""Serious philosophy is not an attempt to construct a system of beliefs, but the activity of awakening, the conversation passionately pursued. Only if professional philosophy reclaims this paradigm and finds ways to embody it, will it achieve an active place in the thought and life of our culture."" --James Conlon, ""Stanley Cavell and the Predicament of Philosophy."" This book is a collection of serious philosophical essays that aim to awaken readers, teachers, and students to a desire for conversation passionately pursued. (...) The essays in this volume speak about sex, movies, poetry, and politics, in short, about those things contemporary Americans passionately discuss. These are the subjects that were taught for forty-three years in James Conlon's classroom at Mount Mary University, a Catholic urban university for women in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This volume celebrates Conlon's work while calling to all who continue to teach and learn about philosophy in contemporary times with the message that relevant philosophy deals with life as it is lived in the moment. ""Dr. Conlon made it his life's work to bring to consciousness an often unconscious awareness that accepts the way things are as the measure of what is real, normative, and moral. His commitment to awakening people to the wonder of common experience made a profound contribution to the mission of Mount Mary. The essays in this volume are a testament to the way he engaged students in the process of living a fully human life."" --Joan Penzenstadler, SSND, Mount Mary University ""True to the spirit of Professor Conlon's teaching, this collection illustrates how his approach made philosophy a genuine dialogue, brought diverse viewpoints and perspectives to bear on any problem, and engaged generations of women in the philosophical conversation."" --Kathleen Poorman Dougherty, Alma College ""This collection of always thoughtful and often provocative essays by James Conlon, his colleagues, and students honors Conlon's decades-long career at Mount Mary University dedicated to teaching the practice of philosophy... Both new and experienced teachers of philosophy will find insights and inspiration in this volume!"" --Donna Engelmann, Alverno College ""Just in Time celebrates the work of the philosopher James Conlon. It also honors the pedagogy of inquiry that has had a profound impact on the students he taught for over 40 years. Conlon's essays are paired with ones from his students and colleagues--testaments to the influence that his teaching has had. Readers will be challenged to pursue passionate conversations and inspire others to engage in thoughtful inquiry about the relevant topics of today."" --Eileen Schwalbach, Former president, Mount Mary University Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Mary University. She is the author of Thinking Woman: A Philosophical Approach to the Quandary of Gender and the editor of The Devil's Whore: Reason and Philosophy in the Lutheran Tradition. James Conlon is Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus at Mount Mary University where he taught for forty-three years. He is the author of numerous philosophical articles. (shrink)

Collection of philosophical essays covering a wide range of topics including sex, movies, poetry, and politics, in celebration of James Conlon, Professor Emeritus at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin."-- Back cover.

What does it mean to teach, live, and imagine one’s futures amidst a global pandemic? How to respond to the reality of unequal and overlapping crises, COVID-19 being one of them? Can alternative understandings of time help us create a more just post-pandemic university? Drawing on environmental humanities, disaster and critical time studies, in conversation with qualitative data, this article theorizes a ‘pedagogy of scale’: a practical and conceptual centering on multiple temporalities and diverse interpretative frames. The (...) analysis argues for the need to attend to overlapping, non-linear, and changeable scales of time, reference, and meaning that students draw on in order to make sense of crises: every crisis, even as unprecedented as COVID-19, is embedded in environmental processes, long-term vulnerabilities and injustices. These overlooked and overlapping scales interweave personal, planetary, and theological notions of time—from ecological deep time to the divine time—meaning, and self. In its focus on asynchronicity, overlap and multiplicity, the analysis extends current theorizations of temporality and crisis in higher education, challenges paradigms of mastery, advocates for epistemic plurality, and embraces decolonial notions of human subjectivity, providing a much-needed critical model for the post-pandemic university. (shrink)

This paper reports on a study of teachers’ perceptions of teaching and learning in Scotland during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of engaged pedagogy and the ideas of bell hooks. It aimed to explore the different ways that teachers experienced teaching and learning during this time and the impact this may have had on teacher identity. Sixty teachers and head teachers were interviewed using MS Teams in the period April-June, 2020. For this paper, 18 transcripts were (...) analyzed by members of the research team. Four key themes emerged from the interview data: Working from home, parental engagement, teacher identity, and changes in pedagogy. Each of these themes were discussed in terms of concepts such as engaged pedagogy, agency, self-actualization, recognition and boundary transgression situated in the work of bell hooks. The idea of boundaries wove itself throughout our data as teachers expressed how the transgression of boundaries was occurring in multiple, and often contradictory, ways in pedagogical, professional, institutional and personal spaces and systems. We see in our data evidence of a shift in practice not just in the way teachers are ‘doing’ education but also, perhaps, in the way that teachers are ‘being’ as educators as they adapt to different ways of knowing. This study provides a unique exploration of a time and space in Scotland during 2020. However, the themes and understandings that emerged are of relevance to educators internationally. Schools across the world were impacted by various lockdowns imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and teachers faced a common set of challenges that were resolved via re-negotiation and recognition of individual and collective agency to create new pedagogies. (shrink)

The article argues that a critical encounter with pre-modern literatures from the national past is long overdue under the impact of a globalized discourse of sexuality. Its effects are already felt at the level of both pedagogy and literary reading, one reconstituting the other, in the ‘global classroom’, a self-conscious pedagogical space imagined by the new educational policy to bring about a globally accredited cultural homogeneity. The case study comes from teaching erotic poetry at an Indian university, from the (...) joint literary complex of Hindi and Urdu in South Asia, a theme uncomfortably located in national culture not just because of its sexuality but its association with non-national linguistic elements which the article terms ‘Indo-Islamic’. The overlapping of the sexual modern with the Indo-Islamic resurfaces a tension in the nationalized body of literary writing in Hindi/Urdu, the major ‘national’ languages of South Asia. This encounter of erotic poetry in old Hindi and Urdu with globalized sexuality, the article shows, offers a chance to reflect on how literary studies are being reshaped by the assumptions of a monolingual, monocultural global sexuality in our nationalist times. (shrink)

No fight over what gets taught in American classrooms is more heated than the battle over humanity’s origins. For more than a century we have argued about evolutionary theory and creationism (and its successor theory, intelligent design), yet we seem no closer to a resolution than we were in Darwin’s day. In this thoughtful examination of how we teach origins, historian Adam Laats and philosopher Harvey Siegel offer crucial new ways to think not just about the evolution debate but (...) how science and religion can make peace in the classroom. Laats and Siegel agree with most scientists: creationism is flawed, as science. But, they argue, students who believe it nevertheless need to be accommodated in public school science classes. Scientific or not, creationism maintains an important role in American history and culture as a point of religious dissent, a sustained form of protest that has weathered a century of broad—and often dramatic—social changes. At the same time, evolutionary theory has become a critical building block of modern knowledge. The key to accommodating both viewpoints, they show, is to disentangle belief from knowledge. A student does not need to believe in evolution in order to understand its tenets and evidence, and in this way can be fully literate in modern scientific thought and still maintain contrary religious or cultural views. Altogether, Laats and Siegel offer the kind of level-headed analysis that is crucial to finding a way out of our culture-war deadlock. (shrink)

This study makes an original contribution to knowledge by investigating the impact of Just-in-Time teaching and peer instruction strategies on the promotion of students’ achievement, interaction, and motivation in English language learning. Students were recruited from an undergraduate TESOL program in the first semester of 2019 at a University in Saudi Arabia. A multiple method research design was used to address the research questions robustly and rigorously. First, a two-group quasi-experimental design was implemented. In the first group, (...) a lecture-based strategy was used, while in the second group, JiT and PI strategies were used in English language lessons. An innovative research method was used in this study: a private Instagram account was created, serving as a platform through which teacher and students could communicate using interactive posts and comments. Second, students filled out a survey reflecting on this medium of language teaching and learning. Finally, focus group interviews were conducted to determine students’ views on the use of Instagram as an educational tool in terms of its flexibility and usefulness. The findings of the study suggest that JiT teaching, and PI promoted students’ achievement and enhanced students’ motivation, particularly in relation to fluency and novelty in the second language. Furthermore, students viewed Instagram as a successful educational tool that significantly facilitated their collaboration. Nevertheless, this study also highlights the challenges of using JiT teaching and PI to facilitate language learning. Suggestions for practitioners are specified; including providing adequate e-learning tools for students to enhance language learning motivation and achievement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Catholic Social Teaching in Global PerspectiveRon MercierCatholic Social Teaching in Global Perspective Edited by Daniel Mcdonald, SJ Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2010. 218 pp. $26.00The collection of essays in Catholic Social Teaching in Global Perspective, the second in a Gregorian University series, responds to a question posed to its authors: “How can you reflect on your particular continent and its ‘culture’ in order to best apply... (...) CST [Catholic social teaching] in your area of the world?” (x). Although the responses of the various authors to that challenge are uneven, the deliberate emphasis on a cultural-critical approach makes this [End Page 211] volume noteworthy and a significant contribution to the discussions in the field.Thomas Hughson’s introductory essay frames the task provocatively. Exploring the work of Bernard Lonergan and Robert Doran on culture, he takes aim at the ways in which “common good” and “Catholic social teaching” too often serve as categorical realities, as if they had a universal and absolute meaning applicable to any concrete situation. He recasts CST by placing it in dialogue with contemporary currents in philosophy and social science and notes both the broader meaning and the fluidity of social justice within CST. He develops what he calls a “modified eudemonistic perspective... to highlight incompleteness in social justice and a common good taken by themselves” (25). This calls for a “reflexive culture,” along the lines of the “transcendental humanism” in Benedict XVI’s Caritas in veritate. While the emphasis on “human flourishing” certainly has a long history in the tradition, Hughson’s approach empowers local communities to make CST their own as a mode of discerning what fosters or undermines human flourishing. For too long CST “has ignored how movement toward just social practice depends on two factors, reflexive culture ‘from above’ and popular culture ‘from within’ practicality” (22). This perspective links well with the insights and concerns of liberation theology, notably its ecclesiology, and helps clarify the meaning and potential of CST.Several essays in the volume pick up this theme even as they explore the many prisms through which one can understand “culture.” David Kaulemu reflects on the African situation in ways similar to Paulinus Odozor and Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, calling for “moral/cultural/spiritual efforts to accompany our political and economic reforms” (37). He explores cultural resources for and barriers to human flourishing in an African context. Agnes Brazal (East Asia) and Joseph Jadhav (India) write in a similar vein: Brazal on the relationship between the role of “harmony” in an East Asian world view and the fragmentation and hybridity engendered by globalization; Jadhav on the interplay between CST and local culture in an arid rural part of India, which has created possibilities for culturally transformative action. John Coleman’s rich and nuanced reflection on North American (especially US) culture underlines the challenges CST faces.Sandie Cornish and David Freeman (Australia) and Johan Verstraeten (EU) explore ecclesiological perspectives: how episcopal, religious, and lay groups have read “the signs of the times” in their area, though largely without a cultural-critical frame. Curiously, the volume avoids any cultural critique of the Church; the dialectic “from above” and “from below” remains ad extra, although Coleman does note how US bishops have frequently undercut their ability to engage culture by focusing narrowly on the institutional interests of the Church. [End Page 212]In sum, the volume advances the work of CST by reframing key concepts within a broader perspective, in particular one that invites voices “from below.” It exposes the reader, especially those familiar with CST, to contemporary dialogues on the ethical significance of “culture” while deepening the value of CST for contemporary reflection. Contributions from Latin America and Eastern Europe, though, would have strengthened the volume.Ron MercierSt. Louis UniversityCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

A leading figure in neuroaesthetics makes the case that aesthetic experience can be meaningfully measured by the tools of neuroscience.

