"Recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot" -- vii.

I like punk rock. I like girls with weird eyes. I like drugs but my body and mind won’t allow me to take them. I like passion. I like things that are built well. I like innocence. I like and am grateful for the blue collar worker whos existence allows Artists to not have to work at menial jobs. I like killing gluttony. I like playing my cards wrong. I like various styles of music. I like making fun of musicians (...) who I feel pladgerise or offend music as art by exploiting their embarrassingly, pathetic versions of their work. I like to write poetry. I like to ignore others poetry. I like vinyl. I like nature and animals. I like to swim. I like to be with my friends. I like to be by myself. I like to feel guilty for.. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conversation between Jacques Rancière and feminist care ethicists. It argues that there are important resonances between these two bodies of scholarship, thanks to their similar indictments of Western hierarchies and binaries, their shared invitation to “blur boundaries” and embrace a politics of “impropriety”, and their views on the significance of storytelling/narratives and of the ordinary. Drawing largely on Disagreement, Proletarian Nights, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, I also indicate that Rancière’s (...) work offers crucial and timely insights for care ethicists on the importance of attending to desire and hope in research, the inevitability of conflict in social transformation, and the need to think together the transformation of care work/practices and of dominant social norms. (shrink)

In this article, I turn my attention to the figure of the ignorant master, Joseph Jacotot, that is depicted in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991). I will show that the voice of Jacotot can actually be read as a reaction against the progressive figure of the teacher which, following Rancière's view, can be seen as effecting a stultification. In some respects, however, Rancière's analysis of the pedagogical order no longer seems to be valid in (...) today's partly reconfigured, pedagogical order that depicts the teacher in terms of facilitation. Yet, the figure of the facilitator can be seen as effecting a stultification as well. Therefore, I will stress that Jacotot's voice is highly relevant today. The most important difference between the figure of the (old and current) figure of the stultifyer and that of the ignorant master is identified in their starting point. The stultifying master starts from the assumption of inequality. S/he transforms taught material (words, text, images, etc.) into objects of knowledge or resources for competence development that open the door to another world. The ignorant master (Jacotot) assumes equal intelligence and draws attention to a thing in common. According to Rancière, the ignorant master keeps the door closed and puts his/her students in the presence of a thing in common. (shrink)

“Pedagogics of Unlearning”: this phrase obviously echoes a notion and a figure that I had set up in my own way when I published a book entitled The Ignorant Schoolmaster with the subtitle “Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation”.1 Both entail the idea of a specific form of learning, which is a negative one: learning how to unlearn, teaching as an ignoramus, learning the emancipatory virtue of ignorance. This idea raises two interrelated problems. First, how are we to understand (...) the type of negativity at work in this unlearning or this ignorance? Secondly, what is the exact target of this negative action? What is the positivity that is under attack? In other words, what is at stake in matters of... (shrink)

Is the primary function of an educator to elucidate and convey their own knowledge? French philosopher Jacques Rancière demonstrates that an incidental experiment by Joseph Jacotot presents an alternative paradigm: the ignorant schoolmaster. In his work The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation [Le maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle], Rancière posits that the ignorant schoolmaster is equally, if not more, capable of instructing students compared to the knowledgeable educator. Rancière examines two educational methodologies: the conventional (...) approach of the knowledgeable educator who explicates and imparts knowledge, and the experimental approach of the ignorant schoolmaster who refrains from explanation and primarily focuses on verifying attentiveness. By providing a brief analysis of these two methodologies, this article aims to demonstrate how Rancière’s work can be utilized to construct a model for articulating the implicit theoretical principles in educational practices. This model is predicated on the following premise: by taking either a successful or a problematic educational practice as an example, one can articulate the theoretical principles inherent within it. The article hopes to facilitate a shift in focus from practices to principles, thereby offering a novel perspective on educational practices and enabling its theoretical explication......... [In Dutch: Bestaat de kernactiviteit van de meester erin om zijn eigen kennis uit te leggen en over te dragen? De Franse filosoof Jacques Rancière laat zien dat een gelegenheidsexperiment van Joseph Jacotot ons een ander voorbeeld aanreikt: de onwetende meester. In zijn boek De onwetende meester: vijf lessen over intellectuele emancipatie (Le maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle) stelt hij dat de onwetende meester evengoed of zelfs beter in staat is leerlingen iets te leren dan de wetende meester. Rancière neemt in feite twee onderwijspraktijken als voorbeeld: de traditionele praktijk van de wetende meester die uitleg geeft en kennis overdraagt en de experimentele praktijk van de onwetende meester die geen uitleg geeft maar vooral gericht is op de verificatie van aandacht. In dit artikel wil ik op basis van een korte analyse van deze twee praktijken laten zien hoe we uit Rancière’s boek een model kunnen afleiden voor het articuleren van de theoretische principes die impliciet in onderwijspraktijken werkzaam zijn. Dit model is gestoeld op het volgende uitgangspunt: door een succesvolle of juist problematische onderwijspraktijk als voorbeeld te nemen kunnen we de theoretische principes articuleren die erin werkzaam zijn. Dit schept de mogelijkheid om de focus van de van de praktijken naar de principes te verleggen. Hierdoor wordt de onderwijspraktijk op een nieuwe manier inzichtelijk en kunnen we haar theoretisch expliciteren.]. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Of Masters, Intellectuals and Inequality On Lessons, Equality, Democracy Focus and Contributions to the book Notes Acknowledgement References Bibliography Jacques Rancière.

