The best representatives of the self-reflection of xinxue 心学 (the School of Mind) and its development during the Ming and Qing Dynasties are the three masters from the late Ming Dynasty. The overall tendency is to shake off the internal constraints of the School of Mind by studying the Confucian classics and history. During the Qing Dynasty, Dai Zhen had attempted to set up a theoretical system based on Confucian classics and history, offering a theoretical foundation for a (...) new academic movement that gradually suspended issues studied by the School of Mind. But the suspension of these issues does not mean they were resolved. For Peng Shaosheng, xinzong 心宗 (the Doctrine of Mind) has emerged from a bottleneck in the development of the Confucian yi li zhi xue 义理之学 (doctrine of meanings and principles): The only way to find the transcendent connection between the doctrine of meanings and principles and the Dao was through the internality of belief. In this case, the Lay Buddhists, represented by Peng Shaosheng, Wang Dashen and Luo Yougao, as lixue biepai 理学别派 (Alternative School of Principles), played the role that the School of Mind had undertaken in the late Ming Dynasty, thus becoming a shelter for the Confucian doctrine of meanings and principles. To a certain extent, the revival of weishixue 唯识学 (the Consciousness-Only School) during modern times was simply a continuance of the "Alternative School of Principles". It took over the Lay Buddhist theme of the doctrine of meanings and principles of the Qing Dynasty and tried to construct a new pattern of learning for Confucian classics that matched up with the doctrine of meanings and principles, offering a model of integration for the reconstruction of the Confucian tradition. /// 明清之际对心学的检讨以及心学内部的发展，以晚明三大师为代表，其总的 倾向是以经史之学的学问方式走出心学的内在性束缚。到了清代，戴震则尝试从独 玩的经史之学出发建设--种新的理论系统，试图为这一逐渐搁置心学问题的新的学 术运动提供理论基础。不过，心学的被搁置，并不意味着心学所指涉问题的消失。 彭绍升的 "心宗" 已经突破了儒家义理学发展的瓶径; 义理学与道体的超越关联必 须透过信仰的内在性来获得。以彭钥升、汪大绅、罗有高为代表的居士佛教，作为 "理学别派承担起了在晚明由心学所承担的功能，从而成为儒家义理学的寄身 之所。近代唯识学的复兴，在→定意义上是对 "理学别派" 的继承。小仅在义理学 的意义上接过了清代居士佛学的主题，更在清代朴学的传统上，尝试亘:构·种与义 理学配合的新的经学模式，在唯识学的基盘上为重构儒学传统提供了-种极有意义 的整合模式。. (shrink)

The best representatives of the self-reflection of xinxue 心学 (the School of Mind) and its development during the Ming and Qing Dynasties are the three masters from the late Ming Dynasty. The overall tendency is to shake off the internal constraints of the School of Mind by studying the Confucian classics and history. During the Qing Dynasty, Dai Zhen had attempted to set up a theoretical system based on Confucian classics and history, offering a theoretical foundation for a (...) new academic movement that gradually suspended issues studied by the School of Mind. But the suspension of these issues does not mean they were resolved. For Peng Shaosheng, xinzong 心宗 (the Doctrine of Mind) has emerged from a bottleneck in the development of the Confucian yi li zhi xue 义理之学 (doctrine of meanings and principles): The only way to find the transcendent connection between the doctrine of meanings and principles and the Dao was through the internality of belief. In this case, the Lay Buddhists, represented by Peng Shaosheng, Wang Dashen and Luo Yougao, as lixue biepai 理学别派 (Alternative School of Principles), played the role that the School of Mind had undertaken in the late Ming Dynasty, thus becoming a shelter for the Confucian doctrine of meanings and principles. To a certain extent, the revival of weishixue 唯识学 (the Consciousness-Only School) during modern times was simply a continuance of the “Alternative School of Principles”. It took over the Lay Buddhist theme of the doctrine of meanings and principles of the Qing Dynasty and tried to construct a new pattern of learning for Confucian classics that matched up with the doctrine of meanings and principles, offering a model of integration for the reconstruction of the Confucian tradition. (shrink)

The paper advocates an epistemological interpretation of the Peano School axiomatics. The construction of axiom systems is presented as a cognitive enterprise unveiling the internal dynamics, evolution, and architecture of axiomatic systems as well as connections to applications. This approach reveals that the study of the relation between axioms and theorems not only serves to reduce a theory to a minimum number of principles and increase the certainty or justification of the latter, but also to study alternative (...) settings of a given mathematical theory. The paper explains why the Peanian conception of axiomatics differs from axiomatic deductivism, if-thenism and scientific deductivism, and analyzes Peano’s conception of rigor. The paper also postulates that Peano had a set-theoretic but also an algorithmic conception of function, and prioritized functions over relations. Two seemingly contradictory aspects of Peano’s axiomatics, global and local reasoning, are illustrated through the examples of rigor and simplicity. Finally, the paper claims that Peano’s axiomatics was a dynamic mathematical enterprise rather than an a priori axiomatization grounded on logical principles, which explains the difference with respect to Frege’s project. (shrink)

