David E Cooper; Practice, Philosophy and History: Carr vs. Jonathan, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 181–186, https:/.

David E Cooper; Practice, Philosophy and History: Carr vs. Jonathan, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 181–186, https:/.

This book takes readers on a fascinating journey to the very heart of Tantra: its key teachings, foundational lineages, and transformative practices. Since the West's discovery of Tantra 100 years ago, there has been considerable fascination, speculation, and more than a little misinformation about this spiritual movement. Now, for the first time in the English language, Tantra Illuminated presents an accessible introduction to this sacred tradition that began 1,500 years ago, in the far north of India. The book uses translations (...) from primary Sanskrit sources, offers a profound look at spiritual practice, and reveals Tantra's rich history and powerful teachings. (shrink)

The important feature of Dao as a philosophic category in early Confucian philosophy is its prominent practical and historical properties, which make it different from those western metaphysic categories. Confucianism emphasizes that the Dao can not be separated with the practice and the history of human being, thus the Tao should be explored in peoples’ social activities and history. They believe that the Tao only lives in the historical tradition and can only be demonstrated by the (...) narrative of history. The historical and practical properties of Dao incarnated the unity of epistemology and axiology, and integrated the value of both “Dao” and “De”. It also spots the conjunction between Confucianism and the historical materialism that persists on the standpoint of dialectic and practice. (shrink)

In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions and approaches of (...) science, but what did it really teach us? What does it mean to study scientific practices? What are the general lessons, implications, and new challenges? This volume explores questions about the practice turn using both case studies and theoretical analysis. The case studies examine empirical and mathematical sciences, including the engineering sciences. The volume promotes interactions between acknowledged experts from different, often thought of as conflicting, orientations. It presents contributions in conjunction with critical commentaries that put the theses and assumptions of the former in perspective. Overall, the book offers a unique and diverse range of perspectives on the meanings, methods, lessons, and challenges associated with the practice turn. (shrink)

Hegel’s contextualization of ethics in history has often been understood as implying the possibility of “world-historical” justifications for unethical actions. Critics have seen this as a category mistake that violates the authority of the ethical sphere; defenders have argued that it represents one of Hegel’s most revolutionary insights, the idea that customary morality should not stand in the way of human liberation. In this essay, I argue that both of these reactions are based on failure to properly distinguish between (...) rational justification and contextual justification. Properly understood, Hegel’s practical philosophy is restricted to the former task; the authority to determine whether norms are binding in any given circumstance is retained by context-sensitive ethical judgment. (shrink)

Introduction: Conversion and the practice of transformation -- The philosophical structure of Jonathan Edwards's religious affections -- Habit, habit change, and conversion in C.S. Peirce -- Reconstructing faith : religious overcoming in Dewey's pragmatism -- Transforming obligation in William James -- Dwelling in absence: the reflective origin of conversion -- Creative transformation : the work of conversion -- The evasion of conversion in recent American philosophy.

The avowed simplicity of thomasius' practical philosophy conceals its real complexity. His treatment of reason and will, Moral and political obligation, And freedom and authority particularly bears this out. The impact of his political philosophy was to transmute the operative ethos of absolutism by demonstrating that while absolute power was possible, Absolute authority was an absurdity.

