In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Charm and Speed: Virtuosity in the Performing ArtsAnthony J. PalmerV. A. Howard, Charm and Speed: Virtuosity in the Performing Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 2008)There may be one other book on virtuosity, but nothing that approaches the depth of argument put forth by V. A. Howard in Charm and Speed. As the author states, “[t]his book offers an interpretation, analysis, and reconstruction of the concept of virtuosity which (...) plays so prominent a role in historical, critical, and theoretical discussions of artistic performance.”1 The book is not an easy read, however, because of Howard’s customarily esoteric vocabulary. While the writing is in fine style, there are too many occasions where the reader may be hampered by having to pause to reconsider what was stated, especially in some of the longer sentences, or because a dictionary consultation is warranted.Nevertheless, this is a must-read for voice and instrumental students and their teachers, coaches, and accompanists. Moreover, this book is a must-read for anyone working with performing artists; Howard covers the performance arts broadly, including theatre and dance as well. If you only surmise what virtuosity is, you will become intimately aware of its meaning and all its ramifications.Its casual use suggests that virtuosity can be found everywhere, from auto mechanics to baristas and even include, as Howard describes, cheetahs on the hunt and the kill. And although the cheetah is perfectly suited to find food to feed her [End Page 101] cubs, the intentional development of techniques and a conscious plan to attack her prey is questionable; she acts out of instinct. We can admire various manifestations of excellence, but their qualities do not measure up to the characteristics of virtuosity. Excellence in execution is not by such virtue virtuosic.The fact is performance in the arts requires a special understanding of virtuosity that must be narrowly applied under appropriate conditions. The ten chapters comprising the book deal with every facet of virtuosity in performance and clarify the issues forcefully and accurately. Charm and Speed is a brief treatise of only 134 pages, plus notes and a 3-page appendix. But in those chapters lie explanations to which most professional performers, teachers, and subsidiary personnel may need to give serious consideration. On the other end of the spectrum, for those who may require a less than keenly argued thesis, how much does one really need to know about virtuosity to enjoy fine, but lesser, performance? Some differences do need to be noted, however, and confusing virtuosity with other artistic appellations could be eliminated.At the outset, virtuosity can easily be confused with creativity, but the latter is more general while “a judgment of virtuosity is necessarily grounded in the observables of execution.”2 Howard’s outline of the conditions of virtuosity is carried throughout the discussion. Three parts comprise any consideration: 1) the performing individual or group “inclusive of training and manifest talent,” judged by experts; 2) the domain of the performance—acting, dancing, and playing the violin—must be specified; and 3) the audience comprised of a general audience and “critics, colleagues, and institutions” must render appropriate judgment.3 Virtuosity is not a single state but requires both process and achievement.Howard narrows his discussion on virtuosity to those in the performing arts, “to those who play instruments, or sing or act, dance or conduct,”4 with no other reason or intention but to render the artwork with unique interpretations at the highest level possible. Howard restricts discourse to allographic5 works in the Western tradition, an important distinction that I had considered questionable at first, but came to realize that virtuosity considered on a wider scale could be overly complicated. My experience with Japanese performing art, for example, would have to examine, Nô, Bunraku, Kabuki theatre, and traditional vocal and instrumental performance, among other things, all quite complex in their own right. Can a puppet in Bunraku be a virtuoso, or would it be the puppeteer? Further, Korean art forms such as pansori and African arts, where some cultures are communal rather than performed by superb practitioners, would all have to be considered. When the whole world is examined... (shrink)

This Teacher Education Project is an intervention research aimed at creating new school roles for educating students as readers and writers as well as citizens. The methodological framework was based on Vygotsky’s discussions of method as praxis, as well as on both the Marxist practical–materialistic–revolutionary activity and Engeström’s extensions of Cultural Historical Activity Theory. The work at school was motivated by students’ limited awareness of reading and writing. The goal was to involve the school as a community (...) in understanding and transforming the ways in which reading and writing were addressed in classrooms. The methodology used for organizing and carrying out the project was devised so as to allow for three activity systems that partially interact with their objects – that is, reading and writing as tools for teaching-learning in different areas in order to constitute students as citizens. However, for this paper, we will focus solely on the Teacher Education Activity System, which we termed Teacher Support Team. Three episodes are discussed in this paper: Two video sessions with the Teacher Support Team, the first of which took place in 2010, and the second in 2011; and a classroom reading class session that was videotaped in 2011 as part of the Teacher Support Team work. The theoretical and practical work developed was targeted at creating a mutual Zone of Proximal Development that supported teachers, coordinators, and the principal, through the appropriation of reading and writing as processes. The results show that the organization of the project as interrelated activity systems enhanced the entire school’s prospects of appropriating the reading and writing teaching-learning processes, by focusing on the same object, in the diverse systems that framed the project. (shrink)

Digital literature is playing an increasingly important role in children's everyday lives and opening up new paths for family literacy and early childhood education. However, despite positive effects of electronic books and picture-book apps on vocabulary learning, early writing, or phonological awareness, research findings on early narrative skills are ambiguous. Particularly, there still is a research gap regarding how app materiality affects children's story understanding. Thus, based on the ViSAR model for picture-book app analysis and data stemming (...) from 12 digital reading dyads containing German monolingual 2- to 3-year-olds and their caregivers this study assessed the narrative potential of a commercial picture-book app and how this is used in interaction. Results of the media analysis showed that the app provides a high number of narrative animations. These animations could be used interactively to engage the child in the story. However, results of the interaction analysis showed that adult readers do not exploit this potential due to their strong concentration on operative prompts and instructions. Furthermore, an explorative analysis of the relation between adults' utterances and children's story comprehension provided preliminary indicators regarding how the length of reading duration and the number of utterances might relate to children's understanding of the story. Findings and methodological limitations of the study are discussed and combined didactically with practical recommendations on how to use narrative animations in interaction effectively. (shrink)

This thesis argues that Dame Iris Murdoch’s writings portray a dialectical picture of morality that invites the reader to acknowledge the presence of evil and reflect upon the necessarily ‘opposing forces’ of good and evil. Murdoch’s engagement with both historical and contemporary discussions of evil is traced through close reading of both her published texts, including fiction and philosophy, and her unpublished and recently published texts and resources, including annotations, interviews and letters. These close readings are focused on the (...) theological, psychological and literary aspects of the contemporary problem of evil. The perspectives offered within this study all transcend the focus on goodness invited by Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy, thus challenging the biased perspective of scholars of the late-twentieth century who sought to elevate Murdoch’s good characters by drawing equations between her moral philosophy and her fiction. This study begins, first, by demonstrating how Murdoch’s writings engage with the problem of evil, with the theological attempt to reconcile goodness with the presence of evil and suffering in the world, by drawing on her allusions to the Book of Job and to the writings of Simone Weil and Dame Julian of Norwich, all of which assert the necessary presence of evil and suffering in the moral life. Second, I interrogate the inconsistencies between Murdoch’s fictional and philosophical pictures of evil to illustrate how her fictional and philosophical engagement with Saint Paul’s writings reveals that she adopted the same dialectical picture of morality for which she critiqued Jung in her moral philosophy. For her, Jung’s picture of morality merges aspects of dualism and monism, both of which, traditionally speaking, offer two countervailing ways in which to picture the moral life, where evil represents, respectively, either an independent moral force separate from the good or a failure to carry out the moral iii ideals of goodness. Third, I identify and develop a link between contemporary moral, psychological and sociological discourses on psychopathy and the evil characters, both male and female, within Murdoch’s novels: not only do her antagonists and demons, often called ‘enchanter’ figures by scholars, echo the psychopath’s moral psychology, but so too do her saintly figures. Such an ambiguous picture resonates with contemporary interpretations of psychopathy, such as those offered by Robert D. Hare, Kevin Dutton, or Simon Baron- Cohen, which highlight the complex role of compassion, empathy and emotion on the individual’s moral awareness, whether they are saintly or psychopathic. In the final chapter, I argue that Murdoch’s dialectical picture of morality is indebted to Blake, whose The Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell illustrates the necessity of the ‘contrary’ pairs of innocence and experience, reason and passion, and good and evil. While Murdoch may praise goodness, her complex engagement with evil reveals a dialectical task for the moral agent in which they have to appreciate the complexity of the moral life, with its inherently ambiguous mixtures of emotion and rationality, the saintly and the psychopathic, and goodness and evil. (shrink)

Knowledge does not float free of the technologies available for its production and presentation. The intimate connection between ideas and praxis - embodied, technological, social - exemplified in any knowledge practice is, in the terms of Ihde & Selinger (2004), an 'epistemology engine'. This refers to the material-semiotic connections that obtain for any specific rendering of an idea. Often this material-semiotic connection is easier to recognise in the case of art than in that of knowledge, where it appears more-or-less obvious (...) that the rendering of an idea in poetic rather than prose form, in musical rather than linguistic form, in plastic rather than digital form, makes a difference to the idea. However, it is also recognisable (if not always actually recognised) in science, where there is a keen awareness of visual media alongside or instead of discursive media. -/- Ideas on the Internet shift and change as they pass through different networks of meaning production and communication, in different media and modalities. Different disciplines and modes of knowledge have either embraced these possibilities of transmogrification or remained aloof. Philosophy is one of the latter, and seems still steadily rooted to the discursive world. However, as a discipline, it overlaps in interesting ways both with science and with art. What are the epistemology-engines that apply to philosophy, and are there specific philosophy-engines? This is the background against which the applications to e-learning in philosophy will be considered. -/- In previous work, I claimed that the nature of philosophical argument cannot simply be assumed to remain constant even in the use of relatively simple discursive technologies such as discussion boards (Carusi 2006). In the present paper I consider a range of other technologies that form the technological culture of philosophy, or which mediate it. The paper aims to open a line of enquiry into these underlying technologies and the kinds of philosophy-engine that emerge from them, individually or by way of a convergence of a set of technologies. In particular, I focus on text-mining techniques, visualisations, and modeling showing what potential they have for disturbing, derailing, re-shaping or transforming the mode, form or substance of philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

