Avi Shulman has taught thousands of people how to look at life and see positive ways to make everything better. In this precious collection of his astute observations, he shares a wealth of wisdom in his concise and simple manner that always hits the target and makes the reader ask himself, why didn't I think of that? With lessons on assuming responsibility, setting attainable goals, creating a warm atmosphere at home, and avoiding the feeling of burnout, Vitamins for the Spirit (...) is a joy to read and an incredible investment in your future happiness and success. (shrink)

One of the mantras of progressive education is that genuine learning ought to be exciting and pleasurable, rather than joyless and painful. To a significant extent, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is associated with this mantra. In a theme of Emile that is often neglected in the educational literature, however, Rousseau stated that “to suffer is the first thing [Emile] ought to learn and the thing he will most need to know.” Through a discussion of Rousseau's argument for the importance of an education (...) in suffering, Avi Mintz contends that the reception of Rousseau by progressives suggests a detrimental misstep in the history of educational thought, a misstep that we should recognize and correct today. We ought to revive the progressive tradition of distinguishing the valuable educational pains from the harmful ones, even if we disagree with the particular types of pain that Rousseau identified as educationally valuable. (shrink)

Ethical theories do not always focus sufficiently on the correct characterization of morally bad choices. Standard accounts include: acts that are unprincipled, low‐utility, badly directed, or in violation of contracts. These standard accounts of immorality are inadequate. The concept of vices – a key part of virtue theory – offers a better account of bad choice. Most virtue ethics focuses on the warm vices (greed, lust, pride, anger, acquisitiveness …), but the cool vices – the vices of insensitivity – may (...) pose as many dangers to human life and happiness. I discuss a range of insensitivities and the ways in which they can infiltrate personality, often spreading so as to affect the entire character. I address the objection that insensitivity is a weak account of bad choice since insensitivity is often an involuntary characteristic. I borrow from Adam Smith the concept of ‘piacularity’ to explain how involuntary habits (and the acts they cause) can be bad despite the fact they are not culpable. (shrink)

Expected utility theory often falls silent, even in cases where the correct rankings of options seems obvious. For instance, it fails to compare the Pasadena game to the Altadena game, despite the latter turning out better in every state. Decision theorists have attempted to fill these silences by proposing various extensions to expected utility theory. As I show in this paper, such extensions often fall silent too, even in cases where the correct ranking is intuitively obvious. But we can extend (...) the theory further than has been done before---I offer a new extension, Invariant Value Theory, which deals neatly with those problem cases and also satisfies various desirable conditions. But other prima facie desirable conditions, including Independence, the theory violates. Is this a problem for the proposal? It may not be---in a new impossibility result, I show that no theory can satisfy Independence in full generality without violating several other conditions that together seem just as plausible. (shrink)

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent—absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal (...) fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not. · 1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath , p. 79.· 2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus and narro from the Sanskrit root gnâ . The same root yields γνωριμος : see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists. Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Cosmopolitan education aims to transmit cosmopolitan forms of life in order to participate morally in the world community. The primary characteristics of this cosmopolitan education are its acceptance of the shared humanity of all persons as a fact of human existence and as a motivating guide for human interaction, and the requirement of democratic inclusion in deliberations of the governance of those interactions, including morality. Such an education in cosmopolitan morality requires means that befit its core components. This paper contrasts (...) the concepts of strict and moderate cosmopolitanism, empirical and deliberative morality, and structural and dispositional cosmopolitanism to show that the moderate, inclusive and deliberative processes of deliberative dispositional cosmopolitanism are more suited to cosmopolitan education in morality than strong, empirical-focused structural cosmopolitan efforts. Though strong, structural and empirically based forms may be more likely to guarantee preferred outcomes in the learning of specific morals or the implementation of institutional norms, they are also more likely to run afoul of the core components of cosmopolitanism because they will privilege outcomes over processes, and are thus more likely to be less inclusive and more coercive. In contrast, and even though they are less certain to guarantee preferred moral outcomes or actions, moderate, deliberative dispositional forms of cosmopolitan education embody the morality they seek to inform, and are more likely to find sustained internalised support over time. (shrink)

Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning - its production, distribution, and consumption - in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in the content of the form, in the way our narrative capacities transforms the present into a (...) fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have desceneded. (shrink)