The ideas and conceptions of the Frankfurt philosophical-sociological school, above all the "critical theory of society," the principles of "negative dialectics" and the "great refusal," the utopia of "pacified existence," occupy an important place in the contemporary ideological struggle between the world systems of socialism and capitalism, and comprise a significant ideological and theoretical arsenal of bourgeois ideology and revisionism. And this is not accidental. The "critical theory of society" formulated and argued for by T. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, (...) H. Marcuse, J. Habermas, and others, which proclaims a protest against any social status quo, is used for the critique both of capitalism and actually existing socialism. At the same time it is also interpreted as an imaginary alternative to Marxism, and from, moreover, both right and "left" positions. Therefore the social theory of the Frankfurt school impacts upon the most diverse currents—from bourgeois social thought to the right and "left" varieties of revisionism. The complex evolution made by the representatives of this school in the last half-century contributed to this wide dissemination of the ideas of the Frankfurt school. Theoretical arguments are found in it both by those whose ideology, being directed to the progressive forces, is developed in the direction of Marxism, and by those who fled the soil of Marxism and are hostile to it. (shrink)

Many have preached the need for business schools to "teach" ethics, but very few have considered that business schools should also adopt and implement their own codes. The authors' previous research indicates that there is a perceived need for a code of ethics for business schools. Currently, relatively few schools have in fact adopted codes of ethics applicable to all the constituents of the institution. Proposals made to businesses to help them determine which values should be included in a corporate (...) code do not appear to adequately address the distinctive issues faced in an academic environment. In an earlier survey, the authors identified general principles of conduct that seemed to encompass the values expressed by the respondents. Relying on research that has indicated that ideally a code of ethics should be inspirational and value oriented rather than prescriptive and proscriptive, the authors herein propose ten values and correlating definitions that would provide a framework for a business school code of ethics. (shrink)

This paper challenges the first Gettier counterexample to the tripartite account of knowledge. Noting that 'the man who will get the job' is a description and invoking Donnellan's distinction between their 'referential' and 'attributive' uses, I argue that Smith does not actually believe that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's ignorance about who will get the job shows that the belief cannot be understood referentially, his ignorance of the coins in his pocket (...) shows that it cannot be understood attributively. An explanation for why Smith appeared to have justified true belief is given by distinguishing between 'belief' and 'belief in truth'. Smith believes the sentence 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket' to be true (he mistakenly believes that Jones will get the job, of whom he knows that he has ten coins in his pocket) (hence his 'belief'), the sentence is true (hence 'truth'), and he has sufficient reason to assent to it (hence his 'justification'). But he does not believe the proposition expressed. Hence he does not know it either. (shrink)

Dreams were a topic of study even in ancient times, and they are a special spiritual phenomenon. Generations of literati have defined the meaning of dreams in their own way, while Zhu Xi was perhaps the most outstanding one among them. He made profound explanations of dreams from aspects such as the relationship between dreams and the principles li and qi, the relationship between dreams and the state of the heart, and the relationship between dreams and an individual’s moral (...) improvement. He summarized previous generations’ understanding of dreams and infused a new dimension from the School of Principles, pointing out a direction for individuals’ moral cultivation and spiritual pursuit. Zhu Xi also examined the opinions of Zhang Zai, Cheng Yi, Hu Hong and other thinkers on Confucius not dreaming of Duke Zhou in his later years, revealing differences between thinkers in the School of Principles. An analysis of Zhu Xi’s thoughts on dreams will provide deeper insight into the research on the School of Principles. (shrink)

Dreams were a topic of study even in ancient times, and they are a special spiritual phenomenon. Generations of literati have defined the meaning of dreams in their own way, while Zhu Xi was perhaps the most outstanding one among them. He made profound explanations of dreams from aspects such as the relationship between dreams and the principles li and qi, the relationship between dreams and the state of the heart, and the relationship between dreams and an individual’s moral (...) improvement. He summarized previous generations’ understanding of dreams and infused a new dimension from the School of Principles, pointing out a direction for individuals’ moral cultivation and spiritual pursuit. Zhu Xi also examined the opinions of Zhang Zai, Cheng Yi, Hu Hong and other thinkers on Confucius not dreaming of Duke Zhou in his later years, revealing differences between thinkers in the School of Principles. An analysis of Zhu Xi’s thoughts on dreams will provide deeper insight into the research on the School of Principles. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive overview of the influence of Platonism on the English literary tradition, showing how English writers, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Pound and Iris Murdoch, used Platonic themes and images within their own imaginative work.