Patina is the word used for the green or brown film formed on the surface of old bronze, an excess of which can mask the true characteristics of the original masterpiece. Filippo Baldinucci used the word patina in a modern sense for first time in his book “Tuscan Vocabulary of the Art of Design”. Metaphors have been part of philosophical speech since the time of Plato. This figure of speech is used to attempt to provide a sensitive presence of (...) an idea to improve understanding and to make a more vivid perception of that concept. On analysing the creative process of contemporary re-search on health topics and its further dissemination, we defend the epistemological thesis that there is always some degree of patina on an original article and this may obscure the underlying scientific work. Conclusion: We consider that patina in scientific papers is very different from the concept of epidemiological bias. We think that any researcher who reads an original article acts as a restorer of knowledge. If a reader is aware of the existence of scientific patina, that reader will know how to look through it and see the masterpiece hidden underneath. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME'S IDEAS In the eighteenth century, there was widespread acceptance of a physiological basis for cognition. Some writers even argued for a rather detailed correlation between awareness and physiological changes, suggesting that (a) the former could be adequately explained in terms of the latter or, in some few instances, (b) that the former are the latter. David Hartley may come to mind as fitting one or the other (...) of these alternatives, but Robert Hooke had earlier argued for ideas as brain impressions, as of course did Descartes in his early scientific treatises. There was also one medical doctor in the eighteenth century, Dr. Astruc, who seems (on the basis of what Chambers reports) to have attempted a very specific correlation between specific forms of awareness and specific states and changes in physiology. There were also writers in this century who warned against the dangers of using physical-object vocabulary when talking about the mind and acts of awareness. Berkeley is one such writer,- Thomas Reid at the end of the century traced, to the use of this vocabulary, what he took to be the indirect realism of the way of ideas. Hume is writing in both these traditions: the tradition of using physical language for characterizing mental operations and the tradition of physiological explanations and correlations. The phrase used by Alexander Pope and Hume, 'the anatomy of the mind', seems to be a mixed metaphor, but it is a phrase which I take as an indication that Hume is doing what we would call 'cognitive psychology'. Another phrase used by Hume (this time in the Enquiry), 'mental geography', may capture his enterprise better: 'geography' still sounds physical, but it is modified by 'mental'. Hume is engaged in mental mapping. I want to take a look at the use of the term 'idea' in Hume's writing (mainly in the Treatise) in order to see 2. whether Hume's text enables us to say anything about the nature of his ideas, to discover what role they play in his mental geography. As far as I can determine, there are three possible candidates for the nature of ideas in Hume: images, brain impressions, and cognitive contents. The first of these is, I think, the standard reading of Hume's ideas. Professor Anderson has presented strong argument and evidence to support the second. I will be suggesting that the third is the best candidate, given the full range of the text of the Treatise. Of course, the correct answer 4 may be all three of these. The Treatise opens by dividing all perceptions of the human mind into two kinds. Impressions and ideas differ in the degree of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind. Even though the language of 'force' and 'liveliness' may be borrowed from physical talk, it is the mind, not the brain, on which perceptions strike. The examples of impressions are sensations, passions, and emotions. Ideas are said to be the faint images of these impressions in thinking and reasoning. The term 'image' throughout the eighteenth century never receives any clear explication. Its inheritance from optical treatises always hangs about it. We should look to the examples cited by Hume, in order to see whether we can construct a meaning for that term when used in these psychological contexts. Let us look first at his very first example of 'ideas': all the perceptions excited by the present discourse. (Tl) He explicitly excludes from these perceptions those which arise from the sight and touch, as well as the immediate pleasure or uneasiness his discourse may excite in us. The perceptions which are thus excluded are sensations and emotions, the impressions he has just distinguished. The only candidate left for ideas would seem to be what this discourse says, our thoughts about it, my understanding of what it says. The distinction is not one Hume thinks is difficult to follow: Every one of himself will readily perceive the difference betwixt feeling and thinking. (Tl-2) Last week I was sad, today I recall that feeling of sadness/ the difference between being sad and remembering that I was sad. Hume gives a different example: the perceptions formed when... (shrink)

This study investigated the association between syntactic awareness and L2 Chinese passage-level reading comprehension among 209 Chinese as a second language adult-learners. The participants were administered a character knowledge test, a vocabulary knowledge test, a morphological awareness test, a grammatical judgment and correction test, a word order test, and two reading comprehension tests. Partial correlation analyses showed that the participants’ performance in two syntactic awareness tasks were significantly positively correlated with their passage-level reading (...) comprehension. Multiple regression analyses revealed that syntactic awareness made a unique contribution to L2 Chinese reading even when the effects of age, major, gender, length of learning Chinese, character knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and morphological awareness were controlled for. In addition, the word order knowledge had a stronger predicting power to L2 Chinese reading comprehension compared to the grammatical judgment/correction ability. (shrink)

This study adapts a Medical English Language Anxiety Scale based on Horwitz’s Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and examines students’ anxiety in medical English vocabulary, listening and speaking, communication, literature reading, and academic paper writing. The biographical factors related to medical English language anxiety were also tested. The questionnaire sets including five dimensions were distributed to the students from a medical university in Sichuan, China, and were statistically analyzed by using SPSS 22.0 and AMOS 21.0. By employing (...) the adapted MELAS, it was found that 85.2% of the medical students surveyed suffered moderate and higher anxiety. Among all dimensions, students with listening and speaking anxiety recorded the highest, followed by literature reading anxiety, English academic writing anxiety, communication anxiety, and vocabulary learning anxiety. We also found that the anxiety of rural medical students in each dimension was higher than that of urban medical students. This study suggests that English teachers should be fully aware of their students’ language anxiety situation, design interesting class activities, and create a relaxed English learning atmosphere in classroom teaching to make students less nervous when learning medical English in class. (shrink)

Thinking with language as a complex practice for educators, advocates, and researchers in early childhood education is a necessary gesture for countering the anti-intellectualism that designates early childhood education as a service providing custodial care. Vitalizing Vocabulary insists that early childhood education in Canada must unsettle our inherited demand for technocratic, instrumental, and accessible relations with language. At the collision of research and practice, Nicole Land and Cristina Delgado Vintimilla propose that cultivating playful, speculative, inventive, accountable, and answerable relations (...) with words, concepts, and language is a critical move toward broadening early childhood education's intellectual and interdisciplinary horizons. The book is organized into four actions that activate pedagogical grammars: reading, writing, citing, and speaking. Each section plays with the purposes of a glossary by proposing language that we would work to erase, reclaim, and introduce. This situates language as an ethical, political, and creative pedagogical process that puts specific relations, curricula, and subjectivities into motion. Vitalizing Vocabulary ultimately envisions a project of early childhood education where students, educators, pedagogists, researchers, community, and others share a common commitment to creating responsive, meaningful, ethical, and political pedagogies. (shrink)

Material acquisition—buying, inheriting, being given—and nonmaterial—learning a word, assimilating a form—have been likened, and in both, meaningful acquisition cannot take place without a taxonomy, a scheme of categories into which the acquired element can be fitted. Then with these elements—both material and nonmaterial—we create a world or build and project a self, the painter and the interior decorator equally manipulating the elements in a vocabulary. The coarseness of such an outlook seems to bludgeon away long-established fine distinctions. We need (...) not deny, however, that there may be a kind of "indifference" in regard to "the real existence of the thing" which allows us "to play the part of judge in matters of taste," as Kant would have it,1 we need not deny the existence of an "aesthetic attitude: it is just that such indifference and such an attitude probably don't have much to do with our day-to-day experience of artifacts and perhaps needn't. The "aesthetic attitude" was not long ago defined by Jerome Stolnitz as "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone."2 Stolnitz is at pains to distinguish the aesthetic attitude from "interests" with which it may be preferable to confuse it. "One of them," he writes, "is the interest in owning a work of art for the sake of pride or prestige". And again, "Another nonaesthetic interest is the 'cognitive,' i.e., the interest in gaining knowledge about an object". Both these interests sound rather acquisitive, and let us consider the "aesthetic attitude" as somehow tied in everyday practice to the bundle of "acquiring" activities. · 1. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, p. 43.· 2. Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism, excerpted in Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, ed. John Hospers, p. 19; all further citations in text. Hiram W. Woodward, Jr. is a lecturer in the department of the history of art at the University of Michigan. He is editor of Eighty Works in the University of Michigan Museum of Art: A Handbook and coeditor of Barabudur: History and Significance of a Buddhist Monument. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Awareness of the Natural World in Shinjin: Shinran's Concept of JinenDennis HirotaAttainment of Shinjin and TruthThe primary issue regarding knowledge that Shinran (1173-1263) treats in his writings concerns the commonplace, "natural" presupposition that it is constituted by an ego-subject relating itself to stable objects in the world. From his stance within Buddhist tradition, Shinran identifies the crucial problem as the human tendency toward the reification of both (...) sides of this dichotomy-resulting in an autonomous self and substantial things-with the consequent attachments fueling the afflictions ("blind passions") of habitual pain and conflict for oneself and others. The focus of Shinran's treatment of this basic Buddhist concern is the point of engagement with dharma or true reality. In this, he draws into the arena of religious faith the probing scrutiny of lingering attachments to self, even in the dedicated practitioner, that is fundamental to the critical attitude of Mahayana Buddhist tradition.My aim in taking up the issue of truth in my article "Shinran and Heidegger on Truth" in The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science 1 is to suggest a way of reading Shinran that both avoids a common pitfall that Shinran himself cautions against-an engagement with Pure Land teachings that adheres to the subject-object dichotomy of ordinary awareness-and opens up his vision to resonances with contemporary western thought, particularly continental philosophy. This latter concern is not to claim that Shinran adumbrates contemporary thought or is affirmed by resemblances, but rather seeks to cast light on compelling aspects of his thought not often treated in traditional Shin scholastics. There are, therefore, both therapeutic and constructive sides in my attempt to engage Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976) thought from a perspective rooted in Shinran's Buddhism.The pitfall in reading Shinran indicated in my article is crystallized in the assumption, prevalent in Western scholarship but also widely seen in Japan, that his Shin Buddhist path centers on a simple faith in the Pure Land teachings, with such faith understood as the subjective acceptance of the truth of doctrinal propositions. In [End Page 189] other words, it is commonly presupposed that Shin Buddhist tradition (what he terms jōdo shinshū, "the true essence of the Pure Land way") implicitly affirms the subject-object dichotomy. This difficulty is frequently compounded by formulations of the supposed tenets of belief that are heavily molded and colored by Protestant Christian notions of self, sin, eschatology, and atonement. It is impossible to take up such comparative theological issues here. 2 In a sense, I have sought in my article to circumvent a hasty assessment of conceptual equivalence by pointing out the possibility of an encompassing or prior dissonance.Since Shinran's concept of "attaining shinjin" (true entrusting, which is also the Buddha-mind given to the practitioner) is built on the endeavor to deconstruct the reification of this dichotomy in engagement with the Pure Land Buddhist path, the unconsciousness reinstatement of it in reading his writings can lead one to a thorough but easily accomplished misconstrual of his thought. My suggestion in my article is that consideration of the analogues in Heidegger's thought can help us see all this. Such comparison also appears to present a relatively untested avenue for Buddhist-Christian conversation, particularly in view of Heidegger's early indebtedness to Luther's "theology of the cross" and the notion of the "alien work of God" as the critical stripping away of attachments to human capacities (destructio in the "Heidelberg Disputation"), and also his approach to Paul's letters to the Thessalonians in The Phenomenology of Religious Life. 3 The keystone in such interreligious conversation remains, however, not simply human fallibility as subject or culpability as agent, but the persistent challenge to the subject-object dichotomy, which may form a locus of refractory difference between the religious traditions.The constructive side of the comparison concerns two general dimensions of Shinran's thought that are highlighted in an approach to his writings that might be called phenomenological. One includes a shift from a reading based on scriptural foundationalism and doctrinal reasoning to a dialogical reading, one attentive to Shinran's effort to... (shrink)

