Helmut Plesner’s philosophical anthropology introduces not only the division of the world of the living being into self and environment, but also a superstructure over the zip distribution: eccentric positionality. This reflexive ability of the self to relate to itself allows the formation of personal-relative, i.e., social life. The aim of the article is: to trace the possibilities of methodological renewal of sociotheoretical discourse, which opens for him the principle of eccentric positionality.The study uses historical-comparative and (...) logical-analytical methods. Research results. H. Plesner in the idea of eccentric positionality unfolds the perspective and possible practical consequences of the establishment of human openness in the world, not stopping at the danger of finally breaking the anthropological framework of his philosophy, dissolving it in the concept of personal socialization.Conclusion. Plesner’s «social» is presented as a life phenomenon – it is the highest manifestation of life, and the process of personalization of life manifestations is a process of socialization. Taking the self beyond oneself in eccentric positionality is something more than separating oneself from the environment, opposing oneself to it and establishing an attitude towards it. In the course of establishing the relation to oneself, the self does not form it automatically – the positioning of eccentricity cannot be carried out directly – which enables a special space favorable for the «inter-self» existence of living beings, a specific sphere of «inter-self» relations – the sphere of social existence. (shrink)

This paper explores a possible anthropological dimension of place by providing an interpretation of Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical approach which proposes to understand it as a twofold “implacement” of man – discussing both the place of man in the natural world and man’s specific relation to place that makes him take his place in the natural world. The interpretation follows Plessner’s idea of a natural set of stages, developed in his major work Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, leading from (...) inanimate objects to plants, animals, and humans. According to Plessner, each stage differs from the other by virtue of its respective spatial delineation toward, and its position in, the world. With the paradoxical concept of man’s “eccentric positionality”, Plessner accounts for the exceptional position of man without thereby neglecting, on the one hand, his being part of nature, and, without falling prey to naturalism, on the other. Thus, Plessner offers an interesting perspective on place that also points beyond mere anthropocentrism. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to emphasize the theoretical and aesthetical meanings of Plessner’s aesthesiology. His theory on the unity of the senses allows to legitimate the normative sense of sensibility and his pregnancy to understand the organization of experience. Such an aesthetical perspective has also relevant implications for Plessner’s philosophical anthropology and his theory of eccentric positionality of human being, which is mainly a theory on the body-mind philosophical conjunction.

This dissertation critically examines Helmuth Plessner's philosophically ambitious explanation of laughter presented in his Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that Plessner's philosophical anthropology makes a distinctive contribution to our knowledge of the human capacity to laugh and, in the process, to our knowledge of human nature. This dissertation is accordingly addressed not only to philosophers interested in the question of human nature, but to physiologists, psychologists, sociologists, (...) and all other scientists interested in explaining laughter. ;Plessner, who lived from 1892 to 1985, was one of the founders and foremost representatives of the twentieth-century movement of thought known as philosophical anthropology, which he characterizes as "the systematic discussion of questions of the structure of human nature." Against Cartesian dualism, Plessner undertakes to investigate "how the psychological is clasped together with the physical." The project of Laughing and Crying , first published in German in 1940 and translated into English in 1970, is to investigate the conditions of possibility of these two forms of expression "in the basic figure of human existence under the spell of the body." ;Plessner's thesis in Laughing and Crying is that these two forms of expression outstandingly disclose "the secret composition of human nature," which in turn "constitutes the basis of laughing and crying." This dissertation is restricted to laughter in order to facilitate the exposition of this "secret composition," which Plessner names our "eccentric positionality." Chapter 1 establishes a role for philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of laughter in the light of physiological, psychological, and sociological findings. Chapter 2 discusses some of Plessner's earlier writings insofar as they form the background of and thus illuminate his approach to laughter. Chapter 3 examines and elaborates upon the development and details of Plessner's argument in Laughing and Crying. Chapter 4 assesses a criticism of Plessner's argument as "behaviorist." After locating Laughing and Crying within Plessner's corpus and Plessner's corpus within the movement of philosophical anthropology in his day, the conclusion addresses the question of the ongoing significance of this discipline of thought. (shrink)

Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is presented as a non-naturalistic philosophy of nature. Such a position is attractive and indispensable, for instance, to all debates concerning personhood and human dignity. Plessner’s work rests on a conception of philosophy that distinguishes without exception the contents of possible experiences from their conditions of possibility. Thus, Plessner’s anthropology is a theory of categorial contents, but not in the aprioric sense according to which they would be assumed to be prior to all experience. Plessner avoids such (...) a misconception by structuring his philosophy in a reflexive way. Therefore his basic philosophical category or idea—eccentric positionality—doesn’t mean a property of human or any natural beings, but the categorial frame called personhood which is in use when we identify empirical properties of humans. The challenge in understanding personhood as conceptually independent of empirical properties consists in distinguishing between the contingency of personhood and arbitrariness. (shrink)