A number of recent studies have examined the sources of conflict surrounding the presence of Muslim minorities in Western contexts. This article builds upon, and challenges, some of the principal findings of this literature through analyzing popular opposition to mosques in Badalona, a historically industrial city in Catalonia where several of the most vigorous anti-mosque campaigns in Spain have occurred. Drawing upon 46 semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observation conducted over a two-year period, I argue that opposition to mosques in Badalona (...) is not reducible to anti-Muslim prejudice or fears of Islamic extremism. Rather, it is rooted in powerful associations drawn between Islam, immigration, and a series of social problems affecting the character of communal life and the quality of cherished public spaces in the city. These associations are expressed through local narratives that emphasize a sharp rupture between a glorified ethnically homogeneous past of community and solidarity, and a troublesome multicultural present fraught with social insecurity and disintegration. I show how the construction of these “rupture narratives” has entailed active memory work that minimizes the significance of prior social cleavages and conflicts, and selectively focuses on disjuncture over continuity with the past. I also highlight how these narratives have been reinforced by strong socio-spatial divisions, which have intensified contestations over public space and led to the integration of mosque disputes into broader struggles over social justice and public recognition. (shrink)

Landscapes of historiography in Christian social ethics -- A critical self-reflexive historiography for Christian ethics -- Metanarrative habits are hard to break -- Reevaluating Tertullian and the virtue of patience -- Continuity, discontinuity, and the quest for justice.

Language for Learning in the Primary School is the long awaited second edition of _Language for Learning_, first published in 2004 and winner of the NASEN/TES Book Award for Teaching and Learning in 2005. This handbook has become an indispensable resource, packed full of practical suggestions on how to support 5-11 year old children with speech, language and communication difficulties. Colour coded throughout for easy referencing, this unique book supports inclusive practice by helping teachers to: Identify children with speech, language (...) and communication needs Understand speech, language and communication skills Consider roles and responsibilities at primary school Plan a differentiated and adapted curriculum Consider the language demands across subjects Adopt a whole school approach Make use of a wide range of positive strategies Empower children to access the curriculum Language for Learning in the Primary School comes complete with a wealth of photocopiable resources, giving teachers and teaching assistants the confidence to help children with SLCN more effectively in mainstream settings. It will also be an extremely useful resource for speech and language therapists, specialist teachers and educational psychologists. (shrink)

This paper reviews the social scientific literature on biometric surveillance, with particular attention to its potential harms. It maps the harms caused by biometric surveillance, traces their theoretical origins, and brings these harms together in one integrative framework to elucidate their cumulative power. Demonstrating these harms with examples from the United States, the European Union, and Israel, I propose that biometric surveillance be addressed, evaluated and reframed as a new form of control rather than simply another means of inspection. I (...) conclude by delineating three features of biometric technologies—complexity, objectivity, and agency—that demonstrate their social power and draw attention to the importance of studying biometric surveillance. (shrink)

This book opens by providing the historical context of Plato’s engagement with education, including an overview of Plato’s life as student and educator. The author organizes his discussion of education in the Platonic Corpus around Plato’s images, both the familiar – the cave, the gadfly, the torpedo fish, and the midwife – and the less familiar – the intellectual aviary, the wax tablet, and the kindled fire. These educational images reveal that, for Plato, philosophizing is inextricably linked to learning; that (...) is, philosophy is fundamentally an educational endeavor. The book concludes by exploring Plato’s legacy in education, discussing the use of the “Socratic method” in schools and the Academy’s foundational place in the history of higher education. The characters in Plato’s dialogues often debate – sometimes with great passion – the purpose of education and the nature of learning. The claims about education in the Platonic corpus are so provocative, nuanced, insightful, and controversial that educational philosophers have reckoned with them for millennia. (shrink)

This paper analyses the activities of five organizations shaping the debate over the global governance of genome editing in order to assess current approaches to public engagement (PE). We compare the recommendations of each group with its own practices. All recommend broad engagement with the general public, but their practices vary from expert-driven models dominated by scientists, experts, and civil society groups to citizen deliberation-driven models that feature bidirectional consultation with local citizens, as well as hybrid models that combine elements (...) of both approaches. Only one group practices PE that seeks community perspectives to advance equity. In most cases, PE does little more than record already well-known views held by the most vocal groups, and thus is unlikely to produce more just or equitable processes or policy outcomes. Our exploration of the strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities of current forms of PE suggests a need to rethink both “public” and “engagement.”. (shrink)

Aggregative moral theories face a series of devastating problems when we apply them in a physically realistic setting. According to current physics, our universe is likely _infinitely large_, and will contain infinitely many morally valuable events. But standard aggregative theories are ill-equipped to compare outcomes containing infinite total value. So, applied in a realistic setting, they cannot compare any outcomes a real-world agent must ever choose between. This problem has been discussed extensively, and non-standard aggregative theories proposed to overcome it. (...) This paper addresses a further problem of similar severity. Physics tells us that, in our universe, how remotely in time an event occurs is _relative_. But our most promising aggregative theories, designed to compare outcomes containing infinitely many valuable events, are sensitive to how remote in time those events are. As I show, the evaluations of those theories are then relative too. But this is absurd; evaluations of outcomes must be absolute! So we must reject such theories. Is this objection fatal for all aggregative theories, at least in a relativistic universe like ours? I demonstrate here that, by further modifying these theories to fit with the physics, we can overcome it. (shrink)