The COVID-19 pandemic affected education institutions just like several other sectors. These institutions, which are among the places where people are found collectively, were the first places that were closed for precaution. Some problems of distance education conducted in online platforms which were assumed upon the termination of face-to-face education emerged in time. Especially in this urgent solution, where the workload of teachers has increased, some application difficulties have been identified in foreign language teaching. From this point (...) of view, considering the foreign language education policy and planning, this study deals with the distance education practices of English teachers, the difficulties they encounter in the process, and their solution proposals. The research, which was designed as a qualitative study, was conducted with a case study design. The participants of the research are 13 English teachers working at the secondary school level in different districts of Northern Cyprus determined by the homogeneous sampling method. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews developed by the researchers. The qualitative data were analyzed with descriptive analysis. As a result of the interviews with the teachers, it has been determined that there are problems related to technology, students, online classes, and planning in English teaching carried out with distance education applications. Accordingly, the teachers offered their recommendations that could be a solution to the existing problems. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Although Kairos in Greek mythology is often depicted as the winged son of Zeus who grants to those who lay hold of his single lock of hair their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, in traditional African American culture, particularly when it comes to speech, Kairos is essentially family. Given how much African American speakers depend on seizing the moment to invoke spiritual connections, emit laughter, and profess the truth, Kairos, or what we might call CPT (“Colored People’s Time”), can be summoned (...) almost at will. One of the African American discourses this article will use to illustrate this point is Call and Response, a verbal exchange in which speakers and listeners attune to one another and to the timeliness of an event. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech was such an event, but it wouldn’t have been so were it not for the timely responding of his favorite gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Culturally Responsive Teaching in Music Education: From Understanding to Application by Vicky R. Lind and Constance L. McKoyEric ShiehVicky R. Lind and Constance L. McKoy, Culturally Responsive Teaching in Music Education: From Understanding to Application (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016).In the book’s penultimate chapter, titled “Community,” we encounter a teacher who agrees to a student’s request to start a mariachi band and gets “more than he (...) bargained for.”1 We hear from a teacher who seeks a greater understanding of the context for her Black students and finds herself the only White person in many of the community events she attends. We learn about a teacher who has her marching band, predominantly comprised of Latinx students, march in annual Korean and Black community parades in the city and why she does this. What to make of these stories—inspiring, provocative, suffused with honesty? I found myself restless to share these narratives with my own teaching colleagues, to ask not simply “What do you see happening here?” but also “Where would something like this take us?”What is notable about Vicky Lind and Constance McKoy’s achievement here is that they have given us a very full book and one that provides many different points of entry—stories and theories and activities and questions—through which to engage with ideas of culturally responsive teaching. In just under 150 [End Page 210] pages with index and references, the book encompasses four chapters that review various academic traditions connected to culturally responsive teaching, concludes with three chapters that relay narratives and vignettes from K-12 music teachers, and includes throughout lists of reflection questions and teaching strategies. The primary audience is pre-service and in-service K-12 music teachers. If a key requirement for culturally responsive teaching is continuous reflection over the impacts our pedagogies have on our students and ourselves as teachers, this book’s wide-ranging engagement is indeed a welcome one.What I offer here in terms of review, then, is first a consideration of the book’s various components and where they might lead us. Second, I bring its ideas of cultural responsiveness into dialogue with ideas more commonly found in anti-racist and social justice approaches to education—traditions the book does not directly engage with but which certainly have a place in conversations around it. This is a particularly relevant time, I suggest, to engage with questions of cultural responsiveness alongside perhaps more politically-minded approaches: this book will be read, I hope, by teachers grappling with our age of renewed and visible racial struggle, increased forced migration, and cultural insecurity.The first half of the book is explicitly dedicated to “understanding” culturally responsive teaching. Its chapters present a historical overview of its conceptual development, explicate the centrality of culture and cultural competence to teaching, and discuss the connection between music and identity in young people. The authors center their conceptualization of culturally responsive teaching around Geneva Gay’s framework, outlined in her Culturally Responsive Teaching, as “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them.”2 “Effective,” here, is understood broadly and includes academic competence, self-efficacy, social critique, and the freedom to be “ethnically expressive.”3In laying this foundation, the authors negotiate thoughtfully a number of tensions inherent in this work that are too often simplified in the classroom. They recognize, for example, the need to acknowledge culture as a category through which human experience is mediated, but also one that too easily gives way to stereotyping. When discussing issues of music and identity they remind readers that musical identities are multiple and suggest that musical identities might be viewed as both “bottom-up” and “top-down”—constructed through a variety of ongoing experiences as much as they are constituted by national or ethnic affiliation.4 They also do not shy from language such as “high expectations” and “academic competence” when discussing the need for comprehensive and supportive classrooms, despite the uneasiness with which these terms often sit in arts education and alongside purposes of engendering social critique... (shrink)

This searching critique of the United Methodist Bishops' pastoral letter on war and peace in a nuclear age, by America's foremost Christian ethicist, exposes theological flaws from which flow gaps in moral argument and strangely utopian politics. Never before has In Defense of Creation been more thoroughly analyzed. At the same time Paul Ramsey gives a full-length and detailed comparison of the Methodist document with The Challenge of Peace by the U.S. Catholic Bishops. Issues of nuclear ethics, as seen (...) by the leaders of two major churches, are set fully in view for the first time in a single volume. This "ecumenical consultation" is broadened by drawing extensively on the writings of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. The book's larger purpose is to construe an encounter between Christian just-war tradition and Christian pacifism. This comparative discussion of Christian ethics should be of interest to any reader concerned about the nuclear crisis. Some of the questions confronted in these pages are: What do people mean by "nonviolence"? Should we never kill another human being, or never kill another human being unjustly? Do Christian pacifism and Christian just-war teachings have anything in common in their understanding of the Christian moral life? Do different interpretations of the person and work of Jesus Christ give rise to Christian pacifism and to just-war participation? Are these irreducibly different options equally valid for followers of Christ? Do the tests of discrimination and proportion lead to the same prohibitions on war and limits in war in a nuclear age? With an epilogue by Stanley Hauerwas, this volume offers the unusual event of two Methodist laymen engaged in lively debate over their church and the modern world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Just ImagineAlisse Waterston (bio)The united states is a flower of harm.—Tongo Eisen-Martin, “Taking a Common Name (after Claudia Rankine’s Just Us)”I never have to go far for evidence of the truth of this line from Tongo Eisen-Martin’s response to Claudia Rankine’s Just Us.On a Friday, Kyoo Lee, coeditor of philoSOPHIA, invited me to offer my own response to Eisen-Martin’s and Fanny Howe’s essays in what she (...) said would be “like a game of exquisite corpse,” a productive way, I think, to build up rather than tear down, the latter of which is too often the case in academia. I had to think about it, to think about Just Us, Claudia Rankine’s powerful, generous, sharp, and profound book. In it, she makes an urgent request for “an American conversation” on whiteness. Rankine teaches us: “Universalized whiteness, that racial imaginary, lives in every moment” (2020, 329).I pace around the house, make some tea, and pick up the New York Times, scanning the headlines. There it is, front-page news this very day: “Sights Set on School Districts as G.O.P. Targets Race Theory” (Saul 2021, A1). Scarlett Johnson, profiled in the article, is a dirty-blond “just a mom” from Mequon-Thiensville, a school district in Wisconsin. Johnson has made it her mission to refuse the conversation; she is buttressed by a set of powerful and wealthy behind-the-scenes interest groups. Rankine writes, “I have only lived as me, a person who regularly has to negotiate dismissal, erasure, disrespect, and abuse” (2020, 23).The news article goes on: “Republicans say critical race theory has invaded classrooms.” Then, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson implores, “take back our school boards, our county boards, our city councils” (Saul 2021, A12; emphases [End Page 141] mine). Rankine observes, “Among white people, black people... are not allowed to implicate the present company in [their] precariousness. They are not allowed to point out its causes” (2020, 155). She explains “the narrative of white privilege that secures white spaces,” then quotes legal scholar Cheryl Harris on “the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white... a valuable asset that whites sought [and seek] to protect” (Rankine 2020, 25). Only connect.§§§The spiraling back, the turn of the screw to take it out, to look at what happened, to break apart the cover, to disclose in reverse, recalibrate and recapitulate, to find points of composure and recognition—to view the news as what happened already but left the stain of reportage and evidence of fraud and failure.... The time we live in and the way we make use of our “screws” to construct a new stage to play on.—Fanny Howe, “After Reading Just Us”Here, Fanny Howe offers a beautiful metaphor for Rankine’s gift to the world, if it will take it. Many people, not enough, have joined in turning the screw. Those who have are engaging the process of thinking, without which the catastrophe of universalized whiteness and its human toll will endure. Howe writes of a new stage to play on, which I interpret as an exciting challenge to re-create. Claudia Rankine writes: “what if ” (2020, 3).What if we imagine. The Oxford English Dictionary defines imagine as the process of forming an image of something in the mind, something akin to dreaming, visualizing, thinking, supposing. To imagine is to form a mental image of something, perhaps a goal, an end to which one yearns to arrive, an achievement not yet actualized. On the last pages of Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano dares readers to exercise the right to dream. “Suppose we rave a bit?” he asks, and he offers a long list of possibilities for an alternative world (Galeano 2000, 333–36; see figure 1).In a classroom exercise designed by my former student James Williams, I ask my undergraduates at a public university in New York City to rave a bit, writing out on a slip of paper one thing they would change to make for an alternative world. The world they... (shrink)

This searching critique of the United Methodist Bishops’ pastoral letter on war and peace in a nuclear age, by America’s foremost Christian ethicist, exposes theological flaws from which flow gaps in moral argument and strangely utopian politics. Never before has _In Defense of Creation _been more thoroughly analyzed. At the same time Paul Ramsey gives a full-length and detailed comparison of the Methodist document with _The Challenge of Peace_ by the U.S. Catholic Bishops. Issues of nuclear ethics, as seen (...) by the leaders of two major churches, are set fully in view for the first time in a single volume. This “ecumenical consultation” is broadened by drawing extensively on the writings of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. The book’s larger purpose is to construe an encounter between Christian just-war tradition and Christian pacifism. This comparative discussion of Christian ethics should be of interest to any reader concerned about the nuclear crisis. Some of the questions confronted in these pages are: What do people mean by “nonviolence”? Should we never kill another human being, or never kill another human being _unjustly_? Do Christian pacifism and Christian just-war teachings have anything in common in their understanding of the Christian moral life? Do different interpretations of the person and work of Jesus Christ give rise to Christian pacifism and to just-war participation? Are these irreducibly different options equally valid for followers of Christ? Do the tests of discrimination and proportion lead to the same prohibitions on war and limits in war in a nuclear age? With an epilogue by Stanley Hauerwas, this volume offers the unusual event of two Methodist laymen engaged in lively debate over their church and the modern world. (shrink)

_Post-Postmodernism_ begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an _intensification_ of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is (...) the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era. _Post-Postmodernism_ surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Sexual Ethics: A Theological Introduction by Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler, and: Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times by Marvin M. EllisonDarryl W. StephensReview of Sexual Ethics: A Theological Introduction TODD A. SALZMAN and MICHAEL G. LAWLER Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012. 280 pp. $26.95Review of Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times MARVIN M. ELLISON Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012. (...) 176 pp. $18.00Intended for “the general educated Catholic population” (xiii), Sexual Ethics: A Theological Introduction (SE) is a masterfully abridged version of the authors’ award-winning 2008 book, The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology (TSP). Nearly all of the text of Sexual Ethics is common to both volumes, much of it edited for a broader audience. Omitted in Sexual Ethics are about seventy pages presenting contemporary debates between the methods and anthropologies of traditionalists and revisionists (most of TSP chapters 2 and 3). New in Sexual Ethics are “Questions for Reflection” at the end of each chapter and a brief discussion of “conscience” (xxv–xxvi).In both books, the authors offer a “historically conscious and revisionist approach” to Catholic sexual morality (SE, 221). Beginning with “two magisterial principles” in “Catholic moral, sexual tradition”—procreation and the confines of marriage—the authors note different theological bases for these principles—nature and reason, respectively (xiii–xiv)—and propose a significant shift in focus from the “‘nature’ of the act” to “the meaning of the act for the human person” (xvii). Chapter 1, which could stand on its own, provides a helpful, “brief history” of “sexual morality in the Catholic tradition,” undergirding the authors’ historical (in contrast with a classicist) approach. In chapter 2, the theological crux of the argument, Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler proceed to explore methodological developments and tensions in magisterial teaching, choosing “the principle of the human person adequately considered,” theologically articulated in Gaudium et spes, as the basis for their proposal of a “unitive sexual anthropology” (47). This holistic anthropological approach to the sexual person attempts to shift the magisterium’s “focus on acts and absolute norms” in sexual ethics to a method more akin to its social ethics, focusing on general principles, interrelationships, and the common good (59). Central to their [End Page 226] argument is a reworking of the concept of complementarity purged “of every suggestion of either gender or sexual inequality” (63). The remainder of the book illustrates “how these principles apply in real, concrete, particular human relationships” (87).To critique the argument of Sexual Ethics necessarily implicates The Sexual Person, which is beyond the scope of this review. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to ask whether the same argument presented as a “renewed Catholic anthropology” (in TSP) for professional theologians functions equally well as a “theological introduction” to sexual ethics (in SE) for a lay (nonscholarly) audience. Chapter 6, “Artificial Reproductive Technologies,” is the most successful in this regard, exploring a range of ethical concerns (e.g., means versus ends, burden of proof, presumptions against, appropriate cautions, and consideration of the common good) to arrive at a qualified expansion of magisterial teaching, which becomes a guide to personal discernment. Other topics in Sexual Ethics include marriage and contraception (chapter 3), cohabitation and premarital sexuality (chapter 4), and homosexuality (chapter 5).Overall, Sexual Ethics functions better as an introduction to Catholic sexual teaching and moral anthropology than as an introduction to sexual ethics. For example, reworking the concept of “complementarity”—despite the authors’ inclination “to abandon both the word and the idea” (63)—may be necessary for reconstructing Catholic tradition, but is not necessarily the most helpful starting point for sexual ethics. Sexual Ethics will be challenging for readers lacking theological training and will be of most interest to those already committed to and invested in magisterial teaching. My recommendation would be to use The Sexual Person as a teacher’s guide when assigning Sexual Ethics. By any measure, these books present a brilliant, careful, and sophisticated scholarly argument that revises Catholic sexual teaching in important and faithful ways.In Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times (MLJ), Marvin Ellison provides an accessible, engaging introduction to sexual ethics for... (shrink)

Monty was just like any other dog. A scruffy and irascible Maltese terrier, he enjoyed barking at pugs and sniffing at trees. But after yet another dramatic confrontation with the local Rottweiler, Anthony McGowan realizes it's high time he and Monty had a chat about what makes him a good or a bad dog. Taking his lead from Monty's canine antics, McGowan takes us on a hilarious and enlightening jaunt through the major debates of philosophy. Will Kant convince (...) Monty to stop stealing cheesecake? How long will they put up with Socrates poking holes in every argument? In this uniquely entertaining take on morality and ethics, the dutiful duo set out to uncover who--if anyone--has the right end of the ethical stick and can tell us how best to live one's life."--GoogleBooks. (shrink)

Today is dedicated to the remembrance of the Holy Innocents, who were victims of a state sponsored terrorist attack at the very beginning of the Christian era. We believe this is an appropriate spiritual time to review and question the moral judgement of the Catholic Bishops of the United States of America that our nation's war on the people of Afghanistan is just. We do this in a spirit of fidelity to the teachings of the Catholic Church and (...) to the charism bequeathed to us as Catholic Workers by our founders, the Servants of God Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day of New York. Our statements, questions, and conclusions may seem startling to you, they may make you uncomfortable. This is because we come to you, not as the rich and powerful, but as the weak, poor, and powerless. (shrink)

