It is well documented that the application of business models to the higher education sector has precipitated a managerialistic approach to organisational structures ( Preston, 2001 ). Less well documented is the impact of this business ideal on the student-teacher encounter. It is argued that this age-old relation is now being configured (conceptually and organisationally) in terms peculiar to the business sector: as a customer-product relation. It is the applicability and suitability of such a configuration that specifically concerns this contribution. (...) The paper maintains that the move to describe the student-teacher relation in these terms is indeed inappropriately reductive, but not straightforwardly so. The problem arises in that we remain unsure of the contemporary purpose of education. We lack any firm educational ideals that, in themselves, cannot be encompassed by the business paradigm. Indeed, the pedagogical critique of education (broadly, that education is only of use in as much as it is of use to society) extends further than has yet been intimated and prevents one securing any educational ideal that does not immediately succumb to critique. This pedagogical logic is unassailable in any linear way but, when pressed, precipitates an aporetic moment that prevents it from assuming any totalising hold over education. We draw on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida to consider whether one might yet imagine an educational 'quasi-ideal' that will enable practitioners and institutions to counter the effects of customerisation. (shrink)

Tenenbaum and Griffiths's article continues three disturbing trends that typify category learning modeling: (1) modelers tend to focus on a single induction task; (2) the drive to create models that are formally elegant has resulted in a gross simplification of the phenomena of interest; (3) related research is generally ignored when doing so is expedient. [Tenenbaum & Griffiths].

This article investigates the role of shame in shaping the epistolary form and aesthetic structure of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I argue that the epistolary framing presents a crisis in the development of Celie's shamed self‐consciousness. To explain the connection between shame and Celie's self‐consciousness, I build on Jean Paul Sartre's theory of existentialism and explore three phases of Celie's evolution as it is represented in three phrases that I identify as significant transitions in the text: “I am,” “But (...) I'm here,” and “It mine.” The first section examines how shame fractures Celie's self‐consciousness; the second focuses on how Celie positions and locates herself in the world; and the third explains how Celie mobilizes shame by connecting her self‐consciousness to a past that is shameful but also generative. I conclude by considering the novel's emergence in the Cosby/Reagan era in order to illuminate the mutual constitution of black familial pride and black racial shame. (shrink)

An incomplete science begets imperfect models. Nevertheless, the target article advocates for jettisoning deep-learning models with some competency in object recognition for toy models evaluated against a checklist of laboratory findings; an approach which evokes Alan Newell's 20 questions critique. We believe their approach risks incoherency and neglects the most basic test; can the model perform its intended task.

Penn et al. argue that the complexity of relational learning is beyond animals. We discuss a model that demonstrates relational learning need not involve complex processes. Novel stimuli are compared to previous experiences stored in memory. As learning shifts attention from featural to relational cues, the comparison process becomes more analogical in nature, successfully accounting for performance across species and development.

ObjectiveParenting sensitivity and mutual parent-child attunement are key features of environments that support children’s learning and development. To-date, observational measures of these constructs have focused on children aged 2–6 years and are less relevant to the more sophisticated developmental skills of children aged 7–8 years, despite parenting being equally important at these ages. We undertook a rigorous process to adapt an existing observational measure for 7–8-year-old children and their parents. This paper aimed to: describe a protocol for adapting an (...) existing framework for rating parent-child interactions, determine variations in parents’ sensitive responding and parent-child mutual attunement by family demographics, and evaluate the psychometric properties of the newly developed measure.MethodParent-child dyads completed one home visit, including a free-play observation and parent questionnaire. Dyads were provided with three toy sets: LEGO® Classic Box, Classic Jenga®, and animal cards. The Coding of Attachment-Related Parenting was adapted for use with 7–8-year-old children, and rating procedures were streamlined for reliable use by non-clinician/student raters, producing the SCARP:7–8 Years. Trained staff rated video-recorded observations on 11 behaviors across two domains.ResultsData were available for 596 dyads. Consistently strong inter-rater agreement on the 11 observed behaviors was achieved across the 10-week rating period. Average ICCs were 0.77 for sensitive responding and 0.84 for positive mutuality. These domains were found to be related but distinct constructs. For both domains, average ratings were strongly associated with the main toy used during the observation. Adjusted multivariate linear regression models revealed that less sensitive responding was associated with younger parent, male parent, non-English speaking background, and greater neighborhood disadvantage. Construct validity was demonstrated using six parent-reported psychosocial and parenting measures.ConclusionThe SCARP: 7–8 Years shows promise as a reliable and valid measure of parent-child interaction in the early school years. Toy selection for direct observation should be considered carefully in research and practice settings. (shrink)