This dissertation examines the conceptual limitations of Kant's ethical theory with the purpose of assessing its suitability as a model of practical philosophy based upon the idea of autonomy. My aim is not only to exhibit the specific weaknesses in Kant's treatment of morality, but also to explore a contrast between two different approaches in ethical theory. This contrast can be characterized in terms of an opposition between a 'formal-individualistic' and a 'social-historical' model for the analysis and derivation of (...) ethical principles. The crucial problem here is whether an ethical theory can be constructed on the exiguous basis of concepts such as the 'rationality' or 'freedom' of the will, or whether it requires an insight into the connection between moral principles and specific conditions of historical and social life that constitute the real foundation of moral judgment. ;The dissertation is composed of four chapters. In Chapter One I consider the deficiencies in Kant's treatment of the historical and temporal dimensions of moral volition. I focus especially upon his neglect of the conditions of historical genesis that underlie the framework of moral concepts he analyzes. In the second and third chapters I examine Kant's failure to attend to the social dimension of morality and distinguish two separate parts to this objection: difficulties resulting from his restriction of the scope of moral freedom to the domain of an agent's inner intentions, so that a consideration of the consequences of action is excluded, and problems arising from his monological interpretation of the universalization procedure. Finally, in Chapter Four I argue that Kant's neglect of the historical and social dimensions of morality is by no means accidental. Rather, it is a function of his reliance upon a two-world metaphysical framework in which moral principles are understood essentially as the laws governing a purely rational, non-natural order. The dependence of Kant's ethical theory upon 'problematic' metaphysical premises--particularly in his justification of the moral law--suggests that the two dimensions he excludes from his analysis--history and society--must be integrated within it in order to yield a more convincing elaboration of the basic concepts of morality. (shrink)

Kata, the preset movements forming the backbone of all karate styles, have been a source of endless confusion for the vast majority of karate students. All students learn how to perform the kata, but there has never been an effective explanation of how they are applied. Until now! Nathan Johnson, a third-degree black belt in karate and a fourth-degree black belt in kung fu, has spent two decades on his quest to find the true meaning of kata. In Zen Shaolin (...) Karate, Johnson explains and illustrates in precise detail every subtle movement of two of karate's most common kata, and provides historical testimony for his explanations by integrating his findings with Zen philosophy. The author's unique interpretations of the Nai Fuan Chin and Saam Chin kata will destroy the barriers separating karate, kung fu, and aikido, and will revolutionize how kata are applied in all karate styles. (shrink)

Pragmatism has affected American historical writing since the early twentieth century. Such contemporaries and students of Peirce, James, and Dewey as Frederick Jackson Turner, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, Mary Beard, and Carl Becker drew on pragmatism when they fashioned what was called the “new history.” They wanted to topple inherited assumptions about the past and replace positivist historical methods with the pragmatists' model of a community of inquiry. Such widely read mid-twentieth-century historians as (...) Merle Curti, Henry Steele Commager, and Richard Hofstadter embraced the perspectivalism, fallibilism, and instrumentalism of the pragmatists, thereby helping to sustain the tradition during its nadir in American philosophy departments. Many historians have been drawn to the study of pragmatism during its recent renaissance; others have advanced pragmatist-inspired philosophies of history. Through such prominent contemporary historians as Thomas Haskell, David Hollinger, and Joyce Appleby, the ideas of Pierce, James, and Dewey continue to influence the historical profession. (shrink)

Two centuries after they were published, Kant's ethical writings are as much admired and imitated as they have ever been, yet serious and long-standing accusations of internal incoherence remain unresolved. Onora O'Neill traces the alleged incoherences to attempt to assimilate Kant's ethical writings to modern conceptions of rationality, action and rights. When the temptation to assimilate is resisted, a strikingly different and more cohesive account of reason and morality emerges. Kant offers a `constructivist' vindication of reason and a moral vision (...) in which obligations are prior to rights and in which justice and virtue are linked. O'Neill begins by reconsidering Kant's conceptions of philosophical method, reason, freedom, automony and action. She then moves on to the more familiar terrain of interpretation of the Categorical Imperative, while in the last section she emphasises differences between Kant's ethics and recent 'Kantian' ethics, including the work of John Rawls and other contemporary liberal political philosophers. This reassessment will add significantly to the understanding of Kantian practical philosophy. (shrink)