In our paper we aim at reflecting upon the extent to which educational theory may be used as a framework in the analysis of policy documents. As policy texts are ‘heteroglossic in character’ (Lingard and Ozga, in The Routledge Falmer reader in education policy and politics, Routledge, London and New York, 2007 , p. 2) and create “circumstances in which the range of options available in deciding what to do are narrowed or changed” (Ball in, Education policy and social class: (...) The selected works of Stephen J Ball, Routledge, London and New York, 2006 , p. 46), they need to be theoretically tackled in their underlying assumptions and implications. This proposal draws on an analysis of two sets of documents of the European Union: texts produced between 2000 and 2006, underlying the European Union programmes; and texts produced by a working group focusing on the key competences of Lifelong Learning (2003–2006). Initially, the framework for the analysis of different documents was grounded on the existing research in the field of educational policy. Now we attempt a secondary analysis of the collected data by transposing the borders of this particular and highly prolific field. We argue that what is outside the texts may reshape what is inside the texts. Educational theory allows us to define some conceptual tools in order to question the documents as political apparatus which open and constrain possibilities. Therefore, we will use educational theory as an arena where different matters, perspectives and possibilities may be explored and assembled. We have engaged in a conversation with both the data and some theoretical approaches. Central to this conversation are the concepts of “ignorant schoolmaster” (Rancière, in The ignorant schoolmaster five lessons in intellectual emancipation, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991 ), “learning contexts” (Edwards, in Rethinking contexts for learning and teaching, Routledge, Oxon and New York, 2009a , b ), and “experience” (Larrosa, in Revista Brasileira de Educação, 19:20–28, 2002 ). (shrink)

This article argues for a definition of public philosophy inspired by John Dewey’s understanding of the “supreme intellectual obligation.” The first section examines five strong reasons why more public philosophy is needed and why the growing movement in public philosophy should be encouraged. The second section begins with a review of common understandings of public philosophy as well as some initial challenges that call for widening our conception of the practice. Then, it applies Dewey’s argument in “The Supreme (...) class='Hi'>Intellectual Obligation” to public philosophy, which must not be seen simply as a one-way street from intellectuals to the masses but, rather, as the task of fostering the scientific attitude and intellectual habits of mind in all citizens. (shrink)

The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement was originally meant to harmonise and enforce intellectual property rights provisions in existing trade agreements within a wider group of countries. This was commendable in itself, so ACTA’s failure was all the more disappointing. In this article, I wish to contribute to the post-ACTA debate by proposing a specific analysis of the ethical reasons why ACTA failed, and what we can learn from them. I argue that five kinds of objections—namely, secret negotiations, lack of consultation, (...) vagueness of formulation, negotiations outside any international body, and the creation of a new governing body outside already existing forums—had only indirect ethical implications. This takes nothing away from their seriousness but it does make them less compelling, because agreements should be evaluated, ethically, for what they are, rather than for the alleged reasons why they are being proposed. I then argue that ACTA would have caused three ethical problems: an excessive and misplaced kind of responsibility, a radical decrease in freedom of expression, and a severe reduction in information privacy. I conclude by indicating three lessons that can help us in shaping a potential ACTA 2.0. First, we should acknowledge the increasingly vital importance of the framework of implicit expectations, attitudes, and practices that can facilitate and promote morally good decisions and actions. ACTA failed to perceive that it would have undermined the very framework that it was supposed to foster, namely one promoting some of the best and most successful aspects of our information society. Second, we should realise that, in advanced information societies, any regulation affecting how people deal with information is now bound to influence the whole ‘onlife’ habitat within which they live. So enforcing IPR becomes an environmental problem. Third, since legal documents, such as ACTA, emerge from within the infosphere that they affect, we should apply to the process itself, which one day may lead to a post-ACTA treaty, the very framework and ethical values that we would like to see promoted by it. (shrink)

This commentary further explores some of the ethical issues raised by Prof. Peter Singer in his Lanson Lecture “Pandemic Ethics: Five Lessons”. In the first part, I distinguish a prioritarian approach to the allocation of scarce medical resources, from the utilitarian one advocated by Singer. I suggest that the prioritarian view better matches common intuitions about fair distribution, even though it likely needs to be balanced with other principles if it is to have plausibility in contexts like vaccine allocation. (...) In the second part of the commentary, I take a global perspective (as Singer himself does regarding the ethics of lockdowns), and highlight the controversial implications of adopting a fully cosmopolitan ethical outlook when deciding how to distribute Covid-19 vaccines. I also raise justice-related concerns about Singer’s proposal to use well-being as a single metric for evaluating public health policies. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020/21 has posed old ethical questions in a new and sharper form, as well as given rise to some new ethical issues. In this lecture, I look at the lessons we can learn from five of these issues: the allocation of scarce medical resources; experimenting on humans; setting priorities for vaccination; when lockdowns are justified; and preventing more pandemics.

This article questions whether past experience with nationalisms rooted in history, language, custom and religion will be much of a guide to pseudo-nationalisms that arise in a globalized age with increasingly ‘liquid’ societies.

One response to the preface paradox—the paradox that arises when each claim in a book is justified for the author and yet in the preface the author avers that errors remain—counsels against the preface belief. It is this line of thought that poses a problem for any view that places a high value on intellectual humility. If we become suspicious of preface beliefs, it will be a challenge to explain how expressions of fallibility and intellectual humility are appropriate, (...) whether voiced verbally or encoded mentally. Moreover, banning expressions of intellectual humility is especially disturbing in our context, for such a preface claim is just the sort of expression of intellectual humility that is supposed to provide a barrier to the costly damage that can be done by zealous faith found in various forms of fundamentalism. The goal is thus to find a way to express humility without engendering paradox. (shrink)