Inquiry is an important learning strategy, even for students who cannot or do not perform actual experiments. The authors describe two activities, other than experimentation, that they used in introductory biology learning groups to emphasize inquiry abilities. They also provide recommendations for creating additional inquiry activities.

This paper explores the relation between love, learning and knowledge as found in three dialogues of Plato, Symposium, Phaedrus and Republic. It argues that the account of the ascent from carnal desire to the love of beauty, as set out in the Symposium, is best seen in terms of a genealogy of love in which the object of love is transformed into an object of knowledge. The Phaedrus shows us how affection and love between (...) two individuals can help motivate a love of learning. The Republic demonstrates the value of knowledge through the distinction between knowledge and opinion. A love of learning is, therefore, driven by that which is genuinely valuable and worthy of love. Plato helps us today in two respects: first, he reminds us that learning can have an affective quality. Second, he reminds that the value of learning is related to the knowledge and insight it yields. (shrink)

Building on the success of her classic, bestselling book, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life (over 100,000 copies sold), Marilee Adams shows in this new book how teachers and other education professionals can change their own and their students' lives by developing an active, inquiring mindset and igniting a lifelong love of learning.

This paper argues for the pragmatic construction of Confucian democracy by showing that Chinese philosophers who wish to see Confucianism flourish again as a positive dimension of Chinese civilization need to approach it pragmatically and democratically, otherwise their love of the past is at the expense of something else Confucius held in equal esteem, love of learning. Chinese philosophers who desire democracy for China would do well to learn from the earlier failures of the iconoclastic Westernizers, and (...) realize that a Chinese democracy cannot come about by ignoring or dismissing such an important part of China's history, its Confucian tradition. The best chances for democracy in China lie in transforming that tradition without destroying it. Eagerness to learn from others must be united with a proper appreciation of one's own past to nurture democracy as a way of life. (shrink)

The love of wisdom carries a certain absurdity. What kind of animal falls into a hole while contemplating the sky, or stands outside all night, just thinking? When Plato and Aristotle say that philosophy begins in wonder, it sounds attractive – wonderful even – but it is in those moments of contemplative wonder that the lion snatches us, or someone walks off with our backpack.

In this essay, Rosa Bruno-Jofré and George Hills examine two major Ontario policy documents: 1968's Living and Learning and 1994's For the Love of Learning. The purpose is, first, to gain insight into the uses of the term “excellence” in the context of discourse about educational aims and evaluation, and, second, to explore how these uses may have changed over time. Bruno-Jofré and Hills employ the conceptual framework developed by Madhu Prakash and Leonard Waks to elucidate the (...) varied notions of excellence contained in the two reports. Bruno-Jofré and Hills argue that Living and Learning is an eclectic report that creates continuity by aligning itself with the pedagogically progressive tradition in Ontario; that propounds a holistic conception of excellence centered on the all-around development of the self; and that seeks simultaneously to secure a sense of being Canadian while dealing with rapidly emerging social fragmentation. For the Love of Learning, in contrast, attempts to combine a technical view of excellence in education (stressing various literacies and skills as measurable indicators) with the principles of caring and the goals of social responsibility. Each report can be seen as an attempt to respond to the expectations of a population that had become increasingly diverse in the interval between the two reports. What is cause for concern in terms of policymaking, Bruno-Jofré and Hills conclude, is the turn away from broader, more comprehensive and coherent views of excellence in education toward narrower and more fragmented accounts that are preoccupied with various types of literacy or loosely related vocational and other skills. The effect of this shift is to leave educational policy and practice in the schools essentially rudderless. (shrink)