This study set out to investigate intellectual domains as well as the use of measurement and validation methods in language assessment research and second language acquisition (SLA) published in English in peer-reviewed journals. Using Scopus, we created two datasets: (i) a dataset of core journals consisting of 1,561 articles published in four language assessment journals, and (ii) a dataset of general journals consisting of 3,175 articles on language assessment published in the top journals of SLA and applied linguistics. We applied (...) document co-citation analysis to detect thematically distinct research clusters. Next, we coded citing papers in each cluster based on an analytical framework for measurement and validation. We found that the focus of the core journals was more exclusively on reading and listening comprehension assessment (primary), facets of speaking and writing performance such as raters and validation (secondary), as well as feedback, corpus linguistics, and washback (tertiary). By contrast, the primary focus of assessment research in the general journals was on vocabulary, oral proficiency, essay writing, grammar, and reading. The secondary focus was on affective schemata, awareness, memory, language proficiency, explicit vs. implicit language knowledge, language or semantic awareness, and semantic complexity. With the exception of language proficiency, this second area of focus was absent in the core journals. It was further found that the majority of citing publications in the two datasets did not carry out inference-based validation on their instruments before using them. More research is needed to determine what motivates authors to select and investigate a topic, how thoroughly they cite past research, and what internal (within a field) and external (between fields) factors lead to the sustainability of a Research Topic in language assessment. (shrink)

The main goal of this article consists in addressing two fundamental issues of consciousness research and cognitive science, namely, the question of why declarative memory functions are inextricably linked with phenomenal awareness and the question of the physical basis of memory traces. The presented approach proposes that high-level cognitive processes involving consciousness employ a universal mechanism by means of which they access and modulate an omnipresent background field that is identified with the zero-point field (ZPF) specified by stochastic electrodynamics, (...) a branch of physics that deals with the universal principles underlying quantum systems. In addition to its known physical properties and memory capacities, the ZPF is hypothesized to be an immanently sentient medium. It is propounded that linking up to a particular field mode of the ZPF activates a particular phenomenal nuance, implying that the phase-locked coupling of a set of field modes, i.e., the formation of a so-called ZPF information state, constitutes an appropriate mechanism for the amalgamation of elementary shades of consciousness into a complex state of consciousness. Since quantum systems rest exactly on this mechanism, conscious memory processes in the brain are expected to differ from unconscious processes by the presence of the typical features of many-body quantum systems, particularly long-range coherence and attractor formation, which is supported by a huge body of empirical evidence. On this basis, the conceptual framework set out in this article paves the way for a new understanding of the brain as a write-read head interacting with the ZPF, leading to self-consistent interpretations of the neural correlates of memory formation and memory retrieval and explaining why these memory processes are closely intertwined with phenomenal awareness. In particular, the neural correlates suggest that the brain produces consciously perceived memory traces by writing sequences of information states into the ZPF and retrieves consciously experienced memory traces by reading sequences of information states from the ZPF. Using these theoretical foundations, altered states of consciousness and memory disorders can be traced back to impairments of the ZPF write-read mechanism. The mechanism should reveal itself through characteristic photon emissions, resulting in testable predictions. (shrink)

Spelling is a fundamental literacy skill facilitating word recognition and thus higher-level reading abilities via its support for efficient text processing (Adams, 1990; Joshi et al., 2008; Perfetti and Stafura, 2014). However, relatively little work examines second language (L2) spelling in adults, and even less work examines learners from different first language (L1) writing systems. This is despite the fact that the influence of L1 writing system on L2 literacy skills is well documented (Hudson, 2007; Koda and (...) Zehler, 2008; Grabe, 2009). To address this shortcoming, this study collected data on real word spelling, pseudoword spelling, and phonological awareness (elision) abilities from 70 participants (23 native speakers; 47 ELLs with alphabetic, abjad, and morphosyllabic L1s). Analyses compared performance on real word and pseudoword spelling between L1 English speakers and ELLs, and additionally among the non-native-speaker L1 groups (categorized into alphabet, abjad, and morphosyllabary groups). Similar comparisons were made across groups for performance on phonological awareness. Further, correlations were calculated between phonological awareness and real word spelling and between phonological awareness and pseudoword spelling, separately for L1 English speakers and the various ESL groups. Spelling accuracy on real words and pseudowords as well as phonological awareness skill differed between native speakers and ESL speakers, and also varied by the ESL speakers’ L1 writing system. Theoretically interesting patterns emerged in the spelling data. For example, the morphosyllabic L1 speakers had strong real word spelling (better than the other ESL groups) but greatly decreased pseudoword accuracy (a drop of 59% in accuracy). Although alphabetic L1 speakers had low spelling accuracy in terms of strict scoring, they had lower rates of errors per item, highlighting the importance of scoring approach for shaping the conclusions that are drawn. Error rates also revealed vowels to be more problematic than consonants, particularly in abjad L1 speakers. The results demonstrate that L2 spelling abilities, phonological awareness, and the relationships among them vary by L1 writing system, and that differing approaches to scoring and analysis may lead to varying conclusions. (shrink)

Literacy is an essential skill. Learning to read is a requirement for becoming a self-providing human being. However, while spoken language is acquired naturally with exposure to language without explicit instruction, reading and writing need to be taught explicitly. Decades of research have shown that well-structured teaching of phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and letter-to-sound mapping is crucial in building solid foundations for the acquisition of reading. During the COVID-19 pandemic, children worldwide did not have access to (...) consistent and structured teaching and are, as a consequence, predicted to be behind in the development of their reading skills. Subsequent evidence confirms this prediction. With the best evidence-based practice in mind, we developed an online version of a well-structured early literacy training program for 5-year-old children. This 2-week online Reading Camp program is designed for pre-K children. It incorporates critical components of the fundamental skills essential to learning to read and is taught online in an interactive, multi-sensory, and peer-learning environment. We measure the participants’ literacy skills and other related skills before and after participating in the online Reading Camp and compare the results to no-treatment controls. Results show that children who participated in the online Reading Camp improved significantly on all parameters in relation to controls. Our results demonstrate that a well-structured evidence-based reading instruction program, even if online and short-term, benefits 5-year-old children in learning to read. With the potential to scale up this online program, the evidence presented here, alongside previous evidence for the efficacy of the in-person program, indicates that the online Reading Camp program is effective and can be used to tackle a variety of questions regarding structural and functional plasticity in the early stages of reading acquisition. (shrink)

In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism. Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible results (...) of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address. In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing', with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas's essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas's reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time. (shrink)

Developmental dyslexia is a specific learning condition characterized by severe and persistent difficulties in written word recognition, decoding and spelling that may impair both text reading fluency and text reading comprehension. Despite this, some adults with dyslexia successfully complete their university studies even though graduating from university involves intensive exposure to long and complex texts. This study examined the cognitive skills underlying both text reading comprehension and text reading fluency in a sample of 54 university students (...) with dyslexia and 63 university students without dyslexia, based on a set of tests adapted for an adult population, including listening comprehension, word reading, pseudoword reading, phonemic awareness, spelling, visual span, reading span, vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, and general knowledge. The contribution of these skills to text reading fluency and text reading comprehension was examined using stepwise multiplicative linear regression analyses. As far as TRF is concerned, a regression model including word reading, pseudoword reading and spelling best fits the data, while a regression model including listening comprehension, general knowledge and vocabulary best fits the data obtained for text reading comprehension. Overall, these results are discussed in the light of the current literature on adults with dyslexia and both text reading fluency and text reading comprehension. (shrink)