The application of the polluter-pays principle in environmental policy depends on answers to the philosophical questions about what is good or detrimental with respect to nature. Science and the economy constitute a functional circle of “observing” nature’s unity as well as its utility. Based on a concept of nature as a system of causally related objects or - complementary to this - as a bunch of “resources,” however, the human interest and responsibility in nature do not seem to be properly (...) observed. Subjecting nature to human subjectivity may have been an adaptation in the wrong direction, since, if humanity is taken as the measure, there is no measure for humanity. A practical philosophy of nature should start from the assumption that science’s missing unity and the economy’s missing goodness are equivalent shortcomings in a complenlentary way. On the one hand, philosophy should engage in the problem-oriented reintegration of the sciences by establishing nuclei of interdisciplinary cooperation. We are relatingourselves to nature in a responsible way only when approaching nature as our own nature. On the other hand, while our technological faculties have reached a very high level of reliability and differentiation, we are definitely much less successful in recognizing goodness in economic “goods.” This calls for demand education with respect to how human needs are to be brought to bear as demands on nature, ahuman relation to nature as well as natural relations between human beings, again depending on answers to philosophical questions. In the history of ideas, nature has declined from “the nature of things and beings” to “the things and beings of nature,” or from being to beings. We will, however, never be able to judge what is good or bad with respect to nature if we do not from the outset start - pragmatically-with a normative concept of nature. (shrink)

: A standard interpretation of Kantian "maxims" sees them as expressing reasons for action, implying that we cannot act without a maxim. But recent challenges to this interpretation claim that Kant viewed acting on maxims as optional. Kant's understanding of maxims derives from Christian Wolff, who regarded maxims as major premises of the practical syllogism. This supports the standard interpretation. Yet Kant also viewed commitments to maxims as essential for virtue and character development, which supports challenges to the standard interpretation, (...) and raises questions about the coherence of Kant's overall conception of the role of maxims in practical philosophy. (shrink)

This book on Philosophy for Children is a compilation of articles written by its founders and the movement's leaders worldwide. These articles have been prepared in the dialogue and interview format. Part I explains the genesis of the movement, its philosophical and theoretical foundations. Part II examines the specialized uses of philosophical dialogues in teaching philosophy, morality, ethics and sciences. Part III examines the theoretical concerns such as the aims of the method in regards to the search for (...) truth or sense of meaning, or the debate on the novel or short stories and its characteristics. Part IV explains the practices of P4C worldwide and the issue of cultural differences, the ways of the community of inquiry and the necessary adaptation to suit local concerns. The book concludes with a notable review of the progress of P4C, the obstacles, and its international spread to over 60 countries. These penetrating insights make the book an incredibly rich resource for anyone interested in or involved with implementing a P4C programme. Brave Old Subject, Brave New World Teaching Science and Morality Via P4C Showing Children can do Philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophy -- Ethics beyond existentialism and structuralism: Sartre's critique of dialectical reason and the debate with Levi-Strauss -- Foucault's ethics of the self -- Derrida in Heidelberg: the specter of Heidegger's Nazism and the question of ethics -- Richard Rorty's cultural politics: ironist philosophy and the ethics of reading -- History -- From metahistory to the practical past: Hayden White's existentialist philosophy of history -- Hayden White and the ethics of historiography literature -- The ethics (...) of conversion: metaphysical desire in Ren, Girard, and Jean-Paul Sartre -- The ethics of realism: literary history and the sublime in Erich Auerbach's mimesis -- The ethics of philology: Erich Auerbach and the fate of humanism -- Edward Said, orientalism, and the political turn in literary and cultural studies. (shrink)

William Whewell raised a series of objections concerning John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of science which suggested that Mill’s views were not properly informed by the history of science or by adequate reflection on scientific practices. The aim of this paper is to revisit and evaluate this incisive Whewellian criticism of Mill’s views by assessing Mill’s account of Michael Faraday’s discovery of electrical induction. The historical evidence demonstrates that Mill’s reconstruction is an inadequate reconstruction of this historical episode and (...) the scientific practices Faraday employed. But a study of Faraday’s research also raises some questions about Whewell’s characterization of this discovery. Thus, this example provides an opportunity to reconsider the debate between Whewell and Mill concerning the role of the sciences in the development of an adequate philosophy of scientific methodology.Keywords: Inductivism; Experiment; Theory; Methodology; Electromagnetism. (shrink)

Methodological eclecticism has gained wide acceptance among practical philosophers in recent years. This paper analyzes and evaluates the strongest justifications supporting such a methodology: the primacy of practice thesis and the doctrine of value pluralism. Our aim is to show that methodological eclecticism cannot be justified by either of these considerations.