This article is part of a Symposium that examines the legal and policy issues raised by the Schwarzenegger bobblehead doll litigation, in which a Hollywood star-turned-governor sued under California's right of publicity laws and under federal copyright law to stop a small Ohio company from selling a bobblehead doll depicting Schwarzenegger in a business suit, with a bandolier of bullets, and brandishing an assault rifle. The article contends that defendants' unauthorized use of the Schwarzenegger image on dolls and their accompanying (...) packaging was permissible as First Amendment-protected free speech under California's right of publicity laws and also constituted fair use under federal copyright law. The article rejects the argument that a First Amendment defense to plaintiff's right of publicity claims was unavailable because a bobblehead doll is not a "traditional" medium of expression for ideas. The article recognizes that overly expansive assertions of rights of publicity and other intellectual property rights threaten to stifle creative expression and diminish the cultural commons. The article also calls for clearer and more consistent recognition of defenses to right of publicity claims, particularly for cases where a defendant's unauthorized appropriation of another's image or likeness is for purposes of caricature, parody, or satire¿especially where the image is that of a politician. It concludes that the settlement of the Schwarzenegger bobblehead doll case illustrates how "strategic" assertions of even objectively non-meritorious rights of publicity can allow powerful plaintiffs to censor unflattering depictions of them and to unduly expand intellectual property rights without full adjudication on the merits of such claims.This insight is critical, because while other scholars have suggested that the "over-protection" of intellectual property rights (including rights of publicity) has a deleterious effect on freedom of expression and the public domain, these criticisms focus almost exclusively on published appellate cases. Yet, as this article reminds us, most cases settle and never become litigated cases, much less published appellate decisions. And most disputes - including intellectual property disputes - never result in formal litigation in the first instance. As with most other areas of the civil disputing process, intellectual property disputes are processed in the "shadow of the law", where repeat players have strategic advantages to shape the outcomes of disputes in their favor. Thus, if we want to know whether intellectual property rights are over-protected, we need to know what happens (and why) in the shadow of intellectual property law. This insight is the basis for the author's empirical research-in-progress focusing on "strategic intellectual property enforcement" by owners of trademarks, copyrights, and patents, including enforcement that never results in litigation and is thus under the radar of what most legal scholars in this area of law examine. (shrink)

The text attempts to rethink the concept of emancipation and how it is structured as political action, while describing its historical origins and how it is further understood by the three important political philosophers: Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Rancière. All three of them – specifically and with substantial differences – understand politics as a space for political action that leads to emancipation in the name of equality. In order to determine the historical origin of the concept in more (...) detail, the argumentation of the text rely upon its elaboration within the school of “conceptual history”, which deals with the historical semantics of terms and sees the etymology of and the change in the meaning of terms as forming a crucial basis for a contemporary cultural, conceptual, and linguistic understanding, and afterwards it links this “pre-history” with Marx’s, Arendt’s, and Rancière’s understanding of the concept of emancipation, and see how they differ and are related to each other, considering what theoretical conclusions about the concept of emancipation we can take from these relations. Particular interest is aimed at how the concept of emancipation is perceived today, who the subject of emancipation is, what the method and final goal of emancipation is, and, finally, how these understandings can help us in the present time when it seems that we need emancipation more than ever. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article proposes to discuss the aesthetic and poetic praxis in the performance art Corda de Nó(s),1 based on theatrical and visual narratives directed towards intellectual emancipation and the expansion of the sensibility from the teaching experience within a municipal public school unit, in the city of Palmas (TO). This study focuses on a qualitative methodology of oral and exploratory narrative as well as the researchers’ field notebooks, prepared during the activities referred to in this text, in conjunction (...) with bibliographic studies, on the concepts of preparation, development and conclusion of the lesson plan of Arts discipline, based on universal education, as proposed by Jacques Rancière. (shrink)

This article contends that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic understanding of corporeality is central to his interpretation of intellectual emancipation. Concretely, I will argue that Rancière’s aesthetic understanding can be viewed as a torsion of a body that affects its vital arrangements, which thereby open paths for political emancipation. I will support my claim with Rancière’s reading of the plebeian philosopher Gauny, as well as works that have not been sufficiently considered in secondary literature, such as The Nights of Labor and (...) The Ignorant Schoolmaster. My reading will, I maintain, help to question common interpretations of emancipation in Rancière that tend to read this notion either in dichotomous terms or as a merely ephemeral, evental practice with no concrete conditions of possibility and without long-lasting or verifiable effects in the world. (shrink)

A daring marriage of philosophical theory and practical politics, this collection is the first of Gianni Vattimo's many books to combine his intellectual pursuits with his public and political life. Vattimo is a paradoxical figure, at once a believing Christian and a vociferous critic of the Catholic Church, an outspoken liberal but not a former communist, and a recognized authority on Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as a prominent public intellectual and member of the European parliament. Building on (...) his unique position as a philosopher and politician, Vattimo takes on some of the most pressing questions of our time: Is it still possible, long after Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, to talk of moral imperatives, individual rights, or political freedom? Are these values still relevant in today's world? Tackling these crucial issues, Gianni Vattimo argues that nihilism is not the absence of meaning but a recognition of a plurality of meanings; it is not the end of civilization but the beginning of new social paradigms. Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism, as a philosophical principle, is far less sensational--it is the ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws, that "truth" is inescapably subjective. Because the conditions for equality and liberty are not "naturally" given, society must actively create these ideals or it will inevitably fall prey to irrationality, prejudice, and oppression. Vattimo contends that the infighting, timidity, and confusion that have overtaken contemporary liberal thought and politics are the products a prolonged and indulgent mourning over the loss of the transcendental father figure--any institution or power structure that defines truth, knowledge, and reality. Until humanity overcomes its need for external authority--whether it be organized religion, the nation-state, or free-market capitalism--emancipation will remain unattainable. Collecting fourteen of Vattimo's most influential essays on ethics, politics, and law, _Nihilism and Emancipation_ is a provocative reevaluation of meaning, values, and the idea of freedom in Western culture. (shrink)