In deliberative argument, in political discourse, in teaching, and in casual conversation, as rhetors we often hope that our attempts at interaction will have some effect on the participants in these discursive environments. The phenomena of stubbornness, however, would seem to suggest that, despite our efforts, there are times when rhetoric just doesn't work. This dissertation complicates this premise, and in so doing complicates common understandings of both stubbornness and rhetorical effect. As I argue, rhetorical effects exist within (...) a complex rhetoric system, within which they circulate and are interconnected with a diversity of other rhetorical and non-rhetorical elements. Using N. Katherine Hayles's concept of "making the cut," I argue that within such complex systems, stability and change are tangled up in an interdependent relationship; in short, in order for complexity to exist it must be constrained by contingent stabilities. These necessary stabilities mask the way that systems are always moving, and so we often do not see changes in the rhetoric systems we inhabit. In this sense, these changes are compensatory, and they work to maintain a stability that can manifest precisely as stubbornness. In delineating what I call a "rhetoric-systems" approach, this dissertation maps the stabilities and movements of several different rhetoric systems, and provides new insight into the complex and relational movement of rhetorical effect. Our use of this approach asks us to recognize the existence and value of certainty and stability, and then to pull back and recognize the existence of complexity and change. The approach integrates insights from systems theory into existing rhetorical theory, and in so doing models an interdisciplinary approach to public rhetorics and writing studies that is firmly grounded in rhetorical theory. (shrink)

Population genetics is often taught in introductory biology classes, starting with the Hardy–Weinberg principle (HWP) and genetic drift. Here I argue that teaching these two topics first aligns neither with current expert knowledge, nor with good pedagogy. Student difficulties with mathematics in general, and probability in particular, make population genetics difficult to teach and learn. I recommend an alternative, historically inspired ordering of population genetics topics, based on progressively increasing mathematical difficulty. This progression can facilitate just‐in‐time math (...) instruction. This alternative ordering includes, but does not privilege, the HWP and genetic drift. Stochastic events whose consequences are felt within a single generation, and the deterministic accumulation of the effects of selection across multiple generations, are both taught before tackling the stochastic accumulation of the effects of accidents of sampling. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity by Rob Arner, and: Christ at the Checkpoint: Theology in the Service of Justice and Peace ed. by Paul Alexander, and: Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and US Policy by Eli Sarasan McCarthyBrian D. BerryReview of Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity ROB ARNER Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010. 136 pp. (...) $15.56Review of Christ at the Checkpoint: Theology in the Service of Justice and Peace EDITED BY PAUL ALEXANDER Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. 182 pp. $19.80Review of Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and US Policy ELI SARASAN MCCARTHY Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. 259 pp. $27.00In Consistently Pro-Life, Rob Arner (who teaches at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia) makes the case that Christians should not kill other human beings—regardless of the circumstances. Taking as his point of departure the vigilante killing of abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, in 2009, he argues not only that abortion is always morally impermissible but so also is [End Page 217] the murder of abortion doctors and the use of the death penalty to punish those who murder them. In addition, he turns to the early church fathers to contend that, prior to Constantine, “without exception, the church strongly condemned the taking of human life in any form whatsoever”—thus rejecting abortion and infanticide, the blood sport of the Roman games, suicide, and killing in war (120). This was because the New Testament witness to Jesus and his death on the cross required early Christians to view “the means as just as important, if not more important, than the ends” (xiii).Arner supplements this deontological argument for Christian pacifism, which he learned from John Howard Yoder, with a brief consideration of the virtue of patience cultivated in the early churches, reflecting the influence of Stanley Hauerwas on his thought. This “cardinal virtue” connoting “longsuffering, forbearance, patient endurance”—as found in Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:38–48)—enabled early Christians to practice non-violent resistance “deferring personal revenge in favor of God’s vindicating justice” (98). If Christians were to adopt this same consistently pro-life ethic today, argues Arner, it would “lead to greater healing and peace in our blood-soaked world” (121). The book closes with three appendices—one of which is a chart of terminology that dehumanizes vulnerable victims, including unborn human beings. Unfortunately, the book does not have an index.Christ at the Checkpoint, edited by Paul Alexander (professor of Christian ethics and public policy at the Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University), includes thirteen plenary addresses delivered at a conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict organized by Palestinian Evangelical Christians at Bethlehem Bible College in March 2010. Almost all of the contributors to this volume—including biblical scholars, theologians, ethicists, pastors, activists, and others—criticize the ideology of Christian Zionism and its support of a theology of dispensationalism that, in their view, distorts the scriptures and fosters violence rather than reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In his own presentation titled “What Can Pentecostals and Charismatics Do for Peace with Justice in Israel and Palestine?,” Alexander—who describes himself as a former “one-sided” Christian Zionist who later discovered the writings of Yoder and Hauerwas—appeals to Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and urges Pentecostals to create church communities “that cultivate persons of character and conviction, who through habits, practices, and action live out the core of our faith” (69). Along with being faithful to the “greater challenges” of love, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, he argues that they should publicly declare that Jesus does not want Israel to continue the occupation of Palestine, and they should engage in the “easier tasks” of promoting human rights, lending support to United Nations Resolutions, and working toward a two-state solution (72). “The time has come in human history,” writes Alexander, “for Pentecostals to speak and act prophetically regarding this present injustice … [End Page 218] and to use every nonviolent weapon in our arsenal—stories, preaching... (shrink)

Teaching medical ethics to medical students in a pluralistic society is a challenging task. Teachers of ethics have obligations not just to teach the subject matter but to help create an academic environment in which well motivated students have reinforcement of their inherent good qualities. Emphasis should be placed on the ethical aspects of daily medical practice and not just on the dramatic dilemmas raised by modern technology. Interdisciplinary teaching should be encouraged and teaching should (...) span the entire duration of medical studies. Attention should be paid particularly to ethical problems faced by the students themselves, preferably at the time when the problems are most on the students' minds. A high level of academic demands, including critical examination of students' progress is recommended. Finally, personal humility on the part of teachers can help set a good example for students to follow. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Art of Teaching MusicBetty Anne YounkerEstelle R. Jorgensen, The Art of Teaching Music(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008)I have had the pleasure of reading the book manuscript, The Art of Teaching Music, by Estelle Jorgensen. The content explores a variety of ideas that are covered in the myriad of courses experienced by undergraduate students and introduces new ones that are critical to the development (...) of musicians and prospective teachers. Some of these ideas might be alluded to or briefly discussed in methods classes, but not at the level of thoughtful detail as they are entertained and examined in the book. This level of depth would require students and teachers to discuss, dialogue, debate, and reflect over time within and across semesters and courses. I dare to suggest that some of the ideas might not be brought to students’ attention at all throughout the undergraduate experience, which is of a concern and suggests an even greater need for such a book.My overall impression of the book is that the content and the depth of writing would serve the undergraduate students throughout their undergraduate experience and the graduate population for similar and yet different reasons. In terms of the undergraduates, there are parts of the book that would be relevant during their first year in a foundations class, second year in technique classes, third year in methods (for lack of a better word) classes, and student teaching [End Page 109] seminar experiences as they prepare to enter the profession. Utilizing a book across an undergraduate’s experience could generate interesting conversation amongst faculty members as discussions about why, how, what, and when parts of the book would be relevant would need to evolve. Some chapters could be revisited while others visited for the first time at differing places and spaces across the four years. I cannot think of another book that could be utilized in this way and thus serve the undergraduate student throughout her four-year experience and this prospect I find exciting.The book is organized around fourteen chapters, all of which are followed by an afterward. The flow of the chapters invites the reader to examine aspects of becoming and being a music educator at various levels of growth and understanding.The first chapter is titled “Teacher” and requires the reader to think at broader and deeper levels when discussing the notions of role and identity, self-awareness, motivation to enter the profession, and reflective practice. While reading the text, I imagined conversations that would include a comparative analysis of students’ experiences, which could in turn provide larger contexts for the topics. Such a discussion is necessary when examining aspects of being and becoming a teacher in various contexts. The notion of situatedness is highlighted when individual cases are heard and examined and compared across other cases, carefully noting what might or might not be comparable and taking that bit of analysis into consideration. Having such discussions across the four years of undergraduate life allows students to re-visit what was and is, and to speculate about what is to come. Such reflection can be just as fruitful at the graduate level. Students enter graduate school with a variety of teaching experiences and time is needed to reflect on the transition from being a teacher to being a student again. Realization of the continuum on which they travel between learner and teacher becomes apparent in that the place on the continuum shifts regardless of their present position; that is, as a student or teacher. For doctoral students, this reflection is rich as they begin to engage with undergraduate students and forge a new path as budding teachers of teachers and researchers and continue to be musicians.Chapter Two took me to the writings of Dewey1 particularly as I read about a student-centered focus and the experience-based approach. So much of our profession has been driven by content and theories that the student has been removed from the center of the focus and thought of as peripheral. I welcome the idea of placing the students at the center of our thinking and conversations. These ideas have been articulated in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Art of Teaching MusicBetty Anne YounkerEstelle R. Jorgensen, The Art of Teaching Music(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008)I have had the pleasure of reading the book manuscript, The Art of Teaching Music, by Estelle Jorgensen. The content explores a variety of ideas that are covered in the myriad of courses experienced by undergraduate students and introduces new ones that are critical to the development (...) of musicians and prospective teachers. Some of these ideas might be alluded to or briefly discussed in methods classes, but not at the level of thoughtful detail as they are entertained and examined in the book. This level of depth would require students and teachers to discuss, dialogue, debate, and reflect over time within and across semesters and courses. I dare to suggest that some of the ideas might not be brought to students’ attention at all throughout the undergraduate experience, which is of a concern and suggests an even greater need for such a book.My overall impression of the book is that the content and the depth of writing would serve the undergraduate students throughout their undergraduate experience and the graduate population for similar and yet different reasons. In terms of the undergraduates, there are parts of the book that would be relevant during their first year in a foundations class, second year in technique classes, third year in methods (for lack of a better word) classes, and student teaching [End Page 109] seminar experiences as they prepare to enter the profession. Utilizing a book across an undergraduate’s experience could generate interesting conversation amongst faculty members as discussions about why, how, what, and when parts of the book would be relevant would need to evolve. Some chapters could be revisited while others visited for the first time at differing places and spaces across the four years. I cannot think of another book that could be utilized in this way and thus serve the undergraduate student throughout her four-year experience and this prospect I find exciting.The book is organized around fourteen chapters, all of which are followed by an afterward. The flow of the chapters invites the reader to examine aspects of becoming and being a music educator at various levels of growth and understanding.The first chapter is titled “Teacher” and requires the reader to think at broader and deeper levels when discussing the notions of role and identity, self-awareness, motivation to enter the profession, and reflective practice. While reading the text, I imagined conversations that would include a comparative analysis of students’ experiences, which could in turn provide larger contexts for the topics. Such a discussion is necessary when examining aspects of being and becoming a teacher in various contexts. The notion of situatedness is highlighted when individual cases are heard and examined and compared across other cases, carefully noting what might or might not be comparable and taking that bit of analysis into consideration. Having such discussions across the four years of undergraduate life allows students to re-visit what was and is, and to speculate about what is to come. Such reflection can be just as fruitful at the graduate level. Students enter graduate school with a variety of teaching experiences and time is needed to reflect on the transition from being a teacher to being a student again. Realization of the continuum on which they travel between learner and teacher becomes apparent in that the place on the continuum shifts regardless of their present position; that is, as a student or teacher. For doctoral students, this reflection is rich as they begin to engage with undergraduate students and forge a new path as budding teachers of teachers and researchers and continue to be musicians.Chapter Two took me to the writings of Dewey1 particularly as I read about a student-centered focus and the experience-based approach. So much of our profession has been driven by content and theories that the student has been removed from the center of the focus and thought of as peripheral. I welcome the idea of placing the students at the center of our thinking and conversations. These ideas have been articulated in... (shrink)