Chan Buddhism as we know it today can perhaps be traceable to what is known as the Hongzhou school, founded by Mazu Daoyi. Although it was Huineng who represented an important turn in the development of Chan with his iconoclastic approach to enlightenment as sudden rather than gradual, it was in Huineng’s successor, Mazu, where we saw its complete radicalization. Specifically, Mazu introduced a radicalized approach of collapsing substance and function, as well as principle and phenomena, into a complete (...) overlap. As a result of this radicalization, the Hongzhou lineage received some strong criticisms, the most important of which was possibly by Guifeng Zongmi, of the Heze lineage. Zongmi criticized Mazu for his supposed antinomianism, claiming that Mazu’s approach completely stunts moral and religious cultivation. Due to their commitment to “suchness” rather than deliberate theory, however, Hongzhou never bothered to answer Zongmi’s critique. As such, it is the goal of this article to utilize Guo Xiang’s philosophy as a tool to understand the implicit Hongzhou response to Zongmi. As I shall demonstrate, his philosophical enterprise shares the same ontology of absolute oblivion which Hongzhou was also predicated upon and is, therefore, a possible alternative to understanding what could have been the Hongzhou response to the alleged antinomianism. (shrink)

_The Budapest School of Psychoanalysis_ brings together a collection of expertly written pieces on the influence of the Budapest conception of analytic theory and practice on the evolution of psychoanalysis. It touches on major figures Sándor Ferenczi and Michael Balint whilst concurrently considering topics such as Ferenczi’s clinical diary, the study of trauma, the Confusion of Tongues paradigm, and Balint’s perspective on supervision. Further to this, the book highlights Jacques Lacan’s teaching of Ferenczi, which brings a fresh perspective to (...) a relatively unknown connection between them. The book highlights that the Hungarian analysts, influenced by Ferenczi, through their pioneering work developed a psychoanalytic paradigm which became an alternative to the Freudian tradition. That this paradigm has become recognised and admired in its own right underlines the need to clearly outline, as this book does, the historical context and the output of those who are writing and working in the tradition of the Budapest School. The contributions to this volume demonstrate the widespread and enduring influence of the Budapest School on contemporary psychoanalysis. The contributors are amongst the foremost in Budapest School scholarship and the insights they offer are at once profound as well as insightful. This book is an important read for those practitioners and students of psychoanalysis who wish for an insight into the early and developing years of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis and its impact on contemporary clinical practice. (shrink)

John Rawls' Difference Principle has been well known since his early papers on distributive justice, and has taken on renewed interest with the publication ofA Theory of Justice. The principle is one I find attractive, but I am skeptical of the arguments heretofore put forward in its defence. Here I will outline an entirely different defence which, while it may yield Rawls' desired conclusion, leaves one with a rather different picture from his of the place of the Difference Principle in (...) the theory of distributive justice. (shrink)

The scientific aim of the paper is to juxtapose the views on economic order developed by the leading representatives of two schools of liberal thinking – German ordoliberal Walter Eucken and the Austrian economist Friedrich August von Hayek. The first scholar opted for deliberately constructed competitive economic order, the second one advocates for allowing the social institutions to emerge and evolve spontaneously. The analysis proves the similarity of both theories in regard to the significance of principles of an economic (...) order and the importance of competition for maintaining individual freedom. On the other hand some differences in the areas of sources of rules, institutional change, and the role of the state, induce their complementarity. Developing an intellectual basis for economic policy requires an eclectic approach combining two analysed perspectives. (shrink)

An Aims-based Curriculum spells out a ground-breaking alternative to the familiar school curriculum constructed around a number of largely academic subjects. Its starting point is not subjects, but what schools should be for. It argues that aims are not to be seen as high-sounding principles that can be easily ignored: they are the lifeblood of everything a school does. -/- The book begins with general aims to do with equipping each learner to lead a personally fulfilling (...) life, and to help others to do so too. From these, they derive more specific aims covering the personal qualities, skills and understanding needed for a life of personal, civic and vocational well-being. -/- The second half of the book, on political realities of implementation, takes this process of aims-derivation further. Some of its detailed aims, but by no means all, overlap with conventional curriculum objectives. It also looks at the role of the state in curriculum decisions, as well as the implications of the book’s central argument for student choice, school ethos, assessment, inspection and teacher education . (shrink)

