This chapter contains sections titled: Make'em Laugh, Make'em Laugh, Make'em Laugh! The Laughing Consciousness Laughing: No Laughing Matter The Joke of Critical Theory Lights Please! References.

[Condensed abstract] Socrates' ironic use of 'makaria' (blessedness) in the Republic exhorts Glaucon to think more critically. Certain features of the supposedly ideal city, motivated by Glaucon's character, may be protreptic for Glaucon to practice philosophical courage and intellectual moderation.

Although recent commentators have attended to dramatic and ironic aspects of Plato’s Republic, a more sustained examination of the relation between irony and the exchanges of Socrates and Glaucon is required because a crucial purpose and presentation of the irony have largely gone unnoticed. This paper argues that Socratesemploys irony in part to parody Glaucon’s extremism and that he does so to exhort Glaucon to think critically. First, it examines how Socrates uses the term makaria primarily ironically and pedagogically. Then, (...) a possible reason for this use of makaria is advanced: aspects of Kallipolis are a parody of Glaucon and that the parody aims to instruct Glaucon intellectually. This paper hopes to show that such a reading deserves further articulation and examination. (shrink)

This paper explores comedy as a queer pedagogical form that subverts problematic representational tropes of queerness pervading mainstream depictions of queer experience. Articulating ‘form’ less as a fixed arrangement of characters, images, objects, and ideas, and more as a kind of formation that positions these in dynamic relation to the wider context in which comedies are encountered, we mobilise the idea of queer pedagogical forms to capture how comedy can foster new modes of thinking about and embodying queerness for, and (...) with, audiences. Drawing on specific examples from Schitt’s Creek and Derry Girls, we document the potential of specific comedic modalities (e.g. irony, sarcasm, irreverence, and slapstick) to foster alternative representations of queerness, in which normative tropes are poked fun at, problematised, and reimagined. Through these examples, we demonstrate how comedies can enable us to ‘laugh ourselves out of the closets’ we live by, feel, navigate, and embody. (shrink)

In several enigmatic passages, Paulo Freire describes the pedagogy of the oppressed as a ‘pedagogy of laughter’. The inclusion of laughter alongside problem‐posing dialogue might strike some as ambiguous, considering that the global exploitation of the poor is no laughing matter. And yet, laughter seems to be an important aspect of the pedagogy of the oppressed. In this paper, I examine the role of laughter in Freire's critical pedagogy through a series of questions: Are all (...) forms of laughter equally emancipatory? Certainly a revolutionary pedagogue can laugh, but should he or she, and what are the political (if not revolutionary) implications of this laughter? In order to shed new light on Freire's fleeting yet provocative comments, I turn to Jacques Rancière for his emphasis on the aesthetics of politics, and Paulo Virno who connects joke telling with critical theory. Overall, I argue that we need to take Freire's gesture toward a pedagogy of laughter seriously in order to understand the aesthetics of critical pedagogy and the fundamental need for a redistribution of the sensible that underlies educational relations between masters and pupils. (shrink)

In this article I try to conceive a new approach towards laughter in the context of formal schooling. I focus on laughter in so far as it is a bodily response during which we are entirely delivered to uncontrollable, spasmodic reactions. To see the educational relevance of this particular kind of laughter, as well as to understand why laughter is often dealt with in a very negative way in pedagogical contexts, this phenomenon should be carefully distinguished from humor or amusement. (...) I build my argument for a smaller part on the basis of conceptual analysis, and to a greater extent on Bakhtin’s work on the transition from Medieval folk culture to Modern civilized culture, in which he claims that a reduction from laughing as a strongly physical experience to mere forms of amusement or humor actually implies that laughter no longer possesses its inherent equalizing and communizing potential. In a sense, laughter forms a threat to any organization of social existence according to similarities and differences in identity and position, and this explains why we usually try to suppress it, or why we try to render it functional in view of the continuation of a societal regime or pedagogical order. More positively formulated, laughter may be said to have an intrinsic educational meaning, because it allows a significant transformation of individual and collective existence. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to enlist the work of the American philosopher and psychologist William James in order to investigate the deeper significance of humor. It is neither James’s character nor anything he states directly about humor or laughter that is under discussion here, but the cosmos as grasped through his bold metaphysics and rich phenomenological observations. The thought of James, it is argued, discloses our inherence within a universe rife with ambiguity, complexity, and incongruity. I explore how (...) these features of reality, particularly when illuminated through James’s lush prose, may cause us to laugh. In addition, the insights of James are employed to examine the close relationship between humor and certain forms of religious experience, as well as with horror. (shrink)

