_In _Broader, Bolder, Better_, authors Elaine Weiss, of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign, and Paul Reville, former Massachusetts secretary of education, make a compelling case for a fundamental change in the way we view education._ The authors argue for a large-scale expansion of community-school partnerships in order to provide holistic, integrated student supports (ISS) from cradle to career, including traditional wraparound services like health, mental health, nutrition, and family supports, as well as expanded access to opportunities such (...) as early childhood education, afterschool activities, and summer enrichment programs. The book builds on nearly a decade of research by the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, a national initiative endorsed by more than sixty policy experts and leaders from across the country, and draws on the work of Harvard’s Education Redesign Lab. It pulls from case studies of effective ISS efforts in twelve diverse communities to illustrate the variety of strategies that can be adopted locally. A call to action that also provides examples of communities that are successfully leveling the playing field for poor children, this book offers a detailed vision for building—through field work, mobilization, and financing—comprehensive systems to prepare all children for success. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Portrait of a Miniature Giant PAUL BAROLSKY There was a time when the art of the sixteenth -century Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino was reviled for its aesthetic excesses. Writing in his classic “The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy,” the great nineteenth -century scholar Jacob Burckhardt wrote that “as an historical painter,” Bronzino must “be placed among the Mannerists,” a judgement equivalent to placing (...) him in an art historical hell. But, Burckhardt added, “as a portrait painter, he is inferior to none of his contemporaries, not even the Venetians.” Given the fact that among the Venetians, Titian is one of the great portrait painters, this is astonishingly high praise. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for art historians, appreciating Mannerism, to celebrate the elegance and preciosity of Bronzino’s exquisite portraits. Of all Bronzino’s portraits, that of the dwarf Morgante is one of the most beguiling. It is distinctive in so many ways. This picture is the subject of a remarkable book by the Israeli art historian Sefy Hendler, Gracious and Beautiful Monster : The Literary Universe of Bronzino’s Nano Morgante, which is an exceptional piece of scholarship. Different aspects of his book have influenced various scholars who have written about the picture and who have fruitfully exploited its various details. What needs to be appreciated, however, is the way in which this book brings out the extraordinary synthetic character of Bronzino’s strange painting and the diarion 28.3 winter 2021 Sefy Hendler, Gracious and Beautiful Monster: The Literary Universe of Bronzino’s Nano Morgante, Maschietto Editore, 2016. 158 the portrait of a miniature giant versity of ways in which it belongs to the courtly culture in which it was painted. The beauty of Hendler’s seemingly all-encompassing book is that it tells a fascinating and highly entertaining story with admirable brevity in just over seventy pages. Hendler, who packs a great deal of deeply absorbing information and insight into his slim and learned volume, is sensitive to the sentiment of Peter Whiffle’s well-known dictum: “You cannot begin not to tell until you know more than you are willing to impart.” Hendler’s exquisitely concise story concerns a favorite dwarf of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, one Braccio di Bartolo in Poggio di Fornione, who flourished at the ducal court in the middle years of the sixteenth-century. Bronzino painted the dwarf for the Duke in 1552. His sometime rival, Giorgio Vasari, painter, architect, and biographer, described the picture as “beautiful and marvelous” in his Lives of the artists. The painting is double-sided, featuring a frontal view of the naked dwarf on the recto of the canvas (fig. 1) and a rear view of the dwarf, similarly exposed on the verso (fig. 2), where the dwarf’s backside dominates the composition. (We might well observe here that Bronzino specialized lasciviously in painting the culo (witness the coy Cupid in his famous Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time). It is therefore not surprising that the anatomical backside rendered over and over again in Italian Renaissance art, with all its connotations, sexual and otherwise, has recently been the subject of a considerable body of scholarship. Hendler, himself writing on various writers of the period, offers little hints into the psycho-sexual dimension of Bronzino’s picture. Its depiction of so many birds leads inevitably to a consideration of the word “bird” in its sexual dimension. Enough said. If Morgante’s posterior is manifest on the verso, the recto of the painting has its own special interest. A butterfly flies by the dwarf directly and conveniently in front of his genitals—a coy if not teasing gesture of decorum. The portrait once hung in the Palazzo Vecchio, which had become a ducal residence. In recent years it has moved around quite a bit, settling in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti, once a ducal residence. Vasari’s description of the picture is not without a certain iro- Paul Barolsky 159 ny, since the beautiful form of the painting as painting stands in opposition to the less than beautiful dwarf. The writer Anton Francesco Grazzini captured this paradox in his poem on the occasion of the death... (shrink)