Philosophical aesthetics have seen an amazing revival over the past decade, as a radical questioning of the very grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that descriptions of what used to be seen as specific to aesthetic experience can instead be viewed as a general model for human cognition. In this revival, no text in the classical corpus of Western philosophy has been more frequently discussed and debated than the dense, complex paragraphs inserted into Kant's Critique of Judgment as sections 23-29: (...) the Analytic of the Sublime. This book is a rigorous explication de texte, a close reading of these sections. The Analytic of the Sublime, he points out, tries to argue that human thought is always constituted through a similar incompatibility between different intellectual and affective faculties. These lessons thus try to isolate the analysis of a differend of feeling in Kant's text, which is also the analysis of a feeling of differend, and to connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits. (shrink)

There are several lessons that can already be drawn from the current research programs on strong AI and building conscious machines, even if they arguably have not produced fruits yet. The first one is that functionalist approaches to consciousness do not account for the key importance of subjective experience and can be easily confounded by the way in which algorithms work and succeed. Authenticity and emergence are key concepts that can be useful in discerning valid approaches versus invalid ones (...) and can clarify instances where algorithms are considered conscious, such as Sophia or LaMDA. Subjectivity and embeddedness become key notions that should also lead us to re-examine the ethics of decision delegation. In addition, the focus on subjective experience shifts what is relevant in our understanding of ourselves as human beings and as an image of God, namely, in de-emphasizing intellectuality in favor of experience and contemplation over action. (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was as a leading figure of 1960s counter-culture and hailed as a 'Guru of the New Left'. His ideas and theories, inspired by a rich fusion of Marxian and Freudian thought, exert a strong influence on contemporary thinking about activism, emancipation and political resistance. He was also member of the Frankfurt School and a student of Heidegger in the late 1920s and engaged deeply with philosophy throughout his career. The Marcusean Mind is an outstanding survey and assessment (...) of Marcuse's thought. Beginning with a thorough introduction to Marcuse's life and work, thirty-nine chapters by an international and interdisciplinary team of contributors are organised into five clear parts: Intellectual Ecosystems of Marcuse Reason and Sensibilities Futures and Utopias Contemporary Movements Counterrevolutions, Neo-Liberalism, and Fascism. These sections each contain a short introduction, after which Marcusean ideas are brought to bear on many key contemporary debates and issues from across the humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. Including a Foreword by. (shrink)

The most powerful lesson learned from the 2013-2016 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was that we do not learn our lessons. A common sentiment at the time was that Ebola served as a “wake-up call”—an alarm which signalled that an outbreak of that magnitude should never have occurred and that we are ill-prepared globally to prevent and respond to them when they do. Pledges were made that we must learn from the outbreak before we were faced with another. (...) Nearly five years later the world is in the grips of a pandemic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 that causes coronavirus disease 2019. It is therefore of no surprise that we are now yet again hearing that the COVID-19 pandemic serves as the “wake-up call” we need and that there are many lessons to be learned to better prepare us for future outbreaks. Will anything be different this time around? We argue that nothing will fundamentally change unless we truly understand and appreciate the nature of the lessons we should learn from these outbreaks. Our past failures must be understood as moral failures that offer moral lessons. Unless we appreciate that we have a defect in our collective moral attitude toward remediating the conditions that precipitate the emergence of outbreaks, we will never truly learn. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Lessons of TheoryJay PariniOne does not have to look far these days to find someone bashing literary theory, and in some respects it deserves it. Joseph Epstein, for one, has almost never tired of picking away at the motives of those who engage in literary theory: “The major impulse of theory was suspicion,” he has said. “In this regard theory gave that portion of the professoriat who (...) came through the sixties unfulfilled, and those younger professors—women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals—who chose to squeeze all they could out of their self-created status of victimhood, a large and lovely outlet for their resentment.” The irony is that one hears in this semi-hysterical cri de coeur the very suspicion that the author is supposedly complaining about. Mr. Epstein, neither female nor gay, apparently feels passed over. Inadvertently, he has become the Victim himself.Literary theory—or just “theory”—has frightened a whole generation of intellectuals into early mental retirement, mostly because they have not the stamina or will to enter into appropriate conversation with their younger colleagues. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the debate over theory has been this extension into the academy of what, in the sixties, used to be called the generation gap; indeed, many of the same dynamics seem to apply, with theorists pitting themselves against all forms of authority. “Never trust anyone under thirty” has been transmogrified into “Never trust anyone who doesn’t appreciate Foucault.”In the seventies, theory moved toward the center of the curriculum at most American graduate schools of literature, and it has remained in place for nearly a quarter of a century. The charge is often heard, perhaps with some justice, that students now spend more time reading [End Page 91] Foucault or Derrida than Shakespeare or Dante, and that this has created an imbalance. But even here, the situation is exaggerated; graduate students do indeed get a heavy dose of theory, yet one sees few undergraduate classrooms in the United States where anything resembling literary theory has displaced the teaching of canonical texts. For the most part what has happened is that the canon has been widened to include texts by previously overlooked writers—usually texts by women or minorities. Such a development hardly threatens to erase or even partially to occlude Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton.The charge that theory is unreadable is, for me, a more important criticism. (There’s a joke I like in this regard: Question: What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist with a mafioso? Answer: An offer you can’t understand.) Jargon has overwhelmed literary criticism to the point where the so-called Common Reader is now fiercely excluded from the conversations that take place in most professional journals and academic conferences, and the consequences of this exclusionary practice are profound. The most obvious effect is that serious literature itself, and thinking about literature and its place in the world, is removed from mainstream consumption. As a result, the general quality of our national discourse—in the arts as well as collateral areas, such as politics—is diminished.This said, I would still argue that an intellectual revolution of sorts has indeed occurred in the last thirty years, and that theory has permanently changed the ways that we—as readers and writers—go about our reading and, yes, our thinking. The peak of the battle over theory passed several years ago; in fact, we seem to have entered a “post-theoretical” moment, and so the time may have arrived for reassessing some of the lessons of theory. This “revolution” is pretty much a literal one: a turning of the wheel. But the wheel has been turning for a long time. Our ways of reading have been challenged almost continuously from the beginning of this century, when the belles-lettres style of criticism popular just after the Great War was dislodged by the philologists, and the philologists were attacked by the literary historians, and the historians were pushed temporarily to one side in the late forties and early fifties by the New Critics. And so forth. The history of criticism is simply a history of overturnings, or absorptions (I rather... (shrink)