SummaryStarting from late Classical-early Hellenistic age a series of witty, lighthearted and irreverent funerary verse-inscriptions aiming to produce some effect of amusement or laughter appeared on a number of monuments, reaching their apogee during Greek-Roman era. Most of them originated in Asia Minor and Rome. Some earliest examples were related to widespread hedonistic exhortations on tombs. Their later ramifications, consisting of ironical or playful expressions, amusing puns and instances of black humour, were written in a more satirical vein, except with (...) inscriptions dedicated for animals that were rife with sentimental motifs. Remarkably diverse as they were, such verse-inscriptions cannot be defined in terms of a distinctly separate, continuous tradition, but they shared some common features. Lacking – for the most part – conventional and formulaic elements, they struck us as heavily individualised, which sets them apart from the mainstream tradition of funerary poetry. This in turn might shed some light on social standing or/and mentality of individuals who opted for such expressive ways of remembering the dead. (shrink)

Santangelo, Paulo (ed.). 2012.Laughing in Chinese.Rome: Aracne Editrice. 472pp. €26. ISBN 97888 548 46203. This book of 15 papers is divided into four parts: humor in Chinese and Japanese literary works, examples of comic literature, the moral involvement of humor, and the psychology of humor. Santangelo provides a substantial introduction to smiles and laughter in the Chinese context and also to the papers in his book (pp. 5–28). This structure lends itself to a description and analysis of smiling and (...) laughing as both social acts and as manifestations of states of mind. An identifiable theme is the interrelationship between social acts (the sociology, culture or politics of situation) and manifest states of mind (the psychology of the individuals involved in the situation). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish OrientalismE. C. Graf (bio)My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than harm.—Miguel (...) de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.—Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!—Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a... (shrink)

This article is a co-written reflection on the process of curating and programming Printing Solidarity: Tricontinental Graphics from Cuba (2021–2022). Held at Stony Brook University's Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, the exhibition featured over sixty posters and printed matter produced mostly in the 1960s–1970s by the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) in Havana. As an experiment in pedagogical curating, the yearlong project spanned the isolation from, return to, and re-envisioning of inperson learning during (...) the COVID-19 pandemic. Reflecting on our inspirations, intentions, and challenges, we argue for the role of art objects in activating material-based, in-person learning on campus and consider the value of academic collaboration, cross-regional research, and experimental pedagogies. The project offered an opportunity to revisit the Cold War-period politics of global solidarity in today's pandemic era while exploring what it would mean to study art today from the question of solidarity rather than division. (shrink)

This article draws on the conclusion of the Commission on the Humanities in The Humanities in American Life that the aim of a liberal arts education is to foster critical reasoning through the use of language or discourse. This paper maintains that the critical method is in itself insufficient to achieve its purpose. Its failure is in its exclusion of feeling and of silence from the thinking process. Hence, the ultimate object of my analysis is to correct and to complement (...) the critical method with the aesthetic method of teaching the humanities. Central to the aesthetic method is art as a means to cultivate contemplative and creative skills. The essay brings out and examines the value of art as voices of silence in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dionysius, Bonaventure, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Paul Gauguin, and pays particular attention to the diaries of Eugène Delacroix. In the course of doing so, I shall be trying to make clear that art teaches us how to listen and how to encounter ourselves totally and completely. It goes on to suggest several pedagogical principles or consequences that flow from this aesthetic pedagogy. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Technocentrism: Supporting Constructionism in the Classroom” by Karen Brennan. Upshot: Brennan describes strategies designed to help teachers use Scratch in their classrooms, emphasising interfaces between the tool and its users, between users and between hope and happening. Previous work with similar aims identified apparently significant cultural approaches to initiating constructionist practice. Questions arise about the development of practice from technocentric to pedagogic over time that may have some answers in the data accumulated.

