0. Relativistic Content In standard semantics, propositional content, whether it be the content of utterances or mental states, has a truth-value relative only to a possible world. For example, the content of my utterance of ‘Jim is sitting now’ is true just in case Jim is sitting at the time of utterance in the actual world, and the content of my belief that Alice will give a talk tomorrow is true just in case Alice will give a talk on the (...) day following the occurrence of my belief state in the actual world. Let us call propositional content which has a truth-value relative only to a possible world ‘non-relativistic content’. Non-relativistic content can be treated as either structured or unstructured. On the unstructured-content view, non-relativistic content is a set of possible worlds and bears the truth-value true just in case the actual world is a member of that set. For example, the content of my utterance of ‘Jim is working now’ at time t is the set of worlds in which Jim is working at t, and this content is true just in case the actual world is among those worlds. On the structured-content view, non-relativistic content is a set or conglomeration of properties and/or objects, where properties are features which objects possess regardless of who considers or observes them and regardless of when they are being considered or observed. Such properties are said to be (or represent) functions from possible worlds to extensions. Relative to a possible world they determine a set of objects instantiating the property. For example, relative to the actual world the property of being human determines the set of actual humans. Not all content is non-relativistic. Let us say that propositional content is relativistic just in case it possesses a truth-value only relative to a centered world. A centered world is a possible world in which an individual and a time are marked, where the marked individual.. (shrink)

David Lewis argues that centered worlds give us a way to capture de se, or self-locating, contents in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. In recent years, centered worlds have also gained other uses in areas ranging widely from metaphysics to ethics. In this paper, I raise a problem for centered worlds and discuss the costs and benefits of different solutions. My investigation into the nature of centered worlds brings out potentially problematic implicit commitments of (...) the theories that employ them. In addition, my investigation shows that the conception of centered worlds widely attributed to David Lewis is not only problematic, but in fact not his. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Relativistic Content The Argument from Primitive Colors The Argument from the Inverted Spectrum The Argument from Dual Looks The Argument from Duplication Conclusion References.

Recent descendants of David Lewis, such as Stephen Torre, Dilip Ninan, and Dirk Kindermann have utilized multi-centered propositions, which are roughly sets of possible worlds centered on a sequence of individuals, to characterize the content of attitudes. In an attempt to explain counterfactual attitudes such as wishing and imagining, Ninan (2012, 2013) developed a more fine-grained characterization of multi-centered propositions than others in the multi-centered camp. While Ninan provides a systematic explanation of the nature of de se attitudes (attitudes (...) one expresses with first-person pronouns like ‘I’ or ‘me’), the nature of other types of indexical attitudes (attitudes one expresses with indexical terms like ‘you,’ ‘today,’ ‘now,’) is not explored. This paper does two things. First, it demonstrates how we can account for indexical attitudes within Ninan’s framework. This, however, has the consequence of generating propositions of limited accessibility of sorts, which in turn conflict with a received and simple model of linguistic communication. According to this simple model, successful communication consists of the transmission of mental content from speaker to hearer. Second, in light of this conflict, the paper proposes an adjustment to Ninan’s theory in order to avoid commitment to propositions of limited accessibility, and thus preserve the shareability of attitudinal content from speaker to hearer. (shrink)

Counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing create a problem for the standard formal semantic theory of de re attitude ascriptions. I show how the problem can be avoided if we represent an agent's attitudinal possibilities using "multi-centered worlds", possible worlds with multiple distinguished individuals, each of which represents an individual with whom the agent is acquainted. I then present a compositional semantics for de re ascriptions according to which singular terms are "assignment-sensitive" expressions and attitude verbs are (...) "assignment shifters". (shrink)

Two lines of investigation into the nature of mental content have proceeded in parallel until now. The first looks at thoughts that are attributable to collectives, such as bands' beliefs and teams' desires. So far, philosophers who have written on collective belief, collective intentionality, etc. have primarily focused on third-personal attributions of thoughts to collectives. The second looks at de se, or self-locating, thoughts, such as beliefs and desires that are essentially about oneself. So far, philosophers who have written on (...) the de se have primarily focused on de se thoughts of individuals. This paper looks at where these two lines of investigations intersect: collective de se thoughts, such as bands' and teams' beliefs and desires that are essentially about themselves. There is a surprising problem at this intersection: the most prominent framework for modeling de se thoughts, the framework of centered worlds, cannot model a special class of collective de se thoughts. A brief survey of this problem's solution space shows that collective de se thoughts pose a new challenge for modeling mental content. (shrink)