In this article, main tenets of Bühler’s theory of language are compared with Plessner’s view on the position of language. Language crystallizes into an in- termediary position highlighting its crucial importance for both philosophy of culture and philosophical anthropology. On the assumption that a sensuously and commonly experienced reality is the basis for speaking and understanding subjects, Plessner and Bühler conceive of language as the crucial medium of »ec- centric beings«. Eccentric positionality and language prove to be co-constitutive.

Behaviour is a key term in Plessner’s philosophical biology and anthropology. »Eccentric positionality« means the embeddedness of all human modes of be- haviour in the spectrum of animal behaviour (centric positionality) and at the same time the evoulutionary emergence of original patterns of human behaviour (via eccentricity). This paper aims at showing that if one considers Plessners main oeuvres rather systematically than chronologically they can be seen as exemplary realisations of Plessner’s theory of behaviour.

In times of the Anthropocene, we are in need of philosophical anthropology, revisiting the question concerning the human condition. I suggest rethinking what one may call ‘human transcendence’ in terms of a responsivist paradigm. Drawing on Heidegger and Plessner, the idea is that we should think of the eccentric or ecstatic position of the human in terms of something we undergo, instead of it being a human capability or something we do. It is a gift, emplacing us to the (...) time-space of responsive embodied existence. The paper will follow this agenda in five steps. Having introduced what I take to be the challenge for a timely ontology, I will unfold the problem entailed in the very idea of philosophical anthropology according to Heidegger. I then focus on Heidegger’s (hidden) rapprochement to Helmuth Plessner’s anthropology, recalling Plessner’s analysis of laughter as a bodily expression displaying the ‘eccentric positionality’ of the human. I suggest rephrasing this kind of transcendence in a responsivist paradigm: Humans are responsive beings. (shrink)

Abstract:In this paper I will explore the contribution of philosophical anthropology to music education research which, over recent years, has been showing an increasing interest in the human body. In order to do this I will especially be drawing on the ideas of one of its pioneers, Helmuth Plessner. Plessner’s philosophy should be understood as an effort to overcome the Cartesian dualism ‘mind/body’ and to highlight the unity of a human being and her/his relation to her/his environment. With his central (...) theory of “eccentric positionality,” Plessner draws on a human’s relation to her/his body because a human is able to acknowledge that “I am body” and “I have body” while at the same time being able to realize her/his own situation and reflect upon it. Plessner grounds his thinking about music on his phenomenological observation about sound. He remarks that sound, which can be at the same time far and near, has voluminosity, impulsivity, an undeviating relation to human expressivity, is organized in vertical and horizontal arrangement, and tends towards sequentially. Because of all this, sound is compliant with a human body. His philosophy and especially his writings about music and sound could be fruitful for music educational theory and praxis. Some crucial aspects of his theory are embodiment in music, the relation between the meaning of music and body movements, the relation between the conduct of music and conduct of a human and the formation of culture as an open process. In this theoretical terrain concrete proposals and more general suggestions for an efficient and successful music education practice can be located. (shrink)