In the research on literacy learning the concept of language awareness has come forward as a unifying framework for understanding the underlying knowledge that supports ability in reading and writing. Consensus is gathering around the idea that language awareness is an essential foundation. If subsequent work in this area confirms it, this factor may turn out to be the key cognitive-domain explanation for successful literacy learning in school (and for academic purposes in general). In this review (...) we examine two cross-cultural comparisons regarding this claim. The comparisons point to the need to examine cases that juxtapose contrasting conditions. Relevant contrasts place side by side examples that appear to be typical and examples that appear to be exceptional. Taking what appear on the surface as sharply diverging cases, how is access to requisite underlying competencies similar, and how different, from one instance to the other? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading And Depth Of FieldSven BirkertsIhave the idea that much of what we think of as literary reading involves the animation of an interior space—a kind of supporting world for the narrative elements—and that the logistics of this phenomenon are in some way comparable to the way we create depth of field when we look at a naturalistic painting. The painter creates the effect through very specific (...) techniques, which include placing the vanishing point and setting up a complex balance between forms and colors. The writer, apart from the deployment of actual descriptive elements—pictorial indicators that make a scene in the reader’s mind—manages his evocation more subtly, perhaps even less consciously. This supporting world exists in the imagination of the writer, and it comes to exist, however differently, in the mind of the reader. What interests me is the transfer, which takes place right from the threshold, even where the language is not deliberately descriptive or evocative.In part, I would argue, the process depends not on a meeting of minds or sensibilities, but on a meeting of the wills. At the root of the writer’s endeavor is the will to convey an entire interior world to the reader. So, too, the true impulse behind reading is the reader’s will to bring another world inside his own. Without this wanting-to-give and wanting-to-receive, both writing and reading acts are inert. Of course, none of this can be measured, and unless one falls into a Heideggerian idiom the process is very difficult to discuss. Still, we need to be aware that the transfer happens—ideally—between two charged poles.Between the writer and the reader there are only the words on the page. What is striking, if seldom remarked, is the process of the transfer. [End Page 122] What essentially happens is that the black marks are converted not only into a sensible narrative—if we are reading a novel, say—but they also elicit in the reader the surrounding impression of a world that is strong enough to sustain the narrative line—that gives it credibility.This transfer, for the sighted reader, takes place via the collusion of eye and ear. The sight of the word creates the hearing memory; though we are moving our eyes we are, in a sense, listening, and it is fundamentally as listeners that we furnish that interior space. Indeed, could it be that in reading we recapitulate origins, returning to the orality that predated literacy? If this were so, then one could perhaps locate in the reading act a kind of fundamental friction: between the imperatives of literate prose and the vestiges of oral conditioning that control our primary sense-making operations.But remember, when we read with the eye we are not actually hearing—the tympanum does not vibrate—we are listening in memory. Which means that it’s not the physical ear, but the metaphysical mind that is engaged. And maybe this holds a clue about the mysterious sensations reading can sometimes unleash: the fact that body (the ear) and mind are joined by the strand of memory for the duration of the act.We hear in memory—more and less sharply. The more sharply we hear, the more intense will likely be our reading experience. Or, at least, the more vivid. This sharpness of hearing has to do, in part, with the focus and will that we are able to direct at the words on the page; and in part with the author’s ability to reward our attentiveness. The Coleridgean model of a “willing suspension of disbelief” is too simplistic and too passive. Indeed, it figures the primary act of will in reading as a will to be passive, to neutralize oneself before the expression of the author.I see the receptive will as far more active and creative. For one does not merely absorb—hear—the conscious and unconscious components of the author’s work; one instantly sets about bringing to life that interior scape. Reading performs an energetic hearing—a listening. This listening begins with the very first words, and the greatest expenditure of conscious and... (shrink)

Children from low-SES families are known to show delays in aspects of language development which underpin reading acquisition such as vocabulary and listening comprehension. Research on the development of morphological skills in this group is scarce, and no studies exist in French. The present study investigated the involvement of morphological knowledge in the very early stages of reading acquisition (decoding), before reading comprehension can be reliably assessed. We assessed listening comprehension, receptive vocabulary, phoneme awareness, (...) morphological awareness as well as decoding, word reading and non-verbal IQ in 703 French first-graders from low-SES families after 3 months of formal schooling (November). Awareness of derivational morphology was assessed using three oral tasks: Relationship Judgment (e.g., do these words belong to the same family or not? heat-heater … ham-hammer); Lexical Sentence Completion [e.g., Someone who runs is a …? (runner)]; and Non-lexical Sentence Completion [e.g., Someone who lums is a…? (lummer)]. The tasks differ on implicit/explicit demands and also tap different kinds of morphological knowledge. The Judgement task measures the phonological and semantic properties of the morphological relationship and the Sentence Completion tasks measure knowledge of morphological production rules. Data were processed using a graphical modeling approach which offers key information about how skills known to be involved in learning to read are organized in memory. This modeling approach was therefore useful in revealing a potential network which expresses the conditional dependence structure between skills, after which recursive structural equation modeling was applied to test specific hypotheses. Six main conclusions can be drawn from these analyses about low SES reading acquisition: (1) listening comprehension is at the heart of the reading acquisition process; (2) word reading depends directly on phonemic awareness and indirectly on listening comprehension; (3) decoding depends on word reading; (4) Morphological awareness and vocabulary have an indirect influence on word reading via both listening comprehension and phoneme awareness; (5) the components of morphological awareness assessed by our tasks have independent relationships with listening comprehension; and (6) neither phonemic nor morphological awareness influence vocabulary directly. The implications of these results with regard to early reading acquisition among low SES groups are discussed. (shrink)

The various kinds and conditions of love are a common theme for Kierkegaard, beginning with his early Either/Or, through "The Diary of the Seducer" and Judge William's eulogy on married love, to his last work, on the changelessness of God's love. Works of Love, the midpoint in the series, is also the monumental high point, because of its penetrating, illuminating analysis of the forms and sources of love. Love as feeling and mood is distinguished from works of love, love of (...) the lovable from love of the unlovely, preferential love from love as the royal law, love as mutual egotism from triangular love, and erotic love from self-giving love. This work is marked by Kierkegaard's Socratic awareness of the reader, both as the center of awakened understanding and as the initiator of action. Written to be read aloud, the book conveys a keenness of thought and an insightful, poetic imagination that make such an attentive approach richly rewarding. Works of Love not only serves as an excellent place to begin exploring the writings of Kierkegaard, but also rewards many rereadings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 299-301 [Access article in PDF] Reading Minkowski with Husserl Bernard Pachoud Eugene Minkowski is generally regarded as one of the main figures of the phenomenological strand of psychiatry in France. However, it is striking that, as a phenomenologist, he very rarely mentions Husserl or Heidegger in his texts. Nor, for that matter, does he use their concepts or rely on their descriptions (...) (except in a few texts entirely devoted to the presentation of the philosophical roots of phenomenology). Actually, the philosopher he most often refers to, and whose concepts he borrows, is Bergson, who is not a phenomenologist. But although Minkowski's framework is not phenomenological in the philosophical sense of the term, his clinical descriptions are certainly based on a genuinely phenomenological approach—in the sense that they deal with the subjective experience of patients and the way in which their experience determines their behavior. It is all the more striking to notice just how much his descriptions of abnormal experiences echo certain Husserlian studies that he seems to ignore. I will focus on some common points between Minkowski's clinical descriptions and Husserlian studies that Minkowski could not, in fact, have known at the time of writing this article (at least in their complete form, since they were developed after 1923).The present text, "A Contribution to the Study of Autism: The Interrogative Attitude," is a typical example of Minkowski's clinical descriptions and theoretical interests. The interrogative attitude of the patient Paul C. is considered by Minkowski to be one of the "schizophrenic attitudes," expressing what he calls "loss of contact with reality," a phenomenon held to be characteristic of schizophrenia. These attitudes are quite simply the modalities of schizophrenic "autism" in Bleuler's sense of the latter term. Minkowski (1925) distinguishes the attitudes of withdrawal that have an affective coloring (morbid daydreaming, sulking, and regrets) from those that are purely intellectual (morbid rationalism, the interrogative attitude, the morbid hypertrophy of geometric and static factors). What gives a pathological cast to Paul C.'s systematically interrogative attitude is that it expresses (following Minkowski's clinical description) the patient's inability to engage in action or to establish any practical relationship with reality. This interrogative attitude can be considered a way to take some initiative and thereby avoid complete passivity, but it is a deficient mode of "position taking" since there is no engagement in real action.This emphasis on disorder of action has a modern sound, for it echoes theoretical hypotheses regarding schizophrenia developed by contemporary neuroscientists (Frith 1992). It also echoes the Husserlian studies of perception, in which the feeling of reality largely depends on the strong connection between perception and voluntary movement (action), kinesthetic sensations playing here a key role (Husserl 1989). There are also some remarkable convergences [End Page 299] with Husserl's studies of the active and passive dimensions of consciousness, to be considered next. Husserl's Studies of the Activity and Passivity of Consciousness The main claim of transcendental phenomenology is that our experience completely depends on what Husserl calls the synthetic activity of consciousness. Everything that we become aware of is constituted by the activity of the mind. In texts written between 1918 and 1926 and gathered together under the title, "Analysis of Passive Synthesis," Husserl (1966) distinguishes different degrees of the activity of consciousness, depending on whether or not the ego has the initiative. Mainly, two kinds of activity are described, one depending on the subject (the ego) and requiring his initiative, the other occurring, so to say, in an anonymous, automatic way, elicited by the object, and labeled for this reason "passive synthesis." In other words, when experience relies on synthetic activity, Husserl distinguishes synthetic acts initiated by the ego (the genuine acts) from those that occur in consciousness in an automatic, passive way. Accordingly, the activity of consciousness turns out never to be a pure activity; it always occurs against a background of passivity. Most often, the act is a response to prior stimulation given passively, and it is through this act that the "I" discovers itself as a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mere ReadingEva T. H. BrannI recall reading in college, some half a century ago, that the first Queen Elizabeth once represented herself to her people as “mere English.” She meant that she was English pure and simple, nothing but English. I want to set out a way with books, primarily but not only those ranged under “literature,” that I think of as mere reading. Neither the phrase (...) “mere reading” or “mere close reading” is new with me, nor is the mode, and I do not imagine myself on a lonely quest for some lost hermeneutic Eden. Children and the literate public merely read all the time. So do scholars liberated from the professional impositions of graduate school; they have achieved what Thomas Mann calls “the second ingenuousness.” They have read the articles claiming that all books and all approaches to books are of necessity theoretically or ideologically skewed and that a job of rectification, thorough enough perhaps even to postpone the actual reading indefinitely, is a precondition of liberation from the author’s subtle or unconscious agenda. Yet they have liberated themselves from the liberators, well knowing that if it’s a gift to be simple, it is also an achievement.I am, therefore, far from thinking that facing a book simply—facing it without “confronting” it—is an obsolescent activity or that either the straight and trustful reading of books or the making of books that present themselves to be so read is in real danger. I no more fear an impending cultural Armageddon than I long for a past interpretational paradise. For one thing, this is a golden age for the English novel, the premier genre of the present. All the assimilated immigrants and quondam colonials, with their delight in the elegancies of mere high English and their loving mastery of its local varieties, are writing their way into the center of English novelistic literature. They seem quite [End Page 383] aware of all those “readings”—Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, etc. Nevertheless they write merrily on for an ingenuous yet discerning public.Consequently, the following baker’s dozen of preconditions and precepts are presented not with a sense of fending off impending doom, but for the pleasure of recognition they might give to those who have come to similar conclusions. In these pages I am apt to be preaching to the choir and, truth to tell, I feel no vocation to convert the unbelievers, the more so since I am convinced that it takes all kinds.1. The First-Person PluralThe coopting “we” is more insidiously imperial than ever was the regal first-person plural. Recall all the sentences in public intellectual speech that tell us what “we” all are thinking or are no longer permitted to think or are now required to think (or do) in matters intellectual in general and in matters interpretational in particular, by reason of our historical situation.When I read one of these dicta pushing and pulling me into my place in time or society, every aversive fiber tenses and signals “who ‘we’?—not me!” For the very thing said in our name to be needful may well be the thing most harmful and the impermissible move the one really required. It seems to me worth considering that in an analysis of “our historical situation” it might be the “our” that is the vitiating flaw.Precept: Don’t say “we” unless you have obtained consent. Try “I” or “some of us.” In particular, always qualify announcements of apocalypse so as to leave room for non-participants. This frame of mind is good for turning from sophisticated to mere reading.2. Critical SuperiorityJudges on their benches sit over the sinners arraigned before them, but that the critics in their studies should be above the writers who are their “subject” is plain comical. For one thing, judging is a social necessity, while criticizing is a discretionary activity; some of us could live without it. Some professors make students believe that criticism is work while writing is a self-indulgence that needs to be curbed. In truth, it is the other way around: the critic is parasitic on the writer; if nothing... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading as a Philosophical Practice by Robert PierceyIris Vidmar JovanovićReading as a Philosophical Practice, by Robert Piercey, 130 pp. London: Anthem Press, 2021.Robert Piercey's Reading as a Philosophical Practice is dedicated to exploring the passion of reading, and to explaining ways in which common readers, as Virginia Woolf calls them, rather than professionals, engage with reading. Piercey's answer to this question, which is also (...) the central claim of the book, is that reading—independently of the subject or a genre—is a philosophical activity, that is, "a kind of reflection on experiences and capacities that are distinctive to human beings" (p. 3). As Piercey argues, reading inevitably invites one to consider issues that fall within three main philosophical domains: those related to selfhood; those related to ethical questions, primarily the ones asking about a valuable life; and those concerning ontological questions regarding the true nature of things. Inspiration for this account comes from the writings of Henry James, Stanley Cavell, and Marcel Proust, each of whom describes reading as an experience in which one's self enlarges and new dimensions of subjectivity are revealed. Piercey's ambition is to understand precisely what happens in such moments of discovery, and he sets out to offer an account of the essence of the experience of reading that explains why reading matters so profoundly to so many people.Piercey finds a philosophical grounding for his main claim in Wolfgang Iser's phenomenological account of reading and Alasdair MacIntyre's account of practice. Piercey praises Iser's account of reading as an activity prolonged in time, during which a reader is situated within the text, and tries to rebuild that text by constantly going through interpretative stages. Such a "wandering viewpoint" (p. 20) generates in one a sense of living through an altered subjectivity. As Piercey argues, the greatest value of this explanation is its capacity to account for how a text is given to one's consciousness.Insightful as it is, however, Iser's account has limits, given his focus on fictional classics and his belief that the aim of reading is to arrive at the correct interpretation of a text. To overcome these shortcomings, Piercey adopts MacIntyre's account of practice and argues that understanding reading as a [End Page 468] type of social practice means recognizing it as "embedded in, and expressive of, a full range of human activities and a full picture of the human person." Moreover, thinking of reading as a practice encourages us to see it "as a space where one reflects on what kind of a person one should become, and tries earnestly to make oneself into that kind of a person" (p. 25).What such a project looks like is examined in the third chapter, where Piercey analyzes writings on reading by novelist Nick Hornby. This chapter is particularly interesting in tackling questions that pop up when one pursues reading as important for one's well-being: questions concerning which books to read and which to skip, issues regarding rereading, and the like. The rhetorical power of this chapter is immense, in raising one's awareness of the many nuances that a reflective approach to reading invites. This awareness is further advanced in the sixth chapter, in which Piercey presents "descriptive hermeneutical ontology" (p. 71) to explain how readers discover what is valuable and meaningful about the nature of things and attachments in the process of reading. Interesting here is the dual nature of books that Piercey describes, namely their material copies and their content, or virtual reality, and the instrumental and intrinsic ways in which each of the two can acquire meaning for individual readers. He concludes that reading matters to so many people because it lets them experience and reflect on the fragmentation built into their encounters with things.In chapter 4, Piercey discusses one of the cornerstones of literary aesthetics: the view—as developed by, among others, Martha Nussbaum—that reading makes us morally better. Piercey acknowledges the relevance of empirical challenge to this view, particularly as advanced by Gregory Currie. Piercey claims that the Nussbaum-like approach to getting ethical lessons from reading is an... (shrink)