ISBN-13: 978-1934074480
Plot Summary from the book:
"An aristocratic young man, fed up with his studies, contemplates military service. His teacher is unable by any reasoning to call him back him from the path he has embarked upon. The young man enlists another youth who commits himself to the journey, dressed in military garb, and he happens upon two deserting soldiers, unsightly and ill-used both in their dress and in their hygiene. Both young men are so moved by the deserters’ (...) remarks deploring and reviling their lot in life that they return to their studies. One of the deserters, however, hopes to be welcomed back by the wife and small children he had deserted and left penniless and bereft of friends. She gives him a nasty reception, with verbal and corporal abuse, and he barely manages to have his sin forgiven and to return to her good graces."
From the Table of Contents:
Introduction
How to Use this Book
Jacobus Pontanus: Biography
Jesuit Comedy – Seriously?
The Stratocles as a Spiritual Exercise
Just War and the Morality of Military Service
A Play about War and the Real Wars of Pontanus' Time
The Characters and Their Names
Pontanus’ Use of Classical Sources
The History of the Text of Stratocles
Performance
Stratocles or War
Endnotes
Appendices
Pontanus on Humanist Studies
Pontanus on Writing Comedy
Renaissance School Hazing, called “Deposition”
Anonymous: Instructions for Deposition
Dialogue on Hazing (Progymnasma 100)
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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviews 91 A SURVEY OF FREE THOUGHT Chad Trainer 1006 Davids Run Phoenixville, pa 19460, usa stratof{[email protected] Paul Edwards. God and the Philosophers. Edited by Timothy J. Madigan. New York: Prometheus Books, 2009. Pp. 330. isbn 978-1-59102-618-1 (hb). us$28.98. zaul Edwards (1923–2004) is most famous as the editor of the magisterial PEncyclopedia of Philosophy. He was one of three coauthors of its lengthy entry on Bertrand Russell. In (...) 1957, Edwards also edited Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian. A collection of his writings entitled God and the Philosophersz has been recently published, edited by Tim Madigan. Timothy Madigan is a previous editor of Free Inquiry who would visit Ed­ wards when travelling to New York City and who had the privilege over the years of reading several drafts of God and the Philosophers, which Edwards knew would be his Wnal project (p. 8). Madigan explains: “Never one to hide his own unbelief, Edwards often com­ mented that his two main goals were to demolish the inXuence of Heidegger and keep alive the memory of William Reich, the much-reviled psychoanalyst whose critiques of religion Edwards felt still remained valid” (p. 10). God and the Philosophersz is probably best appreciated as a very readable survey that is basically a patchwork of Edwards’ various musings on some of the West’s more iconoclastic philosophers. The work is not a systematic compendium and is probably of most value to those inclined to free thought and making their ini­ tial forays into the history of philosophy. The order in which Edwards discusses the thinkers is chronological, but his method of selection is idiosyncratic, especially in the earlier chapters. It is un­ clear why medieval Wgures like Maimonides and Aquinas are includedz in this col­ lection and great ancient independent thinkers like Xenophanes of Colophon and Strato of Lampsacus are excludedz. In any case, Edwards nowhere explains his criteria, or method, for selecting the thinkers he discusses. Edwards credits Russell with being “probably the most inXuential unbeliever of the twentieth century” (p. 253). And the personal inXuence of Russell on Ed­ wards is clear from Edwards’ mention that, while he himself was already “mov­ ing in the direction of unbeliefz”, reading three of Russell’s critiques of religion “Wxed me for good” (p. 253). Not only does Edwards devote an entire chapter to Russell but he cites him December 2, 2009 (5:28 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE2901\russell 29,1 060 red.wpd E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE2901\russell 29,1 060 red.wpd 92 Reviews throughout the book. In the chapter on Hume, Edwards presents the Natural History of Religion’s observation of “religionists’z” insecurity regarding their own beliefs as corresponding to Russell’s view that “believers hate and persecute their critics because they dimly realize that their own beliefs are myths” (p. 96). Ed­ wards takes both Schopenhauer (p. 179) and Spencer (p. 242) to task for assum­ ing that something has no value if it is not permanent and, on both occasions, credits Russell with having a superior rival view. The one occasion where Russell evidently stuns Edwards as being more in the camp of the believers rather than the non-believers is Russell’s discussion of Spinoza’s equation of a mind conceiving something “under a form” of eternity with that mind being eternal. As Edwards sees it, Russell was “apparently under such a spell of Spinoza that he [Russell] reports this view without one word of dissent. My own dissent is very simple: if consciousness cannot exist without the body, no part of it can survive and be Wlled with ‘eternal thoughts’ of God or Nature or anything else” (p. 37). Perhaps Edwards’ most poignant invocation of Russell is at the close of the chapter on Nietzsche. After detailing the “romantic cult of war” and “transition to modern totalitarianism”asamong Nietzsche’s legacies, Edwards illustrates the moral high ground with which German and Austrian establishmentarians could counter contrarian claims that “God is dead”, whereas “[i]n Anglo-Saxon coun­ tries intelligent adolescents have the great fortune of having Bertrand Russell as their guide to unbelief minus... (shrink)