June 2022 A Revolutionary New Metaphysics, Based on Consciousness, and a Call to All Philosophers We are in a unique moment of our history unlike any previous moment ever. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. As I write, the planet is in deep trouble, heat, fires, great storms, and record flooding, (...) weather patterns drastic everywhere. Capitalism has been so successful in supplying us with an endless array of consumer items, that we have never noticed there is a cost. But there is a cost, the cost is the very life of the Earth herself, and now the day of reckoning is here. Days of reckoning are most often days of rath. But I am hoping that this is a day of major Awakening over the entire planet. We have caused a crisis so great for the Earth we can hardly get our minds around it. But I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis are ideas, about who and what the Earth is, Ourselves, and what we are here for. I am proposing that this is a call to all philosophy and philosophers to rethink ourselves from the ground up. The human race has never gotten the Earth right and now we must, for the Earth is the true foundation for civilization. We are in deep trouble with the Earth, and it owes to the fact that the great male thinkers never got the Earth right, they could never make the connection between the life of mind and the life of the Earth. I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis we are in are ideas. And that in fact the planet is in the grip of a false metaphysics, and scientific image of nature that really comes most recently from Descartes. His conviction that matter, and with it the Earth, are simply the weighable, the measurable the extended in space and time, utterly devoid of any inner life of mind thoughts or Consciousness. This view of matter and the Earth goes back to the very dawn of thought, Descartes is just its most recent and comprehensive version of things. This view of matter is really a false metaphysics that dominates most of the modern world and underpins the whole scientific image of nature itself. I am proposing this is a false metaphysics and offering a new version of things based on Consciousness. If there is a single idea fueling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something without Consciousness. When you intend to ravage and savage the planet, turn it into consumer items to be converted into money in the bank, first pretend that all of the bright beings in the natural world are devoid of Consciousness, just “things” you do not have to have any conscious about destroying them. I am proposing that this term Consciousness, that has appeared as term and a problem for modern science, is the key to getting ourselves right with the Earth. I propose this new theory for science will ramify into every other disciplines as well, and the ways we think just about everything. This old paradigm based on a false theory of matter, has run its course, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction. We need new ideas, and we need them now. You will find my recent work in the Scientific God Journal under the title: Consciousness as the Organizing Principle, and a very complete version of my arguments for this term Consciousness, along with radical reinterpretation of modern science itself, on the Galileo Commission site. It is a radical moment for all of the thinkers among us, take this as my small contribution to rethinking ourselves in new terms, based on my understanding that the true basis for the whole of Being, the Universe, the Cosmos, and with them Ourselves, is this term Consciousness. And unpack it. And I predict that with this term Consciousness every intractable human problem in both science and the modern world will go down like a line of dominos before it. And so, here are a few new ideas I would offer you. These are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine, a great Awakening as of Springtime after a long dark and lonely Winter. We are leaving behind us an old civilization based on male dominance, fear lies and control, now in decay, disease, and death disintegrating all around us. We are moving into a whole new civilization based on Love and Truth. A new civilization requires new basic terms values and first principles. And so, I return to Descartes. 1. Just over 300 years ago a young man travelling with the army found himself stranded in a foreign town in a bare room lit by a candle with nothing to do but think. And in a couple of nights Descartes laid the entire thought foundations for modern science and most of the modern world. It isn’t clear that modern philosophers with their funding sources of grants, their graduate students, their reputation and all the perks and privileges of academia can do any better. Descartes claimed there are just two principles in the Universe, Matter and Mind. God was pure mind; human beings were mind and matter. And we are the only ones on the planet with mind. Everything else all of the bright array of beings who share the planet with us are simply matter. And matter? The weighable the measurable the extended in space and time utterly devoid of any inner life of thoughts, feelings, or Consciousness This classification was a boon for developing science. Scientists did not have to worry about any inner life in nature, ideas or Consciousness, they could just set about weighing and measuring, as they have until the present day. But it was a disaster for the Earth. Earth was once worshiped as a Goddess. With Descartes she became almost overnight “things.” Simply commodities and resources, an endless of supply of consumer items, to be turned into money in the bank. And now Descartes concept of matter is up for us. If there is a single idea that is enabling and driving the destruction of the Earth, it is the conviction that Earth is something without Consciousness. This whole scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is driving the destruction of the Earth, and driving us all insane, and it needs to change. Ever since Descartes formulated Dualism, scientists and philosophers have been trying to get rid of it. They have done this by attempting to make matter the fundamental term of reality, and to explain mind or Consciousness in terms of matter. And now, Consciousness has emerged as term and a problem for modern science. 2. The prevailing Universe picture has been mainly based on the belief that Consciousness appears only at the end of evolution in ourselves and some of the higher animals when matter attains “a certain state of complexity” and it is produced by neurons in the brain. But Consciousness is nothing real in itself, the neurons are doing the work, Consciousness is simply a byproduct of neural activity. As William James summed up this position, not his: Consciousness is to the brain as a shadow to the runner, it runs beside him but never influences his stride. And so, the great problem of neuroscience: How do neurons produce Consciousness? So far, no one has been able to say how. All we have is parallelism. Two processes are running in parallel a train of neural events and a train of Consciousness events. And so, which one is primary? The face of neuroscience and much of the modern world is that the neural events are what is really real, Consciousness is secondary. The conviction that Consciousness is something produced by neurons is so deeply held and has been so for so long, that it seems like an obvious fact. It is in fact an assumption and a theory, and it could all well be the other way around. The scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is now up for us. It has enabled the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a unique place in our own evolution where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, there are the best reasons for rethinking Descartes concepts of matter. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to escape dualism by making matter the fundamental term. And now, this has not worked. In a nutshell: The mind body problem, the “hard problem of Consciousness” ---how do neurons in the brain, atoms and molecules give rise to ideas thoughts and feelings and who what and where is the “I” who sees them? And then, the near-death experience. I remind you of the truth of the near-death experience. The body in the bed is brain dead eeg flat, but the patient, pure Consciousness is hovering at the ceiling watching the doctors work over the body below, able to read dials he could not have seen from the bed, sometimes able to events in the corridor beyond the room, all subsequently confirmed by the doctors. Evidence as good as it gets that the patient really was out of his body. And so, the patient is able to see without eyes, hear without ears and to think and remember without a brain. There is not a single scientific principle that can account for this. And I am proposing that the near-death experience is a threshold and a key for a much deeper understanding of the Universe. These three problems are so hard they cannot be solved by present scientific principles and therefore call all present principles and ways of thought into question. When your axioms cannot account for the data, it is time to drop them and find better fundamental terms. We have not been able to solve the problems of Consciousness with the assumption that matter is the most basic and fundamental term. And so, if Cartesian dualism is to be overcome at all, we need to try it the other way around. 3. We are in the position of Copernicus. Remember Copernicus? He was making his calculations on the assumption that the Earth was the center of the Universe until they became so unwieldy that he decided to try it all the other way around. To make the sun the center, the Earth revolving around it. And lo, all of his data fell neatly into place. I am proposing a whole new Universe picture. Evolution makes us continuous with every other being, Consciousness would not be in us if it were not in them also, and then, in the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living beings. I propose to make Consciousness the most basic term and see what follows. I am in fact, proposing a new Copernican Revolution, that Consciousness is the true basis for the Universe and the right fundamental term, for science itself all other disciplines as well, and the whole of the modern world. And I predict that every intractable problem in science or the modern world, will go down like a line of dominos before it. In a nutshell: Consciousness and not matter is “first and fundamental” in the Universe, it is there from the very “Beginning” everything has it and all of the true causalities, the explanatory principles belong to it. Not to matter. What then is matter? All matter is an Appearance of something much more real, Consciousness. All matter is an expression of Consciousness, even the least little bit of matter contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. And so, we revise the scientific image of nature. Science at present is two termed, matter/energy. It needs to become three termed: Matter/energy/Consciousness, with the recognition that all of the basic principles, the true causalities of events, and of the Universe belong to Consciousness. And now physics. To accommodate this new Universe picture physics needs to alter just one term, energy. All energy contains Consciousness, that idea alone will change our world forever. The animals the trees the plants are just as conscious as we are, as is the Earth herself, a continuum of many forms of Consciousness of which our own is one. The Earth consists of interacting and intersecting forms of Consciousness, Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness. A remarkable work has just appeared entitled “Beyond Words What Animals Feel and Think.” Describing in detail how like ourselves all of the animals are. And the more we can see how like us everything else really is, the harder it will be for us to do them all in, in the interest of turning them into consumer items. And so, here is a new principle of understanding, that entails completely new forms of explanation, and a whole new Universe picture to be spelled out in terms of Consciousness and its various properties. This is a Universe that is aware awake and Enspirited throughout. And so, there is only one principle, not two. And so, how does Consciousness work? There is “no mind/body problem.” My Consciousness is aligning the Consciousness of neurons in the brain, that aligns the Consciousness of all other cells in the body, that aligns the Consciousness of molecules and atoms themselves. Mainly from the top down, but also interactive, and not reduction to the purely physical forces. 4. And so, here is a radical new Universe picture, and with it a new way to think about the Universe itself, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. It requires a complete revision of both of the terms of modern science itself. The problem of the modern world owes in deep measure to Descartes concept of matter as something devoid of interior life. But he is only the most powerful and simple expression of a whole tradition of thought that predates him, that goes back to the very dawn of thought itself. It owes to the conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was something devoid of reason, or mind, and therefore something to be held in complete contempt. We are emerging from a civilization based on contempt for the Earth, and down the road, it will become contempt for the body, sex, women, the Native people, and people of color everywhere. And so, this entire tradition is now up for us, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction, and we need to get beyond it. I am proposing that this term Consciousness is the way out. The missing piece of the puzzle and the idea whose time has come. And it will enable us to move into a completely new civilization based on respect for the Earth, women, sex, people of color, that honors everyone and has a place for all. Revolutions in science occur when new data show up that cannot be accounted for by existing paradigms (Thomas Kuhns: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Consciousness, and all the properties and problems of Consciousness are just such data, and they compel a new scientific revolution. But we are a scientific age. A new Copernican revolution in science is such as revolution everywhere. And Consciousness is the key to getting every other reality at all levels and depths right as well. It will enable us finally to get the Earth right, get ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. Archimedes: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. I am proposing a new synthesis among our fundamental terms in which this term Consciousness is the new lynchpin. And so, I return once more to Descartes. Descartes in the Mediations was a dualist, they were two realities interacting in the pineal gland mind and body. But Descartes age was high on “Cartesianisms,” on Descartes concept of matter. Animals were simply cleverly wired machines (Hobbes called them automata). Rumor had it that Descartes followers went about kicking dogs reasoning that their howls were not due to any feelings of pain, but simply the wiring of the machine. We have been doing this to the Earth ever since, and now the Earth is not going to stand for it any longer. It is time we all woke up. There is no matter in Descartes sense of it, or in Plato and Aristotle’s sense of it. This old concept of matter is embedded in all of the crisis and catastrophes---fires, drought, pandemics, over population, the disintegrating economies, our ways of life, capitalism and consumerism themselves. All matter is Enspirited, contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. Now I tell you something about Descartes you may not know. In the Mediations was a dualist, there are minds and bodies. But by the end of his life, he knew the truth. Descartes guided his whole life by these vivid dreams, and toward the end of his life he had this dream: He saw the Universe as a giant machine and in the heart of the machine propelling the whole, was Consciousness. And so, out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day. Here is a renewed and a new science, a new cosmology. And with it, a revolutionary new metaphysics. The whole of the modern world is in the grip of a false metaphysics, based on Descartes theory of matter. Here is a new, and finally true metaphysics based on the single term, Consciousness. 5. And in all my works, I spell out this new metaphysics based on Consciousness, and what it means for how we think about virtually everything: The Universe, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. Of who, what and where Spirit is, that we may connect with Spirit everywhere. There is only one term for the Universe, and not two, this single term Consciousness, that manifests itself in two modes: Consciousness in Form, Consciousness Formless. And so, here is a sketch of what this new term Consciousness really means. For four great aspects of the real, four new cornerstones for a whole new civilization on Earth, based on Love and Truth. A. For the Universe: New causalities, all matter is an expression of Consciousness, awake and aware, Enspirited throughout, which has a place for the causalities of love ideas intent plan and purpose, what Aristotle called final causality, that for the sake of which. And it has a place for subjectivity, the greatest mystery in the whole of the Universe, knowable only in ourselves, but there in everything else as well, bedrock in the chain of causalities. The buck stops here. Here are two very different Universe pictures. The Cartesian Universe consists of things, pushed, and pulled around by the physical forces that function blind. The true Universe consists of selves and not things. Selves at least in ourselves, are organized and focused about an I, an I am, or a sense of self in everything, ever other being dear to itself. Just one aspect of subjectivity. And so, it is Consciousness all the way down, and subjectivity all the way down. Science proceeds on the basis of the negligible of what it can leave out as unimportant. Subjectivity is the ultimate animating principle of the Universe. What Descartes really did was to strip from nature what is most essential about it, its animating principle Consciousness. And so, we come out of a long history of “clunk.” The great male thinkers have killed creation. First in concepts and now in the lived life. And so, after centuries of fruitless search, not all of it in vain, finally, and just in time the true basic principle for the Universe has shown up in virtually all disciplines, this term Consciousness. B. And so, the Earth: What does this term Consciousness really mean for the Earth? It means that all of the bright array of beings around us have Consciousness. And the more we can realize how like us they are, the harder it will be to do them all in. Is this what it really means to be “made in the image of Spirit?” To destroy ever other living being? The god of Genesis is a creator god who has created billions and billions of living forms. Man, taking himself to be made in the image of Spirit has destroyed virtually all of it. The Earth is not things, not commodities and resources, not an endless array of consumer goods. The Earth consists of conscious living spiritual beings like ourselves, who need to be honored and respected, nurtured and cared for, to be Loved. And if the human race can finally pull it off and bring Love here and start helping the Earth rather than destroying her, even our vast numbers now at 8 billion, may not matter. Deeply embedded in the modern world is a false cosmology based on the hitherto useful but ultimately false metaphysics of Descartes. In particular it owes to Descartes concepts of matter, and of the Earth, as something devoid of Consciousness. And now this concept is up for us. If there is a single idea enabling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something devoid of Consciousness. And we all have a vested interest in keeping this false concept in place. When you intend to ravage and savage the Earth, to turn it into consumer items, and money in the bank, first pretend she has no Consciousness that way we need not have any conscious about it. We are in deep trouble with the planet. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, here are a few new guiding principles for the planet, based on Consciousness. Consciousness has field properties. The Earth is Consciousness throughout, connected and interconnected throughout, intersecting and interacting fields of Consciousness of which our own is one. To harm one is to harm all. Only this understanding of the Earth can set our destructive technologies, and capitalism, their goals, and their limits. The real problem with capitalism, and with civilization itself is it has no true understanding of the Earth, all the exquisite networks and webworks that connect all beings with one another. Nor it is about to admit that the Earth is our “life support system,” reason gone insane in the modern world. We are destroying our life support system, capitalism is the full expression of the human death wish in the modern world, and it needs to change. And now, let the barriers between ourselves and all other beings go down. C. And so, Ourselves. This new Universe picture based on Consciousness opens into and has a place for new concepts of human identity. In particular, it has a place for reincarnation, a process whereby one Consciousness dons’ bodies again and again and lays them down. This is a process wholly impossible on materialistic theories. This new view of things puts a higher perspective on Freudian determinism, which is a partial knowing in a greater account. We are something more than the victims of genes drives and childhood. We are immortally eternal evolving spiritual beings who take on a cycle of earthly lives in order to achieve certain goals and abilities, and then, our earthly cycle complete, we depart the Earth plane for other areas of the Universe physical or purely spiritual, to continue our evolution elsewhere. The scientific evidence for reincarnation is increasing on all sides, see for example the work of Michael Newton, a mainstream scientist forced to confront the fact of reincarnation. A completely new reincarnational picture is now emerging everywhere. We choose our parents for abilities we could acquire through them. We all come here with reasons for being here, and we all have free will, an original property of Consciousness, and we work out our issues accordingly. We all come here with the same reason for being here. It is to experience the Earth plane and human society at all levels and depths, in every social role, every climate, both sexes male and female and in all races. We are all here to acquire a deep understanding of the Earth plane with all its challenges and all of its present problems. We are not here to devour and consume the Earth, but to honor her for the learning experience she makes available for us. And so, reincarnation is the great equalizer, the fundamental basis for any bill of rights. Many of the problems of the modern world owe to the fact that reincarnation has not been taught in the West. Reincarnation was the center piece of Jesus teachings. It was banned by a fourth century council that decided the populous could best be controlled through fear. They edited all mention of reincarnation from the scriptures, and inserted fear terms instead, a judgmental god, and so on. If reincarnation had been taught, there would have been no suppression of women, but the gift of both sexes would have been honored and developed. And there would have been no reason for contempt for people of color because who they are, we have been or will be. There is no reason to look down on anyone when we know that our own identity includes membership in theirs. The truth of reincarnation needs to be the foundation for getting ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. D. And so, Spirit. This new Universe picture, based on Consciousness, has a place for Spirit as simply Infinite Consciousness. All universes all worlds are formed out of this Consciousness, divine and sacred throughout. And Spirit is everywhere in the Earth and can be connected everywhere. And the Native North American people had things right. Everything has its own Spirit, and without contradiction is also an expression of Spirit. And what I am really doing in terms of concepts of modern science is presenting the Native North American version of the Real. And this new Universe picture has a place for the essential insight of all religions almost smothered by church tradition: Love. Not an emotion but a great Oneness, that can be found everywhere, even in a busy city street. But especially in the Earth, that is levels and depths of Oneness everywhere. And so, for the first time in their long and bitter antagonistic history, science and religion now share a common base with this term Spirit, the lynchpin in a new conceptual framework. And I offer an interpretation of where we are in our history, this present moment of historical grace, and these tumultuous times in which we live, the return of the Goddess and the Divine Feminine, the Reappearance of the Feminine in history, the Advent of Women, this great Awakening, as of Springtime after a long dark Winter, the Awakening, the Second Coming. And so, stay tuned! (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