What does “belonging to nature” mean today and how can children and young people be inspired to experience this? What basic dilemmas and challenges arise between the requirement for critical thinking on the one side, and the experience of belonging and coexisting in nature on the other? In this article we will scrutinize the ideal of rational arguments and norms as stated in current policy documents and discuss how this best can promote curiosity and wonder, as well as a sense (...) of relatedness and responsibility with nature that can inspire normative actions, We claim that critical thinking informed by a value-based ecology is needed to reveal the hidden curriculum of sustainable education; that is, a loss of “holistic” view in the footsteps of scientific diversification, a lack of curiosity and training of critical thinking, and a “denial of nature” characterized by a missed opportunity to raise the urgent attention towards environmental risks, that today should be a main mission in natural science education. (shrink)

Semiotics and education -- Charles S. Peirce's list of categories and taxonomy of signs -- Semiotics as pragmatic logic -- Education in Peirce's divisions of science -- Suprasubjective being and suprasubjective learning -- From icon to argument -- Diagrammatic reasoning and learning -- Agapic learning -- The Peircean theory of learning and phenomenology -- Possible objections.

In this paper I will deal with some aspects of dialogue, love and multiculturalism. In the first and the second aspect I see very much important presuppositions of a multiculturalism enriching each other. If the person is not able to communicate, to love and define what goals she/he would want to achieve, the person will be not able to enrich the multicultural world! Therefore, I am pressing on the conditions and kinds of dialogue, of the art of (...) class='Hi'>love, and in the end, I am giving some ideas about the multiculturalism. (shrink)

This research investigates the efficacy of business ethics intervention, tests a theoretical model that the love of money is directly or indirectly related to propensity to engage in unethical behavior (PUB), and treats college major (business vs. psychology) and gender (male vs. female) as moderators in multi-group analyses. Results suggested that business students who received business ethics intervention significantly changed their conceptions of unethical behavior and reduced their propensity to engage in theft; while psychology students without intervention had no (...) such changes. Therefore, ethics training had some impacts on business students' learning and education (intelligence). For our theoretical model, results of the whole sample (N = 298) revealed that Machiavellianism (measured at Time 1) was a mediator of the relationship between the love of money (measured at Time 1) and unethical behavior (measured at Time 2) (the Love of Money → Machiavellianism → Unethical Behavior). Further, this mediating effect existed for business students (n = 198) but not for psychology students (n = 100), for male students (n = 165) but not for female students (n = 133), and for male business students (n = 128) but not for female business students (n = 70). Moreover, when examined alone, the direct effect (the Love of Money → Unethical Behavior) existed for business students but not for psychology students. We concluded that a short business ethics intervention may have no impact on the issue of virtue (wisdom). (shrink)

Argues that Plato's dialogues contain a surprisingly neglected account of Socrates' education about the love of noble virtue and that recovering this education could help broaden and deepen liberalism's moral and political horizon.

Considers Auden primarily during the first decade of his litearry career, as both public figure and private man. Contains previously unpublished or uncollected poems, prose, and letters, presented with scholarly introductions and annotation by leading Auden specialists.

AbstractPlato’s analogy of the ladder in the Symposium involves an inquiry into the love of beauty that pertains to a spiritual phenomenology of love. It is reconsidered in this discussion from both an aesthetic and teleological perspectives, and thus construed as a process of philosophical learning and virtuous cultivation. In the final analysis, this paper argues that it is intended to direct the love of beauty along with wisdom as virtue towards the Platonic ideal of human (...) fulfillment and true happiness for the good life qua its ultimate telos. On this account, both the value of knowledge and the cultivation of personality are emphasized for inter-connected reasons, and meanwhile a pragmatic stance is proposed on the kinds-of-life option in the light of the kinds-of-wisdom stratification. (shrink)

Generally, anthropologists are not thought of as contributing to utopian thought and, really, there are few anthropological monographs or articles with even the word "utopia" in the title. As the late anthropological futurist Robert Textor pointed out, this is due to earlier orientations: cultural evolutionism and culture history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and an emphasis on the "ethnographic present" in the mid-twentieth that tended to represent other people as existing in a "timeless" present. Nevertheless, anthropologists have explored (...) utopian possibility. Margaret Mead, for example, drew on her... (shrink)