Satr al-awrah (Hijab /veiling) is one of the obligatory provisions for men and women in Islam. Satr al-awrah, as a religious/jurisprudential term, means covering the parts of the body (awrah) that should be covered by religion. Islamic jurisprudents have disagreed on whether satr al-awrah is a condition of validity for prayer. There are two basic approaches to this issue, one of which belongs to the public (jumhūr including the Hanafī, Shafiī and Hanbalī schools) and the other to the Mālikīs. According (...) to the majority (jumhūr), satr al-awrah is a validity condition of the prayer. Therefore, a prayer performed without fulfilling the satr al-awrah condition is not valid. A prayer performed in this way must be re-performed absolutely within or outside of time. There are two approaches in the Mālikī school regarding whether the satr al-awrah is a condition for the validity of the prayer. The first approach is (partly) the same as the jumhūr. According to the second approach (without any distinction between prayer and outside the prayer), satr al-awrah is a general obligation in Islam and is not a valid condition for prayer.According to the Mālikīs who accept this second view, it is sunnah to comply with the satr al-awrah condition in prayer. On the other hand, in the Mālikī school, awrah is divided into two as ʿawrah mughallaẓa and ʿawrah mukhaffafa in terms of its effect on the validity of prayer. The disagreement about whether the satr al-awrah is a condition of validity for the prayer is related to the ʿawrah mughallaẓa. On the other hand, there is an agreement that the ʿawrah mukhaffafa is not a condition for the validity of the prayer. The disagreement in the classical fiqh doctrine about whether the satr al-awrah is a condition for the validity of the prayer has some jurisprudential consequences. As a matter of fact, according to the majority, whether it is ʿawrah mughallaẓa or mukhaffafa, a prayer performed with an uncovered awrah is not valid and must be re-performed absolutely. In the Mālikī school, there are different opinions depending on whether it is ʿawrah mughallaẓa or mukhaffafa. If the place uncovered on the body is ʿawrah mughallaẓa; According to those who accept the satr al-awrah as a condition for the validity of the prayer, the prayer is not valid and must be re-performed absolutely. After the time has passed, the prayer does not have to be repeated. If the place uncovered on the body is ʿawrah mukhaffafa, according to all Mālikīs, unanimously the prayer is valid. Although it is recommended to reperformed it in time, it is not required to be returned after the time has passed. The following can be said about the practical examples of the disagreement in the classical fiqh doctrine regarding whether the satr al-awrah is a condition for the validity of the prayer, especially in terms of ʿawrah mukhaffafa: According to Mālikīs, who do not accept the validity of the satr al-awrah for prayer, it is valid for women to pray with their heads down, below the knees and with their arms uncovered. Again, according to them, it is valid for men to perform prayers with their thighs/hips (fakhz) uncovered, since it is considered one of the private parts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Current State of Vico ScholarshipDavid L. MarshallGiambattista Vico is one of those chameleon figures in the history of ideas who is so intellectually rich that he can be constantly reinvented. It is indicative of the rich ambiguity of his thought that two of the most prominent intellectual historians working today should have come to opposite conclusions about his relationship to the master-category of eighteenth-century intellectual history: for Mark (...) Lilla, Vico was a Counter-Enlightenment thinker; for Jonathan Israel, he was a figure in the Radical Enlightenment.1 Vico’s fungibility gives reason for pause. Someone who can be folded into all manner of intellectual projects may be suspect. But Vico is more colonizing than colonized and, thus, the diversity of his receptions is evidence of creativity, and not merely malleability. The only way to deal with Vico is to dive into the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and find in them the makings of a new line of inquiry. Vico’s moment of flourishing in the Anglophone world came initially in the 1960s and 1970s, but if the diversity and quality of receptions in the last five years is anything to go by then we can say that Vico remains—especially in Italian, French, and German— an intellectual historical provocateur.This review essay surveys such literature and makes a single recurring observation: the various specifications of Vico’s place in intellectual history come into alignment as dimensions of what one might term Vico’s reinvention of rhetoric. As a professor of rhetoric in a culture that possessed—for [End Page 141] the most part—very weak oratorical institutions, Vico found himself in a particularly paradoxical situation. Recent research on Vico suggests that this paradox worked itself out in Vico’s thought in a number of highly interesting ways. First, Vico constitutes an opportunity for intellectual historians of the scientific revolution by offering a simultaneously rhetorical and pragmatic gloss of the early modern logic of experiment. Second, for intellectual historians of religion, Vico constitutes a study in how early moderns could examine the rhetorical functioning of theological vocabularies without necessarily committing themselves to the independent existence of the referents of those vocabularies. Third, for intellectual historians of Enlightenment, Vico confirms that encyclopedism was not a merely French practice in the eighteenth century and that the kind of omnicompetence implicit in encyclopedic multidisciplinarity had roots in rhetorical criticism. Fourth, intellectual historians of Counter-Enlightenment cannot easily fold Vico into their narratives, in part because his legal works (which have been read as a call for cultural retrenchment in response to early modern skepticism) are in fact an account of how Greek rhetoric found its analogue in Roman jurisprudence. Fifth, for historians of the idea of language, Vico demonstrates that there were powerful alternatives in early modernity to the dominant contractualist account of the origin of language (offered by Hobbes, Locke, and others) that were rhetorical and yet did not emphasize the priority of speech over writing.When it appeared in 1961, Nicola Badaloni’s Introduzione a G.B. Vico was the most sophisticated attempt to locate Vico in the Neapolitan philosophical tradition. In many ways, it remains the best attempt at contextualizing a thinker who is notoriously difficult to situate among his contemporaries. John Robertson’s recent Case for the Enlightenment has many virtues (not least its revealing supposition that Vico ought to be read alongside Hume), but as an attempt at contextualization Robertson’s work is not as rich as Badaloni’s.2 In particular, Badaloni did a great deal to reconstruct the history of natural philosophical inquiry at Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Badaloni’s description, Naples was a place in which a strong culture of natural philosophical investigation set the foundation for concepts such as experimentalism and pantheism. Furthermore, Badaloni argued that, although such concepts originated in natural philosophy, they cross-pollinated with ideas prominent in the Neapolitan schools of jurisprudence—particularly probabilism. In the [End Page 142] broadest terms, Badaloni argued that Vico’s intellectual project was an examination of the pantheistic principle that Jovis omnia plena (“all things are made of Jove”) in the domains of law, poetry, and history... (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Kant sought to explain the objectivity of cognition by describing the operation of certain human cognitive activities. That is, in some sense Kant explained cognition's objectivity by appealing to features of the mind. A century later, the Marburg School Neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp would insist that philosophers must explain cognition's objectivity without appeal to the subject's mind. Once at the center of the Kantian account of objectivity, the mind had been (...) expunged from it. This shift was the emergence of anti-psychologism, the view that the mind has no place in philosophical accounts of cognition's objectivity. This dissertation offers an account of how that shift happened. Chapter 1 argues that a central section of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Deduction, is a description of a cognitive operation—namely, the apperception's synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition. Because this operation is necessary, it determines the structures that a subject's cognition must conform to, and thus explains cognition's objectivity for Kant. But Kant's view that the mind is characterized by necessary cognitive operations was abandoned in the nineteenth century in favour of purely empirical conceptions of the mind. Chapter 2 argues that, in response to this change and in particular to the psychologism of the Back to Kant movement, Cohen developed an anti-psychologistic account of cognition's objectivity: for him, objectivity must be explained by appeal to the principles and laws of mathematics and pure natural science. But his account fails, since he does rot explain why those laws explain cognition's intersubjectivity. Chapter 3 examines Wilhelm Wundt's and Ernst Mach's attempts to articulate purely empirical conceptions of the mind, and to explain cognition's objectivity by appeal to the mind so conceived, as well as Hermann Lotze's anti-psychologism. Chapter 4 argues that, for Natorp, fundamental physical laws constitute the intersubjective content of cognition because they are invariant across space and time, and so different subjects can share representations of them despite having different points of view on the world. Natorp thus finally articulates a successful anti-psychologistic alternative to Kant's account of objectivity. (shrink)