In the modern world of total technologization, scientific knowledge devoid of worldview correction (humanitarian expertise) carries a threatening tendency of self-denial: without a constant, philosophically correct transformation of objective knowledge about certain fragments (branches) of the surrounding reality into human knowledge (questions) about itself, the practical effectiveness of such knowledge inevitably accumulates in itself the threat of practical helplessness. Aim and the tasks of the research. Based on an in-depth analysis of the category of existence, as well as on modern (...) philosophical reflections on the methodological and cognitive insolvency of the idea of the world, to find out the real meaning of those changes that this idea meaningfully undergoes in the conditions of the modern total technologization of human life. The research methodology. From a methodological point of view, the author prefers a dialectical approach, considering the analyzed phenomena, regardless of the mode of their reality, in their development and internally contradictory essence. H. Plesner’s theory of eccentric positionality serves as a certain base point for the analysis of human nature and, accordingly, the world of human existence. Research results: The problematic existence of the world and the epistemological «failure» of the corresponding category, declared in some modern philosophical reflections, are connected exclusively with its anthropological and worldview function, which is based on the fundamental uncertainty of a man’s place in the world. The «worthlessness» («futility») of worldview thematization is derived from the allencompassing inability of the human figure in the world, from that «emptiness» and «invisibility» (specific own transparency) of the spiritual dimension of human existence, on which, however, this existence is based. Discussion. The human «option» of fulfilling the unity of living being can be characterized as extremely intense. In this variant, the phylogenetic line of development turns into an ontogenetic point of worldliness devoid of predetermined content, a fundamentally new type of integration. The horizons of such integration far exceed primarily because of its understanding. And the subject of such a meaningful life is forced to integrate everything that happens to him every time into a certain system (synthesis) of the world. That subjectivity the world has distinguishes the subject from the thing. Subjectivity and the world mutually belong to each other - they are correlative. A thing exists because it is what it is. The subject (and with it his world) does not exist like that. A subject is how and to what it relates. But the relation «how» and «to what» is not carried out completely anew and isolated every time, but exists in its multiplicity in a certain relationship. Each individual case, each individual action (method of action) acquires its meaning from a wider, structured context – in whole or in part. This context is the «world», the «life world» of the real subject, or the «world» as an anthropological idea. Conclusions. The task of modern humanitarianism is not only to find opportunities for rational use of the fact of the fundamental openness of the human being, but also to cultivate the ability to reconcile a man with himself, to accept himself. This gives us certain reasons to hope for the enduring significance of worldview thematization. Criticism regarding the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that to become a man, one must already be one, could be considered fair, but only if one does not take into account the principled nature of such an aphoristic position, because this is exactly how the human world exists - as the art of tolerance uncertainty. (shrink)

Bennett and Hacker criticize a number of neuroscientists and philosophers for attributing capacities which belong to the human being as a whole, like perceiving or deciding, to a “part” of the human being, viz. the brain. They call this type of mistake the “mereological fallacy”. Interestingly, the authors say that these capacities cannot be ascribed to the mind either. They reject not only materialistic monism but also Cartesian dualism, arguing that many predicates describing human life do not refer to physical (...) or mental properties, nor to the sum of such properties. I agree with this important principle and with the critique of the mereological fallacy which it underpins, but I have two objections to the authors’ view. Firstly, I think that the brain is not literally a part of the human being, as suggested. Secondly, Bennett and Hacker do not offer an account of body and mind which explains in a systematic way how the domain of phenomena which transcends the mental and the physical relates to the mental and the physical. I first argue that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology provides the kind of account we need. Then, drawing on Plessner, I present an alternative view of the mereological relationships between brain and human being. My criticism does not undercut Bennett and Hacker’s diagnosis of the mereological fallacy but rather gives it a more solid philosophical–anthropological foundation. (shrink)