Arnold Gehlen's attempt to give anthropological grounds for morality stems from Kant's idea that being freed from the compulsion of instinct left human beings in need of compensation for the loss of the practical guidance which instinct had hitherto provided. Whereas Kant thought this compensation was to found only in reasoned morality, Gehlen would argue that morality provides recompense by becoming a quasi-instinct that functions without reflection and that needs to be bred into human beings. The author maintains that in (...) comparing animals and human beings. Gehlen posits will as a deficient instinct as deficient will; because each side is characterized as the negative of the other, Gehlen's starting point fails to meet the conditions for a valid comparison. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical LifeLiz DisleyRobert B. Pippin. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 308. Paper, $29.99In this work, Pippin offers an interpretation of freedom, rationality, and agency in Hegel’s work and adds substantive content to the key concept of recognition. In doing so, he offers not only a compelling elucidation of (...) a particularly opaque part of Hegel’s analysis of human action and interaction, but also demonstrates the relevance of his practical philosophy to contemporary discussions about free will, intersubjectivity, autonomy, recognition, and liberalism. Pippin provides a substantial defense of Hegel’s position in the context of contemporary political philosophy, arguing against a commonly-held view that Hegelian political philosophy must be much closer to modern communitarian theories than those of classical or modern liberalism. Pippin’s work is central to the recent resurgence of interest in Hegel’s theoretical philosophy by analytical philosophers such as Robert Brandom and John McDowell, as well as the renewed study of recognition in a practical context.Controversially, Pippin claims that Hegel has only one theory of intersubjectivity and recognition from the time of the Jena writings to the Philosophy of Right. The theory develops from an initial stage, where “the desideratum of mutual recognition is posed and explored,” to a realization that ethical life as described in the Philosophy of Right provides the necessary conditions for rational, mutual recognition (184n4). Thus, he rejects the common view in recent Continental Hegel scholarship, asserted by critics including Jürgen Habermas, Michael Theunissen, and Axel Honneth, that Hegel fails to develop adequately the theory of intersubjectivity initially present in his earlier writings and subsumes intersubjectivity into a “grand metaphysical process” of the Absolute Subject’s self-manifestation (184).Pippin defends Hegel from this common charge on the basis of his “very unusual” concept of freedom (185). The key claim here is that Hegel does not set recognition or indeed other-relation as a precondition for any kind of self-relation, but rather, “A true individual [End Page 112] is a free subject and recognition relations function in a complex way as conditions for that possibility” (186). This seems like a promising method of demonstrating that Hegel’s intersubjectivity does not, after all, dissolve in the face of a monological divine conception of reality. The difficulty with the approach, as Pippin concedes, is that it involves making a series of radical, strange, and controversial claims. These claims, in general, focus on the temporal priority of freedom, recognition, and rationality: deeds can count as “mine” in Pippin’s special sense only if they are undertaken rationally, but this state of rationality depends on being in a social state of recognizing and being recognized (190). However, it is neither radical nor strange to make a clear distinction between human interdependence in terms of our particular social psychology and in terms of “an ideal of normative mutuality inherent in any attempt to act” (211).Pippin appreciates that defenders of Hegel’s concept of recognition do not want to say that I cannot be a free subject by myself, but at the same time want to leave the door open for there to be some kind of possibility of ascertaining moral harm in cases of failure to recognize. For Pippin, free actions, and actions committed out of free will, are those committed by agents in a particular social context, namely being situated within norm-governed relations of reciprocal recognition to others. Such an approach fulfills neither of these criteria, since it means I cannot be free by myself but also that, in the case of my being placed in a situation where I am not within these relations of reciprocal recognition to others, there is no obvious originator of moral harm caused by this recognition (218). Pippin accepts that there is no clear answer to this difficulty, but his account of the genesis of norms and social rationality does save Hegel’s account from the objection by Theunissen, Habermas, Honneth et al. mentioned above. Like Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Pippin sees the answer to charges of introducing a... (shrink)