A work of music is repeatable in the following sense: it can be multiply performed or played in different places at the same time, and each such datable, locatable performance or playing is an occurrence of it: an item in which the work itself is somehow present, and which thereby makes the work manifest to an audience. As I see it, the central challenge in the ontology of musical works is to come up with an ontological proposal (i.e. an (...) account of what sort of thing a work of music is) which enables us to explain what such repeatability consists in, whilst doing maximal justice to the way in which we conceive of musical works in our reflective critical and appreciative practice. To this end, many have found it tempting to defend some version or other of the type-token theory : the thesis that a work is a type and its occurrences are its tokens. Much of the early debate prompted by the publication of Jerrold Levinson's seminal 'What a Musical Work Is' in 1980 has taken the type-token theory for granted, choosing to focus on how musical works, qua types, are individuated. (A key question here has been whether we should hold, with the sonicist , that works are identical just in case they sound exactly alike; or whether we should agree with Levinson's contextualist thesis that exact sound-alikes are distinct, if composed in distinct musico-historical contexts.) More recently, however, the type-token theory itself has been put under pressure, and alternatives have been suggested. So, e.g. Gregory Currie and David Davies have held versions of the thesis that musical works (and artworks generally) are acts of composition, whilst Guy Rohrbaugh has recommended that we think more innovatively about our metaphysical categories, and treat musical works (along with all repeatable artworks) as historical individuals . Historical individuals, like particular substances, come into and go out of existence, could have been somewhat different than they are, and can change through time; but such items, unlike particular substances, are nonetheless capable of having occurrences. In the last few years, ontologists of music have also stepped back to consider the very nature of their enterprise. In particular, a debate has ensued concerning the cogency of ontological proposals (such as those of Nelson Goodman, Nicholas Wolterstorff and Julian Dodd) that are substantially revisionary of our folk concept of a work of music. Amie Thomasson, David Davies and Andrew Kania occupy, to a greater or lesser degree, the descriptivist standpoint, according to which such revisionary ontologies are misconceived. The debate between revisionists and descriptivists in the ontology of music – if prosecuted against the backdrop of an awareness of developments in meta-ontology more generally – is a particularly fertile area in the philosophy of music at present. Author Recommends Wollheim, Richard. Art and its Objects . 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. This seminal study nicely introduces and motivates the type-token theory, and in the course of doing so, helpfully, although perhaps contentiously, distinguishes types from both sets and properties. Wollheim's treatment was to a large part responsible for stimulating the subsequent debate as to the ontological nature of musical works. Levinson, Jerrold. 'What a Musical Work Is.' Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980); reprinted in his Music, Art and Metaphysics , 63–88. This paper has, perhaps, been the most influential account of the nature of musical works, post-Wollheim. Presuming the type-token theory to be correct, Levinson elaborates it by claiming musical works to be, not sound structures (i.e. structured patterns of sound-types), but a species of types he calls indicated structures . According to Levinson, a work of music is not to be identified with its sound structure, S ; it is, in fact, a compound of S and a performance-means structure, PM , as indicated (typically, via a score) by its composer on a certain occasion : something that we can represent as S/PM -as-indicated-by- X -at- t . Such indicated structures, Levinson argues, fit the bill for being what works of music are, because they come into being with their indication (i.e. their composition), are individuated in terms of the musico-historical context in which they were composed, and have their specified performance-means (i.e. their instrumentation) essentially. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Works and Worlds of Art . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Part I of this book sees Wolterstorff defend a Platonistic version of the type-token theory (although Wolterstorff calls them 'kinds' rather than 'types'). According to Wolterstorff, considerations about the existence conditions of types commit us to the thesis that works of music, qua types, are entities that cannot come into or go out of existence. Kivy, Peter. 'Platonism in Music: A Kind of Defence.' Grazer Philosophische Studien 19 (1983): 109–29. In this article, Kivy ingeniously (and wittily) defends a variety of Platonism about works of music against the animadversions of Levinson. Currie, Gregory. An Ontology of Art . New York: St, Martin's Press, 1989. Here Currie introduces and defends the thesis that works of music (and, indeed, all artworks) are compositional action-types. The book also contains some well-aimed criticisms of Levinson's account. Dodd, Julian. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. In this book, Dodd defends the type-token theory, but argues that no version of it can escape the Platonisic consequence that musical works exist at all times (and hence, are discovered, rather than created, by their composers). Dodd also defends another controversial thesis, this time concerning musical works' individuation. According to Dodd, and pace Levinson and others, sonicism is correct: works that sound exactly alike are identical. Rohrbaugh, Guy. 'Artworks as Historical Individuals.' European Journal of Philosophy 11 (2003): 177–205. In this essay, Rohrbaugh makes some pointed criticisms of the type-token theory of repeatable artworks in the course of arguing that such works should be viewed, not as types, but as historical individuals (see above). Rohrbaugh suggests that treating musical works as historical individuals best captures our intuitions about such works' temporal and modal characteristics, and, in the course of elaborating his position, he makes some meta-ontological claims that see him endorsing a non-revisionary, descriptivist approach to the ontology of art. As Rohrbaugh sees it, ontologies of art are 'beholden to our artistic practices' (179), and 'aesthetics should not be beholden to the metaphysics on offer, but rather should drive new work in metaphysics' (197). Ridley, Aaron. 'Against Musical Ontology,' Journal of Philosophy 100 (2003): 203–220. This paper sees Ridley outlining a sceptical attitude towards the project of formulating ontological proposals. In his view, a 'serious philosophical engagement with music is orthogonal to, and may well in fact be impeded by, the pursuit of ontological issues' (203). Thomasson, Amie. 'The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics.' JAAC 63 (2005:221–9). Thomasson defends descriptivism in the ontology of art by arguing that such a position is a consequence of the only defensible solution to a problem in the theory of reference: the so-called 'qua' problem concerning how the reference of a term can be fixed. Davies, David. Art as Performance . Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Davies' position is characterised by two theses: one methodological, the other ontological. The methodological claim is that the ontology of art faces a pragmatic constraint : roughly speaking, the ontology of art is answerable to the epistemology of art. The ontological claim is that the rigorous enforcement of the pragmatic constraint commits us to the thesis that all artworks are compositional action-tokens. Online Materials http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?article_id=phco_articles_bpL173 Dodd, Julian. 'Musical Works: Ontology and Meta-Ontology.' Philosophy Compass 3/6 (2008): 1113–34. doi: [DOI link] http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118557784/abstract Thomasson, Amie. 'Debates about the Ontology of Art: What are We Doing Here?' Philosophy Compass 1/3 (2006): 245–55. doi: [DOI link] http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122517227/abstract Davies, David. 'Works and Performances in the Performing Arts.' forthcoming in Philosophy Compass . doi: [DOI link] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/music/ Kania, Andrew. 'The Philosophy of Music.' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Sample Mini-Syllabus Week 1: The Type/Token Theory Introduced Wollheim, Richard. Art and its Objects , §§4–8, 21–3, 35–7. Kivy, Peter. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music , chapter 11. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Dodd, Julian. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology , chapter 1. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Works and Worlds of Art , chapter 2. Week 2: The Type/Token Theory and Platonism in Music Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Works and Worlds of Art , chapter 2. Levinson, Jerrold. 'What a Musical Work Is'. Dodd, Julian. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology , chapters 2–5. Kivy, Peter. 'Platonism in Music: A Kind of Defence.' Grazer Philosophische Studien 19 (1983): 109–29. Kivy, Peter. 'Platonism in Music: Another Kind of Defence.' American Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1987): 245–52. Predelli, Stefano. 'Against Musical Platonism.' British Journal of Aesthetics 35 (1995): 338–50. Caplan, Ben and Carl Matheson. 'Can a Musical Work be Created?' British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2004): 113–34. Week 3: Musical Works as Indicated Structures Levinson, Jerrold. 'What a Musical Work Is'. Levinson, Jerrold. 'What a Musical Work Is, Again', in his Music, Art and Metaphysics . Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. 215–63. Dodd, Julian. 'Musical Works as Eternal Types.' British Journal of Aesthetics 40 (2000). Davies, Stephen. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Account , chapter 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Howell, Robert. 'Types, Indicated and Initiated.' British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 105–27. Caplan, Ben and Carl Matheson. 'Fine Individuation.' British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (2007): 113–37. Week 4: Musical Work as Historical Individuals Rohrbaugh, Guy. 'Artworks as Historical Individuals'. Dodd, Julian. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology , chapter 6. Caplan, Ben and Carl Matheson. 'Defending Musical Perdurantism.' British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (2006): 59–69. Caplan, Ben and Carl Matheson. 'Defending "Defending Musical Perdurantism".' British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008): 331–37. Week 5: Musical Works as Compositional Actions Currie, Gregory. An Ontology of Art . New York: St, Martin's Press, 1989. Davies, David. Art as Performance . Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Dodd, Julian. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology , chapter 7. Week 6: Meta-ontology of Music: What are we Doing When we do the Ontology of Music? Ridley, Aaron. 'Against Musical Ontology'. Thomasson, Amie. 'The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics'. Thomasson, Amie. Ordinary Objects , chapter 11. OUP, 2007. Davies, David. 'The Primacy of Practice in the Ontology of Art.' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009): 159–72. Kania, Andrew. 'Piece for the End of Time: In Defence of Musical Ontology,' British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008): 65–79. Kania, Andrew. 'The Methodology of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism and its Implications.' British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008): 426–44. Cameron, Ross. 'There are No Things That are Musical Works.' British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008): 295–314. Dodd, Julian. 'Musical Works: Ontology and Meta-Ontology.' Philosophy Compass 3/6 (2008): 1113–1134. doi: [DOI link] Focus Questions 1. Are musical works literally created by their composers? 2. Critically examine Levinson's thesis that musical works are 'indicated structures'. 3. What, if anything, is wrong with the thesis that musical works are identical just in case they sound exactly alike? 4. Should we immediately be sceptical of ontological proposals for works of music that are substantially revisionary of the way in which we ordinarily think of them? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scepticism in the Sixth Century? Damascius’ Doubts and Solutions Concerning First PrinciplesSara RappeThe Doubts and Solutions Concerning First Principles, an aporetic work of the sixth century Neoplatonist Damascius, is distinguished above all by its dialectical subtlety. Although the Doubts and Solutions belongs to the commentary tradition on Plato’s Parmenides, its structure and method make it in many ways unique among such exegetical works. The treatise positions itself, at least (...) in part, as a response to Proclus’ metaphysical system. Thus the first principles alluded to in its title refer to a metaphysical structure consisting of five central elements, the Ineffable, the One, and the Noetic Triad, which Damascius both adumbrates in opposition to Proclus1 as well as subjects to his own, internal critique. In this article, I will be asking whether or not Damascius’ critique of Neoplatonic metaphysics is informed or inspired by ancient Scepticism. No doubt this question catches the reader off guard: if the last exponent of ancient Scepticism is Sextus Empiricus, how could this sixth-century Neoplatonist Scholarch, the last officially appointed Platonic Successor, revert to a tradition that seemingly disappears for well over three centuries?2 In what [End Page 337] follows, I suggest that a plausible historical context for such a reversion can be found in contemporaneous Neoplatonic allusions to Sceptical readings of Plato. I then analyze the Sceptical techniques deployed by Damascius in his critique of Neoplatonist metaphysics, focusing especially on his attacks on Neoplatonic theories of intellect and causation. I conclude by speculating on some ideological factors that shaped Damascius’ Sceptical affiliations, suggesting that here it is possible to see an initial volley in what was to become a centuries-long skirmish between reason and revelation.1. the neoplatonists read the sceptics?R. T. Wallis has suggested that Plotinus borrows from the Sceptics’ arsenal in voicing his own objections against Stoic or Stoicizing epistemology and theology. The seemingly radical stance that Plotinus takes against Stoic notions of divine rationality, virtue, and providence is anticipated by the Sceptics’ refusal to grant that an omniscient mind could stand in need of rational deliberation or exercise virtues that imply the presence of corresponding vices, etc. Not only is it the case that Plotinus makes a detailed use of specific Sceptical arguments in his own polemics against the Stoics, he seems to have been the first philosopher to have grasped the implications of Sceptical challenges to Stoic theology, and to have circumvented Sceptical dilemmas by means of his highly original formulations of nondiscursive thinking and negative theology.That this Platonist might side with Sceptics against dogmatic philosophy would hardly be surprising to the modern student of Plato, but it is also true that historically, this has been an uneasy alliance. In fact, it is just this question, the alliance between Platonists and the Sceptics, that gets rehearsed in the sixth century. Olympiodorus devotes Chapter 10 of his Prolegomena to the Study of Platonic Philosophy to the refutation of an ephectic, or nondogmatic Plato3: “Plato also superseded the philosophy of the New Academy since that school gave precedence to akatalepsia (nonapprehension), while Plato demonstrated that there do exist cognitions grounded in genuine knowledge. Nevertheless, some assert, assimilating Plato to the ephectics and to the Academicians, that he too maintained the doctrine of akatalepsia.” These remarks are curious, for we have no indication that a Sceptical reading of Plato was current or even conceivable at this time. In fact, as the context makes clear, the Sceptics are represented in this passage as a prior philosophical school; chapters 7 through 10 present a concise history of philosophy that is remarkably free from any notions of philosophical currency attributable to any of the views that fall [End Page 338] under its purvue: “there has been no shortage of philosophical haireseis [schools] both before and after Plato, yet he surpassed all of them by his teaching, his thought, and in every possible way”4 (Prolegomena, 7.1).Olympiodorus performs the exegete’s role throughout his refutation of a non-dogmatic Plato, turning first to the grammatical item, Plato’s use of what Olympiodorus terms the “hestitating” adverbs, such as “probably,” “perhaps,” and “as I imagine.” Nevertheless Olympiodorus manages... (shrink)