The biological body: The body as thing in a postphenomenological perspective In phenomenology the lived body (le corps vécu) is considered as the subject of reflection while the biological body (le corps objective) is destined for medical sciences. As an alternative I give a view on the basis of the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner who thinks a person as a subject to have a lived body (Leib) and a biological body (Körper) from an eccentric or third perspective (excentric (...) positionality). A person experiences herself from that eccentric point of view as a lived body and at the same time as a biological and instrumental body. These two perceptions can only be characterized as a dual aspect (Doppelaspekt), and cannot be separated from each other. Plessner moreover considers the biological body as a thing among other things. I place this bodily thing in a postphenomenological perspective as worked out by Don Ihde and discuss the idea to consider it as a mediating thing between the person who has it and at the same time is it as a lived body in the world she lives in. I work out the effects on the person in case of organ transplantation or implantation of artefacts in the postphenomenological perspective of the embodiment and the hermeneutic relation. I conclude that from that perspective both relations appear to be too simple to elucidate what really takes place in a patient and suggest that in case of incorporation of organs or artefacts the postphenomenological mediating relations should be expanded to a triadic (semiotic) variant of mediating technologies that considers the biological body itself as mediating thing in order to encompass the whole of the human experiences including meaning. (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(s) 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 INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * 1. To drift is to be propelled by currents. 2. Sentences are textual currents. 3. To drift is to be com pelled with currents. 4. To be compelled is to be overcome by some force. 5. To be overcome by some force requires the instantiation of a weightless body (virtual or actual), upon which and through which a force can operate. 6. Forces can be physical, cognitive, unconscious and sensory. 7. Forces of drift have no particular telos; they incline bodies without knowable destination. 8. Drifting is nomadic, where nomadism includes movements between places, times (also time-zones), genres, thought and cognitive states. 9. Forces are attractors; attractivity is a force. 10. Attractivity is a relation between force and body. 11. Attractivity is relation of exteriority; it is of the domain of the foreign. 12. To drift is to become the prey of attraction, the prey of the foreign. 13. In the movement of becoming prey, one can either be eaten or feed into a re-composition of things. 14. Drifting is liminal; it can be equally productive and destructive. 15. The deviated course implied by drifting may yield novelty, yet may equally yield a perpetual deferral of any positionality. 16. The state of drifting is necessary to the creation of novelty. 17. The state of drifting can inhibit the creation of novelty. 18. The modern drift was celebrated as a form of emancipation, through the liberation of urban structures traced on foot, to the negation of banal tasks in riding on the open highway. In the attention economy, drifting has become a paradigm of labour, precarious and otherwise. 19. To drift in a novel fashion requires a necessary threshold between distraction and re-attraction. 20. Re-attraction is a form of going off-track, yet implies the fidelity to an alter force. Re-attraction is eccentric in inclination, that is, decentred, casting alter orbits of orientation. 21. Eccentricity is a form of drift defined as a body inflected by the force of heterogeneous inclination. Eccentricity is the fidelity to the becoming-foreign of the body as prey to attractivity. 22. Drift as eccentricity is equal to the creation of novel modes of inclination alter to the limits of normative orbits of determinate trajectories. 23. The effects of eccentric drifting can only be known post-movement. 24. All modes of drifting (natural and cognitive) are relative to some former position, although distances and their capacity for measurement are inconsistent. 25. Eccentric drifting does not result in relativism. Drifting is transitional, and, like a Moiré pattern, produces interferences between things. 26. Where there is drifting there are both side-effects and side-affects, which feed-back into the inclination of drift itself. 27. Side-effects and side-affects may produce conditions and sensibilities of failure. 28. The ethics of drifting play out in the responsiveness to side-effects/side-affects. 29. Eccentric drifting is not algorithmic, informational, strategic nor opportunistic; it is tactically lived experience. 30. Eccentric drifting is a dance with contingency, of repositioning a body (a body includes thought) through the affirmation of re-attraction. 31. Eccentric drifting is a form of love, a love of existence that proceeds strategic coupling with ideas, people, situations, places and so forth. 32. As a form of love, eccentric drifting can generate changes of state (and even changes of State). 33. Currents that propel/compel a state of eccentric drifting may be imaginary; a possible current includes the attractive force to that which is not (yet) present. 34. Eccentric drifting is not only a state of transitional movement, but most importantly includes the fabrication of imaginary forces that could propel/compel a given body and its spheres of interaction. 35. These sentences comment on drift, but are not exemplary of drifting. (shrink)

This volume is a tribute to the thought of Seth Benardete by contributors who had the rare good fortune of studying with him or those who discovered the treasure of his writings. Benardete was fully immersed in the world of the ancients, starting with Homer, but their works opened up for him a way to the fundamental questions-about justice and love, nature and law, human and divine. Finding "the problem of the human good grounded in the city, and the problem (...) of being in god," he was led to the conclusion that "Political philosophy is the eccentric core of philosophy." While Benardete wrote this statement reflecting on the theological-political issue in the work of his teacher, Leo Strauss, the paradoxical notion of an "eccentric core," in giving this volume its title, is meant to capture a characteristic of his own way of thinking. The essays in this collection-on the Bible and Homer, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and the Roman writers-indicate the range of Benardete's studies and teaching. The centrality of Plato is evident at the same time in those pieces as well as in the reviews of Benardete's books included here, along with three of his own previously unpublished essays. Book jacket. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a reflexive account of fieldwork in out of school clubs in a range of localities across England and Wales. By reflecting upon our personal experiences of researching with children aged between 5 and 12 years, we examine the impact of the positionality of the researcher on the research encounter, and highlight the ways in which relationships between adult researchers and child subjects are gendered. Finally, we identify a number of issues for researchers to consider (...) when working with children in the field. (shrink)