I suggest a way of extending Stalnaker’s account of assertion to allow for centered content. In formulating his account, Stalnaker takes the content of assertion to be uncentered propositions: entities that are evaluated for truth at a possible world. I argue that the content of assertion is sometimes centered: the content is evaluated for truth at something within a possible world. I consider Andy Egan’s proposal for extending Stalnaker’s account to allow for assertions with centered content. I argue that Egan’s (...) account does not succeed. Instead, I propose an account on which the contents of assertion are identified with sets of multi-centered worlds. I argue that such a view not only provides a plausible account of how assertions can have centered content, but also preserves Stalnaker’s original insight that successful assertion involves the reduction of shared possibilities. (shrink)

The Centred View offers an account of the connection between imagination and possibility that combines the centred world framework with some allegedly appealing intuitions regarding our persistence over time. In particular, Dilip Ninan suggests that the Centred View has the theoretical advantage of respecting our intuitions about cases of personal identity in certain imaginative scenarios while also being compatible with physicalism. Unfortunately, the Centred View faces a series of serious objections and should ultimately be rejected.

It was pointed out, first by Robert Stalnaker, then also by Andy Egan, that David Lewis’s model of centered-worlds contents has undesired consequences for communication of de se contents. The recent years have seen a number of attempts to save the model by amending it to handle de se communication. Proposals include the appeal to sequences of individuals in the centers, to ersatz classical propositions, and to operations of “re-centering”. The authors are Dilip Ninan and Stephan Torre, Sarah Moss (...) and Max Kölbel, and Alan Gibbard and Clas Weber. The present paper discusses these attempts. The conclusion is that they fail. (shrink)

This paper explores, through empirical research, how values, engineering practices, and technological design decisions shape one another in the development of privacy technologies. We propose the concept of “privacy worlds” to explore the values and design practices of the engineers of one of the world’s most notable privacy technologies: the Tor network. By following Tor’s design and development we show a privacy world emerging—one centered on a construction of privacy understood through the topology of structural power in the Internet (...) backbone. This central “cipher” discourse renders privacy as a problem that can be “solved” through engineering, allowing the translation and representation of different groups of imagined users, adversaries, and technical aspects of the Internet in the language of the system. It also stabilizes a “flattened,” neutralized conception of privacy, risking stripping it of its political and cultural depth. We argue for an enriched empirical focus on design practices in privacy technologies, both as sites where values and material power are shaped, and as a place where the various worlds that will go on to cluster around them—of users, maintainers, and others—are imagined and reconciled. (shrink)

I argue that strong representationalism, the view that for a perceptual experience to have a certain phenomenal character just is for it to have a certain representational content (perhaps represented in the right sort of way), encounters two problems: the dual looks problem and the duplication problem. The dual looks problem is this: strong representationalism predicts that how things phenomenally look to the subject reflects the content of the experience. But some objects phenomenally look to both have and not have (...) certain properties, for example, my bracelet may phenomenally look to be circular-shaped and oval-shaped (and hence non-circularshaped). So, if strong representationalism is true, then the content of my experience ought to represent my bracelet as being both circular-shaped and non-circular-shaped. Yet, intuitively, the content of my experience does not represent my bracelet as being both circular-shaped and non-circular-shaped. The duplication problem is this. On a standard conception of content, spatio-temporally distinct experiences and experiences had by distinct subjects may differ in content despite the fact that they are phenomenally indistinguishable. But this undermines the thesis that phenomenal character determines content. I argue that the two problems can be solved by applying a version of an idea from David Chalmers, which is to recognize the existence of genuinely centered properties in the content of perceptual experience. (shrink)