In 2002 a significant number of American theologians declared that the ‘war on terror’ was a just war. But the indiscriminate strategies and munitions technologies deployed in the invasion and occupation of Iraq fall short of the just war principles of non-combatant immunity, and proportionate response. The just war tradition is one of Christendom's most enduring legacies to the law of nations. Its practice implies a standard of virtue in war that is undermined by the indiscriminate effects (...) of many modern weapons and by the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure. The violent power represented by the technology of what the Vatican calls ‘total war’has occasioned a significant shift in Catholic social teaching on just war since the Second World War. Total war generates an asymmetry of weakness in those subjected to these techniques of terror, and this has only strengthened the violence of the Islamist struggle against the West. But those who draw inspiration and legitimacy from this weakness in their struggle with the West also reject virtue in war. In a time of terror the theological vocation is to speak peace and to recall the terms in which the peace of God was achieved by way of the cross. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Your Cell Will Teach You Everything":Old Wisdom, Modern Science, and the Art of AttentionNoreen HerzfeldA brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked him "Father, give me a word." The old man said to him "Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything." 1 Among the Desert Fathers, Christian monks of the fourth and fifth centuries, it was customary for a novice to (...) go to an elder and ask for "a word," a word of advice, of counsel, a word to take home and reflect on. What does this word of advice say to us today?A Multitasking World"Your cell will teach you everything." To my students, this seems like very strange advice indeed. "Your cell?" When I quoted Abba Moses to a colleague he instinctively reached for his phone. But a monk's cell? Isn't a monk's cell empty, isolated? What can that cell possibly have to teach? And how? The lives of the young men and women I teach are the very antithesis of sitting in a cell. Their attention is fragmented, divided by an array of modern technologies. I watch them walk by my office window, iPod plugged into the ears, cell phone or Blackberry in hand as they check e-mail or send a text message. Time in their rooms is characterized by one eye on the television and another on the computer, on which are open their theology paper, an instant messaging box or two connecting them to friends, their Facebook page, in case one of their friends should post a status update, and perhaps a Twitter feed or their favorite blog. They assure me that they have grown up multitasking. Young Americans spend an average of six hours a day using nonprint media, and at least a quarter of that time they are using more than one screen, device, or channel.2 They are connected, linked in, logged on.It is not just the student who multitasks while doing homework. The average office worker is interrupted roughly every three minutes during the workday, interruptions that the worker herself often initiates.3 These include the phone, e-mail, [End Page 83] checking websites. As more jobs move to the knowledge and service sectors, more of us find the temptation to multitask at work irresistible.But what effect does all this multitasking have on the person? We're not getting more done, for one thing. Several recent studies have shown that, contrary to self-perception, people really can't multitask. The brain cannot concentrate on several things simultaneously. Instead it switches focus from task to task the same way a computer does. This means that all tasks are slowed down somewhat by the switching process, and the attempt to coordinate too many tasks can lead to more time being devoted to the switching than to the tasks at hand, a phenomenon computer scientists have long been aware of, known as "thrashing." Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT, notes: "Think about writing an e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time. You cannot focus on one while doing the other. That's because of interference between the two tasks."4 Miller notes that in an MRI you can actually see the brain struggling as it shifts rapidly from one to the other.One can see that this might have a deleterious effect on one's work life. Research shows that, once interrupted by an e-mail or a phone call, the average worker can take up to half an hour to return to full concentration on the task at hand.5 But why does this matter for the spiritual life? Over time, multitasking erodes our ability to pay focused, close attention, and this eventually eats away at traits such as patience, tenacity, judgment, and problem solving. This is most evident in the latter. In a test of fifteen-year-olds, the United States ranks twenty-fourth out of the twenty-nine developed countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development on problem solving skills, with nearly 60 percent of them scoring below the most basic level of using a single... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Globalization: The Quest for AlternativesAmy LevadCatholic Social Teaching and Economic Globalization: The Quest for Alternatives John Sniegocki Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2009. 335 pp. $37.00.John Sniegocki’s dense volume argues for rethinking development policies in light of widespread poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation that have resulted from these policies over the last century. This argument does not mark Sniegocki’s text as (...) particularly original. However, the dialogue that he constructs between Catholic social teaching (CST) and three schools of thought on development, which he describes as “neoconservative,” “radical,” and “grassroots” views, provides a compelling argument for new directions for both CST and economic globalization.Sniegocki’s book begins with three chapters that provide an overview of development theory (beginning with calls for “modernization” of the “Third World” beginning in the 1950s), examine failures of this theory in practice, and discuss the growth of CST concerning development. While these chapters provide important groundwork for understanding the context of Sniegocki’s argument, the heart of the argument comes in the fourth chapter, where he places CST in dialogue with neoconservative and radical approaches to development (represented, respectively, by Michael Novak [End Page 209] and Mary Hobgood). Neoconservatism is clearly incompatible with CST, as any denial of structural inequality or whole-hearted embrace of capitalism— even “democratic capitalism”—would be. However, radical approaches maintain that CST does not sever itself completely from the economic liberalism that underlies neoconservatism. As a result, even when CST recognizes the pitfalls of capitalism and the realities of structural injustice, it still often resorts to liberal assumptions. Radicals maintain that if CST were more consistent, it would more adamantly call for social struggle resulting in “democratic socialism.”Sniegocki finds resources for CST in radicalism but also introduces a third perspective from grassroots critics of development, exemplified by Vandana Shiva. These critics question whether “development equals Westernization via industrialization” (242, quoting Herb Addo), as maintained by both neoconservatives and radicals; they instead call for revitalization of local economies and traditional cultures. Sniegocki concludes that this vision could enhance CST in several ways: resolving the tension in CST between modernization and respect for local cultures, improving its framework for understanding ecological issues, encouraging recognition of grassroots action and social struggle for change, and attending to the role of women in economic and social processes. In the two concluding chapters, Sniegocki proposes that radical and grassroots perspectives together provide a basis for critiquing neoconservatism and improving CST.At least two issues deserve more attention in Sniegocki’s text. First, the principle of subsidiarity, “which asserts that issues should be dealt with at the most decentralized level appropriate to the issue at hand” (121), would seem to offer a strong grounding in CST for many grassroots arguments, yet Sniegocki gives this principle little attention. Second, Sniegocki criticizes the decision-making practices within many international development organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), for suppressing democratic participation. In many ways, this critique could also be leveled against the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Could deficiencies of CST concerning development be an outgrowth of the decision-making practices of the hierarchy, just as problems with IMF, WB, and WTO policies are an outgrowth of their decision-making practices? Sniegocki seems to recognize this possibility in a single sentence: “The resurgence within the Catholic Church in recent years of more top-down, centralized, and secretive ecclesiastical practices, while the church at the same time recommends to the broader world the importance of grassroots participation, dialogue, and human rights, makes ongoing attention to these issues especially urgent” (331). Although this sentence touches on an important question, Sniegocki leaves it here. It seems that addressing this question, however, may be crucial for [End Page 210] bringing about the enhancement of CST by radical and grassroots views that Sniegocki envisions.Amy LevadUniversity of St. Thomas St. Paul, MinnesotaCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The central theme and core objective of this comprehensive resource for elementary teachers on climate change and children’s emotions and resiliency is supporting children’s understanding of and respect for the interconnectedness all life: human, animal, plant, and clean air, water, and soil. Its broad social/cultural perspective emphasizes that social and ecological justice are interrelated. Challenging elementary teachers to more explicitly address current environmental issues with students in their classrooms, the book presents a diverse set of topics from a variety of (...) perspectives. Coverage includes descriptions of environmental education pedagogies such as nature-based experiences and place-based studies; peace-education practices; children doing environmental activism; and teachers supporting children emotionally in times of climate disruption and tumult. The pedagogies described invite student engagement and action in the public sphere. Children are represented as ‘agents of change’ engaged in social and environmental issues and problems through their actions both local and global. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.1 (2005) 77-92 [Access article in PDF] Art and the Teaching of Love Didier Maleuvre Art is rightly thought to be the domain of expression and illusion. It is expression because every work of art, however stone-faced or impersonal in aspect, is the product of human intention. And it is illusion because, however concrete, vivid, or raw, it holds up only images. These (...) two points — that art is expression and fiction — are deeply entrenched in the modern understanding of art. They are the twin pillars of our aesthetics.In the following I wish to argue that this focus on the expressive and the representative eclipse the most important dynamic of art — what I propose to call the communicative and the iconoclastic. By the former, I mean that art is primarily, not a subjectivity giving shape to a private vision, but a form of sanctifying the human conversation, that is, the encounter between subjectivities; by the latter, I mean to suggest that art is an image that paradoxically strives to go beyond the realm of images. On this account we will see that an image is artistic to the extent that it breaks through representation.Briefly put, art has a destination beyond itself. One should not imagine, as postmodernism ruled ex officio, that the essence of art is formal or social self-reflectivity. Certainly, self-mirroring occurs in art, but no more or less than in any act of intelligence. Moreover, it is not enough to affix tokens of self-consciousness onto an object to turn it into art. The aim of art is not art. Its destination is elsewhere; its aim is reality encountered and lived with.And the vehicle by which art travels into reality is not just skill, insight, knowledge, or intelligence. It is love. To defend these two propositions will be the gist of the following essay.The aim of education is rightly thought to be knowledge of the world. Knowledge, however, is of two kinds: one is concerned with storage of facts, the other with modes of relating to the world. The first is a technical pursuit; the second, moral practice. The sort of education fostered by art clearly belongs with the second sort. Art is less concerned with delivering [End Page 77] information about the world than teaching us about how to stand in relation to it, how to find our place in it, and live with it: through art we do not seek to master the world so much as become its denizens. It is a teaching of love. Art, Mind, and Reality Now, the idea that art is religious embrace of reality runs against a powerful philosophic doctrine: the idea, known as subjectivism — that the human mind is kept from reality by its own knowledge of reality. We perceive reality only through mental representations. I see a tree, I hear laughter, I taste tea. When my mind alights on these objects, they have already been retouched and recomposed by my senses. By the time I am aware of them, I have reordered the perceptual datum into the concepts of "tree," "laugher," "tea." So we really deal with conceptual images of things, even when those things fall on our head like rain, or trip us like an untied shoelace.Subjectivism takes art to be proof of its doctrine. No two artists have transposed the same landscape or object in exactly the same hues and forms. Monet may have wanted to put in his paintings only what the retina mirrored; still, in the end he painted like no other before him and an indisputable infusion of the Monet personality stamps his paintings. Likewise there is a Titian "take" on reality that is not Rubens's, a Constable way of painting gray watery skies that is not Corot's, or again a Twombly way of rendering the four seasons that is nothing like Vivaldi's. This, then, should be where art's commitment to reality expires — on the evidence that no two artworks have ever been able to... (shrink)