A daring marriage of philosophical theory and practical politics, this collection is the first of Gianni Vattimo's many books to combine his intellectual pursuits with his public and political life. Vattimo is a paradoxical figure, at once a believing Christian and a vociferous critic of the Catholic Church, an outspoken liberal but not a former communist, and a recognized authority on Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as a prominent public intellectual and member of the European parliament. Building on (...) his unique position as a philosopher and politician, Vattimo takes on some of the most pressing questions of our time: Is it still possible, long after Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, to talk of moral imperatives, individual rights, or political freedom? Are these values still relevant in today's world? Tackling these crucial issues, Gianni Vattimo argues that nihilism is not the absence of meaning but a recognition of a plurality of meanings; it is not the end of civilization but the beginning of new social paradigms. Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism, as a philosophical principle, is far less sensational -- it is the ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws, that "truth" is inescapably subjective. Because the conditions for equality and liberty are not "naturally" given, society must actively create these ideals or it will inevitably fall prey to irrationality, prejudice, and oppression. Vattimo contends that the infighting, timidity, and confusion that have overtaken contemporary liberal thought and politics are the products a prolonged and indulgent mourning over the loss of the transcendental father figure -- any institution or power structure that defines truth, knowledge, and reality. Until humanity overcomes its need for external authority -- whether it be organized religion, the nation-state, or free-market capitalism -- emancipation will remain unattainable. Collecting fourteen of Vattimo's most influential essays on ethics, politics, and law, _Nihilism and Emancipation_ is a provocative reevaluation of meaning, values, and the idea of freedom in Western culture. (shrink)

It is hard to overstate the growing impact of the works of Andreas Reckwitz and Hartmut Rosa on contemporary social theory. Given the quality and originality of their intellectual contributions, it is no accident that they can be regarded as two towering figures of contemporary German social theory. The far-reaching significance of their respective approaches is reflected not only in their numerous publications but also in the fast-evolving secondary literature engaging with their writings. All of this should be reason (...) enough to take note of their collaborative work, which, most recently, has culminated in the publication of their co-authored book Spätmoderne in der Krise: Was leistet die Gesellschaftstheorie? (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021). The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the latest exchange between Reckwitz and Rosa contains valuable insights into recent and ongoing trends in society in general and social theory in particular. The first part comprises an outline of the central matters at stake in, and the core lessons learnt from, the constructive dialogue between Reckwitz’s critical analytics and Rosa’s critical theory, before moving, in the second part, to an assessment of the most significant limitations of their respective views and propositions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Reflection, and Emancipation: Farrell and Habermas on the Critical Studies of CommunicationG. Thomas GoodnightThere are moments in history that appear to be alive with emancipatory possibilities. Such were the years moving toward the end of the long twentieth century. In spring 1989, students protested the communist regime in China; the Tiananmen Square massacre initiated an episode of opposition and commenced China’s modern journey toward global reengagement. Revolutions in (...) Europe that autumn were more peaceful. On August 23 two million Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian citizens held hands and announced the Baltic Way as a departure from Soviet rule. Transitions rapidly followed in Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, culminating in the Velvet Revolution where on November 17 student protests were beaten back by police in Prague only to be followed three days later by an assembly of 200,000 demanding the transfer of power from the Communist Party. On December 3, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly announced an imminent end to the fifty-year-old Cold War. During this time of hopeful transition, two scholars were at work refiguring the philosophical mission of the Frankfurt school, transforming critique from its early totalizing posture into the critical study of communication.Thomas B. Farrell and Jürgen Habermas were trained in different traditions but adjacent disciplines, communication and sociology. Their works [End Page 421] share a commitment to philosophical inquiry directed toward critique and understanding the cultural, social, and linguistic constitution of communication. As a rhetorician and as a philosopher, these scholars share an evident passion for scholarly argument and for engagement with the controversies of public culture. In different ways, both were at work during the portentous years of transition from the Cold War to new democracies and incipient globalization. Each constructed a guarded program of hope in the possibilities of communicative reflection and reasoning. In the post-World War II era, such a broad, positive vision took long to develop. After the brutal realities of the Holocaust became publicly known in the late 1940s, “the generous faith in rationality and the possibilities of human progress which underlay much of earlier historical thought seems discredited today” (Katznelson 2003, 2). The Enlightenment possibilities for reason had been invested in the technical efficiency of modern institutions that produced the capacity to kill systematically without constraints. Ira Katznelson points to a generation of scholars—including individuals at Chicago, Columbia, the New School, and others—who began in the 1950s to engage in a project that would “shade the Enlightenment’s philosophical anthropology, thicken its defenses against evil, deepen its capacity to reason, and restore” an Enlightenment more critical and less susceptible to co-optation by the excesses of nationalism, ideology, and evil (2003, 2). The work of Farrell and Habermas belongs to the extended post-Holocaust moment, where the possibilities of reflective reason in ethical and moral deliberations were set carefully on a road to personal and collective emancipation.Max Horkheimer saw in the modern, postwar welfare state little reason for optimism. Writing in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War, he concluded: “Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society” (1974, 22). “Salestalk” by “the surrogates of culture” creates an “illusory triumph of democratic progress that consumes the intellectual substance on which democracy has lived” (Horkheimer 1974, 31). Scientifically engineered propaganda renders public opinion as “a substitute for reason.” With such tools, the forces of barbarism are always waiting in the wings to seize power. Early on, Habermas shared these views. His thesis, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989a), tracks the opening possibilities of communicative reasoning in the liminal spaces of eighteenth-century coffeehouses where frank talk replaced hierarchically driven politeness, the development of these talks into the practices of deliberative democracy, and the decline of deliberative democracy with the union of the state and mass media in producing spectacles in [End Page 422] support of rituals of legitimation. Habermas broke with Horkheimer over the dissertation, however. A thesis of decline, by itself, leaves open only the route of totalizing critique. While never far from critique of institutional practices, Habermas spent his career in opening a positive... (shrink)

