outlined, recognized, territorialized. The academies marked by their peculiar disciplines, outlined by their rigid boundaries, recognized as factories of value. This far from ensures complete purchase on the space of thought, but it has made an undeniably elaborate means of making work significant. The academy is a muddy spot, it is fertile, but its gates are high and its dogs are barking. The coordinates of concept and experience. Already claimed by a stabilizing suspension, the terms enter specificity of ‘this is this’. Another correlation: activity and the individual. The individual, a placeholder in the crosshairs of juridical identification. Activity, what expands and surrounds this location, but utterly indebted to the node of “one who”. What's happening in this oscillation of nature and nurture is practice. Practice, as Stengers tells us “is not the activity of an individual or the product of that activity. It is the ingredient without which neither that activity nor this product would exist as such.” 3 Moving outward from our own honing, we're curious about the ingredient creating the place for holding conceptual and experiential engagements in each hand. And we'd like to argue that this place is not a limiting specification, but a practice undulating daily, by the minute. And we call this practice the para-academic practice. I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason. —Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it discovers in itself—a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist. — Albert Camus, The Rebel Anyone is a para-academic or practicer of such means. The academic can, and we argue should, be active para-academically, to escape the bounds, recognizing no site specific place as a place to rest on or the place to grab the Kafka's top and wonder at its disobedience not to continue. Yet, the para-academic practice must maintain the desire for rigor in scholarship. Indeed desiring past itself to claim a more naïve rigor, one that does not take its form for granted. Without a para-academic practice, the scholar spends half the time merely working on behalf of a hierarchy, to maintain it, and the other measly amounts of time are in the name of thinking, but only in name. Not to mention the amount of debt it takes to attend the halls of higher education. Not to mention the snoring tenures. Not to mention the barely scraping by adjuncts. Not to mention the materials that shake the very force of producible theory. Not to mention when swimming in texts becomes slogging through data. Academia is a barbaric food chain and it is our claim that there is, as always, an imperative for thought to move, with Heidegger, beyond the logics of calculation and planning, to a time of its own. The path, into the panic of the dark wood of this space can be followed by any; any who let the silence and the rigor enter the play. Where the little theater is larger when inhabited ; where the data of the tutor asymptotically refutes; and where, as much as one wouldn’t expect it here, ballet may turn out to be the most feral of forms… NOTES Jean Baudrillard, “Value's Last Tango” Simulacra and Simulation trans. Sheila Faria Glaser,. “What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced.” Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text. Isabelle Stengers, “The Science Wars” Cosmopolitics I trans. Robert Bononno, 47. (shrink)

Moral judgments, we expect, ought not to depend on luck. A person should be blamed only for actions and outcomes that were under the person’s control. Yet often, moral judgments appear to be influenced by luck. A father who leaves his child by the bath, after telling his child to stay put and believing that he will stay put, is judged to be morally blameworthy if the child drowns (an unlucky outcome), but not if his child stays put and doesn’t (...) drown. Previous theories of moral luck suggest that this asymmetry reflects primarily the influence of unlucky outcomes on moral judgments. In the current study, we use behavioral methods and fMRI to test an alternative: these moral judgments largely reflect participants’ judgments of the agent’s beliefs. In “moral luck” scenarios, the unlucky agent also holds a false belief. Here, we show that moral luck depends more on false beliefs than bad outcomes. We also show that participants with false beliefs are judged as having less justified beliefs and are therefore judged as more morally blameworthy. The current study lends support to a rationalist account of moral luck: moral luck asymmetries are driven not by outcome bias primarily, but by mental state assessments we endorse as morally relevant, i.e. whether agents are justified in thinking that they won’t cause harm. (shrink)