What role does love--of cinema, of cinema studies, of teaching and learning--play in teaching film? For the Love of Cinema brings together a wide range of film scholars to explore the relationship between cinephilia and pedagogy. All of them ask whether cine-love can inform the serious study of cinema. Chapter by chapter, writers approach this question from various perspectives: some draw on aspects of students' love of cinema as a starting point for rethinking familiar films (...) or generating new kinds of analyses about the medium itself; others reflect on how their own cinephilia informs the way they teach cinema; and still others offer new ways of writing with a love of cinema in the age of new media. Together, they form a collection that is as much a guide for teaching cinephilia as it is an energetic dialogue about the ways that cinephilia and pedagogy enliven and rejuvenate one another. (shrink)

Each year since 1983 the American Council of Learned Societies has invited one of America's leading scholars to deliver the Haskins Lecture, in honor of Charles Homer Haskins, a distinguished scholar and teacher who was instrumental in the founding of the ACLS. In this volume, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of the ACLS, Douglas Greenberg and Stanley Katz bring together the lectures presented by ten of America's most distinguished scholars. Each lecture is a personal and intellectual glimpse into the "life (...) of learning" of such leading scholars as Maynard Mack, Annemarie Schimmel, and John Hope Franklin. The lectures focus on self-reflection of lives dedicated to learning, rather than on scholarship in the usual sense of the term. Ranging from being forced to learn Latin to painful memories of war and racism, the lecturers all recount stories from their eventful lives. Each offers thoughts on the body of work he or she has produced and the forces, personal and intellectual, that have shaped it. The scholars bring something of their disciplines to the lecture, sharing not only personal anecdotes but their love of learning. (shrink)

This practical book is designed to help school leaders develop a sustainable culture of learning across the curriculum. It offers a personal insight into how one school embraced a range of dialogic and analytical tools to create an environment in which all stakeholders were inspired to evaluate and innovate. Each chapter tackles one piece of the 'jigsaw' that makes up a successful school environment, considering topics such as Attitudes for Learning, Coaching for learning and Love of (...) Learning. Utilising theory, case studies and activities, it illustrates how the reader can realistically and practically increase student attainment in their own school setting. This book will help leaders: Develop a supportive and encouraging leadership style that will create a cycle of self-improvement and self-efficacy for all ; Adapt the curriculum to focus on progress and engagement ; Use the Philosophy 4 Children strategies to promote deeper thinking and enquiry, increasing the rate of school improvement through a system of enquiry based staff professional development Using an inner city primary school as a working example, this book will be a source of inspiration and encouragement for school leaders, teachers and school advisors looking to cultivate and embed a love of learning into their school. (shrink)