At my university we never stop reforming the curriculum, and we’re now discussing the plurality of ways in which our students fulfill our requirement of a full year of “freshman humanities.” Some of us feel that we now provide too many ways: neither students nor faculty members can make a good defense of a requirement—in itself an expression of power, if you will—that leads to scant sharing of readings or subject matters for the students, and to no goals or methods (...) clearly shared by increasingly diverse faculty members. As we attack and defend this kind of flabby pluralism, we naturally find ourselves discussing other kinds of pluralism, and we begin to discover the true depth of a topic that may at first seem “merely practical.” There may be some nouns that can be joined to the phrase “in the classroom” without taking on a total theory of education: Shakespeare in the classroom; Romanticism in the classroom; perhaps even irony in the classroom. But when we try to discuss “pluralism in the classroom,” we throw into the discussion every belief we may have about what education should be and how it should be conducted. To ask whether or in what sense we should be pluralists in the classroom is obviously to ask, in the most fundamental way possible, “What should a teacher teach? What should we hope that every student would learn, regardless of our commitment to this or that doctrine of the moment?”Most teachers, even in a time like ours when professed relativists pluralists abound, answer that question, at least implicitly, like this: One should try very hard to teach the truth—not a “dogma,” of course, perhaps not even a set of propositions, but at least some single right away of doing things. Indeed in some moods any honest teacher might confess to feeling lucky if students learn even one truth or one mode of working. “They’ll meet plenty of plurality just in the nature of their lives.” “They’ll meet plenty of other teachers, most of them with absolutely mistaken views, and my chief task is to set them straight so that when they encounter nonsense they’ll know how to deal with it.” Still, when you press people who talk that way they of course claim that they teach no dogmas, only an appropriately open-minded way of dealing with error in the world. They may even call themselves pluralists or relativists. But it takes no great analytical skill to detect the monisms behind their claims. When pushed, they believe that they hold=--or might someday find—some one way of working, some supremely powerful “killer mode” that can dispose of all other modes with decisive proofs. They work finally in one way only, pursuing, finally, one kind of truth. Wayne C. Booth is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English and of Ideas and Methods at the university of Chicago. His previous works on pluralism include Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism and “Pluralism and Its Rivals” in Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me . He is now completing a book on ethical criticism. (shrink)

I feel honored to be asked to speak at this university where so many ground-breaking scientists and philosophers were students or teaching, spreading their message world wide and I am especially glad to have been asked to come by the Institut Wiener Kreis, of which I am proud to be a member, and whose splendid work for two decades and to this day is being carried out vigorously under Professor Stadler and his colleagues. Through that, a bright flame is (...) being kept shining. That has its own salience. But I firmly believe, as you will hear later, that at just this time such studies have additional purpose, force and inspiration, in academe and society, as well as in global policies that are now under our very eyes. All these contain an urge to bring about a new version of a unifying Weltauffassung. If that succeeds, historians of the future may well say that there was a certain pre-established harmony between the original Vienna Circle program, and what is now being done here, and a new, better world. Let me add two remarks about why being invited to speak here today is special for me. You have often seen the large, elegant building at the corner of Schottengasse 10 and Schottenring. One of its high balconies were part of a Kanzlei of an attorney, specializing in international law, who had got his degree in jurisprudence right at this university, nearly a century ago. When his older boy visited there and looked out from that balcony, he could see the university where he hoped to study one day. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Institutional AuthorityA Buddhist PerspectiveDhammanandā Bhikkhunī (Chatsumarn Kabilsingh)Rules and Authority in the Early Days of the SaṅghaAfter the Buddha gained enlightenment, he addressed the group of five people (pañcavaggīya) with whom he had once practiced austerities. Kondañña became enlightened, and eventually the whole group of five became enlightened, one after another. There was no need then to set any rules for them to follow, as they were all enlightened.In these (...) early days, there was no material gain in the monastic lifestyle. People walked the monastic path out of sheer commitment. They were serious in pursuing their own spiritual path. As time went by, the teaching of the Buddha became more popular and his followers increased. Even then the Buddha did not think it was necessary to lay down any monastic rules (vinaya). This was clear when he turned down a proposal from Sāriputta, his immediate disciple, that he should lay down some rules.Monastic rules came into existence only when specific problems arose in the community for consideration. The very first rule was laid down because Sudinna, a young monk, had sex with his own wife when he visited his parents’ home and was urged toward this by his mother so that she could have a grandchild to continue the family lineage. Sudinna, having met his mother’s request, was disturbed in conscience. As the days went by, he became pale and thin. When his friends asked what was wrong, he told them what was bothering him. The Buddha then laid down the first pārājika (defeat—action that requires expulsion from the Order) for bhikkhus (monks) and bhikkhuṇīs (nuns): that they should not have any sexual relationships. In settings such as this, rules started to come into existence.Even at the First Council, I do not think that the complete pātimokkha,1 as the bhikkhus and bhikkhuṇīs now have it, was in existence. It should be remembered that the Buddha gave permission for the modification of minor rules if the monastic saṅgha (community) should agree.2 At the First Council, however, the five hundred arahats could not agree as to which could be considered major and minor rules. As [End Page 147] a result, Mahā Kassapa, the chief monk, who presided over the council, proposed that all should be kept intact. That has become solidified and is now normative for Theravāda Buddhism.In the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta, in the chapter on the last journey of the Buddha from Sāvatthi to Kusinagar, it is recorded that Ānanda, the Buddha’s attendant and cousin, asked the Buddha if he was going to choose anyone to lead the saṅgha after his passing away. The Buddha replied very clearly that he had given the dhamma and vinaya as dīpa (an island) for the bhikkhus and bhikkhuṇīs to follow. The sutta makes it very clear that the Buddha did not intend to appoint anyone to hold a position of complete authority.I would venture to say that if the Buddha had not made this point clear, Ānanda would have been given a natural position of authority after the Buddha had gone. After all, Ānanda had followed the Buddha, serving him, learning and absorbing the dhamma from him, continuously for twenty-five years of the Buddha’s life. He was the only one praised for being foremost (etadagga) with many abilities, for instance the ability to remember most of the Buddha’s teaching. He was indeed qualified for the position. We read also that during the three months between the passing away of the Buddha and the First Council, people were already seeking him out as their spiritual guide. The only drawback was that, during the Buddha’s lifetime, he was not enlightened. However, he attained enlightenment just in time for him to participate in the First Council, which five hundred arahats are recorded as attending.During the Buddha’s lifetime, if disagreement arose in the saṅgha, the case was always brought to the Buddha, who, having called both parties together, would settle the case in front of them... (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew Kieran, ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value’. Philosophy Compass 1/2 (2006): pp. 129–143, doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2006.00019.x Author’s Introduction Up until fairly recently it was philosophical orthodoxy – at least within analytic aesthetics broadly construed – to hold that the appreciation and evaluation of works as art and moral considerations pertaining to them are conceptually distinct. However, following on from the idea that artistic value is (...) broader than aesthetic value, the last 15 years has seen an explosion of interest in exploring possible inter‐relations between the appreciative and ethical character of works as art. Consideration of these issues has a distinguished philosophical history but as the Compass survey article suggests (‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43), it is only very recently that figures in the field have returned to it to develop more precisely what they take the relationships to be and why. Consensus is, unsurprisingly, lacking. The reinvigoration of the issues has led sophisticated formalists or autonomists to mount a more considered defence of the idea that aesthetic and literary values are indeed conceptually distinct from the justification or otherwise of the moral perspective or views endorsed in a work (Topic I). The challenges presented by such a defence are many but amongst them are appeals to critical practice (Lamarque and Olsen), scepticism about whether or not art really can give us bona fide knowledge (Stolnitz) and the recognition that truth often seems to be far removed from what it is we value in our appreciation of works (Lamarque). One way to motivate consideration of the relevance of a work’s moral character to its artistic value concerns the phenomena of imaginative resistance. At least sometimes it would seem that, as Hume originally suggested, we either cannot or will not enter imaginatively into the perspective solicited by a work due to its morally problematic character (Topic II). In some cases, it would seem that as a matter of psychological fact, we cannot do so since it is impossible for us to imagine how it could be that a certain attitude or action is morally permissible or good (Walton). The question then is whether or not this is a function of morality in particular or constraints on imaginative possibility more generally and what else is involved. At other times, the phenomena seem to be driven by a moral reluctance to allow ourselves to enter into the dramatic perspective involved (Moran) or evaluation of the attitude expressed (Stokes). Nonetheless, it is far from obvious that this is so of all the attitudes or responses we judge to be morally problematic. After all, it looks like we can and indeed often do suspend or background particular cognitive and moral commitments in engaging with all sorts of works (Nichols and Weinberg). If the moral character of a work interacts with how we appreciate and evaluate them, then the pressing question is this: is there any systematic account of the relationship available to us? One way is to consider the relationship between our emotional responses to works and their moral character (Topic III). After all, art works often solicit various emotional responses from us to follow the work and make use of moral concepts in so doing (Carroll). Indeed, whether or not a work merits the sought for emotional responses often seems to be internally related to ethical considerations (Gaut). Yet, it is not obvious that we should apply our moral concepts or respond emotionally in our imaginative engagement with works as art as we should in real life (Kieran, Jacobson). A different route is via the thought that art can convey knowledge (Topic IV). There might be particular kinds of moral knowledge art distinctively suited to conveying (Nussbaum) or it may just be that art does so particularly effectively (Carroll, Gaut, Kieran). Either way where this can be tied to the artistic means and appreciation of a work it would seem that to cultivate moral understanding contributes to the value of a work and to betray misunderstanding is a defect. Without denying the relevance of the moral character of a work some authors have wanted to claim that sometimes the immoral aspect of a work can contribute to rather than lessen its artistic value (Topic V). One route is to claim that there is no systematic theoretical account of the relationship available and what the right thing to say is depends on the particular case involved (Jacobson). Another involves the claim that this is so when the defect connects up in an appropriate way to one of the values of art. Thus, it has been claimed, only where a work reveals something which adds to intelligibility, knowledge or understanding in virtue of its morally problematic aspect can this be so (Kieran). The latter position looks like it could in principle be held whilst nonetheless maintaining that the typical or standard relationship is as the moralists would have it. Yet perhaps allowing valence change for such reasons is less a mark of principled explanation and more a function of downright inconsistency or incoherence (Harold). The topics themselves and suggested readings given below follow the structure articulated above as further amplified in the Compass survey article. The design and structure given below can be easily compressed or expanded further. Author Recommends 1 Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 126–60. 2 This article develops the idea that engaging with narrative art calls on moral concepts and emotions and can thereby clarify our moral understanding. 2 Carroll, Noël. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 4 Part IV consists of six distinct essays on questions concerning the inter‐relations between art and morality including the essay cited above and the author’s articulation and defence of moderate moralism. 3 Gaut, Berys. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. 4 Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 7 This monograph provides the most exhaustive treatment of the issues and defends the claim that, where relevant, whenever a work is morally flawed it is of lesser value as art and wherever it is morally virtuous the work’s value as art is enhanced. Chapters 7 and 8 defend concern ethical knowledge and chapter 10 is a development of the article cited above concerning emotional responses. Chapter 3 also gives a useful conceptual map of the issues and options in the debate. 5 Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. 9 A wide ranging and extended treatment of relevant issues which objects to generalising moral treatments of our responses to art works and defends the idea that particular works can be better because of rather than despite their moral defects. 6 Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. 11 A general argument for immoralism is elaborated by outlining when, where and why a work’s morally problematic character can contribute to its artistic value for principled reasons (through enhancing moral understanding). 7 Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. 13 This chapter argues against both aestheticism and straightforward moralism about art, elaborating a defence of immoralism in relation to visual art whilst ranging over issues from pornographic art to the nature and demands of different genres in art. 8 Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’ Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. 15 This article concisely outlines and defends a sophisticated aestheticism that denies the importance of truth to artistic value. 9 Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. 17 This article articulates and defends the claim that no knowledge of any interesting or significant kind can be afforded by works appreciated and evaluated as art. 10 Walton, Kendall. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I.’Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. 68 (1994): 27–51. 19 This article builds on some comments from Hume to develop the idea that when engaging with fictions it seems impossible imaginatively to enter into radically deviant moral attitudes. Online Materials ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: The State of the Art.’American Society of Aesthetics online (Jeffrey Dean):. ‘Art, Censorship and Morality’ downloadable podcast of Nigel Warburton interviewing Matthew Kieran at Tate Britain (BBC/ou Open2.net as part of the Ethics Bites series):. ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43 (Matthew Kieran):. ‘Ethical Criticism of Art.’Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Ella Peek):. ‘Fascinating Fascism.’New York Review of Books Piece Discussing Leni Riefenstahl (Susan Sontag):. ‘The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1450s), Giovanni de Paolo’ (Tom Lubbock):. Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss Lolita (CBS):. Sample Syllabus Topic I Autonomism/aestheticism • Anderson, James C. and Jeffrey T. Dean. ‘Moderate Autonomism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 38.2 (1998): 150–66. • Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958. Chapter 12. • Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement.Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952 [1790]. • Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. • ——. ‘Tragedy and Moral Value.’Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73.2 (1995): 239–49. • Lamarque, Peter and Stein Olsen. Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Chapter 10. • Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. Topic II Imaginative Capacities, Intelligibility and Resistance • Moran, Richard. ‘The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.’Philosophical Review 103.1 (1994): 75–106. • Nichols, Shaun. ‘Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave Like Believing’. Mind & Language 21.4 (2006): 459–74. • Stokes, Dustin. ‘The Evaluative Character of Imaginative Resistance’. British Journal of Aesthetics 46.4 (2006): 387–405. • Tanner, Michael. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, II’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 51–66. • Walton, Kendall (1994). ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 27–51. • Weinberg, Jonathan. ‘Configuring the Cognitive Imagination.’New Waves in Aesthetics. Eds. K. Stock and K. Thomson‐Jones. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 203–23. Topic III Moralism and Emotions • Carroll, Noël. ‘Moderate Moralism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 36.3 (1996): 223–37. • Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.126–60. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapter 10. • ——. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. • Hume, David. ‘Of the Standard of Taste.’Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993 [1757]. 133–53. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Emotions, Art and Immorality.’Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Emotions. Ed. Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 681–703. • Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art?. London: Penguin, 2004. Chapters 5 and 15. Topic IV Moralism and Knowledge • Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. M. Heath. London: Penguin, 1996 [367–322 BC]. • Carroll, Noël. ‘The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature and Moral Knowledge.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.1 (2002): 3–26. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapters 7 and 8. • Gaut, Berys. ‘Art and Cognition.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 115–26. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Art, Imagination and the Cultivation of Morals.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54.4 (1996): 337–51. • Nussbaum, Martha. ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination.’Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. 148–68. • Plato. The Republic. Trans. D. Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Book 10. Topic V Immoralist Contextualism • Harold, James. ‘Immoralism and the Valence Constraint.’British Journal of Aesthetics 48.1 (2008): 45–64. • Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. • ——. ‘Ethical Criticism and the Vices of Moderation.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 342–55. • John, Eileen. ‘Artistic Value and Moral Opportunism.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 331–41. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge:The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. • Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. • Patridge, Stephanie. ‘Moral Vices as Artistic Virtues: Eugene Onegin and Alice.’Philosophia 36.2 (2008): 181–93. Focus Questions 1 What is the strongest argument for the claim that the moral character of a work is not relevant to its artistic value? Does artistic or literary criticism tend to concern itself with the truth or morality of works? If so, in what ways? If not, why do you think this is? 2 What different explanations might there be for difficulty with or resistance to imaginatively entering into attitudes you take to be immoral? How might this relate to the way our imaginings work as contrasted with belief? How might different literary or artistic treatments of the same subject matter make a difference? 3 How do narrative works draw on our moral concepts and responses? Can we suspend our normal moral commitments or application of moral concepts in responding emotionally to art works? Should we respond emotionally to art works as we ought to respond to real world events we witness? Why? Why not? 4 How, if at all, do art works convey moral understanding? How, if at all, is this related to the kinds of moral knowledge art works can teach or reveal to us? When, where and why might this be tied to the artistic value of a work? How can we tell where a work enhances our moral understanding as opposed to misleading or distorting it? 5 What art works do you value overall as art which commend or endorse moral values and attitudes that you do not? Is appreciation of them always marred or lessened by the morally dubious aspect? If not, what explains the differences in evaluation? What, if anything, might you learn by engaging with works which endorse moral attitudes or apply moral concepts different from those you take to be justified? How, if at all, might this connect up with what makes them valuable as art? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dwelling in the GapsGalen SanderlinHave you ever wondered what it would be like to be a mythical being? As a hermaphrodite, I exist in a culture that sees only male or female. Those of us who don’t fit into the rigid sex binary are left out of many of the protections offered to our cousins who more neatly fit the two categories. This leaves an enormous gap in cultural (...) definitions and societal acceptance of my fundamental being.My journey has three main threads: 1) My personal and often rocky self–development, as I have come to understand and accept what it means to be a hermaphrodite, and finding others of my tribe; 2) recognizing the harm done by my medical treatment and actively seeking to change how the medical system treats hermaphrodites, starting from birth onwards; and 3) identifying what was done to me as a human rights violation.I was born in January of 1975. No genetic test was done at the time. My body looked male and my assigned sex/gender was male. As a child, I gravitated toward “male” toys. In 1989, a rural– MD noted that I was not experiencing puberty like my peers and she recommended that my parents take me to a teaching hospital in Seattle for tests. A pediatrician referred me to the adolescent medical division, and from there I was referred to an endocrinologist. After conducting many invasive tests, including drawing blood and comparing my testicles to a bead ring of ersatz testicles, the endocrinologist diagnosed me with Klinefelter’s Syndrome and a karyotype of 47,XXY. I was prescribed testosterone injections to affirm and strengthen the male identity I was assigned at birth and to prevent my body from developing secondary female sex characteristics (breasts and hips).Soon after the shots started I bulked up, adding muscle and hair everywhere. I also became dangerously aggressive and moody. I began to have serious self–esteem issues and a drastic increase in risk–taking behavior as my body was subjected to medical intervention that my parents innocently followed.The prescribed hormone treatment fractured my psyche—what I know now to be a common defense mechanism experienced in trauma survivors. The portion of my consciousness that existed prior to testosterone became deeply buried to prevent harm, and I experienced the emergence of a new “entity.” With each change in prescription, new fractures occurred: testosterone cypionate to enanthate shots, to patches, to gels.The physicians did not consider my feelings or preferences during recommendations or treatment. I feel I was forced into a “male” body based on a medical emergency they created to ease societal concerns.Last February I decided to stop hiding. Tearing the mask off has brought a flood of emotions hidden behind old traumas. I’d been living openly as an intersex person, but still deeply closeted, if not from the public—worse, from myself.Here is the writing that came pouring out of me as I’ve been accessing my repressed memories:I felt the first stirrings of my existence in August of 1989, like a fleeting visage of a long lost lover passing just out of view. The timing of the universe—Out of the infinite we are born, but in this case the body we are to occupy was already housing many other souls. Is this some mistake? Asked to be patient I waited... Late in the year of 1989 I was borne on testosterone wings into an imaginary masculine role/body.Molded in the image of Adonis, Hermes was forced to submit. No longer sexless or ageless—lost in a sea of supposed pressures and roles. My assumed gender [End Page E10] was male. Why!?! Screaming, thrashing, and damaging all around me, no way to express the horror of being so brutally manhandled.My guide Galen/Juniper were excised from our psyche—lost behind a barrier. The only solace was a shared beat: 1,2,3,4 over and over. Was this the pounding of our heart? Thank god for our love of music least we lose ourselves entirely.Why do they insist on calling me Galen? I no longer knew who this was. I... (shrink)