How are the teachings of a thirteenth-century master relevant today? Twenty contemporary writers unpack Dogen's words and show how we can still find meaning in his teachings. Engaging Dogen's Zen is a practice oriented study of Shushogi (a canonical distillation of Dogen's thought used as a primer in the Soto School of Zen) and Fukanzazengi (Dogen's essential text on the practice of "just sitting," a text recited daily in the Soto School of Zen). It is also a study of the (...) entire self. Here, the principles of Soto Zen practice are unpacked and explained by leading contemporary Buddhists from the living tradition--monks, priests, academics, and community teachers. Tackling Dogen's approach to key issues, such as the preeminence of shikantaza, universal buddha nature, and what it means to be a Mahayana Buddhist, the contributors to the volume help Zen practitioners and any who are trying to deepen their lives to appreciate better the teachings of Soto Zen and make these teachings part of their lives. By revisiting what remains precious in Shushogi and Fukanzazengi, we let them breathe just as we learn to breathe in zazen. We find that Soto practice not only engages Dogen and Sakyamuni, but all of our sisters and brothers, and indeed the great earth itself. Includes essays from Kosho Itagaki, Taigen Dan Leighton, Tenshin Charles Fletcher, Shudo Brian Schroeder, Glen A. Mazis, David Loy, Drew Leder, Steven DeCaroli, Steve Bein, John Maraldo, Michael Schwartz, Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Leah Kalmanson, Erin Jien McCarthy, Dainen David Putney, Steven Heine, Graham Parkes, Mark Unno, Shudo Brian Schroeder, and Kanpu Bret W. Davis. (shrink)

This article concerns the ways in which authors from various fields conceptualise the ethical issues arising in the conduct of research. We reviewed critically and systematically the literature concerning the ethics of conducting research in order to engage in a reflection about the vocabulary and conceptual categories used in the publications reviewed. To understand better how the ethical issues involved in conducting research are conceptualised in the publications reviewed, we 1) established an inventory of the conceptualisations reviewed, and 2) we (...) critically assessed them. We found that the publications reviewed mostly showed examples of descriptive ethics, in that most authors describe ethical issues without reflecting much on them, which could be explained both by 1) a lack of ethical education in research contexts, and 2) by the fact that we do not know what researchers know (or do not) about ethical issues. Additionally, the definitions identified in the publications are scarce and at times imprecise, but this seems more to point out the ethical vocabulary’s difficulties in certain contexts. Further, very few authors offer proper conceptualisations of the ethical issues arising in conducting research. When dealing with vast arrays of ethical issues to conceptualise, perhaps one ought to remember that some typologies already exist that could guide further reflection and help understand other realities for which the current ethical vocabulary may be lacking. We believe that combining the reviewed typologies, both with other well-developed typologies and critical reflection, could help support better ethical practice in conducting research. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

The right to religious liberty as for instance set out in the European Convention of Human Rights protects acts of religious observance. Such protection can clash with other considerations, including laws aimed at protecting other state interests. Religious freedom therefore requires an account of when the right should lead to exemptions from other laws and when the right can legitimately be limited. Alan Patten has proposed a Fair Opportunity view of the normative logic of religious liberty. But Patten’s view faces (...) several problems. The normative work in his view is mainly done by added accounts of reasonable claims and of justifiability. So, the Fair Opportunity view in itself does not provide a normative criterion. Defenses of the Fair Opportunity view must therefore turn on the theoretical preferability of its structural features. But the Fair Opportunity view has the wrong form to capture the right to freedom of religion. The form of the right to freedom of religion is due to how its point is to address how states limit the liberty of citizens. Given a practice dependent approach, which assigns importance to the point and purpose of the right to freedom of religion, Patten’s theory is thus problematic. (shrink)