The discussion on Party ethics in the 1920s is an undeservedly forgotten page in the intellectual history of Soviet society. The new interest in it is due not only to the reawakened thirst for complete knowledge about our past and the much sharpened interest in moral and ethical problems. Another aspect is much more important: it goes back to the sources of socioethical utilitarianism and the distortions in morals associated with it that to a certain extent are specific to (...) socialism. In its current criticism and progress toward overcoming these distortions our society is coming to understand morality as a value in itself, as well as its permanent, universally human foundations. This debate will teach us much, and alert us against a lot. We shall dwell only on a few, in our opinion the most topical, lessons. (shrink)

The article describes the obstacles to the emancipation of Roma women in the family and Czech society. The theoretical side deals with the recent changes in gender roles in the Roma family, changes in the position of Roma women and their discrimination as well as the concept of emancipation. The article aims to describe the obstacles a Roma woman must overcome in the course of emancipation. The data are based on qualitative socio-ethnographic research conducted through narrative interviews with 30 women (...) of different ages and classes who identify as Roma and live in three Czech regional capitals. The research sample was compiled using the snowball method. The data collected in the field research were analyzed in Atlas.ti using anchored theory. We identified five main obstacles to the emancipation of Roma woman. They include obstacles emanating from the family and the majority society as well as obstacles caused by the hegemony of masculinity and those emanating from the woman. By gaining an understanding of relations in Roma families, the situation regarding the emancipation of Roma women and the associated barriers may help those who come into daily contact with the Roma minority to take appropriate actions and apply the right interventions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay asserts that the intellectual and moral attitude that legitimates, justifies and ennobles violence derives from the fact that the evolution of modern philosophical history has been dominated by the ‘rationalist’ paradigm. This process is clarified by reference to four European scholars, whose analysis is different but in many respects analogue: Huizinga, Del Noce, Eisenstadt, and Spaemann. The triumph of violence and injustice in late modern societies demonstrates the failure of this paradigm; and its failure perhaps provides an (...) opportunity for the realist/ontological paradigm to strengthen its position. (shrink)

In this paper, I sketch an answer to the question “Why be an intellectually humble philosopher?” I argue that, as far as philosophical argumentation is concerned, the historical record of Western Philosophy provides a straightforward answer to this question. That is, the historical record of philosophical argumentation, which is a track record that is marked by an abundance of alternative theories and serious problems for those theories, can teach us important lessons about the limits of philosophical argumentation. These (...) class='Hi'>lessons, in turn, show why philosophers should argue with humility. (shrink)

Epistemologies of the South explores “a set of inquiries into the construction and validation of knowledge born in struggle, of ways of knowing developed by social groups as part of their resistance against the systematic injustices and oppressions caused by capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy” . The author, Boaventura de Sousa Santos—Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison—is one of the leading intellectuals of the World Social Forum , the network of (...) organizations from the “global South” that challenge the current dominant order, and whose activities are often informed by experiences, aspirations and understanding that lie outside of the comprehension of the world as provided by mainstream scientific, economic and social theories. Through the WSF, Santos has made profound contact with the knowledge, forms of knowledge , their strengths and limitations, and the practices infor .. (shrink)

This paper argues that commonsense responses to radical skepticism can provide helpful lessons for religious epistemology—in particular, for thinking about how best to defend, and respond to, religious skepticism. Section 1 briefly summarizes of some of the main elements of the Reid-inspired epistemic-intuition-based commonsense response to radical skepticism developed in my 2021 book, "Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition" and highlights the role (in our thinking about radical skepticism) of epistemic intuitions understood as seemings about epistemic value in much the (...) same way that moral intuitions are seemings about moral value. Sections 2 and 3 identify five important lessons that can be drawn from the position presented in that book, apply them to religious epistemology, and explain how they can help us to account for our religious disagreements without implausibly disparaging the rationality of those with whom we disagree. Section 4 addresses some potential concerns about Sections 2 and 3. (shrink)

Studies on associations between music training and cognitive abilities typically focus on the possible benefits of music lessons. Recent research suggests, however, that many of these associations stem from niche-picking tendencies, which lead certain individuals to be more likely than others to take music lessons, especially for long durations. Because the initial decision to take music lessons is made primarily by a child's parents, at least at younger ages, we asked whether individual differences in parents' personality predict (...) young children's duration of training. Children between 7 and 9 years of age ( N = 170) with varying amounts of music training completed a measure of IQ. Their parents provided demographic information as well as ratings of their own and their child's Big Five personality dimensions. Children's personality traits predicted duration of music training even when demographic variables and intelligence were held constant, replicating findings reported previously with 10- to 12-year-olds and 17-year-olds. A novel finding was that parents' openness-to-experience predicted children's duration of training, even when characteristics that pertained to children (demographic variables, intelligence, and personality) were controlled statistically. Our findings are indicative of passive and active gene-environment correlations, whereby genetic predispositions influence the likelihood that a child will have certain experiences, such as music training. (shrink)