Everettian quantum mechanics tells us that the fundamental dynamics of the universe are deterministic. So what are the `probabilities' that the Born rule describes? One popular answer has been to treat these probabilities as rational credences. A recent alternative, Isaac Wilhelm's centered Everett Interpretation (CEI), takes the Born probabilities to be centered chances: the objective chances that some centered propositions are true. Thus, the CEI challenges the `orthodox assumption’ that fundamental physical laws concern only uncentered facts. I provide three arguments (...) against the centered Everett Interpretation. First, I argue that the CEI is in apparent tension with a significant motivation for adopting Everettian quantum mechanics: rejecting the attribution of special significance to observers or agents in fundamental physics. I suggest the CEI can avoid this tension, but only at the cost of sacrificing its central claim that there are objective chances in an Everettian multiverse. My second argument concerns the CEI’s claim that the centered Born rule is a fundamental physical law. I provide two plausible notions of fundamentality for physical laws, and I argue that the centered Born rule satisfies neither. My final argument is that the CEI’s branch-relative laws cannot explain or constrain an agent’s rational credences in the way that the CEI claims. (shrink)

Moore, Gerard Review of: Sackcloth and ashes: Penance and penitence in a self-centred world. The Bloomsbury lent book 2014, by Anne Widdecombe, London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 181, $19.99; Looking through the cross: The archbishop of Canterbury's lent book 2014, by Graham Tomlin,, pp. 215, $24.99.

The consequentializing project relies on agentcentered value (aka agent-relative value), but many philosophers find the idea incomprehensible or incoherent. Discussions of agent-centered value often model it with a theory that assigns distinct better-than rankings of states of affairs to each agent, rather than assigning a single ranking common to all. A less popular kind of model uses a single ranking, but takes the value-bearing objects to be properties (sets of centered worlds) rather than states of affairs (sets of (...) class='Hi'>worlds). There are rhetorical, presentational differences between these kinds of models, but are there also structural differences? Do the two kinds of models differ in their capacity to represent normative theories? Despite an initial appearance of equivalence, the two kinds of models are different. The single ranking of properties has greater representational power; its representations contain more information. The main question I address in this article is whether this extra information is useful, in the sense that it distinguishes between normative views that we think are really different, or whether it is just junk information. (shrink)

Previous work in Game Studies has centered on several loci of investigation in seeking to understand virtual gameworlds. First, researchers have scrutinized the concept of the virtual world itself and how it relates to the idea of “the magic circle”. Second, the field has outlined various forms of experienced “presence”. Third, scholarship has noted that the boundaries between the world of everyday life and virtual worlds are porous, and that this fosters a multiplicity of identities as players identify both (...) with themselves-offline and themselves-in-game. Despite widespread agreement that these topics are targets for research, so far those working on these topics do not have mutually agreed-upon framework. Here we draw upon the work of Alfred Schutz to take up this call. We provide a phenomenological framework which can be used to describe the phenomena of interest to Game Studies, as well as open new avenues of inquiry, in a way acceptable and useful to all. This helps to distinguish the core of the field from the supplemental theoretical and critical commitments which characterize diverse approaches within the field. (shrink)

When one considers one's own persistence over time from the first-person perspective, it seems as if facts about one's persistence are "further facts," over and above facts about physical and psychological continuity. But the idea that facts about one's persistence are further facts is objectionable on independent theoretical grounds: it conflicts with physicalism and requires us to posit hidden facts about our persistence. This essay shows how to resolve this conflict using the idea that imagining from the first-person point of (...) view is a guide to centered possibility, a type of possibility analyzed in terms of centered worlds. (shrink)

We have become estranged from the cosmic movements, according to Bataille. We are confined by the error linked to the representation of ‘the stationary earth’. We have negated the immersive immanence of the whole and made nature into a fixed world of tools and things. How then do we recognise ourselves as part of the ‘rapture of the heavens’? Bataille urges us to consider life as a solar phenomenon, the free play of solar energy on the earth. This paper argues (...) how Bataille’s cosmic vision anticipates both planetary and ecological thinking. This entails a base materialism of difference based on a radical Nietzschean and Heraclitean theory of becoming and flux. This thought is developed along Bataillean concepts such as the movement of the whole, the labyrinthine, and compound beings, ipseity, as well as the concept of a communifying movement. This materialism paired with Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere lays the foundation for the laws of the general economy, which also constitutes an economy inclusive of a general ecology: a tragic vision of Gaia and Dionysos. Finally, poetry is considered, as a way we might reconnect with the universe and stimulate ecological imagination. (shrink)