Two centuries after they were published, Kant's ethical writings are as much admired and imitated as they have ever been, yet serious and long-standing accusations of internal incoherence remain unresolved. Onora O'Neill traces the alleged incoherences to attempts to assimilate Kant's ethical writings to modern conceptions of rationality, action and rights. When the temptation to assimilate is resisted, a strikingly different and more cohesive account of reason and morality emerges. Kant offers a "constructivist" vindication of reason and a moral vision (...) in which obligations are prior to rights and in which justice and virtue are linked. O'Neill begins by reconsidering Kant's conceptions of philosophical method, reason, freedom, autonomy and action. She then moves on to the more familiar terrain of interpretation of the Categorical Imperative, while in the last section she emphasizes differences between Kant's ethics and recent "Kantian" ethics, including the work of John Rawls and other contemporary liberal political philosophers. (shrink)

Methodological eclecticism has gained wide acceptance among practical philosophers in recent years. This paper analyzes and evaluates the strongest justifications supporting such a methodology: the primacy of practice thesis and the doctrine of value pluralism. Our aim is to show that methodological eclecticism cannot be justified by either of these considerations.

No one, including Heidegger himself, disputes that he has completed a turn in the development of his thinking. Roughly put, this leads from human existence as something to be analyzed in phenomenological and transcendental philosophy to the “Being” which is to be proclaimed directly in its concealment and disclosure. Above all others, Löwith and Schulz have proposed the thesis that this turn involves at least a reinterpretation of the original tendency, if not an inversion or an erosion. Löwith’s book (...) on Heidegger gives a hint of the judgment presently widespread, that the latter has fallen back from his significant beginning in Being and Time and has stopped being a philosopher in order to give himself over to the mysticism of Being. According to Schulz, however, the turn has world-historical significance: Heidegger’s essay “What is Metaphysics?” is not merely the end of his first period of work, but is even “the metaphysical finale of traditional metaphysics.”. (shrink)

This essay interprets Hölderlin’s prose fragment On Religion as an extension of and response to The Oldest System Program of German Idealism. After a brief discussion of the historical reasons for considering these fragments in this relation, I argue that On Religion demonstrates Hölderlin’s sympathy to the goals of the System Program, but that it also provides a more satisfactory account of how Hölderlin planned to make good on the goals presented in the System Program. I argue that On Religion (...) develops a conception of freedom that can only be ‘grounded’ through mythic, poetic discourse. I then explore the political implications of this point and claim that On Religion considers the creation of mythology as a public, communal event, in which the poet plays the role of giving measure and form, but not content, to the creation of mythology. (shrink)

Elizabeth Edwards, Photographs and the Practice of History: A Short Primer, 176 pp., ISBN 9781350120658. Upon receipt of your copy of Photographs and the Practice of History, I encourage you to first read the bibliographic afterword and peruse through the section titled 'Selected Reading' of the book before delving into its substantive chapters. This is because while Elizabeth Edwards refers to her publication as a short a primer, scholars of photography, visual history and visual culture (...) will recognise it as a culmination of not only her oeuvre at a theoretical level, but also a filtering, a synthesis and meditation on key debates that have characterised critical literature on photography and the philosophy of history in the recent past, presented in a most succinct fashion that is characteristic of the author's deceptive ease. Both the bibliographic afterword and the subsequent selected reading list at the end are a testament to this effort to coalesce and think through this past scholarship. In the preface, Edwards notes that while she hopes historians of photography and visual historians will find it interesting, the book 'is for students, the discipline's new generations, who are starting to think with photographs within historical studies'. Photographs and the Practice of History combines pertinent engagement with ease of access thus making it an excellent resource for such readers. (shrink)

This book presents a two-pronged analysis of Africa’s predicament by looking at the duality of ethics and identity. Its subject is the influence of history in the making of modern African identity, nationalism, peace-building and questions of ethics and justice.