In conditions of post-pandemic reality, the creation of optimal psychological and pedagogical conditions for the formation of future specialists, raising the level of their professional training, socialization and adaptation to work in the work collective requires appropriate psychological support, the development of cognitive and psychological support technologies for the constructive implementation of practical social psychological assistance in the pedagogical process, as well as the use of modern cognitive-psychological approaches by teachers, the development of psychological recommendations on the style of pedagogical (...) impact and the like.The article highlights the important socio-psychological conditions for preparing a future teacher for socio-pedagogical activity in the context of post-pandemic realities. The necessity of using cognitive psychology technologies in the process of forming professionally speaking competencies of future psychologists and their speech culture in the process of professional speech training is substantiated. The technologies and conditions for the organization of the pedagogical process for the preparation of future practical psychologists who have undergone changes as a result of recent events related to the implementation of the educational process in a remote mode are described. The structure of the seminar on the basics of speech competence of a psychologist is presented as a result of using a dialogical approach in the system of professional training at a university.In our opinion, the materials in this article will be of interest to educators, practical psychologists, and social educators of the vocational education system, since they will help not only better understand the psychological characteristics of the professional and personal development of future specialists, but also constructively solve the urgent problems of their professional training. (shrink)

Following the Enlightenment, the concept of ‘critique’ broadened and acquired a political denotation, in which the expression of opinion alone could itself be already considered critique. This meaning of ‘critique’ expresses acknowledgement of men as equal, free and rational. This broad concept of critique, however, also tends to negate certain more technical and specific forms. This paper goes back to conceptions of critique introduced by Kant and developed in an educational perspective by the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp. Kant's concept of critique (...) concentrated on the conditions of possibility of judgemental powers, resulting in a transcendental critique of Reason. Natorp applied this conception of transcendental critique to education. Though Natorp relates education to society as a whole, his concept of critique does not uncover the social determinants of educational views but holds on to a transcendental critical idea of critical judgement that is not completely socially determined. Consequently, in the transcendental critical approach, the critical function of Reason is given priority over any political vision. This results in a conception of critique that primarily questions validity claims, stressing rational testing as opposed to other sources of validity, such as traditional or religious authority. The transcendental critical programme, further developed in twentieth-century Germany, still endorses the implied denial of the possibility of deriving the validity of propositions from experience. It can be distinguished from Karl-Otto Apel's brand of transcendental critique by its refusal to assume any primary criterion for critical judgement, in the manner of Apel's ‘ideal communicative community’. Consequently, this programme cannot result in any positive conception of education. Its main contribution consists in exposing those presuppositions of educational views and practices that function as a priori ideas as conditions of the possibility of their justification. Though not denying the value and relevance of positive educational conceptions, this transcendental critical approach primarily aims at preventing metaphysical foundational questions from being forgotten or dogmatically fossilised. (shrink)

In order to reach a better understanding of relationships in pedagogical practices the authors believe their language about relationships needs to be broadened and deepened. This chapter draws upon American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt who writes about ‘care’ and how what we care about represents a volitional drive. It explores his notion of love in relation to his notion of care, and elaborates more fully what is at stake in our pedagogical interactions. The chapter also offers some thoughts on why (...) a more complex theory of actions is needed in order to broaden and deepen our language of pedagogical relations and what this means for reimagining pedagogical relationships. Finally, it discusses two statements from two school leaders: ‘you have to give of yourself’ and keeping ‘an open door’. These led the authors to investigate some aspects of human relationships in education that are rarely touched upon in pedagogical literature. (shrink)