In this article, I defend a proposal to cap the proportion of students admitted to elite colleges who were educated at elite, often private, schools to not more than the proportion of students who attend such schools in society as a whole. In order to defend this proposal, I draw on recent debates that pit principles of equality against principles of adequacy, and I defend the need for a pluralist account of educational fairness that includes both elements. I (...) argue that while equality best captures our convictions about unfairness in access to the instrumental and positional benefits of education, such as job prospects and college admission, adequacy best captures our convictions about unfairness in stunting the development of human talent and the intrinsic benefits of education. The proposal to cap the proportion of private school students at elite universities advances both of these, usually conflicting, principles because it permits unequal but efficient talent development through the vehicle of private tuition and elite schooling, and yet promises to seriously curtail the unfair positional instrumental benefits of private or elite schooling by having those students compete against each other and not students who did not attend elite schools. The policy also achieves its aim consistent with preserving some attractive aspects of parental choice. Towards the end of the article I consider a number of practical objections and an alternative proposal. (shrink)

In the controversy on the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics Whitehead's philosophy of organism has an essential place. But its realistic position invalidates any attempt to relate it to the School of Copenhagen's “orthodox interpretation”. Unlike, the Eurhythmic Physics developed by the Lisbon School has notable theoretical tunings with Whitehead's philosophy. In both, the notion of passive matter disappears; entities are understood as ecstatic process of becoming arising from a continuum of potentialities; and they achieve physical persistence grace (...) to a set of synergistic interactions among their own regimes of rhythmical activity. The principle of Eurhythmy proposed by Prof. Croca then appears as the hypothesis, in contemporary theoretical physics, corresponding to the organicist vision of a universe in a developmental process of realization of the abstract potentiality of all possible worlds: a universe that, as a living organism, should be described as guided by an immanent teleological principle. (shrink)

