Reviled and fetishized, the work of Georges Bataille has been most often reduced to his outrageous, erotic, and libertine fiction and essays. But increasingly, readers are finding his insights into politics, economics, sexuality, and performance revealing and timely. Focusing on Bataille’s most extensive work, The Accursed Share, Shannon Winnubst and the contributors to this volume present contemporary interpretations that read Bataille in a new light. These essays situate Bataille in French and European intellectual traditions, bring forward key concepts for understanding (...) the challenges posed by his important work, and draw out his philosophy. Established voices and younger scholars cover a range of topics and themes, including ethics, politics, economy, psychology, and performance so readers can think with and through Bataille. While focusing attention on Bataille and his provocative work, this book offers a sympathetic, yet critical, reappraisal and rehabilitation. Contributors are Alison Leigh Brown, Andrew Cutrofello, Zeynep Direk, Jesse Goldhammer, Dorothy Holland, Pierre Lamarche, Richard A. Lee, Jr., Alphonso Lingis, Ladelle McWhorter, Lucio A. Privitello, Allan Stoekl, Amy Wendling, and Shannon Winnubst. (shrink)

This is a review essay on Jesse Goldhammer, The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005; and Dennis King Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005.

The main focus of this book is the normative or ethical aspects of sustainability, including matters of justice in governance that is important to sustainability. The idea of sustainability is widely perceived as having a normative dimension, often referred to as equity, but the character of this normative dimension is seldom explored. The book aims to fill this gap in the literature of sustainability. It proposes a conceptualization of sustainability that is geared to clarifying its essential ethical structure. It frames (...) sustainability in terms of the capacity of natural systems to provide opportunities to live well, as well as the conduciveness of human practices and systems to preserving such opportunity into the distant future. It develops the idea of sustainability as an art of preserving opportunity to live well – an ethically and scientifically grounded political art of living well together without diminishing opportunity to live well in the future. (shrink)

Aristotle regarded law and education as the two fundamental and deeply interdependent tools of political art, making the use of education by the statesman a topic of the first importance in his practical philosophy. The present work develops the first comprehensive treatment of this neglected topic, and assesses the importance of Aristotle's defense of public education for current debates about school choice and privatization, and educational equality.

Joel Katzav's survey of the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna's philosophy covers a broad range of ideas, and I have selected three for further development and commentary: (1) the relationship between naturalism and analytic philosophy, (2) the relationship between classical and radical empiricism, and (3) the historical question of where to situate a view such as de Laguna's in the history, the present, and the future of philosophy. I suggest that the view belongs with a group I call the (...) ‘New Naturalists’, including Theodore de Laguna, Susanne Langer, Marjorie Grene, Michael Polanyi, and others who keep philosophy closer to developments in natural and social science than is typical for pragmatists, process philosophers, and analytic philosophers. This is a position somewhere between classical and radical empiricism, but which insists that reductionism is too limiting and unwise, even when restricted to being only a method. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 377-382, Fall 2021.

The aim of this paper is to revive a tradition of educational thought that identifies good judgment as the highest aim of education. It identifies sharply opposed manifestations of this tradition in the works of Aristotle and Locke, and uses these as points of departure in defending and exploring the tradition. The defense rests on the claims that the basic aim of educational institutions should be to enable people to live well and that good judgment is essential to living well. (...) The relationships between good judgment and other widely discussed educational aims are addressed, including autonomy, fulfillment of potential, and acquisition of knowledge. Curricular and pedagogical aspects of the promotion of good judgment are addressed, and the paper concludes by identifying potential benefits as well as limitations associated with the conditions of epistemic dependence. (shrink)

This chapter addresses some basic questions about the cultivation of responsibilist intellectual virtue. What is intellectual virtue? How are specific intellectual virtues defined and how do they contribute to intellectual virtue in general? What are the epistemic goods at which intellectual virtue and virtues aim? What justifies education in epistemic virtue, understood as a state of intellectual character? How should the motivational aspect of epistemic character be understood? How can educators cultivate a devotion to epistemic goods for themselves? How can (...) curricula, methods of instruction, and the evaluation of student learning and schools best support and not undermine the cultivation of intellectual virtue? (shrink)

In this commentary, I focus on Machery's criticism of Neo-Empiricism. I argue that Neo-Empiricism can survive Machery's critique, and I show that there is an empiricist strategy for forestalling eliminativism.