This book discusses some of the most challenging ideas emerging out of the research program on institutional diversity associated with the 2009 co-recipient of 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom, while outlining a set of new research directions and an original interpretation of the significance and future of this program.

In their highly topical paper, Grahamet alargued that Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are not actually about trust because they reduce or remove ‘…the need for trust in the use and sharing of patient health data’. We believe this is fundamentally mistaken. TREs mitigate or remove some risks, but they do not address all public concerns. In this regard, TREs provide evidence for people to decide whether the bodies holding and using their data can be trusted. TREs may make it easier (...) for people to trust but there is still a need for that trust. (shrink)

A persistent boast of the historical approach to functions is that functional properties are normative. The claim is that a token trait retains its functional status even when it is defective, diseased, or damaged and consequently unable to perform the relevant task. This is because historical functional categories are defined in terms of some sort of historical success -- success in natural selection, typically -- which imposes a norm upon the performance of descendent tokens. Descendents thus are supposed to perform (...) the associated task even when they cannot. The conceit, then, is that malfunctions are explicable in terms of historical success. The aim of this paper is to challenge this conceit. My thesis is that the historical approach to functions lacks the resources with which to account for the possibility of malfunctions. If functional types are defined in terms of historical success, then tokens that lack the defining property due to defect, and tokens that have lost the defining property due to disease or damage, are excluded from the functional category. Historically based malfunctions, in consequence, are impossible. The historical approach is no better than its non-historical competitors in accounting for the presumed normativity of functional properties. (shrink)