This paper argues that expected utility theory for actions in chancy environments should be formulated in terms of centered chances. The subjective expected utility of an option A may be seen as a weighted sum of the utilities of A in different possible worlds, with weights being the credences that the agent assigns to these worlds. The utility of A in a given world is then definable as a weighted sum of the values of A’s different possible outcomes, (...) with weights being the conditional chances of these outcomes if A were performed. On the centered-chance view, the chances to be used as weights in the definition of utility are centered. Unlike ordinary chances, centered chances depend not only on what happens prior to the agent’s choice but also on the events that occur after the choice. Thus, to give an example, suppose that the action under consideration results in a bad outcome due to some event whose ordinary chance of occurring was very low at the time of choice. Then the utility of that action in the actual world could be high on the non-centered view, but on the centered view that utility is negative, since the centered chance of the event in question given the action was one, given that it did actually take place. A precise definition of centered chances is not easy to frame, but the concept can be made intuitively clear. The resulting decision theory is, in my opinion, philosophically more satisfactory than the extant proposals, even though it doesn’t differ much in its practical recommendations, with the exception of some rather peculiar cases. (shrink)

Gert Biesta has published his latest book, World-Centred Education: A View for the Present. He calls the book ‘the fifth volume of the “quintet”’ (Biesta 2022, p. ix)1. The relevant questions then...

Aesthetics is about sensations, experiences and emotions – but also about the rational mind that guides them. At the centre lies the feeling, sensing and thinking individual. The world unfolds from within oneself. No matter how remote a spot one chooses, it becomes the centre of the world; everyone travels with his own centre of the world, inevitably. He is, I am, the centrepoint.

This is a response to Hwa Yung's paper on the shift of the centre of the gravity of the church from the West into the Majority World. It reflects on the reasons why the church grew in the West, particularly in Europe, in the past and suggests what can be learned from the strengths of the Western church, as well as its weaknesses and failures. Three periods of Western church history are covered: The Early Church from AD 30 to AD (...) 330, the sixteenth century European Reformation, and the modern missionary expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the subsequent decline of the Western church. (shrink)

This paper explores Biesta’s recent revisiting of his iconic and at times contested notion of education as subjectification. First, I look at how Biesta presents his notion by attending to his answers to the criticisms it has faced concerning elusiveness, oversimplification, and self-centredness. Then, going beyond the declarative level, I explore a concrete example of education as subjectification from Biesta’s 2022 book, World-Centred Education. Analysing the example of Homer Lane and Jason, I examine the ambivalence between Biesta’s explicit statements (...) on subjectification as a form of spontaneous and non-coercive teaching aimed at cultivating freedom and the more complex picture that emerges from a close reading of the original story. From this analysis, I find important conceptual limitations to education as subjectification: it could conceal part of the institutional context of education and the teacher’s active role, and also reduce freedom to an individualistic concept. I thus conclude by suggesting that the language of subjectification should always be engaged with critically—but never in isolation—and with a stereoscopic optic in mind. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. The received picture of linguistic communication understands communication as the transmission of information from speaker's head to hearer's head. This picture is in conflict with the attractive Lewisian view of belief as self-location, which is motivated by de se attitudes – first-personal attitudes about oneself – as well as attitudes about subjective matters such as personal taste. In this paper, I provide a solution to the conflict that reconciles these views. I argue for an account of mental attitudes and (...) communication on which mental content and speech act content is understood as sets of multicentered worlds – roughly, possible worlds ‘centered’ on a sequence of individuals at a time. I develop a Stalnakerian model of communication based on multicentered worlds content, and I provide a suitable semantics for personal pronouns and predicates of personal taste. The resulting picture is one on which the point of conversation is the coordination of individual perspectives. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Some stage setting on the value of understanding words and plans Agreement and shared understandings Davidson's challenge to representation Are we confusing semantics and pragmatics? Why we need possible worlds Voyages through logical space How to finesse the issue in analytic ontology The need for centered worlds Getting information from sentences with centered content Saying things a new now that centering is in the story Where to now?