The closure of schools as a result of COVID-19 has been a critical global incident from which to rethink how education works in all our countries. Among the many changes generated by this crisis, all teaching became mediated by digital technologies. This paper intends to analyze the activities carried out during this time through digital technologies and the conceptions of teaching and learning that they reflect. We designed a Likert-type online questionnaire to measure the frequency of (...) class='Hi'>teaching activities. It was answered by 1,403 teachers from Spain. The proposed activities varied depending on the learning promoted, the learning outcomes, the type of assessment to which the activities were directed, and the presence of cooperative activities. The major result of this study was that teachers used reproductive activities more frequently than constructive ones. We also found that most activities were those favoring verbal and attitudinal learning. The cooperative activities were the least frequent. Finally, through a cluster analysis, we identified four teaching profiles depending on the frequency and type of digital technologies use: Passive, Active, Reproductive, and Interpretative. The variable that produced the most consistent differences was previous digital technologies use These results show that Information and Communication Technologies uses are reproductive rather than constructive, which impedes effective digital technologies integration into the curriculum so that students gain 21st-century competencies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A NOTE ON THE RELATION OF PACIFISM AND JUST-WAR THEORY: IS THERE A THOMISTIC CONVERGENCE? 1 GABRIEL PALMER-FERNANDEZ Youngstown State University Youngstown, Ohio FOR CENTURIES, the moral analysis of war began with a consideration of a set of principles which together form the doctrine of the just-war and with a rejection of pacifism. However, several recent studies by Catholic moralists argue that pacifism and just-war theory (...) have much in common and converge in at least one morally important way-namely, they share a presumption against violence. In this note I want to consider whether or not classical just-war theory gives us reason to accept this claim. I will give evidence against it, and suggest that the "original just-war question," as James Turner Johnson calls it, does not begin with aprohibitive presumption or some equivalent constraint on action. If we are to speak of a presumption in classical just-war theory, it is that justice be done for the sake of the common good. Up to very recent times, those Christian denominations which Ernst Troeltsch called the "church-type" (Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinist, and Roman Catholic) upheld a " two-tiered " or "double" morality. A "vocational" pacifism was required of clerical ranks, and the individual Christian was obligated to take up arms for the sake of the common good. For example, prior to the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholic teaching on war rejected conscientious objection to all war (i.e., pacifism) as an option for Catholics. Manuals of moral theology prior to Vatican 1 I wish to acknowledge the very helpful and detailed comments provided by Richard B. Miller to an earlier version of this paper. 247 248 GABRIEL PALMER-FERNANDEZ II did prohibit the soldier from fighting in an unjust war and made room for subjective doubt about the justice of a particular war. But the consensus among Catholic theologians was both wide and deep. Pacifism for individual Christians did not have any moral-theological justification. It was, in fact, a grave moral error. In spite of this, Vatican II called for a " completely fresh reappraisal of war." 2 The policy of obliterating whole cities enacted during World War II, coupled with the development of nuclear and other indiscriminate weapons of destruction (e.g., incapacitating gases, biological weapons, etc.) and the instability of superpower relations, created an unprecedented condition for which traditional teachings on war seemed woefully inadequate, if not morally dangerous. A new, more far-reaching perspective was needed. And this was to allow for individuals the pacifist option as a second and complementary moral doctrine alongside traditional teaching on war.3 As the American Catholic bishops said in their pastoral letter on war and peace : 2 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, in A. Flannery, 0.P., ed., Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents (Collegeville, Minn. : Liturgical Press, 1975), par. 80. 3 This development in contemporary Roman Catholic teaching on war and peace has been challenged with considerable force by George Weigel in what has become one of the most controversial studies on the subject. In Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Weigel advances several arguments which are meant to correct what he insists is a failure among Catholic ethicists in the U.S. to develop their tradition, and, indeed, an abandonment of their heritage. " At the level of moral theory," Weigel maintains, "the two classic positions [just-war theory and pacifism] are not reconcilable. The attempt to merge them... tends to corrupt both traditions. Pacifists end up making judgments on military strategy and tactics, and just-war theorists are held accountable to arguments they previously declined to accept.... The net result is to bifurcate morality and politics, and to abandon attempts to apply the tradition of reason to the limit case of the use of armed force in the defense of values-which is precisely the result Murray most feared in his strictures against moralism" (251). For David Hollenbach's rebuttal, see his review essay, "War and Peace in American Catholic Thought: A Heritage Abandoned? " Theological Studies 48 (1987) : 711-727... (shrink)

What is the role of language in constructing knowledge? In this article, we ask whether learning new relational language can create new ways of thinking. In Experiment 1, we taught English speakers to talk about time using new vertical linguistic metaphors, saying things like “breakfast is above dinner” or “breakfast is below dinner”. In Experiment 2, rather than teaching people new metaphors, we relied on the left–right representations of time that our American college student participants have already (...) internalized through a lifetime of visuospatial experience reading and writing text from left to right. In both experiments, we asked whether the representations are susceptible to verbal interference. We found that learning new metaphors created new space–time associations that could be detected in a nonlinguistic implicit association task; these newly learned representations were not susceptible to verbal interference; and with respect to both verbal and visual interference, representations newly learned from linguistic metaphor behaved just like those on the left–right axis that our participants had acquired through years of visuospatial experience. Taken together, these results suggest that learning new relational language can be a powerful tool in constructing new representations and expanding our cognitive repertoire. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 58-64 [Access article in PDF] Media Literacy Education in Art:Motion Expression and the New Vision of Art EducationThe Bauhaus, which established the foundation of modern design, has greatly influenced Japanese design and art education. It is a historical fact that the movement views "synthetic art" as an integration of the various fields and the integration of the art and machine technology experimentally. (...) However, the Bauhaus is not just of historical importance but continues to have an influence even in the integration of the art and electronic technology in today's "multimedia." In addition, it can be said that it is very much alive as "the digital Bauhaus" or "the electronic Bauhaus." 1 As we know, today's multimedia and the Internet give us a new life-environment, and expandthe possibility of expression in art. Therefore, current art education must examine how these new medias will be incorporated into the curriculum.In the cases of the photograph, video, or computer, an expression by the image media is added to the art course for the junior high school course of study. 2 Also in school art classes, image media was introduced, expanding the possibilities of self-expression through art. This result can be matched to the needs of the industrial world in Japan as well. As an educational practice, the content of this course of study is promising, even though someproblems must be solved, acquiring new equipment, re-educating the artteacher, and securing additional art school hours. The new content in art education can be summarized as follows:1. The motion picture (animation) which includes time and movement. Motion picture is asequence of continuous images, obviously different from the still images of painting. There are, of course, artworks that express motion or induce the viewer'seye movement. There are also kinetic artworks that do move, such as mobiles. Works of motion picture have, however, a fixed time shaft, and they are formed by the afterimage phenomenon. Thinking about the progress of time shaft is an indispensable element for the production. [End Page 58]2. The synchronism of image and sound. Because time is a factor in the visual expression, the works are compatible with music — the art of time. There is a synchronized relation between the motion picture and music. Image expression with multimedia became synthetic art, just as the Bauhaus looked for "architecture." Currently, this kind of expression transitions from art to entertainment, and permeates daily life.3. The method with interactive art work. Not only artworks of installation, but also TV games and web design have interactive construction as an indispensable interface. The aesthetic value of these visual works will be appreciated when the user starts the action by hitting a touchpad, pushing buttons, or clicking a mouse. To make this kind of artwork, one needs to consider the latent relationships between humans and work, and establish the input-output order for the method of construction.4. The problem of virtual reality. The term "virtual reality" is used by some art teachers as criticism against digital works such as computer graphics. These teachers insist that there is no reality there. One can, however, get an aesthetic feeling through sensory information, imagination, and sensitivity, even though what one sees is an illusion. The feeling of reality a picture of an apple gives, for example, may be equal to a computer graphic apple.Human imagination also creates "virtual reality" beyond reality in the myth, the novel, and so on. It can be said that this is the basis for human creativity.Furthermore, expression by image media raises the problem of a "reality" in which material experience is important to encounterthe world directly. Such an argument discusses multimedia as a tool of expression and a teaching material while reconsidering human reality.More recently, "media literacy" (ability to read and understand media) became an important point of discussion for Japanese educators. Usually, in this discussion, the critical ability to talk back to the television program is emphasized. However, through art... (shrink)