Western culture, which influenced the whole world, came from Europe. But its roots are not there. They are in Athens and Jerusalem. European culture takes its bearing from references that are not in Europe: Europe is eccentric.What makes the West unique? What is the driving force behind its culture? Remi Brague takes up these questions in Eccentric Culture. This is not another dictionary of European culture, nor a measure of the contributions of a particular individual, religion, or national (...) tradition. The author's interest is especially, with regard to the transmission of that culture, to articulate the dynamic tension that has propelled Europe and more generally the West toward civilization. It is this mainspring of European culture, this founding principle, that Brague calls Roman.Yet the author's intent is not to write a history of Europe, and less yet to defend the historical reality of the Roman Empire. Brague rather isolates and generalizes one aspect of that history or, one might say, cultural myth, of ancient Rome. The Roman attitude senses its own incompleteness and recognizes the call to borrow from what went before it.Historically, it has led the West to borrow from the great traditions of Jerusalem and Athens: primarily the Jewish and Christian tradition, on the one hand, and the classical Greek tradition on the other. Nowhere does the author find this Roman character so strongly present as in the Christian and particularly Catholic attitude toward the incarnation.At once an appreciation of the richness and diversity of the sources and their fruit, Eccentric Culture points as well to the fragility of their nourishing principle. As such, Brague finds in it notonly a means of understanding the past, but of projecting a future in proposing to the West, and to Europe in particular, a model relationship of what is proper to it.An international bestseller, this work has been or is presently being translated into thirteen languages. (shrink)

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF OURSELVES and our place in nature constitutes, if not the central, at least a central problem of metaphysics. Yet, faced with this question, modern philosophical thought has for the most part swung helplessly between an empty idealism and an absurd reductivism. It is time we overcame our narrow factionalism and learned not only to think more independently ourselves about persons, minds, and living nature, but to profit from the efforts of those who have already given us concepts (...) and arguments which could help us along this road. Among such writings, Helmuth Plessner's major work, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, seems to me outstanding, in that it provides both a firm rational basis for the biological sciences, in their many-levelled structure, and for the sciences of man. (shrink)

Melisa Vivanco objects to my theory of the Arabic numerals in Roads to Reference that the reference fixing procedure that I postulate doesn’t exploit the morphological structure of the Arabic numerals, but it should. Against Vivanco, I argue that the procedure in question does exploit the morphological structure of the numerals in an essential way.

In this paper we provide a reflexive account of fieldwork in out of school clubs in a range of localities across England and Wales. By reflecting upon our personal experiences of researching with c...

Much has been written in recent years over the need to disclose the 'positionality' of geographical researchers. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that such positionality, however much disclosed, can never fully express the complexities underpinning a research relationship. This essay explores these issues through a retrospective review of research carried out into the economic geographies of the Economy of Sharing. It argues that the issues surrounding positionality can be much more than a question (...) of hidden agendas, power relations and conflicts of interests. In some cases, confronting positionality means negotiation of conflicting worldviews-different understandings of reality rooted in philosophical principles distant from the dominant orthodoxies. Such conflicts, if engaged in creatively, have the capacity to challenge beliefs, values and thought patterns. (shrink)

Western culture, which influenced the whole world, came from Europe. But its roots are not there. They are in Athens and Jerusalem. European culture takes its bearing from references that are not in Europe: Europe is eccentric.What makes the West unique? What is the driving force behind its culture? Remi Brague takes up these questions in Eccentric Culture. This is not another dictionary of European culture, nor a measure of the contributions of a particular individual, religion, or national (...) tradition. The author's interest is especially, with regard to the transmission of that culture, to articulate the dynamic tension that has propelled Europe and more generally the West toward civilization. It is this mainspring of European culture, this founding principle, that Brague calls Roman.Yet the author's intent is not to write a history of Europe, and less yet to defend the historical reality of the Roman Empire. Brague rather isolates and generalizes one aspect of that history or, one might say, cultural myth, of ancient Rome. The Roman attitude senses its own incompleteness and recognizes the call to borrow from what went before it.Historically, it has led the West to borrow from the great traditions of Jerusalem and Athens: primarily the Jewish and Christian tradition, on the one hand, and the classical Greek tradition on the other. Nowhere does the author find this Roman character so strongly present as in the Christian and particularly Catholic attitude toward the incarnation.At once an appreciation of the richness and diversity of the sources and their fruit, Eccentric Culture points as well to the fragility of their nourishing principle. As such, Brague finds in it notonly a means of understanding the past, but of projecting a future in proposing to the West, and to Europe in particular, a model relationship of what is proper to it.An international bestseller, this work has been or is presently being translated into thirteen languages. (shrink)