Discourse connection is a challenging aspect of writing in a second language. This study seeks to investigate the effects of two classroom instructions on discourse connection in writing for EFL college students, focusing on their argumentative writing. Three classes were exposed to different pre-task conditions: receiving reading materials that provide content support for the writing, receiving planning instructions on effective outlining, and receiving no resources. The results showed that the instructions helped students attain better overall (...) coherence in writing. However, noticeable differences between the two experimental groups emerged in terms of cohesion features. The reading group was found to employ more lexical cohesion devices in writing than the outline group, which indicated a heightened genre awareness. This inquiry helped us identify the reading group’s alignment with content support materials, particularly the change in stance as a factor that contributes to a higher level of lexical cohesion in writing. (shrink)

Möbian Nights: Literary Reading in a Time of Crisis develops a new understanding of literary reading: that in the wake of disasters like the Holocaust, death remains a premise of our experience rather than a future. Challenging customary "aesthetic" assumptions that we write in order not to die, Sandor Goodhart suggests (with Kafka) we write to die. Drawing upon analyses developed by Girard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Levinas (along with examples from Homer to Beckett), Möbian Nights proposes that all (...) literature works "autobiographically", which is to say, in the wake of disaster; with the credo "I died; therefore, I am"; and for which the language of topology (for example, the "Möbius strip") offers a vocabulary for naming the "deep structure" of such literary, critical, and scriptural sacrificial and anti-sacrificial dynamics. (shrink)

Much thought is being given nowadays to the ways in which society might continue to substantiate the principle of solidarity in the economic sphere. Predictable cost increases in the social security system stand at the root of a number of problems that have arisen. While those concerned look for solutions, a discussion is emerging concerning the communal scope of solidarity. People are not only asking themselves how they are to remain in solidarity, but also with whom they should share the (...) means at their disposal. The concomitant question ‘with whom?’ is not always as evident as it might seem, since the ethical scope of solidarity appears, in principle at least, to be unlimited.De facto, however, the limits of solidarity tend to coincide with those of the political community. The ongoing unification of Europe should broaden matters in this regard, but whether this process will also broaden our perspective on world-wide solidarity remains to be seen. At the same time, certain groups are calling for a stricter delimitation of our solidarity. The elections in Europe during the past ten years have made it clear that a number of emotional factors play a role in this context, factors which are not infrequently expressed in the slogan ‘our own first’.The intention of this article is to confront, with the Christian principle of solidarity, certain spontaneous and emotional motivating forces which call for a limitation of our solidarity. Solidarity implies both a feeling and a rational decision. In line with any other emotion, the feeling of solidarity is rooted in motivating factors of which we are not always consciously aware. Such factors are rarely thematised in an explicit fashion, partly because they are as such difficult to discuss and partly because they are difficult to make operational at the ‘scientific’ level. As a rule, our attention tends to be focused on the ethical desirability and practical-economical achievabilty of solidarity.Ours is a talkative age. Never before have people talked so much. The telephone, radio, cinema, television, audio and video recording have all increased our opportunities for speaking to one another not only when we are together but across distance and across time as well. This has been the century of chatter .Chattering carries in itself the risk of superficiality. Before we realise it, we are talking without thinking deeply. Messengers of doom, such as Postman and Finkielkraut , warn the western world against the dangers of the television and video culture which they contend constitute a threat to western democracy. As we grow accustomed to the high speed and fleeting character of the ‘new media’, we tend to gradually lose our capacity to think things over and reflect. Ultimately, its cursory and uncritical approach to things becomes the norm.For those who consider television as the summit of idle chatter, reading is not merely a relief but a threatened activity which needs all our support. If we consider thoughtfulness and consideration to be virtues, then the unhurriedness associated with reading must be seen as a virtuous quality. More than at any other time in our history, being literate is of great importance in our industrialised societies. Hence, there is a growing awareness of the need to link critical thinking with literacy skills. More than ever before, we need the writings of others – distant in history, geography and profession – to understand our complex world. Such writings provide information, recommend actions and promote political and philosophical orientations.Discourse analysis proves that the complexity of the discourse is higher in written than in spoken language. Written language integrates more idea units in a clause, making use of nominalisation, embedded constituents, etc. Gaining access to such thorough knowledge is a first step in the long process of asserting control. Being literate creates the opportunity for increasing access to knowledge not generally available in the direct experience of life. Being able to read enables the individual to transcend time and space and to liberate his or her own mind and spirit. It removes the individual from dependence on immediate senses, direct contacts, commonplace talk.All these elements are important in the shaping of one’s personality. Confrontation with challenging, original and even provocative ideas forces the individual to make up his or her own mind. Democracy needs this kind of individualism. (shrink)