This practical book is designed to help school leaders develop a sustainable culture of learning across the curriculum. It offers a personal insight into how one school embraced a range of dialogic and analytical tools to create an environment in which all stakeholders were inspired to evaluate and innovate. Each chapter tackles one piece of the 'jigsaw' that makes up a successful school environment, considering topics such as Attitudes for Learning, Coaching for learning and Love of (...) Learning. Utilising theory, case studies and activities, it illustrates how the reader can realistically and practically increase student attainment in their own school setting. This book will help leaders: Develop a supportive and encouraging leadership style that will create a cycle of self-improvement and self-efficacy for all ; Adapt the curriculum to focus on progress and engagement ; Use the Philosophy 4 Children strategies to promote deeper thinking and enquiry, increasing the rate of school improvement through a system of enquiry based staff professional development Using an inner city primary school as a working example, this book will be a source of inspiration and encouragement for school leaders, teachers and school advisors looking to cultivate and embed a love of learning into their school. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:For the Love of Nothing:Auden, Keats, and DeconstructionJo-Anne Cappeluti"Authors can be stupid enough, God knows, but they are not quite so stupid as a certain kind of critic seems to think. The kind of critic, I mean, to whom, when he condemns a work or a passage, the possibility never occurs that its author may have foreseen exactly what he is going to say"—W. H. AudenIDeconstruction by definition (...) is an exercise of the intellect's predilection to disprove and deny aesthetic experience. Deconstruction is in love with denying this "nothing," but is seemingly unaware of how attempting demystification entangles the intellect all the more with the imagination. And it is the imagination that creates aesthetic experience, the very entity critics deny even exists. This dynamic is especially true of deconstruction looking at the Romantic mode of poetry: the poetry of poets who serve as their own subject. Analyzing the internalized quests of these poets, deconstruction offers a drama of itself too much in love with demystifying aesthetic experience, attempting and always failing, intellectually, to reduce it to nothing.Poets who write in the Romantic mode of poetry are in love with this "nothing"; they present internalized quests filled with their acute awareness of the aesthetic—and highly indeterminate—nature of being human. At the core of this indeterminacy is the ongoing debate between imagination and intellect, the first interested in exploring what is there, in human consciousness, the second prone to demystifying it. Poets who write in this mode learn that such improvable yet actual aesthetic experience or "nothing" is germane to being human. Any attempt [End Page 345] to escape it intellectually will only lead back to the imagination that presents it.Poets who write in the Romantic mode of poetry are so familiar with the way in which this aesthetic nature of human existence involves the unresolved conflict between imagination and intellect that these poets present in their poetry a response to the criticism that denies it. John Keats and W. H. Auden are two poets who show this dynamic and who, not by coincidence, have a lot in common. Deconstruction, however, sees Auden and Keats—however separately—as poets who wake up at mid-career to the fallaciousness of the imagination and subsequently turn their talent to making nothing happen in their poetry: undermining its aesthetic nature. Keats's Endymion and Auden's "Caliban to the Audience" are frequently cited as prime examples of this demystification process. As I will argue, however, both of these poems deliberately dramatize the self-thwarting attempts of the intellect to dissect and dismiss what it claims is nothing.1Keats dramatizes this dynamic in Endymion, drawing attention to the way in which this "Brain-sick shepherd prince" claims—actually over-protests—to have loved "nothing" after his miraculous experience beneath the ocean with the strangely indeterminate creature, Glaucus (pp. 134, 206).2 Auden offers as well a detailed description of this dynamic in "Caliban to the Audience," the last section of The Sea and The Mirror, A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest. In this poem, the strangely indeterminate, begged question of existence, Caliban, reveals in great detail his audience's futile attempt to demystify what upsets them.My argument concludes with a discussion of the way in which these poems dramatize deconstruction's unintentional witness to the "real Word" of the imagination (CP, p. 444).3As poets who write in the Romantic mode, exploring what is there in their consciousness, Keats and Auden find a great indeterminacy inherent in their human nature: an unresolved problem that they explore—rather than try to solve. Auden, in fact, links himself to Keats, finding in Keats's idea of the chameleon poet his (Auden's) central idea of the poet as actor for the imagination. Like Keats, Auden takes the imagination quite seriously and fuses Keats's sense of the imagination with Coleridge's: observing that poetry records the poet's experiences in which the (Primary) imagination is drawn to certain "sacred" beings and events. In "Making, Knowing and Judging," Auden declares that the "impression made upon the imagination by any sacred being is of... (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt has a comprehensive and, at times, compelling, account of love, which are outlined in several of his works. However, he does not think that romantic love fits the ideal of love as it ‘includes a number of vividly distracting elements, which do not belong to the essential nature of love as a mode of disinterested concern’. In this paper, I argue that we can, nonetheless, learn some important things about romantic love from his (...) account. Furthermore, I will suggest, conversely, that there is distinct value in romantic love, which derives from the nature of the relationship on which it is based. Frankfurt tries to take agape and reformulate it so that it can also account for love of particular people. Whilst he succeeds, to some extent, in describing parental love, he fails to accurately describe romantic love and friendship, and, moreover, overlooks what is distinctly valuable about them. Although it was not his intention to describe romantic love, by failing to include features such as reciprocity in his account of love, Frankfurt leaves no room for a kind of love that is important and valuable to many people. (shrink)

"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet." -Ralph Waldo Emerson We have all come across a sentence in a book or a line of poetry that seems to jump off the page as if it has been patiently waiting for you to discover it in this precise instant. At times, the lyrics of a song or words spoken in a play (...) can feel as if God is speaking directly to you, guiding you on your quest for truth and authenticity in this weird and wonderful life. (shrink)