This chapter contains sections titled: Preamble The case of proper names The difference principle The ‘within a world’ version of the argument using the difference principle Sentences containing “actual” and “actually” Demonstrative adjectives Natural kind terms A passing comment on centering Where to from here?

Proposes a dynamic new approach to the production of knowledge on Africa, one that is global, multiple and heterogeneous, elucidating this through both discursive theoretical chapters and case histories.

Relativism offers an ingenious way of accommodating most of our intuitions about 'know': the truth-value of sentences containing 'know' is a function of parameters determined by a context of use and a context of assessment. This sort of double-indexing provides a more adequate account of the linguistic data involving 'know' than does standard contextualism. However, relativism has come under recent attack: it supposedly cannot account for the factivity of 'know', and it entails, counterintuitively, that circumstances of evaluation have features that (...) cannot be shifted by any intensional operator. I offer replies to these objections on behalf of the relativist. I then argue that a version of contextualism can account for the same data as relativism without relativizing sentence truth to contexts of assessment. This version of contextualism is thus preferable to relativism on methodological grounds. (shrink)

The Property Theory of attitudes holds that the contents of mental states --- especially de se states --- are properties. The "nonexistence problem" for the Property Theory holds that the theory gives the wrong consequences as to which worlds "fit" which mental states: which worlds satisfy desires, make beliefs true, and so on. If I desire to not exist, since there is no world where I have the property of not existing, my desire is satisfied in no (...) class='Hi'>worlds. In this paper I argue that the problem can be solved with a suitable account of how properties as mental states fit worlds. The solution relies on a distinction between to kinds of property-instantiation at worlds inspired by Fine's distinction between "inner" and "outer" truth. (shrink)

In Western medicine the interpretation prevails that mental illness is a psychological and/or biological disorder. Most important concepts in health psychology, such as sense of coherence, self‐efficacy, hope, or dispositional optimism are all very cognition and individual centered. In this individualized perspective, mental illness is constructed in such a way that it can be treated in a dyadic doctor–patient or therapist–patient relationship with the help of drugs or therapeutic techniques. In this article, I would like to develop a contrasting social (...) construction of mental illness. In Umbanda and Candomblé temples in Brazil, what is interpreted in the Western model as illness is understood as a “spiritual problem.” Here, the individual is constructed in relationship to the community, and individual health and healing is footed in moral‐spiritual orders. In presenting the details of my investigation, I will apply Grawe’s common factors as a foil for developing the link between mental illness and its social context. (shrink)

In addition to being uncertain about what the world is like, one can also be uncertain about one’s own spatial or temporal location in the world. My aim is to pose a problem arising from the interaction between these two sorts of uncertainty, solve the problem, and draw two lessons from the solution.

In response to the increasing interest in the cultural and historical interactions between the Mediterranean and Asia, Jesuit University Ignatianum in Cracow has established a Centre for Mediterranean and Oriental Studies. Over the centuries, the historical and cultural connections between the Mediterranean and Asian regions have been marked by a rich tapestry of interactions. These exchanges encompassed not only commercial activities but also religious, technological, and cultural aspects. Understanding these complex relationships is essential, particularly for defining the conditions for future (...) international cooperation. China, Korea, and Japan now play significant roles on the international stage. The Western world first encountered these societies at the dawn of the modern era. In the early phase of this contact, interactions primarily involved exchanges of ideas, with Jesuit missionaries playing a pivotal role. In the second half of the 19th century, cultural interactions were further influenced by political and economic factors, leading to partial Westernization of these societies. In the past three decades, tensions between Chinese and Western civilizations have emerged, largely driven by political and economic rivalries. These tensions are compounded by a deep crisis within Western civilization itself, marked by a weakening social fabric and diminishing sense of identity. This crisis is closely related to modern generations’ departure from Christian religion and Greco-Roman traditions, which historically bonded Western civilization. Cultural historians at Ignatianum have highlighted that Jesuit missionaries active in Northeast Asia during the 16th and 17th centuries—such as Poles Michał Boym, Jan Mikołaj Smogulecki, and Andrzej Rudomina— left behind a valuable archive of early contacts between Mediterranean civilization and the Asian world. A team of researchers at Ignatianum is currently examining these materials as part of grant projects under the Science for Society and National Science Development Program. (shrink)