Thomistic metaphysics has been challenged on the grounds that its principles are inconsistent with our experiences of divine action and of our own subjectivity. Challenges of this sort have been raised by Eastern Christian thinkers in the school of Gregory Palamas and by contemporary Personalists; they propose alternative metaphysics to explain these experiences. Against these objections and against those Thomists who hold that Thomas Aquinas’ claims exclude Byzantine and Personalist metaphysics, I argue that Thomas’ metaphysical principles (...) already have “flexibility” built into them, such that they can accommodate ways that reality is given in experience, which Thomas did not consider. I argue for this claim using the work of Byzantine and Personalist Thomists, and especially of Jacques Maritain, who outlines several ways in which Thomistic metaphysical principles can be expanded to explain experiences that he did not consider. (shrink)

Recent research both on the Kyoto School and on the contemporary New Confucians suggests significant similarities between these two modern East Asian philosophies. Still missing is, however, an explanation of the shared philosophical ideas that serve as the foundation for comparative studies. For this reason, I analyze the basic theories of the two distinctly East Asian philosophies of Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) and Mou Zongsan (1909-95) so as to identify and extract the same type of argument. This is an (...) class='Hi'>alternative to the analyses provided by the previous studies of their philosophies, which inevitably regard their theories as an East Asian assimilation of modern European philosophy in the Kantian, Neo-Kantian, or phenomenological tradition, or else as the traditional tenets under the guise of philosophical speculation, without being able to clarify how these theories contribute to philosophy. My analysis shows that both the logic of basho and the theory of perfect teaching formulate the same type of theory, the ontological or topological-onto-topological-turn from the act of consciousness to its basho or its vertical enfolding, which constitutes the bedrock of East Asian philosophy. (shrink)

This piece of work intends to shed light on Alexander of Aphrodisias from the second-century Aristotle commentator through the history of Aristotelian psychology up to the sixteenth century's clandestine prompter of the new philosophy of nature. In the millennium after his death the head of the Peripatetic school in Athens served as the authority on Aristotle in the Neo-Platonic school, survived the Arabic centuries of philosophy as Averroes' exemplary exponent of the mortality of the soul and as such (...) was not considered worthy of translation by the Latin Scholastics. This attitude changed only in the Late Middle Ages, when the resistance against Averroes grew fierce and Alexander emerged as the only Aristotelian alternative to him. In 1495 his account of Aristotle's psychology was translated and published and the underlying principles of a natural philosophy, based on sense perception and exempt from metaphysics, became accessible. The prompt reception and widespread endorsement of Alexander's teaching testify to his impact throughout the sixteenth century. (shrink)

The article discusses the origins, formation, and development of the scientific school of chemical physics and nanotechnology in Kazakhstan. The authors describe the achievements of a scientific school that is on par with the best of its kind locally and globally, adding new competitive results of practical relevance to the economic development of the country. The article also highlights the special role of the outstanding scientist Zulkhair Aimukhametovich Mansurov in the development of the methodological foundations of the scientific (...) school, the targeted training of the scientific personnel in the priority areas of the development of Kazakhstani chemical physics, and the creation of nanoscale materials for multifunctional purposes. Also, the main principles of the philosophy of Mansurov’s scientific school are presented. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Literary Method of Urban Design: Design Fictions Using FictionAlan Marshall (bio)For students of design the world over, there’s usually nowhere near enough time in the school year to build a prototype of each and every single innovative idea that pops into one’s head—let alone to test them all in the social world or the marketplace. To speedily explore as many innovations as possible, students are sometimes encouraged (...) to follow an alternative pathway, to create “design fiction.” Intended to exist only on paper or the screen, a “design fiction” is not really destined for the real world.1 As a learning technique, it allows for a significant degree of technical experimentation as well as the imagining of new social arrangements. Many design experts see this “free-for-all” method as rather annoying and untrustworthy—more art than science. Yet for the most creative students, it serves to liberate them from the various constraints of their discipline. My own peculiar process of “design fiction” is what I call the “Literary Method of Urban Design.” I will come to this method in a moment.Last year, I was invited by the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Germany, to contribute artworks for a special exhibition entitled “Ways to Utopia: Life Between Desire and Crisis” (running from April 1, 2023—January 29, 2024).2 [End Page 560] This exhibition is a celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Bauhaus’s first architectural product: a modern suburban family home in the city of Weimar called the Haus Am Horn. Built in 1923 the Haus Am Horn ushered in the Bauhaus style, a streamlined functional elegance presented in clean, bright, hopeful hues.3 Beyond just style, though, the house was proffered up in utopian terms. Its Bauhaus creators suggested that such a home could be mass-produced on an industrial scale cheaply and efficiently to provide elegant living to every single family in Europe, be they rich or poor. In its first iteration, the Staatliches Bauhaus was a high-spirited, playful, future-oriented, and socially aware fine arts and architecture school that ran from 1919 to 1933 in Weimar, then Dessau, then Berlin. However, its liberalism and experimentation away from traditional teaching and practice invited scorn from conservatives and from the Nazi Party. The former took the Bauhaus school’s funding away; the latter shuttered it for good. Despite the closure of the building, the Bauhaus style transformed design across the world as former teachers and ex-students applied Bauhaus principles and approaches in new settings. The old Bauhaus school has since been resurrected, with the opening of Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and the Bauhaus Museum, with locations in Weimar and Dessau.A few years back, Skyhorse Publishers published a book of my own “design fictions” depicting real-world cities set far in the future, each presented in utopian terms.4 Because of this, the Bauhaus approached me to help them celebrate their centennial anniversary by displaying my utopian urban designs in their museum. However, to convey the centenary theme of the exhibition, they requested exactly 100 different artworks of 100 different urban utopias portraying 100 different real-world cities set 100 years in the future. At the time, I had only produced eighty such works over the preceding decade. However, since the exhibition was to include masterworks by Bauhaus design greats like George Muche and Alma Buscher, I did not want to fall short. To make the “century” in quick time, I pushed ahead by deploying my own peculiar “Literary Method of Urban Design.”5 This method comprises three steps:1. Select a city.2. Select a literary work.3. Design the future of the selected city, based upon the themes of the selected literary work.[End Page 561] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Future London. By the author, inspired by More’s Utopia (1516).When I used this method for the first time with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as the literary base, a curator at the Museum of London was tickled enough to include it in an exhibition about the future of London.6Since then, the utopian spark has flowed through many of... (shrink)