The focus of this research concentrated on ascertaining the presence of ethical climate types and the level of analysis from which ethical decisions were based as perceived by lodging managers. In agreement with Victor and Cullen (1987, 1988), ethical work climates are multidimensional and multi-determined. The results of this study indicated that: (a) benevolence is the predominate dimension of ethical climate present in the lodging organization as perceived by lodging managers, and (b) the local level of analysis (e.g. immediate workplace (...) norms and values) is the predominate determinant of ethical decisions in the organization.The implication of this study is that the knowledge gained from understanding that ethical decision making in an organization is multidimensional and multi-determined will foster understanding of ethical decision formation in the organizational context. (shrink)

The various efforts to put the idea of humanity on a secure ethical, political, and social base have not succeeded. The various post-humanist and transhumanist programs are inadequate. Our deep-seated suspicion of our deepest selves and motives is understandable in light of the barbarity of the twentieth century, but humanism is not to blame. The thought of Ernst Cassirer holds a framework for a new humanism, once it is rid of certain colonialist, triumphalist, and Eurocentric ideas that distorted Cassirer’s understanding (...) of the European role in creating the problems of civilization, especially its mistake of thinking that science was a progressive symbolic form of culture. I set out the basis of a new humanism based upon not the problem of knowledge, but the problem of genuine self-situating socialty, a personalist point of view. (shrink)

This paper aims to consider Peirce and Eco’s approach to signs and semiotics in order to assess their relation to Peirce’s mature pragmatism. Both thinkers attempted to set out a truly general theory of signs, and ran into difficulties on similar points. I show that the responses of Peirce and Eco to the difficulties that arose in seeking a truly general theory of signs were quite different. And yet, the differences are not so deep as to prevent us from thinking (...) of both Peirce and Eco as pragmatists, and perhaps of a similar stripe. (shrink)

This article is a précis of the book, Living well now and in the future: Why sustainability matters. It provides an overview of the book, focusing especially on its conceptualization of the nature...

Philosophy of Education: An Anthology brings together the essential historical and contemporary readings in the philosophy of education. The readings have been selected for their philosophical merit, their focus on important aspects of educational practice and their readability. Includes classic pieces by Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Dewey. Addresses topical issues such as teacher professionalism and accountability, the commercialization of schooling, multicultural education, and parental choice.

Preview: Bergson noted that the cinematographic image does not really move. It is, then as now, a series of still photographs. The real motion in such images is produced by machinery, which imparts a kinesis, an energy of movement, to the succession of fixed images. Our perception then endows such images with their “life,” insofar as they can be said to possess life. It is an illusion, it is “virtual” both as space and time. The real duration, as generated by (...) the machinery or as lived by the perceiver is part of a broader system of images that includes those still photographs and their succession. Images of images of images, by the time they are processed by our bodies and appear to our mind’s eye as inhibited acts we have not enacted. (shrink)

Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder suggest that it is possible for an omnipotent being, Jove, to create randomly a world from a continuum of ever more perfect possible worlds. They then go on to argue that Jove could be characterized as morally unsurpassable despite creating a surpassable world. I raise a number of problems for the view that Jove could be characterized as morally unsurpassable when he creates (randomly or not) a surpassable world.

Fritz Allhoff has recently offered an extremely compelling challenge to the morality of human cloning. He argues that a biological phenomenon, that of telomere shortening, undermines the moral permissibility of human cloning. Telomere shortening is caused by cell replication, and appears to be one of the central reasons that cells and organisms age and die. Allhoff considers a thirty-year-old woman who wishes to create a genetic clone. He notes that the DNA from her cell that would be used to create (...) the clone would have shortened telomeres—as it would have gone through many generations of cell replication. As a result, the clone would begin its existence with shortened telomeres; the clone’s telomeres would be the same length as the woman’s telomeres at the time of cloning. The moral problem lies in the fact that because of shortened telomeres, the clone will senesce more rapidly as compared with noncloned organisms, and would have increased susceptibility to degenerative conditions and diseases. Allhoff then goes on to argue that earlier senescence and disease susceptibility constitute a moral ground for rejecting cloning because “the life of a clone would be worse than that of a non-clone”. This line of argument is rooted in Parfit’s The Same Number Quality Claim : “If in either of two outcomes the same number of people would ever live, it would be bad if those who live are worse off, or have a lower quality of life, than those who would have lived”. Applying Parfit’s Q principle to cases of cloning, it could be argued that parents ought to produce children that would be maximally well off, and since clones would be worse off than children produced “normally,” it follows that parents should avoid cloning. As Allhoff puts it, “obviously sexual reproduction would not transfer shortened telomeres to offspring so, all else being equal, sexual reproduction is better than cloning ”. For this sort of line to pack any moral punch, Q must be interpreted rather strongly. (shrink)