Publication date: 30 November 2016 Source: Author: Olha Bashkir The process of forming program provision for teaching pedagogical disciplines, pedagogy in particular, in pedagogical educational institutions has been characterized in the article on the basis of analyzed pedagogical literature, archival records, and scientific researches in periodicals. Pedagogical educational institutions in Ukraine were reorganized from the institutes of public education to “the united pedagogical institutes” at the beginning of the 30s of the 20th century. The content of programs for disciplines (...) of pedagogical direction has been revealed. They had undergone some changes due to the reformation of higher pedagogical education in Ukraine before the creation of classical pedagogical educational institution. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article aims to discuss the ethical ambiguities inherent to pedagogical tutoring teaching-relationships work in teacher training institutions. The thrust of its argument is that the special character of teaching relationships in pedagogical tutoring work invites an implicit blurring of boundary lines, which in turn poses distinct ethical and pedagogical challenges. The article goes on to discuss some of the pedagogical ambiguities that typically emerge in pedagogical tutoring work and teaching relations. Finally, based on the concepts of “ambiguity” and “dialogue”, (...) an attempt is made to shed light on the pedagogical potentialities these concepts hold for pedagogical tutoring work. (shrink)

For Gadamer, understanding moves between two different levels. One is the everyday ontological level in which there is a meeting between the familiar and the alien, between the known and the not‐quite‐expected. But understanding can also be a skill to be developed. This is the way in which we achieve good knowledge. In pedagogical terms, encountering the alien is the basis for self‐formation, or bildung, originating in Hegel. But there is an ambiguity at the heart of bildung. The notion of (...) encountering the alien runs together two different notions: (a) being pulled up short, as elaborated by Deborah Kerdeman; and (b) allowing oneself to be interrogated by the other, as described by Charles Taylor. And each of these has affective psychodynamic parallels in Jungian and Freudian psychology, the first in the notion of deflating hubris, and the second, in the reintegration of projection. The experiences of encountering the alien in these two forms can be extremely intense for university students and they constitute significant self‐transformations. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have critiqued norms of neoliberal higher education by calling for embodied and anti-oppressive teaching and learning. Implicit in these accounts, but lacking elaboration, is a concern with reformulating the notion of ‘time’ and temporalities of academic life. Employing a coloniality perspective, this article argues that in order to reconnect our minds to our bodies and center embodied pedagogy in the classroom, we should disrupt Eurocentric notions of time that colonize our academic lives. I show how (...) this entails slowing down and ‘being lazy’. (shrink)

On June 13, 323 BCE, Alexander the Great, king of the Greeks, died at Babylon at the age of thirty-three. He had conquered a large part of the known world—the oikoumenē of the Greeks—and he had pushed back the eastern limits of the universe by advancing into India as far as the basin of the Ganges. He had also done everything in his power to give birth to a myth around his person, a myth that endures to this day. Alexander (...) came to power in 336 BCE, at the age of twenty, after his father, Philip II, king of Macedon, had been assassinated. He was the cherished pupil of Aristotle, who followed him in his ventures and dedicated a treatise to him entitled Rhetoric to Alexander. He went to war in Asia against the .. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

This essay starts off with a modern-day court jester praising a Pope. Fo presents us with an historic moment: Luciani scandalises his Church by calling God “Mother.” With utmost seriousness, Fo appreciates the Pope’s kindness and warmth by which the artist perceives a way of scandalising the world out of complacency. In their idealised and situated presentations of the world, the sacred and the profane return the necessary to the contingent as moments of equal attention and distraction. Likewise, irony and (...) satire mark our situated sense of the ideal by an inability to unlearn the certainties by which we are urged to construct our world. This is done by first presenting a situated pedagogical context that refuses to provide solutions presumed on measurement, certainty or finality. Secondly this begins to lay claim to the political, aesthetic and moral values that are gained through art’s ironic disposition. Thirdly, through our contingent states of being we begin to understand how education is culturally conditioned and why we need to shift it to another gear – that of unlearning through a weak pedagogy. An atheist, Fo suggests that thanks to Pope Luciani, we now could endear to the Holy Spirit as a spirito ridens, a spirit that laughs. Here one finds a kenotic sense that gives us a glimpse in how an ironic disposition owes its strength and effectiveness to a weak pedagogy. By dint of such weakness, the jester’s pedagogical disposition becomes a form of resistance, exiting the Court in order to be with the people and consequently transformed by the people. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFaced with the marketization of Higher Education in England, pedagogy is under pressure in ways that often undermine lecturers’ deeply held values. For instance, this pressure results in the reduction of significant aspects of teaching to narrow metrics and requires universities to operate within intrusive structures that subordinate their pedagogical aims to profit-orientated objectives. In this paper, I analyse the way that people can preserve their agency in this pedagogical context. I guide my analysis with a framework that combines (...) critical realism with Aristotelian virtue ethics and MacIntyre’s ideas of qualities within human practices. I suggest the kinds of qualities that might assist faculty to preserve and advance rich pedagogical projects in the current circumstances. Finally, I use a critical realist morphogenetic approach to argue that people may be able to resist losing their way when faced with ubiquitous performativity regimes. (shrink)