What kind of thing do you believe when you believe that you are in a certain place, that it is a certain time, and that you are a certain individual? What happens if you get lost, or lose track of the time? Can you ever be unsure of your own identity? These are the kind of questions considered in my thesis. Beliefs about where, when and who you are are what are called in the literature de se, or self-locating beliefs. (...) This thesis examines how we can represent de se beliefs, and how we can reason about de se uncertainty. In the first part of the thesis, I present and motivate a specific account of the content of de se belief, based on the one given by David Lewis. On this account, the content of de se beliefs are centred propositions. I defend this view against a rival account, put forward by Robert Stalnaker, according to whom the content of de se beliefs are ordinary propositions. In the second part of the thesis, I explore how we can reason probabilistically about de se uncertainty. I start by defining probabilities over centred propositions, and investigate what probabilities mean in this context. As it turns out, all the main interpretations of probability can be extended to centred propositions. The only trouble seems to arise for the Bayesian principle of updating via conditionalization. After giving a diagnosis of the problem, I offer a solution by formulating a natural extension of conditionalization, which I argue preserves the essential features of Bayesian reasoning. In the final chapter, I apply my view and show that it leads to a natural resolution of a puzzle that is generally taken to be a test case for any account of centred updating. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Centre-pieceSarah Wood (bio)πoν σoν θαvατɛ τo κɛντρoν πoν σoν αδη τo νıκoςO death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?- St. Paul, 1st Letter to the Corinthians… on dit en anglais, self-centred. En vérité je rêve depuis toujours d’écrire un texte self-centred, je n’y suis jamais arrive, je tombe toujours sur les autres, cela finira par se savoir.- Jacques Derrida, ‘Mes chances’The word exists, (...) therefore the feeling exists.- Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.What makes a centre is something sharp: a goad, the point of a needle or the sting of an insect. A spur, peg, rivet or pin. One becomes aware of the possibility of a point, a douleur vive, a lively pain. For the word ‘centre’ is derived from the Greek for ‘sting.’Kentron can mean pain itself. The sting refers to an external cause of pain and to the pain as it is experienced, so it is not one but two; not two but one. And a kentron, even if it is pain and pains you or me, is not itself a perception. It arrives but it’s not given: we have to read and write towards it. For perception, as Derrida clarified in the discussion after giving ‘Structure, Sign and Play’: ‘is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language as a system of reference’(Macksey and Donato 272). Sometimes, in torment, and perhaps still looking for origin and presence, I go to the dictionary.But words have no centre. The dictionary tells me this. Figuratively a kentron is an incentive, a metaphorical goad. However there is no mention of kentron in the etymology of ‘incentive,’ which comes, according to the OED, from canere, to sing. An incentive is what makes you sing. A beautiful mistake, one suspects. But let’s make no mistake, our word kentron is the enchanted and enchanting and chance vibration of a tuning-fork in the nerves that is silence and song. It hits me-and-the-dictionary like lightning because it is part of poetry. What I am saying is: a centre has a particular relation to the part of us that is capable of feeling a desire to die. Hélène Cixous is very precise about this wish: ‘The desire to die is the desire to know; it is not the desire to disappear, and it is not suicide, it is the desire to enjoy’ (Cixous, Three Steps 34). It makes us two, she says. It follows from this, I think, that we have to be two to want to be part of the events that ensue when a poem strikes, to want to know silence from the inside. This kentron, this centre, doubles us up like a stitch.How is it possible to know and enjoy what is not? To expand on this question I can point you to two later texts by Derrida: ‘“Che cos’è la poesia?”,’ and Archive Fever. The former gives an account of poetry as ‘a stranger to all production, especially creation,’ and the latter discusses the Freudian death drive, which is ‘an aggression and a destruction’ of a particularly thorough kind (Derrida, ‘Che’ 233 / 232; Archive Fever 11). A poem enjoins its reader: ‘destroy me [détruis-moi], or rather render my support invisible to the outside, in the world … in any case do what must be done so that the provenance of the mark remains from now on unlocatable or unrecognizable.’ It will be as if the thing Freud calls the death drive had come along, working in silence ‘to destroy [détruire] the archive: on the condition of effacing, but also with a view to effacing its own “proper traces.”‘ (Derrida, Archive Fever 10 / Mal d’archive 24.) Destruction without ruin, without trace, unreadable, completely missing but not without love: what Derrida calls poematic experience entails the forbidden knowing and enjoyment of what never happens as a kind of phenomenal allure that never was, but is all the more taken to heart, loved... (shrink)

