Der Artikel untersucht den originären Beitrag Simon Kronbergs zur deutschen Literatur des Expressionismus. Der zu den „vergessenen und verkannten Autoren der expressionistischen Generation” (Lützeler) gehörende Kronberg ist bis heute kaum untersucht. Als Sohn jüdisch-galizischer Zuwanderer 1891 in Wien geboren, studiert er 1913 bei Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, dessen Licht- und Bewegungschoreographien ihn nachhaltig prägen. Weitere Stationen sind Düsseldorf bei dem Schauspieler-Paar Lindemann/dumont, München und Berlin. 1934 emigriert er nach Palästina, wo er 1947 stirbt. Seine Texte entwerfen eine Sprache, deren sinnstiftende (...) Bilder von seiner biographischen Erfahrung geprägt sind und jüdische Mystik, Tanz und Rhythmus auf spezifische Weise integrieren. Im Zentrum steht Kronbergs Konzeption des Schattens als einer Möglichkeit der Wandlung des Menschen in einer Welt der Rationalität und der Entkopplung des täglichen Lebens von Körper und Sinnlichkeit hin zu einer Erfahrung des Lichts. Am Beispiel seiner Erzählung “Chamlam” zeigt der Beitrag, dass seine Schattenfiguren in einem beachtenswerten Spannungsverhältnis zum Diskurs der Gespenster im Expressionismus stehen. (shrink)

In this influential work, first published in English in 1963, Durkheim and Mauss claim that the individual mind is capable of classification and they seek the origin of the ‘classificatory function’ in society. On the basis of an intensive examination of forms and principles of symbolic classification reported from the Australian aborigines, the Zuñi and traditional China, they try to establish a formal correspondence between social and symbolic classification. From this they argue that the mode of classification is determined by (...) the form of society and that the notions of space, time, hierarchy, number, class and other such cognitive categories are products of society. Dr Needham’s introduction assesses the validity of Durkhiem and Mauss’s argument, traces its continued influence in various disciplines, and indicates its analytical value for future researches in social anthropology. (shrink)

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The author confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history. He focuses on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, & science.

Emile Meyerson's writings on the philosophy of science are a rich source of ideas and information concerning many philosophical and historical aspects of the development of modem science. Meyerson's works are not widely read or cited today by philosophers or even philosophers of science, in part because they have long been out of print and are often not available even in research libraries. There are additional chevaux de!rise for all but the hardiest scholars: Meyerson's books are written in French (...) (and do not all exist in English versions) and deal with the subject matter of science - ideas or concepts, laws or principles, theories - and epis temological questions rather than today's more fashionable topics of the social matrix and external influences on science with the concomitant neglect of the intellectual content of science. Born in Lublin, Poland, in 1859, Meyerson received most of his education in Germany, where he studied from the age of 12 to 23, preparing himself for a career in chemistry.! He moved to Paris in 1882, where he began a career as an industrial chemist. Changing his profession, he then worked for a time as the foreign news editor of the HAVAS News Agency in Paris. In 1898 he joined the agency established by Edmond Rothschild that had as its purpose the settling of Jews in Palestine and became the Director of the Jewish Colonization Association for Europe and Asia Minor. These activities represent Meyerson's formal career. (shrink)

This paper attempts to reintegrate the concept of plasticity into educational philosophy. Although John Dewey used the concept in Democracy and Education it has not generated much of a critical or practical legacy in educational thought. French philosopher, Catherine Malabou, is the first to think plasticity rigorously and seriously in a contemporary philosophical context and this paper outlines her thinking on it as well as considering its applicability to education. My argument is that her definition not only successfully reintroduces the (...) concept in a way which is generative for contemporary educational philosophy and practice but that it also significantly extends the remit of educational plasticity as previously conceived by Dewey. This paper will examine the concept of educational plasticity as providing an opportunity as well as ‘the feeling of a new responsibility’ towards the plastic subject in philosophical approaches to education. (shrink)

Cet article présente les paradigmes de la cécité au changement. J'y identifie et évalue les interprétations perceptives et cognitives des déficits induits par des manipulations de l'attention, et critique le critère épistémique proposé par Dretske en faveur de la conception cognitive. Mon argument souligne l'influence de l'attention sur le contenu de l'expérience perceptive.