How might we extend aggregative moral theories to compare infinite worlds? In particular, how might we extend them to compare worlds with infinite spatial volume, infinite temporal duration, and infinitely many morally valuable phenomena? When doing so, we face various impossibility results from the existing literature. For instance, the view we adopt can endorse the claim that worlds are made better if we increase the value in every region of space and time, or that they are made better if we (...) increase the value obtained by every person. But they cannot endorse both claims, so we must choose. In this paper I show that, if we choose the latter, our view will face serious problems such as generating incomparability in many realistic cases. Opting instead to endorse the first claim, I articulate and defend a spatiotemporal, expansionist view of infinite aggregation. Spatiotemporal views such as this do face some difficulties, but I show that these can be overcome. With modification, they can provide plausible comparisons in cases that we care about most. (shrink)

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

Avi Sion's book The Logic of Causation (2010) could not include all relevant tables (which either justified or applied various doctrines in the book), due to their sizes or quantity. These additional tables were made available to interested readers at time of publication in the author's website The Logician. The present 'Annex' collects in one pdf file the numerous original pdf files, to facilitate download. The file is almost 0.5 Gb in size, and contains almost 108,000 pages.

This commentary builds on Haico te Kulve and Arie Rip’s ( 2011 ) notion of “engagement agents,” individuals that must be able to move between multiple dimensions, or “levels” of research, innovation, and policy processes. The commentary compares and contrasts the role of the engagement agent within the Constructive Technology Assessment and integration approaches, and suggests that on-site integration research represents one way to transform both social and natural scientists into competent and informed “engagement agents,” a new generation of researchers (...) that possess the knowledge and capacities to forge “novel linkages” between the oftentimes disparate terrains of science, politics, and policy. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical discussion of the views of Merleau-Ponty and contemporary enactivism concerning the phenomenological dimension of the continuity between life and mind. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s views are at odds with those of enactivists. Merleau-Ponty only applied phenomenological descriptions to the life-worlds of sentient animals with sensorimotor systems, contrary to those enactivists who apply them to all organisms. I argue that we should follow Merleau-Ponty on this point, as the use of phenomenological concepts to describe the “experience” (...) of creatures with no phenomenal consciousness has generated confusion about the role of phenomenology in enactivism and prompted some enactivists to ignore or turn away from phenomenology. Further, Merleau-Ponty also emphasizes the stark distinction between the vital order of animals and the human order to a greater degree than many phenomenologically inspired enactivists. I discuss his view in connection with recent research in developmental and comparative psychology. Despite the striking convergence of Merleau-Ponty’s visionary thought with the most recent findings, I argue that he somewhat overstates the difference between human experience and cognition, and that of our closest animal kin. I outline a developmental-phenomenological account of how the child enters the human order in the first years of life, thereby further mitigating the stark difference between orders. This results in a modified Merleau-Pontian version of the phenomenological dimension of life-mind continuity which I recommend to enactivism. (shrink)

Violating the human status : the evil of genocide and crimes against humanity -- Superfluous humanity : the evil of global poverty -- Citizens of nowhere : the evil of statelessness -- Effacing the political : the evil of neoliberal globalization.

In a recent article, ‘Why lockdown of the elderly is not ageist and why levelling down equality is wrong’, Savulescu and Cameron argue that a selective lockdown of older people is not ageist because it would treat people unequally based on morally relevant differences. This response argues that a selective lockdown of older people living in long-term care homes would be unjust because it would allow the expansive liberties of the general public to undermine the basic liberties of older people, (...) and because it would discriminate on the basis of extrinsic disadvantages. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses correctly asserts that the attempts of the human sciences of the past five hundred years to represent the world in language have failed because these sciences did not recognize the opacity or thingness of language itself. Foucault pretends to have written a plotless anti-history of the human sciences which stresses the discontinuities that characterize the succession of one "'episteme" by another. In fact, he has explained these vicissitudes by the changes of tropological strategy (...) that underlie epistemic shifts. Although he disavows the movement, Foucault's interest in revealing the poetic basis of all linguistic representations of reality places him in the eschatological wing of the structuralist establishment. (shrink)

Highlighting the importance of historical methods for Christian ethics, this essay begins with a general overview of recent trends in historiography that culminate in the ideologically attuned and textually based work of Elizabeth Clark. Clark's work provides the basis in the second part of the essay that identifies Constantinianism as a dominant master narrative in the work of Stanley Hauerwas through which he rereads Tertullian's concept of patience and undergirds his call for pacifism. The final section explores the dangers of (...) such master narratives for Christian ethical analysis and calls instead for a critical, collaborative, and self-reflexive approach to history more capable of reconciling power, privilege, and marginalization. (shrink)