This is the fourth paper in the invited collection. Shotwell examines the work of direct-action activists as forms of medical activism that express a non-reductionist and complex intersectional science and technology practice, bridging lay and professional medical contexts. Shotwell draws on Lorraine Code’s generative theory of the importance of “ecological thinking” as one way to practice what she calls “epistemic responsibility,” and to think about the varied and complex early responses of activists in Canada to AIDS. Activists made wide-ranging, theoretically (...) sophisticated, and socially significant interventions in how AIDS manifested in Canada; their interventions manifested a kind of political work welcoming to unpredictable and emergent medical and social situations. Three preliminary insights are offered, from an ongoing research project investigating the history of AIDS activism in the Canadian context: the usefulness of Code’s conception of the social imaginary for understanding how calcified social relations shape and limit the conditions for responsible knowing; the importance of recognizing the communal and social nature of knowledge as a key piece of epistemic responsibility, articulated in terms of collective epistemic privilege; and the possibility for practices of epistemic responsibility to create virtuous epistemic effects beyond what is known or intended by particular agents. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to provide a comment on Simone Weil’s brief but seminal essay ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.’ It complements an earlier one on Weil’s Lectures on Philosophy. The essay was sent via a letter to her friend and mentor, the Catholic priest, and Dominican friar, Father Joseph-Marie Perrin O.P. It set out her belief that school studies should provide the individual pupil or student (...) with an education in the value and acquisition of attention. This, Weil believed, would be of fundamental value when reaching out to God through prayer. Such a capacity for attention would also enhance the student’s general academic and social learning providing a basis for authentic dialogue with others, and not only teachers and schoolfellows. The article introduces her as a religious philosopher, explains the origins of the essay, and Weil’s friendship with Father Perrin, who was her Christian religious mentor, examines the text itself, considers some critical commentaries, and assesses its relevance to the philosophy and practice of education today. (shrink)

It is a common complaint that antireductionist arguments are primarily negative. Here I describe an alternative nonreductionist epistemology based on considerations taken from multidisciplinary research in biology. The core of this framework consists in seeing investigation as coordinated around sets of problems (problem agendas) that have associated criteria of explanatory adequacy. These ideas are developed in a case study, the explanation of evolutionary innovations and novelties, which demonstrates the applicability and fruitfulness of this nonreductionist epistemological perspective. This account also bears (...) on questions of conceptual change and theory structure in philosophy of science. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, 831 Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55455; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

The idea that teachers love children is often taken for granted in education. Rarely is the idea of love itself examined. Bringing together the work of educators, curriculum theorists and clinical psychoanalysts, and drawing upon autobiographical and narrative case studies, this groundbreaking collection examines the collision of love and learning, including the ways in which such intersections are provoked, repressed and denied. Contributors turn to psychoanalysis to explore questions of love in all of its varying (...) permutations - ambivalence, sexuality, hatred, desire, projection, and loss - in order to demonstrate how the social ramifications of such work is critical to the ways teachers are currently being prepared for life in the classroom. (shrink)

“Functional homology” appears regularly in different areas of biological research and yet it is apparently a contradiction in terms—homology concerns identity of structure regardless of form and function. I argue that despite this conceptual tension there is a legitimate conception of ‘homology of function’, which can be recovered by utilizing a distinction from pre-Darwinian physiology (use versus activity) to identify an appropriate meaning of ‘function’. This account is directly applicable to molecular developmental biology and shares a connection to the theme (...) of hierarchy in homology. I situate ‘homology of function’ within existing definitions and criteria for structural assessments of homology, and introduce a criterion of ‘organization’ for judging function homologues, which focuses on hierarchically interconnected interdependencies (similar to relative position and connection for skeletal elements in structural homology). This analysis of biological concepts has at least three broad philosophical consequences: (1) it provides the grounds for the study of behavior and psychological categories as homologues; (2) it demonstrates that philosophers who take selected effect function as primary effectively ignore large portions of comparative, structural, and experimental research, thereby misconstruing biological reasoning and knowledge; and, (3) it underwrites causal generalizations, which illuminates inferences made from model organisms in experimental biology. (shrink)