Through readings of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology and 'The Age of Hegel', attention is given to two of the problematic types of relationships that philosophy can have with education. These engagements, alongside a reading of 'The Antinomies of the Philosophical Discipline: Letter Preface', show how Derrida’s thought can prescribe no educational programme and instead troubles educational proclamations and certainties. Throughout his life, Derrida negotiated his relationships to the educational systems and institutions to which he was responsible, these negotiations, though, were (...) not indicative of a belief in any ontologically grounded educational truth. Quite to the contrary, as I will claim, Derrida’s thought is remarkable for its deflation of the myth, stretching at least as far back to Plato’s Republic, that philosophy can discover and prescribe the practical means for its own educational good. The argument presented in this article is that Derrida’s thought is particularly fertile when it comes to educational reflection precisely because it does not close down, presuppose, or prescribe, and that these characteristics also allow for generative contradictions in Derrida's educational and philosophical thought and practice. (shrink)

This article introduces a form of ‘conversation’ distinct from dialogue or dialectic to the context of educational theory, practice, and research. Through an engagement with the thought of Maurice Blanchot, this paper outlines the conditions he attributes to conversation in the form of plural speech, its relationship to research, how it can be educational, and speculatively concludes by considering how it can operate productively within and around educational institutions. As such, this paper provides an original intervention into educational philosophy and (...) theory, which relies on a close reading of key sections of Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation, and reflections on the distinctiveness of his argument in relation to contemporary theoretical approaches, as well as the significance of his thought and its application here to the broader questions of what non-prescriptive theory might have to offer educational research and practice. (shrink)

La palabra amr («orden dada» - «autoridad») vino a ser, entre los Almoha-des Mu'miníes, una denominación utilizada para designar a `Abd al-Mu'min y a cada uno de sus sucesores los califas: « al-Amr » («la Autoridad»), «háda l-Amr» («esta Autoridad»). Este artículo propone como origen de este uso mu'miní el recuerdo de las exclamaciones atribuidas al mahdi Ibn Tumart, en las cuales había designado a `Abd al-Mu'min como el futuro poseedor del amr; entre estas exclamaciones tumartíes se debe dar un (...) lugar de preferencia a la que -entendida de otra manera hasta ahora- había proferido poco tiempo antes de su muerte, al enterarse de la derrota almohade de la Buhayra. (shrink)

Insurance coverage of abortion varies widely across the United States and is an extensively debated issue. Medicaid coverage of abortion is particularly relevant because the majority of abortion patients are poor or low‐income and are thus often covered by Medicaid. Since the Hyde Amendment was first passed in 1976, federal Medicaid funds have been banned from covering the costs of elective abortion. Although states are allowed to use their own funds to cover abortions for their Medicaid recipients, only 17 states (...) currently do so. Of these 17 states, only five cover abortion costs voluntarily; the others do so pursuant to court order. The medical literature includes few ethical analyses of the Hyde Amendment’s ban on Medicaid funding of elective abortions. To fill this gap, we perform an ethical analysis of federal policy to fund elective abortions using a consequentialist approach focused on consequences for pregnant women and their children. (shrink)

Positive ignorance is the putting in to question of, and sometimes moving on from, the knowledge we think we have, and asking where it might be just or helpful to do so. Drawing primarily on the work of Barbara Johnson, this article shows how the notion of positive ignorance might be offered as a tool in the context of education and educational research. Partly a critical development of Richard Smith's argument in ‘The Virtues of Unknowing’, I attempt to understand ‘unknowing’ (...) as an active rather than passive form of ‘not knowing’, in a manner that challenges some aspects of ‘the virtues of unknowing’ and its concomitant epistemological and ethical positions, not least those tied to Smith's advocacy for what he calls the ‘well-stocked mind’. Unknowing, in my reading, is not a dispositional acceptance of the desirability of nonknowledge, instead, unknowing is a means of epistemological resistance, especially against that which, often with very real social and political consequences, is presented as self-evident. (shrink)

“Scalar implicatures” is a phrase used to refer to some inferences arising from the competition between alternatives: typically, “Mary read some of the books” ends up conveying that Mary did not read all books, because one could have said “Mary read all books”. The so-called grammatical theory argues that these inferences obtain from the application of a covert operator \, which not only has the capability to negate alternative sentences, but also the capability to be embedded within sentences under other (...) linguistic operators, i.e. \ has the potential to add to the meaning of expressions, the negation of their alternatives. This view typically seeks support from the existence of readings that could not be explained without the extra-capability of \ to occur in embedded positions. However, if some embedded positions seem to be accessible to \, not all conceivable positions that \ could occupy yield sensible results. In short: the \ approach is powerful, maybe too powerful. Various approaches based on logical strength and monotonicity have been proposed to justify on principled grounds the limited distribution of \; these approaches are mostly based on a comparison between possible parses, and considerations of monotonicity. We propose a new constraint based instead on “connectedness”, ruling out parses because of inherent problems their outcome may raise. Connectedness is a sister notion of monotonicity, which has been recruited to explain certain lexical restrictions on nouns, adjectives and more recently quantifiers; we propose here that connectedness could play a similar role at the level of propositional meanings. (shrink)