Historians of philosophy are often challenged to discern the relative impacts of the ideas and the actions of ancient philosophers. The ideas of these thinkers often stand alone in an almost disembodied fashion, set apart from the physicality of a philosopher, his or her personality, and even their intellectual development over time. This article considers the tension between the people, the ideas, and the social context in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria and investigates the way in which genial and difficult (...) personalities influence the fate of Neoplatonic schools in the two cities in the late fifth and early sixth centuries AD. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 2, pp 277 - 295 In this paper I argue that in Husserl’s _Ideas I_ there is a seeming contradiction between the characterization of pure consciousness as the _residue_ of the performance of the phenomenological reduction and the claim that in the natural attitude consciousness is taken to be an entity is the world. This creates a puzzle regarding the positional status of consciousness in the natural attitude. After reviewing some possible options to solve this (...) puzzle in the existing literature, I claim that the positional status of conscious experiences in the natural attitude is best characterized as _unsettled_. The act that _settles_ the positional status of conscious experiences is reflection. In reflection, experiences are posited as beings, either in a psychological or in a phenomenological key. I conclude by arguing that the problem of positing is of paramount importance to understand correctly Husserl’s claim that phenomenology is _voraussetzungslos_. (shrink)

As William Hart notes, we live in a deconstructive age. Whether we read Derrida or not, many of us in and outside of the academy are invested in destabilizing established narratives, ideas, and categories. Similarly, we are eager to show how dominant narratives and categories tend to cover over more promising ways of imagining and interpreting the world. Recently, this deconstructive spirit has been directed toward discourses about the black church, black religion, and black cultures more generally. Authors like Curtis (...) Evans, Eddie Glaude, Anthony Pinn, and Barbara Savage, for instance, have challenged hoary tendencies to imagine the black church as a monolithic whole, to assume that black folk are naturally .. (shrink)

This article engages with Johann Arnason’s approach to the entanglements of culture and power in comparative civilizational analysis by simultaneously reframing the themes of the civilizing process and the public sphere. It comments and expands upon some key insights of Arnason concerning the work of Norbert Elias and Jürgen Habermas by adopting an ‘Islamic perspective’ on the processes of singularization of power from its cultural bases and of reconstruction of a modern collective identity merging the steering capacities and the participative (...) ambitions of an emerging urban intelligentsia. The Islamic perspective provides insights into the interplay between civilizing processes and the modes through which cultural traditions innervate a modern public sphere. By revisiting key remarks of Arnason on Elias and Habermas, the Islamic perspective gains original contours, reflecting the search for a type of modernity that is eccentric to the mono-civilizational axis of the Western-led, global civilizing process. While this eccentric positioning entails a severe imbalance of power, it also relativizes the centrality of the modern state in the civilizing process and evidences some original traits of the public sphere in a non-Western context. (shrink)

In 1928, a German zoologist and philosopher named Helmuth Plessner published a book titled Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. Almost a 100 years later, Jos de Mul has edited a collection of 26 new essays on Plessner’s text, titled Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology: Perspectives and Prospects. The volume offers a variety of advanced discussions of its theme. In this review essay of de Mul’s collection, I provide a critical overview of the contents of the (...) new volume and some speculations on the possible motives and future directions of the current “Plessner renaissance.”. (shrink)

This case study explores the use of collaborative book clubs and word sorts to influence teacher positionality in an undergraduate social studies methods course for pre-service teachers. Drawing upon existing literature that suggests the effectiveness of dialogue as a means of navigating prior beliefs and the benefits of collaborative spaces for teachers to engage in collegial discussions, the study utilized books surrounding socio-political themes and educational inequalities to prompt conversation among participants. Results of the study suggest that dialogic and (...) collaborative activities like word sorts and book clubs provide productive opportunities for pre-service teachers to (re)negotiate their positionalities and grapple with their existing assumptions as they learn and co-construct meaning from and with one another. At the same time, the pre-service teachers’ perceptions of privilege and identity seem to remain somewhat unexamined and the teachers remain hesitant about the practical reality of working to dismantle inequalities in their own classrooms. (shrink)

This essay attempts to define a value (not «the» value) of what, in it, comes to be called an «eccentric». In a largely standardized and stereotyped society like ours of the present times, a society where a human being can be creative but only within certain predefined limits, diverse groups exert all kinds of pressure on an individual, and with growing geographical as well as social mobility these kinds of pressure, intertwined and superimposed, give rise to overdue stress and (...) situations of psychological and maybe even metaphysical impossibility. One solution is a «no notice» attitude, in which all rules but a few selected ones are more or less dignifiedly flouted. Another solution is an attitude of an eccentric, close to, but not identical with, that of John Henry Newman’s «gentleman». I try to define this attitude and show one of its values: enabling us to evade too much social pressure without estranging us from society. (shrink)