A prominent phenomenon in contemporary philosophy of science has been the unexpected rise of alternative philosophers of science. This article analyses in depth such alternative philosophers of science as Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, and Michel Foucault, summarizing the similarities and differences between alternative philosophies of science and traditional philosophy of science so as to unveil the trends in contemporary philosophy of science. With its different principles and foundation, alternative philosophy of science has made breakthroughs in (...) terms of its field of vision, scope, and methodology, and its relationship with science has become more humanistic and pluralistic. Attention should be given to alternative perspectives in the contemporary philosophy of science, and research should be expanded into the fields of the epistemology of science and cognitive science, the sociology of scientific knowledge and scientific anthropology, the scientific cultural philosophy, and scientific ethics. (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

This book examines the European discussion about alternative schooling in the 20th century. It refers to a stream of concepts that are often described as New Education, Progressive Education, Education Nouvelle or Reformpädagogik, and discusses a range of different models of alternative schooling. Exploring the works of a range of continental educational philosophers, including Lietz, Blonsky, Kerschensteiner, Freinet, Decroly and Petersen, the book offers a unique insight into texts not yet translated into English. These educational models are presented (...) with regards to the biographical background of the authors; the crucial elements of their construction; the historical interconnections between schooling, society and culture; and finally their connection to today's discussions in educational sciences. The book will be highly relevant for researchers and advanced students working on the theory, history and practice of schooling, particularly those with a focus on alternative schooling and the philosophy of education. Ralf Koerrenz is Head of Chair for Historical Education and Global Education at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Annika Blichmann is Research Associate at the Chair for Historical Pedagogy and Global Education at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Sebastian Engelmann is a research associate and lecturer at the Institute for Bildung and Culture at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.1 (2004) 92-95 [Access article in PDF] Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique. Ed. Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Pp. 227. $23.95, paperback. Not long ago at a gathering of arts and humanities scholars, I found myself introduced to a group of people as someone interested in the work of Theodor Adorno, whose name led one (...) member of the group to groan, "Not that old chestnut!" Such has been an ambient attitude in cultural studies toward not just the work of Adorno but many of the scholars who came to be known collectively in the 1960s as the Frankfurt School, thanks to their affiliation with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Rethinking the Frankfurt School, a deceptively slim volume that manages to cover a lot of ground in a dozen densely packed essays edited by Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr, counters the conventional cultural studies wisdom regarding the Frankfurt School, debunking along the way not just the facile dismissal of some of the school's members for their "mandarin elitism," but also the notion that the scholars who arguably pioneered the critical study of mass culture have lost their relevance for cultural studies.The association of the Frankfurt School with a cranky and outdated variant of bourgeois proto-Marxism—what Lukacs once dismissed as self-indulgent despair cultivated in the comfort of "the Grand Hotel Abyss"—was at least in part a legacy of the rediscovered cultural and political optimism of the late 1960s. This optimism came to characterize those strands of cultural studies that countered the gloomy assessments of the Frankfurt School with the potential of what the collection's editors disparagingly describe as "subversive consumption." From the perspective of the new millennium it's no longer the Frankfurt scholars who look misguided. In a turning of the tables, the outdated figure of this volume is not Adorno, the pointy-headed pessimist, but rather those who helped dismiss him as such. In particular, Simon During, who edited the 1993 version of the cultural studies canon, The Cultural Studies Reader, comes in for a double dose of implicit criticism (thanks in part to what seems to be an editing oversight) for his critique of Horkheimer and Adorno's failure to take into account [End Page 92] the "opportunities for all kinds of individual collective creativity and decoding" provided by the culture industries (3, 62). If, as During suggested, the 1960s represented a time in which the mass media had become more variegated and presumably more flexible and porous than in the period treated by Horkheimer and Adorno, this collection suggests the renewed relevance of the Frankfurt School might in part be explained by the "unprecedented consolidation within the multinational 'infotainment' industry" during the 1990s (5). The triumphal resuscitation and consolidation of monopoly capitalism triggers, on this account, the rehabilitation of its most scathing critics.The more compelling argument advanced in this volume, however, is that the ostensibly outdated character of much of the work of the Frankfurt School was as much a result of superficial and dismissive readings as of changing historical conditions. As contributor Evan Watkins suggests in his discussion of Adorno, the dominant tendency in culture studies has been to contradict disparaging claims about mass culture (claims which earned Adorno and Horkheimer the sticky moniker of elitists) rather than to take seriously an approach that explored the intricate connections between mass culture and the social relations of production and consumption. Only in the abstract can the consumption of ostensibly counter-hegemonic texts be figured as subversive politics, especially during a time when "The Times They Are A-Changin' " can become a jingle for a bank commercial.Against the theoretical backdrop of the Frankfurt School, the very attempt to isolate culture as a sphere of resistance unto itself becomes a symptom of reification. As Imre Szeman puts it, perhaps the most important lesson of the Frankfurt School for cultural studies "can be summarized by a negative maxim: don't fetishize culture" (74... (shrink)