In the Symposium of Plato, Socrates reports that Diotima once described to him a process of initiation by which a lover rises from desiring one beautiful body to catching sight of what seems to be the Platonic form of beauty. Scholars have debated whether the lover is to make this ascent by a rational process or a non-rational one, or by both working either in concert or independently. This paper argues that love leads and guides a process in this (...) initiation that necessarily involves rational activity. No teaching is necessary or appropriate, so that the process is an example of learning without being taught. The philosophical insight that results is life-changing, but it does not amount to the kind of knowledge that would fully satisfy a Socratic seeker after knowledge. (shrink)

Many philosophers of biology have embraced a version of pluralism in response to the failure of theory reduction but overlook how concepts, methods, and explanatory resources are in fact coordinated, such as in interdisciplinary research where the aim is to integrate different strands into an articulated whole. This is observable for the origin of evolutionary novelty—a complex problem that requires a synthesis of intellectual resources from different fields to arrive at robust answers to multiple allied questions. It is an apt (...) locus for exploring new dimensions of explanatory integration because it necessitates coordination among historical and experimental disciplines . These coordination issues are widespread for the origin of novel morphologies observed in the Cambrian Explosion. Despite an explicit commitment to an integrated, interdisciplinary explanation, some potential disciplinary contributors are excluded. Notable among these exclusions is the physics of ontogeny. We argue that two different dimensions of integration—data and standards—have been insufficiently distinguished. This distinction accounts for why physics-based explanatory contributions to the origin of novelty have been resisted: they do not integrate certain types of data and differ in how they conceptualize the standard of uniformitarianism in historical, causal explanations. Our analysis of these different dimensions of integration contributes to the development of more adequate and integrated explanatory frameworks. (shrink)

Although no one unified anarchist theory exists, educational approaches can be taken to support the full liberation of the self and the construction of an interconnected community that strives to rid itself of eco-sociocultural oppressions. An anarchist pedagogical approach could be one that is rooted in a love/rage unit of analysis occurring along a spectrum of various types of actions and contributions within a community. Anarchism as a violent destruction of the state is a stereotypical view that has perhaps (...) led to its own early demise as a social movement. Anarchism that embraces adaptation through more inclusive forms of resistance, including a reconstruction for the K?12 classroom context, is one that stands a chance in evolving a society toward love, justice, and empowerment. This article explores those possibilities aiming for accessibility while still honoring core anarchist calls for strong, localized democratic participation and decision-making outside of permanent hierarchies. (shrink)

One foundational question in contemporarybiology is how to `rejoin evolution anddevelopment. The emerging research program(evolutionary developmental biology or`evo-devo) requires a meshing of disciplines,concepts, and explanations that have beendeveloped largely in independence over the pastcentury. In the attempt to comprehend thepresent separation between evolution anddevelopment much attention has been paid to thesplit between genetics and embryology in theearly part of the 20th century with itscodification in the exclusion of embryologyfrom the Modern Synthesis. This encourages acharacterization of evolutionary developmentalbiology as the marriage (...) of evolutionary theoryand embryology via developmental genetics. Butthere remains a largely untold story about thesignificance of morphology and comparativeanatomy (also minimized in the ModernSynthesis). Functional and evolutionarymorphology are critical for understanding thedevelopment of a concept central toevolutionary developmental biology,evolutionary innovation. Highlighting thediscipline of morphology and the concepts ofinnovation and novelty provides an alternativeway of conceptualizing the `evo and the `devoto be synthesized. (shrink)

Learning Love from a Tiger explores the vibrancy and variety of humans' sacred encounters with the natural world, gathering a range of stories culled from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Mayan, Himalayan, Buddhist, and Chinese shamanic traditions. Readers will delight in tales of house cats who teach monks how to meditate, rivers that grant salvation, shamans who shape-shift into jaguars, crickets who perform Catholic mass, and many others. More than a collection of wonderful stories, this book introduces important concepts and (...) approaches that underlie much recent work in environmental ethics, religion, and ecology. Capper's light touch prompts readers to engage their own views of humanity's place in the natural world and in particular question longstanding assumptions of human superiority"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)