In order to understand how the logic of public management can enrich humanistic management’s practices, the current paper will analyze the managerial practices adopted by public administrations within a situation of emergency, a condition where the specific features of the public management can emerge more clearly. Specifically, it will focus on the ways in which the municipality of Bergamo (one of the hardest-hit cities) have reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic, outlining interesting managerial practices especially from the point of view of (...) Humanistic Management’s theory. Such interest resides also in the fact that although the Humanistic Management’s field of research has dealt with a wide range of topics (including human development, emancipation and progress), so far, however, it has not yet considered public administrations, whose role is by definition oriented towards human development through the creation of public value. The analysis of public management through the lens of Humanistic Management can be useful in various respects. Above all, the difference between public administrations and private enterprises can also lead to a very much different process of value creation, based on collaborative forms of production as well as relational and reflexive forms of management. In accordance with the Humanistic Management framework, also business organizations must generate social wellbeing. From this point of view, the lesson of public administrations can be extremely useful for business organization and management alike. (shrink)

One of the many narratives of twentieth century philosophy regards the relationship of philosophy to science: the opinions and arguments over whether philosophy as a discipline should be an assistant, critic, or master over science, and what particular ways philosophy could articulate these roles. One can interpret most of the major conflicts and disciplinary divisions of philosophy as having to do with its relationship with science. The conceptual roots of the general acceptability of a convergence of science and metaphysics would (...) appear to lie in the focus of both subjects, broadly conceived: investigating the nature of existence. Yet, after the rise of post-modernism in many humanities fields, dialogue between philosophy and science on many important issues has become impossible, scientifically-minded intellectuals having no expectation that humanities can contribute usefully to the disciplines of science. (shrink)

Legal inference is fundamental for building and verifying hypotheses in police investigations. In this study, we build a Natural Language Inference dataset in Korean for the legal domain, focusing on criminal court verdicts. We developed an adversarial hypothesis collection tool that can challenge the annotators and give us a deep understanding of the data, and a hypothesis network construction tool with visualized graphs to show a use case scenario of the developed model. The data is augmented using a combination of (...) Easy Data Augmentation approaches and round-trip translation, as crowd-sourcing might not be an option for datasets with sensible data. We extensively discuss challenges we have encountered, such as the annotator’s limited domain knowledge, issues in the data augmentation process, problems with handling long contexts and suggest possible solutions to the issues. Our work shows that creating legal inference datasets with limited resources is feasible and proposes further research in this area. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific experts advised governments for measures to be promptly taken; they also helped people to understand the situation. They carried out this role in the face of a worldwide emergency, when scientific understanding was still underway. Public scientific disputes also arose, creating confusion among people. This article highlights the importance of experts’ epistemic stance under these circumstances. It suggests they should embrace the intellectual virtue of epistemic humility, regulating their epistemic behavior and communication accordingly. In (...) so doing, they would also favour the functioning of the broad network of knowledge-based experts, which is required to properly address all the aspects of the global pandemic. (shrink)

The notion of refugees as a viable source of labor to address skill shortages in the destination country’s labor market has rarely been the dominant discourse on refugee entrants. Bella’s1 lived experience as a professional woman who arrived as a Syrian conflict refugee to Australia in 2017 presents an outlier in refugee research and challenges conventional scholarly wisdom and public discourse. A combination of human capital, a purposeful use of networks, supported by her desire for recognition and a deep sense (...) of self-worth allowed her to navigate the formalized and structured Australian business landscape. Accordingly, she was able to overcome the stigma of being a refugee: Less worthy of employment status in a position representative of her overseas skills and qualifications. In drawing on an outlier methodology and critical theory, we develop a more nuanced understanding of the agency of skilled and qualified refugee women drawing attention to lessons for business which typically takes a “one size fits all” approach to labor integration. (shrink)

To modern writers, the distinctive achievement of twentieth-century jurisprudence can be viewed as its emancipation from the narrow confines of English utilitarianism, and the subsequent development of perspectives rooted in the fundamental values of justice and rights. The central jurisprudential task of the new century is thus the exploration of a deeper, more elusive moral standpoint, the most profound intellectual commitments of which are yet to be fully digested and understood. My aim in this essay is to reveal something (...) of the character of those commitments by considering the relationship of our present thinking about law and morality to its historical development. (shrink)

This unique collection of studies, based for the most part on transcripts of talks in India, Europe and America over the last five years, covers the period in which Roy Bhaskar was developing out of the seeds of the most radical phase of critical realism, his new philosophy of meta-Reality. Because of the spontaneous and informal nature of these talks and discussions, this book provides probably the most immediately accessible introduction to his thought, both for those new to it and (...) those already familiar with it alike. (shrink)

In his influential 1949 essay, The Intellectuals and Socialism, F.A. Hayek prophesied that the “revival of liberalism” must coincide with the resurgence of “the courage to be Utopian.” Today, at a time when liberalism is under attack from multiple fronts, we need courage more than ever. Indeed, the rediscovery of the Utopian potential of liberalism coincides with going back to its roots. My paper shows that liberalism, especially in its so-called “epistemic” or "evolutionary" branch whose notable theorists include Adam Smith, (...) J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, and F.A. Hayek, provides a framework for “real Utopian” theory and practice. However, I argue that evolutionary liberalism should be enriched with the insights of contemporary evolutionary theory and complexity theory to properly account for the downsides of social evolution and to overcome the understandable charge of social Darwinism. Only then can it robustly realise its emancipatory aspirations and real Utopian promise. (shrink)