This essay considers the ethical implications of engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort, using as a point of departure Butler's reflections on ethical violence and norms. The author shows how this attempt is full of tensions that cannot, if ever, be easily resolved. To address these tensions, the author first offers a brief overview of the notion of pedagogy of discomfort and discusses its relevance with Foucault's idea of ‘ethic of discomfort’ and the promise of ‘safe classroom.’ Then, (...) he focuses on Butler's account of ethical violence and norms to show how the subject's constitution and regulation are inextricably linked to violence in several ways. In the final part of the paper, the author turns more specifically to the ways in which a pedagogy of discomfort might entail ethical violence, suggesting how the turn to a nonviolent ethics might become possible or whether the ethical resonances of that challenge will always entail a degree of ambivalence. (shrink)

This book offers a moral rather than instrumental notion of university education whilst locating the university within society. It reflects a balancing of the instrumentalization of higher education as a mode of employment training and enhances the notion of the students' well-being being at the core of the university mission. Compassion is examined in this volume as a weaving of diverse cultures and beliefs into a way of recognizing that diversity through a common good offers a way of preparing students (...) and staff for a complex and anxious world. This book provides theoretical and practical discussions of compassion in higher education, it draws contributors from around the world and offers illustrations of compassion in action through a number of international cases studies. (shrink)

Being a member of a minority group makes it harder to succeed in academic philosophy. Research suggests that students from underrepresented groups have a hard time in academic philosophy and often drop out instead of pursuing a career in philosophy, despite having the potential to become excellent philosophers. In this paper, I will argue that there is a specific way of thinking about traditional conceptual analysis within analytic philosophy that marginalizes underrepresented groups. This has to do with what kinds of (...) analyses we philosophers think are worthy of conducting and with who we think are worthy of pursuing such analyses. I will then show why this is particularly worrisome for the profession of philosophy as an institution geared towards the love of knowledge and argue that it should be in our interest as philosophers to find ways to prevent this marginalization of underrepresented groups. Finally, I will provide an example of how to do philosophy differently that does not exclude members of underrepresented groups and suggest ways in which the teaching of analytic philosophy can directly counter the discriminatory practices of academic philosophy. (shrink)

This article discusses the use of a pragmatic approach as the philosophical foundation of pedagogy in Finnish universities of applied sciences. It is presented that the mission of the universities of applied sciences falls into the interpretive paradigm of social sciences. This view is used as a starting point for a discussion about pragmatism in higher education. The Learning by Developing (LbD) action model is introduced, analyzed and compared to pragmatism. The paper concludes that, at least in practice-oriented academic (...) subjects, a pragmatic approach to pedagogy, as well as the LbD action model, is effective and could be considered in several universities as the basis of philosophy of pedagogy. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Radical Constructivist Structural Design Education for Large Cohorts of Chinese Learners” by Christiane M. Herr. Upshot: In this comment, I take Herr’s proposition for a constructivist-informed pedagogy for structural design education to extract initial ideas for a framework for a constructivist pedagogy, a framework focused on the decision-making of a constructivist teacher. I enhance this initial framework with initial findings of a study I conducted with a constructivist mathematics teacher.