In his analysis of the social and economic conditions of intellectual activity in ancient Greece, Gentili argues that the value of poetry underwent a notable change in the late archaic period. Poetry came to be produced within a contractual relationship between patrons and poets, it became a commercial good available to the one who could pay for it and its value was expressed no longer by honouring the poet but by paying for his product. At the time of Solon and (...) Theognis the producers of poetry had been aristocratic members of the polis giving political advice to their peers and gaining renown by the quality of their advice. Yet Simonides and Pindar wrote under different social conditions. Gentili writes: Fully conscious by now of the dignity and importance of his role, the poet also becomes aware of its [i.e. poetry's] ‘commercial’ value. He puts his own sophia at the disposal of the highest bidder, thereby creating a basis for the tendency to regard wealth and poetic ‘wisdom’ as interchangeable moral equivalents. (shrink)

This article analyses some of the shifts in tone and argumentation in Derrida's work by comparing the treatment of the topics of theatre and theatrical representation in his early writing on literary and philosophical texts with the conception of a politically committed ‘ethics’ in his late work. The topic of theatrical representation is particularly useful for a critical assessment of Derrida's later ethics because it allows us to give careful consideration to his position on different types of, and contexts (...) for, involvement. I argue that some of the important differences in tone and argumentation in Derrida's work arise not just because of the different exigencies that distinguish readings of literary/philosophical texts from analyses of political circumstances and events. There is also a shift in his work from attempting to account for the aporetic economy that supports positions held and defended to the terms of his advocacy for ethical commitment. In the case of his early writing the emphasis falls on accounting for meaning in terms of a typology of conversion effects; positive values are aporetically joined with negative ones. In his later work aporias do not present occasions for examining conditions of meaning. Rather, they become compelling imperatives to act. Despite the differences between these perspectives they both articulate an important role for aesthetic experience in meaning. I conclude by considering the consequences that such a position on meaning imposes on Derrida's use of the vocabulary of injunctions and imperatives to ‘compel’ a response. (shrink)

Gutoku Shinran 愚禿親鸞 maintains his status today as one of the most consequential religious thinkers in Japanese history. The tradition stemming from his thought and teaching activity, Shin Buddhism, has been a significant force in Japanese society since the fifteenth century and remains one of the largest Buddhist movements in the world at present, with over twenty thousand temples in Japan and a century-old institutional presence in North America. His writings have been studied in a commentarial tradition going back to (...) his early descendants in the fourteenth century, burgeoning during the Edo period, and continuing in recent times with prominent nonsectarian philosophers such as NISHIDA Kitarō西田幾多郎, SUZUKI Daisetsu 鈴木大拙, TANABE Hajime 田辺元, MIKI Kiyoshi 三木清, and NISHITANI Keiji 西谷啓治. Shinran’s concern in his writings is less to impart doctrinally validated teachings or methods of proper conduct than to articulate and enable a fundamental transformation of awareness. This is because it is precisely such an “overturning” of ordinary awareness and entry into a transformed mode of existence that signals the authentic encounter with enlightening activity that lies at the core of his Buddhist thought. His focal issues are, therefore, the nature of a person’s interaction with the Pure Land path and the distinction between provisional and genuine modes of engagement. He recognizes that it is usual for persons initially encountering Pure Land teachings to seek a coherent intellectual understanding of the doctrines from the perspective of the conventional self and to pursue means to assimilate the advantages of the path into their ongoing lives. Shinran, however, views such efforts as a continued assertion of the false discrimination and self-attachment that propel ordinary human life in anxious and painful existence. Thus, he seeks in his writings to precipitate a shift in apprehension that leads to authentic engagement with, and indeed itself arises from, the working of the Pure Land path. In other words, Shinran views the distinctive accessibility and effectiveness of Pure Land Buddhism as rooted in its transformative functioning within the realm of mundane, illusive thought and language. In this essay, I focus on aspects of reading Shinran, first taking up the overarching issues of Mahāyāna and Pure Land Buddhist thought that contextualize the basic problems in doctrinal understanding he feels compelled to address in his own writings. I then go on to consider the character of his methods of composition in formulating and communicating his own religious awareness. I close by highlighting several of the major philosophically relevant themes and issues in his thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Defense of My Reading of Husserl and a Final NotePeter Hadreas (bio)KeywordsSSRI, Prozac, Fluoxetine, Zoloft, Sertraline, Paxil, Paroxetine, Husserl, phenomenologyI want to acknowledge Dr. Mark D. Rego and Professor Marilyn Nissim-Sabat for the care they put into the responses to my paper "Husserlian Self-Awareness and Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors." One of the abiding strengths of Philosophy, Psychiatry and Philosophy is its debate format.Thanks to the debate (...) format, I am not constrained from openly (and sincerely) contesting Marilyn Nissim-Sabat's reading of my paper. In my opinion, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat remarks suffer from many misconceptions. I'll respond in some detail to these misconceptions and misapprehensions. Contrastingly, I am largely in agreement with Mark Rego's commentary. After discussing Nissim-Sabat's misconceptions, I'll use the remaining space to propose how some of Mark Rego's suggestions might be filled out for further psychological research using the model of prereflective awareness.Nissim-Sabat brings many misunderstandings to my paper. They extend to the paper's purposes, its manner of evidence, as well as its consequences for psychotherapy. I respond to each of these issues.First about the paper's purpose. She writes: "I share with Hadreas the conviction that Husserlian phenomenology is the best philosophical approach to understanding, and indeed, possibly improving the treatment of mental disorders" (54). Nissim-Sabat and I do not share the same point of view regarding Husserlian philosophy and mental disorders. I am keen on Edmund Husserl's theories of pre-reflective awareness inasmuch as they provide a model for understanding mental disorders. Given the space limits, I focus my paper on puzzles emerging from case histories of people treated with SSRIs. Even so, I think it is a mistake to make Husserl's philosophy into a Rosetta stone for decoding this topic. This may mislead the reader as well as misrepresent the history of philosophy. As I point out in the section of the paper titled, "Husserl on Self-Awareness," Husserl is not the only well-known philosopher or psychologist who proposes a pre-reflective account of self-awareness. William James proposes an analogous notion of self-awareness. G. W. Leibniz, at the and of the seventeenth and the beginning of eighteenth centuries, worked out a very sophisticated understanding of pre-reflective awareness, which he applied to a multitude of psychological, epistemological, and ethical topics (Leibniz 1996, 53, 11, 164, 194). Husserl's account of pre-reflective awareness is 'better' inasmuch as it is systematically connected to an epistemology that can enable a researcher to understand how pre-reflective awareness fits both personal self-understanding and empirical psychological [End Page 61] experimentation. But James' and Leibniz 's accounts also have their strengths. Their descriptions of pre-reflective awareness are less burdened with technical language than Husserl's and, in the case of Leibniz, broadly applied to topics outside of psychology and epistemology.Perhaps in keeping with Husserl's philosophy as "the best," Nissim-Sabat argues that I am unfaithful to Husserl's true mission as she sees it. I fail to uphold the essence of Husserlian philosophy. She reminds us: "… Husserl's view that the raison d'etre of phenomenology is to develop an attitude that 'overcomes naturalism once and for all' …" (55–56). She quotes from Husserl's "Vienna Lecture," in support of the claim that overcoming naturalism is the raison d'etre of Husserl's phenomenology. Nissim-Sabat picks out one theme of Husserl's philosophy and makes it into its "raison-d'etre." Those familiar with Husserlian philosophy, and circumspect of its application to current issues in psychiatry and psychotherapy, would find her position worrisome. Specifically, as regards the application of Husserlian philosophy to current issues, a more specific obstacle than a looming naturalism is the prospect that researchers in the empirical sciences will doubt the efficacy of Husserlian philosophy for establishing causal relations through statistical correlations. Because Husserlian philosophy is intentionality based, it might seem (falsely) that it cannot handle the rigorous quantitative analysis of after and side effects that psychopharmacology requires.There should be little worry that anyone who would apply Husserlian philosophy to current psychological or psychiatric issues might... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Colonial Figures and Postcolonial ReadingSuvir Kaul (bio)Jenny Sharpe. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.Sara Suleri. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Biologists tell us that racialism is a myth and there is no such thing as a master race. But we in India have known racialism in all its forms ever since the commencement (...) of British rule. The whole ideology of this rule was that of the herrenvolk and the master race, and the structure of government was based upon it; indeed the idea of a master race is inherent in imperialism. There was no subterfuge about it; it was proclaimed in unambiguous language by those in authority. More powerful than words was the practice that accompanied them....—Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946)Sara Suleri begins The Rhetoric of English India with a critique of “some of the governing assumptions” of the field of colonial cultural studies, which she sees as subject to a debilitating “concept-function”: “While the representation of otherness has long been acknowledged as one of the must [sic] culturally vexing idioms to read, contemporary interpretations of alterity are increasingly victims of their own apprehension of such vexation. Even as the other is privileged in all its pluralities, in all its alternative histories, its concept-function remains too embedded in a theoretical duality of margin to center ultimately to allow the cultural decentering that such critical attention surely desires” [1]. Suleri enumerates some of the problems attendant upon “alteritist” methods of reading: “While alteritism begins as a critical and theoretical revision of a Eurocentric or Orientalist study of the literatures of colonialism, its indiscriminate reliance on the centrality of otherness tends to replicate what in the context of imperialist discourse was the familiar category of the exotic.” In its single-minded devotion to the analysis of difference, alteritism runs the risk of “representing ‘difference’ with no attention to the cultural nuances that differentiation implies. Instead, alteritism reads to reify questions of cultural misapprehension until ‘otherness’ becomes a conceptual blockage that signifies a repetitive monumentalization of the academy’s continuing fear of its own cultural ignorance” [12].In her account of academic processes, Suleri is surely right in claiming that, “in contravention of the astounding specificity of each colonial encounter... contemporary critical theory names the other in order that it need not be further known” [13], thus providing theoretical models and vocabularies whose easy portability and schematic applicability become the reasons for their institutional success. Now that a loose affiliation of texts, revisionary reading practices, and literary histories are being institutionalized (particularly in departments of English) under the disciplinary rubric of colonial and postcolonial discourse studies, such a questioning of the protean versatility [End Page 74] and analytical usefulness of notions of “otherness” or alterity is timely. 1 In much academic writing, the critique of colonial discourses ends where perhaps it should begin, by positing the many forms of alterity that are invoked in the writing of the imperial, nationalist, or even subaltern subject. Particularly in the work of literary theorists, this dynamic of self and other proves entirely compelling when charted in and through textual representation, and the metropolitan archive, both literally and figuratively open in our moment of decolonization, provides ample opportunity to think about the reiterated motifs of “civilization” and “barbarism,” modernity and its antecedents, trade and empire, warfare and conquest.Yet what is to make such intellectual work “postcolonial” in any significant sense? Today, “postcolonial studies” in the Anglo-US academy often suggests simply the opening up of a new archive or a bringing together, in different ways, of various interpretative or reading techniques developed by poststructuralist theorists. There is little evidence that such intellectual work derives any of its critical functions and polemical urgencies from the present-day cultural and intellectual life of the “postcolonial” nation or nations whose historical legacy is under study. Metropolitan concerns and agendas dictate the nature and process of inquiry, rather than a more appropriate sense of the pressing issues that have priority in the national debates of once-colonized countries. What is required is a different... (shrink)

Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Analytical Reading and Reasoning, Second Edition, provides a nontechnical vocabulary and analytic apparatus that guide students in identifying and articulating the central patterns found in reasoning and in expository writing more generally. Understanding these patterns of reasoning helps students to better analyze, evaluate, and construct arguments and to more easily comprehend the full range of everyday arguments found in ordinary journalism. Critical Thinking, Second Edition, distinguishes itself from other texts in the field (...) by emphasizing analytical reading as an essential skill. It also provides detailed coverage of argument analysis, diagnostic arguments, diagnostic patterns, and fallacies. Opening with two chapters on analytical reading that help students recognize what makes reasoning explicitly different from other expository activities, the text then presents an interrogative model of argument to guide them in the analysis and evaluation of reasoning. This model allows a detailed articulation of "inference to the best explanation" and gives students a view of the pervasiveness of this form of reasoning. The author demonstrates how many common argument types--from correlations to sampling--can be analyzed using this articulated form. He then extends the model to deal with several predictive and normative arguments and to display the value of the fallacy vocabulary. Ideal for introductory courses in critical thinking, critical reasoning, informal logic, and inductive reasoning, Critical Thinking, Second Edition, features hundreds of exercises throughout and includes worked-out solutions and additional exercises at the end of each chapter. An Instructor's Manual--offering solutions to the text's unanswered exercises and featuring other pedagogical aids--is available on the book's Companion Website at www.oup.com/us/wright. (shrink)

At the end of the Fifth Meditation, Descartes has the Meditator proclaim: “the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends uniquely on my awareness of the true God, to such an extent that I was incapable of perfect knowledge [perfecte scire] of anything else until I became aware of him”. Not so, complained the Second Objectors, for it seems an atheist can know, in the sense of being “clearly and distinctly aware,” that the angles of a triangle are equal (...) to two right angles. In response, Descartes simply agreed, writing, “[t]he fact that an atheist can be ‘clearly aware that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles’ is something I do not dispute” (AT... (shrink)

In classical Chinese philosophy, the best kind of life is a life lived in line with the Dao (the “Way”). A core feature of this kind of life is attaining the ideal of wu-wei. In early Daoist writings, wu-wei denotes an ideal way of acting. However, since wu-wei is normally translated as “no-action” these ancient texts give us a picture of the best kind of life that may appear paradoxical to many philosophers. In this paper, I suggest a way to (...) make sense of this classical ideal. I argue that by applying a Merleau-Pontyian framework of action we can arrive at a non-paradoxical reading of wu-wei. On this reading, wu-wei is essentially manifested in a specific way we are aware of what we are doing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 8-21MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Klossowski's Reading of Nietzsche Impulses, Phantasms, Simulacra, StereotypesDaniel W. SmithIn his writings on Nietzsche, Pierre Klossowski makes use of various concepts—such as intensities, phantasms, simulacra and stereotypes, resemblance and dissemblance, gregariousness and singularity—that have no place in Nietzsche's own oeuvre. These concepts are Klossowski's own creations, his own contributions to thought. Although Klossowski consistently refused to characterize himself as a philosopher (...) ("Je suis une 'maniaque,'" he once said, "Un point, c'est tout!"),1 his work in its entirety was marked by an extraordinary conceptual creation. From this point of view, his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle can be read as a work in philosophy—at least in the idiosyncratic sense given to this term by Gilles Deleuze, who defined philosophy as the creation or invention of concepts [Deleuze and Guattari 2]. No doubt, Klossowski remains an almost unclassifiable figure—philosopher, novelist, essayist, translator, artist—and attempting to analyze his work through the prism of philosophy may seem to be a reductive approach that belies the complexity of his exceptional oeuvre. Reading Klossowski as a conceptual innovator, however, at least has the advantage of allowing us to chart a consistent trajectory through his difficult and often labyrinthine text, without denying its other dimensions (affective, perceptive, literary, and so on). In what follows, then, I would like to examine three of Klossowski's most characteristic and important concepts—impulses and their intensities, phantasms, and simulacra and their stereotypes—as well as the precise interrelations he establishes among them. Taken together, these three concepts describe what Klossowski terms the tripartite economy of soul, which constitutes the implicit model through which he interprets Nietzsche's thought.1Impulses as Fluctuating IntensitiesKlossowski describes his books on both Nietzsche and Sade as "essays devoted not to ideologies but to the physiognomies of problematic thinkers who differ greatly from each other" ["Postface" 137, emphasis added]. This emphasis on the "physiognomy" of thinkers reflects Nietzsche's insistence on taking the body rather than the mind as a guide for philosophy since the body is a more accessible phenomenon, less surrounded by myth and superstition. "The body and physiology as the starting point," Nietzsche wrote. "Why?... The phenomenon of the body is the richer, clearer, more tangible [End Page 8] phenomenon.... Belief in the body is more fundamental than belief in the soul" [WP §§492, 489, 491]. Klossowski himself, however, when writing of the intensive status of the impulses, frequently makes use of the term "soul" (âme), owing in part, no doubt, to his interest in the theological literature of the mystics, such as Meister Eckhardt and Teresa of Avila. For the mystics, the depth of the soul is something irreducible and uncreated: it eludes the exercise of the created intellect, and can only be grasped negatively.2 Nonetheless, if one can find a similar apophaticism (or "negative theology") in Klossowski, it is related exclusively to the immanent and chaotic movements of the soul's intensive affects, and not to the transcendence of God. What is incommunicable in the soul (or body) are its "impulses"—their fluctuations of intensity, their rises and falls, their manic elations and depressive descents, which are in constant variation.Nietzsche himself had recourse to a highly varied vocabulary to describe what Klossowski summarizes in the term "impulse": "drive" (Triebe), "desire" (Begierden), "instinct" (Instinke), "power" (Mächte), "force" (Kräfte), "impulse" (Reize, Impulse), "passion" (Leidenschaften), "feeling" (Gefülen), "affect" (Affekte), "pathos" (Pathos), and so on.3 Klossowski frequently employs the musical term tonalité to describe these states of the soul's fluctuating intensities—their diverse tones, timbres, and changing amplitudes—which can take on various forms ("aggressiveness, tolerance, intimidation, anguish, the need for solitude, the forgetting of oneself" [NVC 6]). At bottom, what these impulses express are what Klossowski calls the "obstinate singularity" of the human soul, which is by nature noncommunicable; they constitute "the unexchangeable depth" (le fond inéchangeable) or "the unintelligible depth" (le fond unintelligible) of the soul. What makes every individual... (shrink)

A novel approach to the scientific understanding of phenomenal awareness is presented that accepts consciousness as ontologically fundamental and is based on the hypothesis that the whole range of phenomenal nuances is inherent in the frequency spectrum of a ubiquitous field of consciousness. Pursuing this idea, it is postulated that the brain employs a universal interaction mechanism through which it taps into this field, thereby acquiring phenomenal qualities. I argue that the edifice of modern physics can not only offer (...) a promising candidate for the field of consciousness, consisting in the zero-point field (ZPF), but also an appropriate interaction mechanism. What is more, the empirical body of evidence supports the conclusion that conscious processes make use of exactly this mechanism. More specifically, the neural correlates of consciousness suggest that in the stimulus-oriented operating mode the brain produces streams of consciousness by periodically writing information states into the ZPF, while in the stimulus-independent operating mode the brain is receptive to previously generated ZPF information states that constitute the repository of conscious experiences, implying that self-referential conscious states are retrieved by periodically reading information states from the ZPF. Beyond its explanatory power the presented approach opens up new horizons for the future research strategy. (shrink)

In the year 1471 a member of the Sorbonne, Guillaume Fichet, looking back on the history of what today we should call communication technology, divided it into three periods: antiquity , a subsequent period which we should identify as the Middle Ages , and a period just beginning . Just over five hundred years later an American scholar, Walter J. Ong, looking back on a longer historical span, divided it into orality, writing, printing, and electronic communications. No matter how (...) much these two figures may differ over details, they occupy a similar position: each stands at the start of a communications shift which has alerted him to changes in the past, and Ong claims explicitly that contrasts “between electronic media and print have sensitized us to the earlier contrast between writing and orality.” We do not have to go as far as Eric A. Havelock, who suggests that our new awareness can be precisely dated by a number of publications appearing in the annus mirabilis 1963 , in order to accept the general point that recent work has been stimulated by recent technology. (shrink)

This text gives an account of the experience of reading Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva in the form of a brief dialogue with the text. It foregrounds the writing voice’s address of a second person and the attention this address brings to the acts of writing and reading that hold the two pronouns in relation, producing at once an infinite and nonexistent distance from being to being. The dialogue observes Lispector’s insistent return to the formulation “atrás do (...) pensamento,” which has been translated into English as “beyond thought” and can also be translated as “behind-thought” or as the background of thought, in a more spatial sense. Nancy reads the translation into French, where this spatial nuance is preserved, in consultation with Lusophone interlocutors about the specificities of the Portuguese original. The dialogue interrogates the link across this dimension, the recurrence of the pronoun it in the original Portuguese version of Água Viva, and the acts of writing and reading a text that brings awareness to a living, pulsing, ongoing, and escaping instant beyond meaning that is nonetheless the cause of the address in the first place. The dialogue follows the thread of this movement as it slips out behind thought, where Água Viva meets other books attuned to the instant and in which the dialogue’s “I” feels their vitalizing effects. (shrink)