Natural sociability and the basic features of human nature stood at the centre of Thomas Abbt's confrontation with conjectural history, the popular eighteenth-century mode of reconstructing the evolution of human culture. Abbt (1738–1766) criticised conjectural histories due to their arbitrary character, and opted for a synthetic approach consisting of both sacred and secular history. He suggested that the anthropology of Genesis should be accepted as the starting point for a conjectural history, since it left ample room for further questions and (...) speculations. Yet his own perspective on human nature and its evolution remained naturalistic, as attested by his divergent interpretations of the confusion of tongues at Babel. Attempting to shed new light on the lesser-known elements of Abbt's work, the essay links his views on the Bible and conjectural history to his debate with Moses Mendelssohn over the constitution and destination of man. In this debate, both Mendelssohn and Abbt dealt with the contemporary controversy over the natural or artificial character of sociability, self-interest, and fellow-feeling. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Persuasion and RhetoricThomas M. ConleyPersuasion and Rhetoric. Carlo Michelstaedter. Translated with an introduction and commentary by Russell Scott Valentino, Cinzia Sartini Blum, and David J. Depew : New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. 178. $32.50, hardcover.Readers of this book will not find much in it about the "persuasion" and "rhetoric" they might expect to read about in this journal. Nor will they find in it the Appendici (...) Critiche that appear in the original text, Michelstaedter's thesis entitled I concetti di persuasione e rettorica [sic] in Platone e Aristotele, which he submitted to the Faculty of Letters in Florence in 1910. But the version printed here by the editors (hereafter "VBD," as there is no indication of who did what) will no doubt appeal to those who dislike Plato and Aristotle, have the idea that something better can be found in the Presocratics, and claim allegiance to such philosophers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Heidegger of Being and Time; for this is a book about the problem of attaining a sort of existential "authenticity" and not, in my view, "one of the most trenchant and influential studies in modern rhetoric," as the liner notes claim. To be sure, Persuasione e rettorica has been the subject of decades of contentious scholarship in Italy. But most of that scholarship (and that displayed in the headnotes provided by VBD) concerns the sources of Michelstaedter's ideas and his true debt to the likes of Parmenides and Heraclitus, both of whom figure significantly in his worldview."Persuasione"—and I use the Italian here to avoid confusion—might best be understood to mean a sort of self-possession, being at one with oneself and with the world, or what I called before "authenticity." Michelstaedter himself never makes an effort to define it, for to do that would be to turn it into the sort of abstraction that Michelstaedter opposes. Defining things, as we learn from the Appendici, is the sort of thing philosophers like Aristotle and Hegel do in an act of bad faith or delusion. "Persuasione" is, by contrast, something lived, not understood—or, more precisely, it is a state to which true philosophers (Parmenides and Socrates, for instance) aspire with the full understanding that, like the limit approached asymptotically by an hyperbola (see 48, 109), it can never be attained. That understanding was replaced by the false consciousness represented by the "rettorica" taught by the Sophists and Plato (along with his disciple, Aristotle), and continues to the present day. This account is hinted at in the "Historical Example" allegory of the present text (77–84); but is more fully "documented" in a section of the long Appendix 2, "Note alla triste historia" (107–56 in the 1972 Raschini edition), entitled "La decadenza" (129–35). [End Page 170]"Rettorica," then, is the name Michelstaedter gives to the whole range of ingenious linguistic devices we use to convince ourselves that we are satisfied, fulfilled, secure in our selves and in the world—i.e., "persuaded"—when we are only suffering from a delusion created by language itself. It is rettorica that gives rise to "commonplaces" that masquerade as true understanding, to the impostures of "science" in the name of "objectivity" (see 89–95), to technology and machines, to "education" (110–11, 148–52), and indeed to every manifestation of bourgeois ideology (see the "dialogue" at 104–6, for instance). Rettorica is a kind of hypocrisy, deception, and (self-) flattery; an instrument of "the community of the wicked" (100, 143), a collection of "ornaments of the darkness" (e.g., 137, 139).The problem we face in acknowledging all this is, of course, that the attempt to articulate it has to be done in language; and language, by its very nature in all its semantic and syntactic elements (the point of Appendix 1, Raschini, 103–6), subverts true "persuasione." How can one "speak truth to authenticity," so to speak, when one begins by "giving a name to" its contrary, "rettorica"?"Trenchant," in any event, is hardly the right term to describe Persuasion and Rhetoric. "Mordant" or "plangent" might be closer to the mark. And as for its influence on "modern rhetoric... (shrink)