This article canvases some of the issues involved in the idea of form as a practice in Kant, Blumenberg and Foucault, and it also outlines the different contexts and approaches the individual papers collected in this Special Issue use to explore this idea.

This book is the first to explore in detail the role that symbolic representation plays in the architecture of Kant's philosophy. Symbolic representation fulfills a crucial function in Kant's practical philosophy because it serves to mediate between the unconditionality of the categorical imperative and the inescapable finiteness of the human being. By showing how the nature of symbolic representation plays out across all areas of the practical philosophy - moral philosophy, legal philosophy, philosophy of (...) history and philosophy of religion - Heiner Bielefeldt offers a unique perspective on how these various facets of Kant's philosophy cohere. (shrink)

Kant is probably one of the most misunderstood philosophers in the history of Western thought. Some of the most well-known and pervasive objections to Kant’s practical philosophy often rest on considerable misunderstandings of his central theses or a poor and superficial reading of his work. A common misconception is that in Kant’s practical philosophy there is no place or role for human happiness. In Happiness in Kant’s Practical Philosophy: Morality, Indirect Duties, and Welfare Rights, Alice Pinheiro (...) Walla dispels this misunderstanding by elucidating Kant’s conception of happiness (understood in broadly hedonist terms) and showing that, for Kant, the pursuit of happiness plays an important role in our personal and collective lives. This means that, far from endorsing an ascetic ideal of the moral agent, as it is commonly thought, Kant’s system embraces an ideal of the human life in which there is significant space, and even a duty, to pursue pleasurable endeavours. Somehow surprisingly, in Pinheiro Walla’s reading, Kant’s ethics is arguably less demanding than standard interpretations of Aristotelian and Utilitarian ethical theories. (shrink)

The concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘authority’ are generally understood to be problematical in history curriculum design. Drawing on MacIntyre’s account of disciplines as social practices, this article argues that, to the contrary, these are concepts that need to be incorporated into any curriculum theory that attempts to build a school subject on the foundations provided by an academic discipline. In history education, there is a strong consensus towards deriving the ideas of the history curriculum from the discipline (...) of history, and this article argues that it is therefore necessary for history curriculum theory to account for the concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘authority’ as they exist in disciplinary practice. (shrink)

In line with the British Psychological Society's recent recommendations for teaching the history of psychology, this comprehensive undergraduate textbook emphasizes the philosophical, cultural and social elements that influenced psychology's development. The authors demonstrate that psychology is both a human (e.g. psychoanalytic or phenomenological) and natural (e.g. cognitive) science, exploring broad social-historical and philosophical themes such as the role of diverse cultures and women in psychology and the complex relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in the development of psychological knowledge. The (...) result is a fresh and balanced perspective on what has traditionally been viewed as the collected achievements of a few 'great men'. With a variety of learning features, including case studies, study questions, thought experiments and a glossary, this new textbook encourages students to critically engage with chapter material and analyze themes and topics within a social, historical and philosophical framework. (shrink)

Ryder's engaging text welcomes students and practicing teachers into the intellectual framework of current education systems and pedagogy. Not assuming prior knowledge of philosophy, the book outlines general principles, acknowledges outlying factors, and presents a systematic and socially conscious approach to the practice of teaching.

In the beginning of his critical period, Kant treated the perfect attainment of the highest good—the unconditioned totality of ends which would uphold the perfect proportionality between moral virtue and happiness—as both the ground of hope for deserved happiness and the final end of our moral life. But I argue that Kant moved in the direction of de-emphasizing the latter aspect of the highest good, not because it is inappropriate or impossible for us to promote this ideal, but because the (...) endless pursuit of it offers no prospect of moral satisfaction. I take this change as one possible reason for him to shift his focus more toward social and political progress in history, which has as its main subject the human species which is in some sense immortal. (shrink)