M. Tullius Cicero was the first among the Roman thinkers, who made the pro_blematic of culture and civilization his serious concern. His investigations led him to the belief that the culture, seen as a whole of traditions, norms and values, is in_separable from artes, i. e. the spiritual phenomena in science and art. From his awarness of the necesssity to create the Roman culture in this sense of inseparability resulted his ambitious philosophical project: the Romans should accept the spiritual experience (...) of the Greeks and develop it in philosophical writings in Latin language. To all doubts and prejudices hostile to this intention he thus responded by philosophical and linguistic writings based on his conviction, that the Latin language is able to express even the most complicated philosophical ideas and concepts and that the human interaction is possible. (shrink)

Developmental dyslexia hinders reading and writing acquisition of around 5-10 % of the children all over the world. However, little is known about role of prospective memory among dyslexics. Prospective memory is realization of delayed intention. Realization of delayed intention requires self initiated process. The present study explored the role of memory (prospective and retrospective memory), meta-memory and attention among dyslexic’s children. One hundred and fifteen children (51 dyslexics and 64 normal controls) participated in the study. Prospective and (...) retrospective memory questionnaire, everyday attention questionnaire and meta-memory were administered on children. Analysis of variance was used to analyses the data. All the main effects were significant. Some interactions were also found to be significant. Results suggest that dyslexic’s performance on memory (prospective and retrospective memory) was worse than normal control. Meta-memory influences both dyslexics and normal control on prospective and retrospective memory. However, meta-memory affected dyslexics much more than normal control group. Similarly, significant differential effects were observed for simple, difficult and mixed attentional condition among between dyslexics and normal control. Dyslexic’s performance was deteriorated as compared to normal control group. The findings of the study are discussed in the light of the existing literature. Keywords: Meta-memory, Phoneme, Phonological awareness,and Visuo-spatial sktechpad. (shrink)

Two studies examined children’s developing understanding of Aesop’s fables in relation to reading comprehension and to theory of mind. Study 1 included 172 children from Junior Kindergarten through Grade 6 in a school-wide examination of the relation between reading comprehension skills and understanding of Aesop’s fables told orally. Study 2 examined the relation between theory of mind and fables understanding among 186 Junior (4-year-old) and Senior (5-year-old) Kindergarten children. Study 1 results showed a developmental progression in fables understanding (...) with children’s responses becoming increasingly decontextualized as they were able to extract the life lesson. After general vocabulary, passage comprehension predicted fables understanding. Study 2 results showed a relation between young children’s theory of mind development and their understanding of fables. After general vocabulary, second-order theory of mind predicted children’s fables understanding. Findings point to the importance of developing mental state awareness in children’s ability to judge characters’ intentions and to understand the deeper message embedded in fables. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cancel Culture and the Trope of the ScapegoatA Girardian Defense of the Importance of Contemplative ReadingJoakim Wrethed (bio)What unfolds in this article encompasses violence, language/reading, and ethics. René Girard addresses these topics primarily in terms of mimesis, its potential violence, and the trope of the scapegoat. Still, toward the end of his career and life, he relentlessly pointed out the dangers implicated in the dynamism of these forces. (...) He addressed it clearly in his "apocalyptic book" Battling to the End (2010):I have been accused of repeating myself too often, of turning my theory into a fetish, of using it to explain everything. Yet it has described mechanisms that recent discoveries in neuroscience confirm: imitation is the initial and essential means of learning; it is not something acquired later on. We can escape mimetism only by understanding the laws that govern it. Only by understanding the dangers of imitation can we conceive of authentic identification with the Other. However, we are becoming aware of the primacy of moral relationship at the very time when the atomization of humanity is being realized, and when violence has increased in intensity and unpredictability.1[End Page 15] It is this thin line between necessary/harmless imitation and its dangerous versions that will be the central theme in the analysis. As Girard states, a vast amount of established research confirms that the mimetic impulse is innate.2 We should pay specific attention to "the atomization of humanity," since it zooms in on our contemporary epoch's paradoxical "mass-individualism," evidently tremendously enhanced by information and communication technology (ICT). In order to contribute to Girard's lifework and to extend it beyond his own writing, we outline a few contemporary phenomena that clearly exhibit the primordial dangers of human violence that Girard draws attention to. These phenomena are initially only roughly sketched, but subsequent sections give them sharper relief. The central phenomena are cancel culture, speed, and the reading of literature. Just to be clear, the intended mode of reading should be construed in a broad sense, thus potentially including philosophy and theology, if one is inclined to emphasize the differences between these disciplines and the reading of literature.3Cancel culture in certain ways makes manifest a social welfare society version of escalating violence, indicating that "violence has increased in intensity and unpredictability."4 A succinct definition of cancel culture will initially suffice:Cancel culture refers to ending (or attempting to end) an individual's career or prominence to hold them accountable for immoral behavior. Driven primarily by young progressives, often through social media, cancel culture has attracted controversy since it swept into the national conversation.5This definition can easily be extended into larger historical patterns in which, for instance, colonial crimes are highlighted and demands are raised for contemporary acts of atonement. As Rob Henderson points out, the obvious flip side is that "the swift and decisive nature of cancel culture can stifle debate, and some believe that dialogue is a more productive way to foster change."6 The "swiftness" and the immediate collectable consequences are decisive in their functions as social punishment and exclusion; in other words, digitalized speed accomplishes verdict and punishment in a very short time span, which is a reflection of desire pure and simple. The rapidity from intention to anticipated effect rather resembles an instinctive and violent action more than the forwarding of a carefully thought through argument or statement. The present becomes an invincible ivory tower bristling with power to finally mete out the justice that the erroneous ethics of earlier times were incapable of conceiving and achieving. An always already accelerating modernity speeded up immensely through [End Page 16] the fast growth of information and communication technology (ICT). To be sure, the whole evolution of computer technology is defined primarily in terms of processing speed, together with the quantity of information that can be contained in as small a spatial entity as possible. The present-day reality of having almost everything only one or a few clicks away on a screen—as a modern day realization of the library in Alexandria—enhances the relevance of a phenomenon historians have referred to... (shrink)

Paul uses the hapax legomenon ίλαστήριον in Romans 3:25. Pauline scholars have discussed the background for Paul’s use of the word, whether from the LXX, Second Temple practice or pagan inscriptions. Two altars were found in the Asian city of Metropolis in the early 1990s with the dedication Καίσαρος ἱλαστηρίου. This article discusses their discovery, the history of Metropolis and the possible relationship of Paul to the city. It explores the date of the erection of the altars by establishing a (...) viable sitz im leben early in the reign of Augustus. It then traces the semantic history of the ίλαστήριον and attempts to establish its possible meaning within Pauline theology. Finally, the question whether ίλαστήριον should be added to the vocabulary of imperial ideology in Paul’s writings is addressed. (shrink)

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete's thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete's life-long engagement with one (...) thinker in particular -Plato. The Platonic dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of that periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers. The core of The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays Benardete produced in his last years; the collection provides at the same time an entry into that world through some of Benardete's earliest articles on Plato and on Greek poetry. Benardete's earlier path of close textual analysis always reflected his intimate philosophic dialogue with the thinker in whose work he was immersed; later, he drew on resources of erudition acquired over a lifetime to present a broader picture, on a theme like the dialectics of eros or freedom and necessity. In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic thinkers. He had become increasingly aware that the discovery of philosophy through the "Socratic turn" was really the rediscovery of an understanding already present in some form in the Greek poets and that awareness guided his last years of study of the pre-Socratic philosophers. According to the standard view of the history of Greek philosophy, the Socratic turn, with its focus on "the human things," marks a point of radical change in philosophy's history. Benardete's late studies led him to the conclusion that the kind of pivotal reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark of what it means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or Parmenides is a genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent that a Socratic turn can be found in some form within his own thought. At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what it means to be "post-Platonic." As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, the Platonic notion of a "second sailing" gave Benardete a key to the relation between Greek and Latin thought - and with that to a comprehensive under-standing of antiquity-as it did to the relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Ronna Burger teaches philosophy at Tulane University; she is the author of The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth from St. Augustine's Press and Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics. Michael Davis teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College; he authored Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics and, with Seth Benardete, translated Aristotle - On Poetics, both from St. Augustine's Press. Burger and Davis collaborated on editing Seth Benardete's Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. (shrink)

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete's thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete's life-long engagement with one (...) thinker in particular -Plato. The Platonic dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of that periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers. The core of The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays Benardete produced in his last years; the collection provides at the same time an entry into that world through some of Benardete's earliest articles on Plato and on Greek poetry. Benardete's earlier path of close textual analysis always reflected his intimate philosophic dialogue with the thinker in whose work he was immersed; later, he drew on resources of erudition acquired over a lifetime to present a broader picture, on a theme like the dialectics of eros or freedom and necessity. In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic thinkers. He had become increasingly aware that the discovery of philosophy through the "Socratic turn" was really the rediscovery of an understanding already present in some form in the Greek poets and that awareness guided his last years of study of the pre-Socratic philosophers. According to the standard view of the history of Greek philosophy, the Socratic turn, with its focus on "the human things," marks a point of radical change in philosophy's history. Benardete's late studies led him to the conclusion that the kind of pivotal reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark of what it means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or Parmenides is a genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent that a Socratic turn can be found in some form within his own thought. At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what it means to be "post-Platonic." As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, the Platonic notion of a "second sailing" gave Benardete a key to the relation between Greek and Latin thought - and with that to a comprehensive under-standing of antiquity-as it did to the relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Ronna Burger teaches philosophy at Tulane University; she is the author of The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth from St. Augustine's Press and Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics. Michael Davis teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College; he authored Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics and, with Seth Benardete, translated Aristotle - On Poetics, both from St. Augustine's Press. Burger and Davis collaborated on editing Seth Benardete's Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. (shrink)