This paper discusses an important puzzle about the semantics of indicative conditionals and deontic necessity modals (should, ought, etc.): the Miner Puzzle (Parfit, ms; Kolodny and MacFarlane, J Philos 107:115–143, 2010). Rejecting modus ponens for the indicative conditional, as others have proposed, seems to solve a version of the puzzle, but is actually orthogonal to the puzzle itself. In fact, I prove that the puzzle arises for a variety of sophisticated analyses of the truth-conditions of indicative conditionals. A comprehensive solution (...) requires rethinking the relationship between relevant information (what we know) and practical rankings of possibilities and actions (what to do). I argue that (i) relevant information determines whether considerations of value may be treated as reasons for actions that realize them and against actions that don’t, (ii) incorporating this normative fact requires a revision of the standard ordering semantics for weak (but not for strong) deontic necessity modals, and (iii) an off-the-shelf semantics for weak deontic necessity modals, due to von Fintel and Iatridou, which distinguishes “basic” and “higher-order” ordering sources, and interprets weak deontic necessity modals relative to both, is well-suited to this task. The prominence of normative considerations in our proposal suggests a more general methodological lesson: formal semantic analysis of natural language modals expressing normative concepts demands that close attention be paid to the nature of the underlying normative phenomena. (shrink)

The article describes a capstone engineering course for preservice and inservice secondary science and mathematics teachers and shows teacher attitudes toward engineering before and after the course and results of a comparison with a convenience sample. It also gives the results of the attitudes of high school student experimental and control groups toward engineering in a pretest-posttest design. Four findings were made: (a) The science and mathematics preservice and inservice teacher attitudes toward engineering became more favorable after the capstone (...) course; (b) the attitudes of the convenience sample of secondary graduate students were less favorable toward engineering than they were among the treatment group in the capstone course; (c) the attitudes of the experimental group of high school students became significantly more favorable toward engineering after a 3-week unit on engineering; and (d) the attitudes of the experimental group became significantly more favorable toward engineering than did those of the control group after the 3-week unit. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce the narrow-sense and wide-sense conceptions of the community of inquiry (Sprod, 2001) as a way of understanding what is meant by the phrase ‘converting the classroom into a community of inquiry.’ The wide-sense conception is the organising or regulative principle of scholarly communities of inquiry and a classroom-wide ideal for the reconstruction of education. I argue that converting the classroom into a community of inquiry requires more than following a specific procedural method, and, therefore, (...) that the wide-sense conception must inform the narrow-sense community of inquiry, as it provides the pedagogical guidelines for classroom practice. This is followed by a discussion on the dual role of the teacher as facilitator and co-inquirer in mediating between the two conceptions of the community of inquiry. Finally, I look at three different interpretations of John Dewey’s educational theory and practice that underpins philosophy for children. I conclude that without an understanding of the relationship between the two conceptions of the community of inquiry to guide the larger aims of an education that supports democratic ways of life, the teacher’s role remains unclear. (shrink)

This paper seeks to explore the processes involved in becoming a teacher in this particular historical moment of global pandemic in Brazil. What are the challenges, limitations, possibilities and opportunities that the pandemic presents to the process of teaching work and teacher formation? A review of the literature that included contributions from Caponi, Kohan, Larrosa, Neuscharank, Vaz, Arroyo and Abramowicz suggests a dialogue between pedagogic theory, philosophy of education and the contemporary experience of political and social events in the (...) pandemic period The discussions reviewed explore the profound extent to which Covid-19 has affected our way of living, working and relating to others, and the psychological effects of social isolation. The situation demands from the Brazilian teacher an attitude of openness to change, specifically in the use of new technologies, and the extent to which they are or are not able to replace face-to-face interactions. The situation also challenges us to reconstruct, beyond the logic of neoliberalism, our notions of the type of school we have and type of school we want, the type of teachers we are and the type of teacher we want to be. We conclude that this process of thinking school again depends, if it is to escape neoliberal logic, on the capacity of understanding the vocation of the teacher to be one of “becoming-child” in the sense of experiencing an openness to and a desire for the new. As such, the “becoming-teacher” is one who allows herself to be addressed by another logic, another more sensitive and more aesthetic temporality, and who finds, in encounter with others, with art, with childhood, with becoming itself, the capacity to think, to resist, to fight for the realization of that logic. (shrink)