I hear the patter of little feet around the house, I expect Bruce. What I expect is a cat, a particular cat. If I heard such a patter in another house, I might expect a cat but no particular cat. What I expect then seems to be a Meinongian incomplete cat. I expect winter, expect stormy weather, expect to shovel snow, expect fatigue---a season, a phenomenon, an activity, a state. I expect that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. (...) This time what I expect is a state of affairs. If we let surface grammar be our guide, the objects of expectation seem quite a miscellany. The same goes for belief, since expectation is one kind of belief. The same goes for desire: I could want Bruce, want a cat but no particular cat, want winter, want stormy weather, want to shovel snow, want fatigue, or want that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. The same goes for other attitudes to the extent that they consist partly of beliefs or desires or lacks thereof. But the seeming diversity of objects might be an illusion. Perhaps the objects of attitudes are uniform in category, and it is our ways of speaking elliptically about these uniform objects that are diverse. That indeed is our consensus. We mostly think that the attitudes uniformly have propositions as their objects. That is why we speak habitually of "propositional attitudes.". (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the attempts to centre education in one of its three constitutive aspects that have long determined the discourse on the purpose and aims of education run the risk of one-sidedness. Theories of student-centred education have been in vogue for many centuries now, having been born out of a polemic against teacher-centred education which focuses on knowledge transfer. In turn, recent thing-centred or world-centred accounts of education polemicize against student-centred accounts (...) and their privileging of individual learning processes. However, each side of this multifaceted polemic is one-sided in its own way, and this has held back not only theories of education, but also educational practice. We argue that educational theorising that is not attentive to all three aspects and dimensions of educational practices – teacher, student, and world – will ultimately lead to a poorer understanding of the purpose and aims of education. Here, we argue with Hannah Arendt that educational love must be polyamorous. (shrink)

This article briefly examines six centres of learning and witness representing Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Zoroastrian and Muslim faiths. It explores the implications of five potential insights arising from these historical models for the Asian contexts of today. These insights are approached from the perspective of the Christian world view, but are equally applicable to other faiths. An attempt has been made to do two main things. First is to highlight historically the importance of pre-modern centres of learning and witness that (...) can perhaps also be called universities, or 'proto-universities'. There has also been the desire to encourage the 'Global South' in their history of education, and suggest implications for the future. (shrink)

Theologians speak of the silence of churches' prophetic voice in the 'new' South Africa, whilst the country features amongst the socio-economically most unequal countries in the world, and the urban areas in particular continue to be characterised by segregation. In this context I ask: where is liberation theology? I spell out my reading of some of the recent voices in the liberationist discourse. In dialogue with these scholars I, firstly, argue for the faith community to be made a conscious centre (...) of liberationist debates and praxis. Secondly, I do this by suggesting two theoretical building blocks for local faith communities that wish to grow in a liberationist fashion. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have been carrying out a certain amount of soul searching. In this context, the term “professionalism” gets thrown around. The thought is that too much of what we philosophers do looks inward at the work of colleagues instead of outwards at the issues. Sometimes it can seem that it is more important for one's career to demonstrates that one is on top of the literature rather than on top of the problems the literature is addressing. There is, however, (...) a kind of professionalism that we should applaud. It consists of being sufficiently on top of a range of different areas of philosophical inquiry to see key connections between different areas. Although progress in the sense of convergence in doctrines is nothing for philosophers to write home about, I think we are making progress in seeing connections. (shrink)