There are two attitudes regarding the historical situation of understanding commonly held today. On the one hand, we believe that we only achieve a real, worthwhile understanding of a topic when our thinking manages to break free from the dogmas of the past. We believe that this transcendence of the historical situation of thought is both possible and desirable. We applaud those whose thought appears to us to proceed unhinged by traditional dogmas, whether those dogmas be old habits of scientific (...) thought or traditional ideas about social life. We celebrate as epistemic heroes those who discover their own way of thinking. On the other hand, many are quick to accept as a general rule that one’s understanding is inevitably bound to one’s particular historical and cultural situation. Nobody understands things in a historical vacuum. Accordingly, we believe that there is no transcending the historicity of the understanding and thus no epistemic heroes to applaud. This chapter examines Gadamer's argument in “The Elevation of the Historicity of Understanding" (a central section in "Truth and Method") as a critique of both of these alternatives -- alternatives that can be traced back to the historical epochs of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. I argue that, for Gadamer, both of these historical models of understanding misconstrue the way that understanding is grounded in historical consciousness. (shrink)

Much of the history of Western ethical thought has revolved around debates about what constitutes a good life, and claims that a good life is achievable only by certain human beings. In Feminist Philosophies of Life, feminist, new materialist, posthumanist, and ecofeminist philosophers challenge this tendency, approaching the question of life from alternative perspectives. Signalling the importance of distinctively feminist reflections on matters of shared concern, Feminist Philosophies of Life not only exposes the propensity of discourses to normalize and (...) exclude differently abled, racialized, feminized, and gender nonconforming people, it also asks questions about how life is constituted and understood without limiting itself to the human. A collection of articles that focuses on life as an organizing principle for ontology, ethics, and politics, chapters of this study respond to feminist thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Søren Kierkegaard. Divided into three parts, the book debates the question of life in and against the emerging school of new feminist materialism, provides feminist phenomenological and existentialist accounts of life, and focuses on lives marked by a particular precarity such as disability or incarceration, as well as life in the face of a changing climate. Calling for a broader account of lived experience, Feminist Philosophies of Life contains persuasive, original, and diverse analyses that address some of the most crucial feminist issues. Contributors include Christine Daigle, Shannon Dea, Lindsay Eales, Elizabeth Grosz, Lisa Guenther, Lynne Huffer, Ada Jaarsma, Stephanie Jenkins, Ladelle McWhorter, Jane Barter Moulaison, Astrida Neimanis, Danielle Peers, Stephen Seely, Hasana Sharp, Chloë Taylor, Florentien Verhage, Rachel Loewen Walker, and Cynthia Willett. (shrink)

Drawing upon concepts from actor-network theory (ANT), this article explores how the principle of symmetry can provide alternative readings of the translations of the prescribed into the enacted curriculum, without reducing understanding to explanation. The paper explores the contrasting ways in which the prescribed curriculum is translated into the enacted curriculum as certain organisations, individuals and artefacts become enrolled through networks of school and college. It points to the ways in which a position which eschews conventional distinctions e.g. (...) between the human and non-human, and enacts an anti-foundationalist ontology provides the basis for a radical materialist understanding of the multiplicity of educational practices. (shrink)