The article aims to discuss the relationships between work, education and politics, analyzing how everyday material relationships are projected as ways of living the present time and expectations regarding the future. Based on “selective expectations”, given the possibility of discarding in an eliminatory labor market, practices aimed at entrepreneurship and selectivity are investigated both in the context of work and in formal and non-formal education, highlighting the links between profitability and punishment, at the crossroads between privatized social policies and militarization.

Moti Mizrahi has argued that Thomas Kuhn does not have a good argument for the incommensurability of successive scientific paradigms. With Rouse, Andersen, and others, I defend a view on which Kuhn primarily was trying to explain scientific practice in Structure. Kuhn, like Hilary Putnam, incorporated sociological and psychological methods into his history of science. On Kuhn’s account, the education and initiation of scientists into a research tradition is a key element in scientific training and in his explanation of incommensurability (...) between research paradigms. The first part of this paper will explain and defend my reading of Kuhn. The second part will probe the extent to which Kuhn’s account can be supported, and the extent to which it rests on shaky premises. That investigation will center on Moti Mizrahi’s project, which aims to transform the Kuhnian account of science and of its history. While I do defend a modified kind of incommensurability, I agree that the strongest version of Kuhn’s account is steadfastly local and focused on the practice of science. (shrink)

Pedagogy in general is not only ruled by planning, explicit normative framings, and governmental strategies, but its topics, such as the success or the failure of teaching or learning processes or learners’ precarious or promising personality development, are also decisively influenced by unspoken, silent, corporal, spatial, material, barred, or alienated dimensions of pedagogy. Gender as an analytical category encloses these dimensions, as well as being a social category. In this essay, three sets of arguments, referring to implicit or (...) tacit knowing, to bodiliness and corporeality, and to performativity and mimesis will be used to explain the tacit side of gender as a dimension of pedagogy. (shrink)

In two very influential papers from 2008, Tamar Gendler introduced the concept of “alief” to describe the mental state one is in when acting in ways contrary to their consciously professed beliefs. For example, if asked to eat what they know is fudge, but shaped into the form of dog feces, they will hesitate, and behave in a manner that would be consistent with the belief that the fudge is really poop. They alieve that it is disgusting, while they believe (...) it is not. This paper investigates laughter from self-proclaimed egalitarian, tolerant folk, in response to oppressive jokes that might fit the alief-model. If I merely alieve the content of a joke at which I laugh, will that constitute morally exculpating reasons for such laughter? And what else might it imply? This paper will provide insights at the intersections of humor studies, ethics, epistemology, phenomenology, and the philosophy of mind, all while being moderately and appropriately amusing. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate ‘the confessional’ as an aspect of Wittgenstein's style both as a mode of philosophising and as a mode of ‘writing the self’, tied explicitly to pedagogical practices. There are strong links between Wittgenstein's confessional mode of philosophising and his life—for him philosophy is a way of life —and interesting theoretical connections between confessional practices and pedagogy, usefully explored in the writings of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. The Investigations provides a basis and springboard for (...) understanding the notion of ‘writing the self’ as a pedagogical practice which encourages a confessional mode compelling us to tell the truth about ourselves and, thus, creating the conditions for ethico-poetical self-constitution. (shrink)

This article examines the discursive practices evident in Whole-Class Text-Response Discussion as a pervasive curriculum activity in secondary English classrooms in Australia. This site was selected as an important one in the social construction of adolescents as apprentice citizens capable of reasoning from text in culturally valued ways. Bernstein's model of pedagogic discourse provides a sociologically principled framework within which the construction of particular forms of argumentative reasoning can be examined, as these forms are regulated either through visible or invisible (...) pedagogies. Halliday's model of social semiotics provides the linguistic tools for the examination of how institutionally privileged values and ways of reasoning are realized in the micro-semantic exchanges of two such whole-class text-response discussions; one regulated through a highly visible pedagogy and the other through a relatively invisible pedagogy. (shrink)