Three experiments examined the role of response criteria in a masked semantic priming paradigm using an exclusion task. Experiment 1 used on-line prime-report and exclusion instructions in which participants were told to avoid completing a word stem with a word related to a prime flashed for 0, 38 or 212 ms. Semantic priming was significant in the items analysis, but was moderated by peoples’ ability to report the prime in the participant analysis. Prime-report thresholds in Experiment 2 were made more (...) liberal by instructing participants to guess on every trial. Prime-report increased from Experiment 1 as exclusion failures were eliminated. Experiment 3 clarified the relationship between awareness and prime identification using an on-line measure of confidence and different liberal prime report instructions. The current findings suggest that the ability to act upon and report information in a masked prime is determined by a variable response criterion, which can be manipulated as an independent variable. (shrink)

Provides an ideology-critique of Whitehead's and Hartshorne's metaphysics and demonstrates how their metaphysical principles reflect their personal commitments to the values and norms of the modern liberal political ideology.

Until recently, it was widely assumed in societies with long-established, publicly funded school systems that school attendance served the interests of children, society, and parents alike. In the United States and other common-law jurisdictions, safeguarding and promoting the independent welfare and developmental interests of every child was a public responsibility under the parens patriae doctrine. Compulsory schooling laws enacted under parens patriae authority required all persons having care and control of a child to share their custodial authority with publicly certified (...) teachers for limited periods of time. By compelling all parents to send their children to school, the state ensured that all children had access to instruction and opportunities for social, economic, and civic participation beyond what their parents alone could provide. Parents were incidentally freer to manage the competing demands of domestic life and paid employment, and the enforcement of child labor laws was greatly facilitated by efforts to ensure school attendance. While compulsory schooling laws imposed obvious limits on the custodial authority of all parents for the sake of all children, they were rarely challenged on that basis. Not so today. (shrink)

This is a performative piece of writing in the presence of and inspired by Richard Shusterman'sPhilosophy and the Art of Writing. It tries to show that the relationship between the act of writing and the formation of our human consciousness (philosophical and, more deeply, poietic) is a developing and growing process through history, and before it. The dominance of an image consciousness was slowly challenged and then replaced by a linguistic consciousness with the advent of writing, and accelerated by the (...) invention of printing and mass literacy. Shusterman teaches us an embodied kind of philosophizing that uses the word but isn't limited by it. This paper suggests that a return to image consciousness has already occurred and that the old book consciousness is disappearing. Lessons from the book consciousness are offered. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Politics offers both a broad diagnosis of the hazards of contemporary populism and a broad characterization of actionable remedies, and it does so in conjunction with an ideal of political societies as properly partnerships in living well, characterized by voluntary cooperation, mutual advantage, and civic friendship. The task of this paper is to explain the diagnosis, remedies, and ideals more fully and to illustrate their currency and value in contemporary political analysis. It addresses Aristotle’s views on demagogues and civic (...) friendship, the nature and circumstances of populism in the U.S., and the Aristotelian remedies that may be helpful in strengthening civic friendship today. (shrink)

I am exceedingly grateful to John Doris, Josh Gert and Valerie Tiberius for their gracious, thoughtful and penetrating commentaries. They have each brought out aspects of The Emotional Construction of Morals that are both core to the project and in need of further elaboration and defence. Or, better than ‘defence’, I should say discussion, since I take many of these issues to be unsettled. Also, the commentaries are refreshingly constructive. In a limited space, they manage to advance substantive theses about (...) the nature of morality. These are not book reviews; they are significant contributions to the literature. Tiberius stakes out a subtle strategy for rendering relativism irrelevant. Gert offers a rosy new way of viewing the analogy between morals and secondary qualities. Doris crafts an innovative story about why history should matter to moralists. In my replies, I offer some reasons for upholding the perspective charted out in ECM, but my thinking about all of these issues has been deepened by the exchange. (shrink)