This chapter provides a brief history of the concept of emancipation and its applications in and relationship with education, starting with the Enlightenment and considering both the continuation and the critique of this tradition that has further shaped the relationship between education and emancipation. The tension between two meanings of emancipation—personal, intellectual emancipation on the one hand, and political emancipation of the oppressed and the entire society on the other—comes into view in the divergence between Kantian and Marxists paths (...) to emancipation. The chapter goes on to consider the ideas by notable classic thinkers who further developed the Enlightenment ideal of emancipatory education by democratizing it (Freire, Habermas, Dewey, Popper), but also outright questioned some of its main aspects (Peirce, Berlin, Rancière). Nevertheless, even the critics of the Enlightenment mentioned here stay faithful to the ideals of equality and freedom that were formulated in the Age of Reason. And here we are, facing “new” and “old” challenges and media. The chapter then presents the content of this volume, commenting on each chapter and reflecting on how the book Rethinking Education and Emancipation tackles the relationship between emancipation and education by considering contemporary struggles and crises, as well as rethinking and recontextualizing the classic ideas (authors), and building on more recent work. (shrink)

Having spent 40 years as a psychologist in academia with a minority perspective at odds with the culture of his profession, the author was requested to reflect upon his experiences in order to offer advice to younger colleagues of the same persuasion. There are indeed prices to be paid when one's values place one outside the established view within the discipline of psychology, but remaining true to oneself is never theless posited as the highest value. The chief drawback of marginality (...) is the lack of the possibility of being placed within a normative university setting where the training of the next generation of scholars with similar values can take place. Basically, one encounters the resistances that sociology of knowledge factors offer rather than intrinsic resistances to the minority theoretical perspective. Five theoretical notions that met political resistance are listed and seven advisory comments are offered for young potentially marginal psychologists. (shrink)

In this book, best-selling author and mathematician Haim Shapira presents an introduction to mathematical theories which deal with the most beautiful concept ever invented by humankind: infinity. Written in clear, simple language and aimed at a lay audience, this book also offers some strategies that will allow readers to try their ability at solving truly fascinating mathematical problems. Infinity is a deeply counter-intuitive concept that has inspired many great thinkers. In this book we will meet many sages, both familiar and (...) unfamiliar: Zeno and Pythagoras, Georg Cantor and Bertrand Russell, Sofia Kovalevskaya and Emmy Noether, al-Khwarizmi and Euclid, Sophie Germain and Srinivasa Ramanujan. The world of infinity is inhabited by many paradoxes, and so is this book: Zeno paradoxes, Hilbert's "Infinity Hotel", Achilles and the gods paradox, the paradox of heaven and hell, the Ross-Littlewood paradox involving tennis balls, the Galileo paradox and many more. Aimed at the curious but non-technical reader, this book refrains from using any fearsome mathematical symbols. It uses only the most basic operations of mathematics: adding, subtracting, multiplication, division, powers and roots - that is all. But that doesn't mean that a bit of deep thinking won't be necessary and rewarding. Writing with humour and lightness of touch, Haim Shapira banishes the chalky pallor of the schoolroom and offers instead a truly thrilling intellectual journey. Fasten your seatbelt - we are going to Infinity, and beyond! (shrink)

It has been widely proposed that the Jain logical methods of linguistic analysis collectively known as anekāntavāda (manypointedness) are an extension of the Jain ethical imperative of ahiṃsā (non-harm) into philosophy as a form of intellectual tolerance and relativity--described by several scholars as "intellectual ahiṃsā"--whose genealogy and development over the past sixty-five years are given in detail. It is shown how Jains used anekāntavāda to expose the relative truth of non-Jain metaphysics, while arguing that only Jain metaphysics, which (...) alone is based on the omniscience (kevala-jñāna) of the Jina, contains absolute truth (samyag-jñāna). Examples are given of Jain intolerance of others, based on nonphilosophical literacy and historical evidence, before returning to the issue of Jain tolerance for and curiosity about non-Jain philosophical positions, in an attempt to ground future discussions of Jain tolerance and intolerance on a fuller range of Jain data and not on ideological formulations inadequately grounded in historical analysis. (shrink)

Analysing feminist responses to the (mainstream) media coverage of the sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, this article shows how a theoretical concept that is used to frame feminist arguments can influence the strength of those arguments. German-speaking media extensively reported on the large number of sexual assaults against women that happened during that night in Cologne. The dominant narrative in those media reports dwells on the circumstance that the arrested suspects all had a refugee or migrant (...) background, which assisted right-wing politics in re-creating a racist stereotype about male refugees and migrants being a threat to western women. Feminist responses to that media discourse insisted that rape culture was a cross-cultural phenomenon and that media as well as political analyses of the assaults need to take into account an understanding of intersectionality. Based on a content analysis of twenty-five feminist texts about the events of ‘Cologne’, I argue that the application of the concept of intersectionality created contradictions and argumentative voids within the – otherwise strong – feminist arguments because it conflated sexist and racist dynamics, which were both present in the context of ‘Cologne’ but not always intersecting. I further argue that these contradictions unintentionally aided the right-wing co-option of feminist demands concerning ‘Cologne’ and I suggest that the theoretical concept of femonationalism is better equipped to analyse events like ‘Cologne’. (shrink)

In many scientific fields, sparseness and indirectness of empirical evidence pose fundamental challenges to theory development. Theories of the evolution of human cognition provide a guiding example, where the targets of study are evolutionary processes that occurred in the ancestors of present-day humans. In many cases, the evidence is both very sparse and very indirect (e.g., archaeological findings regarding anatomical changes that might be related to the evolution of language capabilities); in other cases, the evidence is less sparse but still (...) very indirect (e.g., data on cultural transmission in groups of contemporary humans and non-human primates). From examples of theoretical and empirical work in this domain, we distill five virtuous practices that scientists could aim to satisfy when evidence is sparse or indirect: (i) making assumptions explicit, (ii) making alternative theories explicit, (iii) pursuing computational and formal modelling, (iv) seeking external consistency with theories of related phenomena, and (v) triangulating across different forms and sources of evidence. Thus, rather than inhibiting theory development, sparseness or indirectness of evidence can catalyze it. To the extent that there are continua of sparseness and indirectness that vary across domains and that the principles identified here always apply to some degree, the solutions and advantages proposed here may generalise to other scientific domains. (shrink)