This paper does not present an advocacy of a passive education as opposed to an active education nor does it propose that passive education is in any way ‘better’ or more important than active education. Through readings of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and B.S. Johnson, and gentle critiques of Jacques Rancière and John Dewey, passive education is instead described and outlined as an education which occurs whether we attempt it or not. As such, the object of critique for this essay (...) are forms of educational thought which, through fate or design, exclude the passive dimension, either within or outside of formal educational settings. An underlying component of this argument is therefore also that education does occur outside of formal educational settings and that, contra Gert Biesta and his critique of ‘learnification’, we may gain rather than lose something by attending to it as education. (shrink)

This paper asks the question of how we can situate the educational subject in what Luciano Floridi has defined as an ‘informational ontology’. It will suggest that Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler offer paths toward rethinking the educational subject that lend themselves to an informational future, as well as speculating on how, with this knowledge, we can educate to best equip ourselves and others for our increasingly digital world. Jacques Derrida thought the concept of the subject was ‘indispensable’ as a (...) function but did not subscribe to or accept any particular theory of how a subject could be defined or developed because it was always situated in and as a context. Following Derrida, Bernard Stiegler explains in Technics and Time: 1 that ‘the relation binding the “who” and the “what” is invention’. As such, the separation between self and world can be seen as artificial, including if this world is perceived wholly or partly as technological, digital or informational. If this is the case, a responsibility is placed on the educator and their part in ‘inventing’ this distinction for future generations. How this invention of the educational subject is negotiated is therefore one the many philosophical tasks for digital pedagogy. (shrink)

Trois idées sont proposées ici : 1° L’explication scientifique, que Descartes regardait comme une extension logique progressive du point de vue mathématique aux différents plans du savoir, doit céder aujourd’hui la place à une explication chronologique de l'ordre d’apparition des diverses sciences. 2° Cet ordre suit un rythme qui débute par la physique, pour descendre à la mathématique, et remonter ensuite à la biologie, 3° Cette succession correspond au rythme analogue de la vie de la pensée : intuition, abaissement vers (...) l'analyse, conversion vers la synthèse qui ést un etat d’équilibre intermédiaire. (shrink)

In this paper, we build on recent work on the role of the ‘utopian pedagogue’ to explore how utopian thinking can be developed within contemporary higher education institutions. In defending a utopian orientation on the part of HE lecturers, we develop the notion of ‘minimal utopianism’; a notion which, we suggest, expresses the difficult position of critical educators concerned to offer their students the tools with which to imagine and explore alternatives to current social and political reality, while acknowledging the (...) contingent ethical constraints of the system within which they and their students are working. While agreeing with utopian theorists such as Darren Webb who have defended the need for ‘blueprint utopias’ in education in the face of the reduction of the idea of utopia to a purely process-oriented pedagogy, our focus here is on the prior educational task of providing the conceptual and communicative tools for utopian thinking to emerge. The collaborative nature of this paper is ref... (shrink)

Principles of legislation.--Principles of the civil code.--Principles of the penal code.

This article proceeds from a consideration of what John Baldacchino calls ‘viable ignorance’, attempting to take leave from the critical and pedagogical obligations of certain elements of Barbara Johnson's ‘positive ignorance’. It considers Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard and the composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen's reflections on modes of experience, and the cultivation of complementary dispositions, where the knowing, egocentric subject is transformed into, or undermined as, what Nietzsche calls ‘a medium of overpowering forces’. The disposition itself is outlined through close readings of (...) key elements of Nietzsche's notebooks, Lyotard's final chapter of Libidinal Economy (1993), and Stockhausen's lecture, ‘Intuitive Music’ (1971) and developed through supplemental practice-as-research activity in sound. The intention of this paper is to explore the space of aesthetic ignorance as committedly as possible, without reverting constantly to positive ignorance. (shrink)

The primary purpose of this paper is to outline the conceptual means by which it is possible to be optimistic about education. To provide this outline I turn to Ian Hunter and David Blacker, after a brief introduction to Nietzsche’s conceptions of optimism and pessimism, to show why certain forms of optimism in education are either intellectually unhelpful or dispositionally helpless in the face of current educational issues. The alternative form of optimism—which I argue is both intellectually and practically helpful—is (...) drawn from a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche. This reading of Nietzsche is not a simple exercise representing his views. As Nietzsche never explicitly advocated for any form of optimism—and frequently advocated against many of its manifestations—drawing what I call ‘a new version of optimism’ from his writings is no straightforward task, and certainly not without risk. As such, I have extended my readings of Nietzsche across his entire oeuvre, including his writings unintended for publication from his Nachlass. At the core of my argument is the claim that when Nietzsche was sketching out what he called ‘a new version of pessimism’, it was actually quite close to what we might now call ‘a new version of optimism.’ This first claim precipitates a second, which is that this new version of optimism is not only especially suited to contemporary educational thought and practice but is itself a description of an educational experience and disposition. (shrink)