Education in the twenty-first century witnessed a profound shift in emphasis from the teacher to the learner, or from pedagogical inputs to learner outcomes. According to neoliberal logic, the teacher is the primary value-add in a relationship that is best characterized as cause (instruction) and effect (learner outcome). As a result, the problem of teacher quality has emerged as the central question of our day. What is effective teaching? What does teacher quality look like? Traditional music educators will posit that (...) excellence in norm-governed forms is the most reliable measure of teacher quality. This essay makes a case for a richer and more varied conception, embracing diversity and openness as defining ideals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hard Times:Philosophy and the Fundamentalist ImaginationRandall Everett Allsup"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this (...) is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts!" So admonishes headmaster Gradgrind in the very beginning of Hard Times, Charles Dickens' prescient tale of education in the industrial world.1 Facts—"addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow and never wonder"—Facts form the essence of Gradgrind's philosophy.2A close reading of Gradgrind's opening monologue will provide the starting off point for an examination of the role and place of philosophy in the music curriculum. I am particularly intrigued by the question Reimer posed in his opening. He asked us to consider, Who is philosophy of music education for? We will return to this question at the close of this brief reflection.For the moment, however, I would like to continue on to the second paragraph of Hard Times, where Dickens does something very interesting. Following Gradgrind's inglorious monologue, he casts the scene of a small schoolroom, a "plain, bare, monotonous vault."3 Headmaster Gradgrind stands in front; he is described with a "square wall of a forehead," his mouth is "wide, thin, and hard set," his voice "inflexible and dry."4 His hair "bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside."5 A square wall of a forehead, a lumpy head like the crust of a plum pie: these words give us more than "hard Facts"—they are more than mere descriptors. It seems that Dickens, through metaphor, mood, dynamic contrast—through the aesthetic imagination—has imbedded a quiet rebuke to the bold commonsense of Facts.The Gradgrind philosophy finds easy parallel to current thinking in American education. In the fundamentalist imagination, sources of ambiguity must be rooted out—basic skills make adults out of reasoning animals. "Children should be tested on basic reading and math skills every year, between grades three and eight. Measuring is the only way to know whether all our children are learning—and I want to know, because I refuse to leave any child behind."6 The speaker, of course, is George W. Bush whose call to basic skills and episodic testing appeals [End Page 139] to our sense of reason. Like Gradgrind suggests, it is the principle on which we brought up our own children, and this is the principle on which we will bring up today's children. Such a philosophy of education proudly combines folk beliefs about teaching and learning with the hard science of thorough assessment.The President further recommends that our children "must also be educated in the values of our civil society. Some people think it's inappropriate to make moral judgments anymore. Not me. We must be willing to draw a clear line between right and wrong. Those clear lines must be supported by political leaders, public schools, and our public institutions. Educating our children about their moral and civil responsibilities will serve them—and the nation—every bit as well as the academic learning they require."7 In addition to discipline-based standards of knowledge, Facts (in this view) govern the rules of citizenship, provide moral clarity, and as we will see shortly, inform the aesthetic. It is worth noting that such a linear equation—those clear straight lines—currently places skeptics in the category of unpatriotic, miseducative, and morally corrupt.8The fundamentalist philosophy of education is a governing philosophy—it is a philosophy for, not with, its initiates. Judgments are passed, not reached; answers are given, not argued. Teachers in this setting—whether willing accomplices or not—define what needs to be known and... (shrink)

Czy coś naprawdę „odchodzi” całkowicie? Niniejszy artykuł jest poszukiwaniem „rzeczywistego usunięcia” i metafizyki, która musi temu towarzyszyć. Dlaczego to jest ważne? W badaniach nad sztuczną inteligencją naukowcy zaproponowali ruchomy punkt docelowy do momentu osiągnięcia sztucznej inteligencji. Zaczęło się od testu Turinga i ewoluowało przez dużą ilość argumentacji (np. Dreyfussa, dotyczącą tego, czego nie potrafią komputery, przez „osobliwość” Kurzweila oraz wiele innych kryteriów i tysiące dyskusji na temat tego, czym jest inteligencja i co oznaczałoby ją symulować lub, jak wolę, naśladować). Cała (...) ta dyskusja wciąż polega na rozważaniu analogii do ludzkiej inteligencji, a nie na zbliżaniu się do samej rzeczy, ale dobre analogie muszą dotyczyć czegoś znacznie więcej niż funkcji analogicznej: muszą zbliżać się do prawdziwej nieodróżnialności. Moje wywody będą zatem dotyczyły głównie dziedziny metafizyki i ontologii, tak jak rozumiem słowo „rzeczywisty” w wyrażeniu „rzeczywiste usunięcie”. Nie sądzę, aby współcześni badacze właściwie rozumieli problem czasu i jego wpływ na kryterium lub. kryteria sztucznej inteligencji. Stąd j w tych ramach oferuję „rzeczywiste usunięcie” w znaczeniu, które należy właśnie opisać. Argument AI ma implikacje dla całej metafizyki, ponieważ odnosi się do fundamentalnego charakteru czasu. (shrink)