Critically analyzes and revitalizes agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution. Today, most historians, philosophers, political theorists, and scholars of rural America take a dim view of the agrarian ideal that farmers and farming occupy a special moral and political status in society. Agrarian rhetoric is generally seen as special pleading on the part of farmers seeking protection from labor reform and environmental regulation while continuing to receive direct payments and subsidies from the public till. Agrarianism should not be viewed as (...) a set of immutable claims about farming and political order, but as a tradition of moral and political philosophy that has evolved and deepened over the centuries. Agrarian naturalism--the belief that culture and conduct are conditioned by nature because they are of a piece with nature--becomes pragmatic naturalism, giving way to a new set of puzzles about how we are to understand the rural landscape and our responsibilities for its use. The agrarian idea that personality and sociability are integrated with the material transformation of the landscape can serve as the basis for a new, pragmatically grounded ethic of natural resources and rural development. The essays in this volume critically analyze and revitalize agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution in the classical American philosophy of key figures such as Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and Royce. Three chapters address the belief that farming peoples develop moral virtue and a taste for democracy as it evolved in the American context, and four examine how a reconstitution of agrarian themes might invigorate our nation's thinking on environment, food, and rural development policy. The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism will be of broad interest to scholars of American philosophy, rural history, history of ideas, geography, and agricultural or natural resource policy. (shrink)

Duhem is often described as an anti-realist or instrumentalist. A contrary view has recently been expressed by Martin (1991) (Pierre Duhem: Philosophy and History in the Work of a Believing Physicist (La Salle, IL: Open Court)), who suggests that this interpretation makes it difficult to understand the vantage point from which Duhem argues in La science allemande (1915) that deduction, however impeccable, cannot establish truths unless it begins with truths. In the same spirit, the present paper seeks to establish that (...) Duhem is at any rate not the kind of anti-realist he is often presented as being, and that his views are like those Quine sees fit to call realist. An interpretation of Duhem's views on explanation and precision in science, and their bearing on the epistemological status of theory, is advanced which leads naturally into his critique of conventionalism. His attitude towards atomism, which should not be judged from a post-1925 perspective, is considered part of the unified view he strove after and appropriately called Duhem's physicalism, standing in contrast to the kind of reductionist conception usually associated with atomism. (shrink)

Should we act only for the sake of what we might bring about (causal decision theory); or is it enough for a decent motive that our action is highly correlated with something desirable (evidential decision theory)? The conflict between these points of view is embodied in Newcomb's problem. It is argued here that intuitive evidence from familiar decision contexts does not enable us to settle the issue, since the two theories dictate the same results in normal circumstances. Nevertheless, there are (...) several reasons to reject the causal approach: (1) its relative complexity; (2) its commitment to the existence of situations in which every possible act would be irrational; (3) its incorporation of an arbitrary time bias; and (4) its implicit distinction between what ought to be done and what ought to be hoped for. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to the 30th Anniversary Issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & PsychologyJohn Z. Sadler (bio)This issue marks the 30th anniversary of Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology (PPP). All of us at the journal are grateful to our authors, readers, editors, and publishers for enabling this landmark. To commemorate this event, I invited our Founding Editor and Chair of the Advisory Board, K.W.M. "Bill" Fulford to write a brief essay, along with (...) our panel of smart and industrious senior editors. Their instructions were simple: 500 words on PPP past, present, and/or future. These essays appear in the pages to follow. As Editor-in-Chief, I write about PPP's early commitments as a scholarly journal, situate these in the history of academic publishing, and muse over our current moment.Bill Fulford briefly discusses the early years of the journal in his essay. My perspective emerges from an editor's perspective. As co-editors in the early years, Bill and I were committed to an international authorship with comparable editorial oversight. We wanted to build a journal that would equally recognize clinical science and practice and philosophy, maintaining the rigor of each field. We saw philosophers and mental health practitioners as equal partners, collaborators, innovators, and educators. More important, PPP was intended to offer up the best criticism of the mental health and related fields.The scattershot history of scholarly editing has identified several functions of the editor over the centuries following Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the mid-1440s. The earliest editors took liberties with the language of the Bible, trying to make it more accessible to the public; the printing press permitted fast and inexpensive reproduction. Not surprisingly, this popularizing of the Bible led to praise as well as outrage. The printing of other scholarly works followed quickly. In 1470, only about 25 years after the invention of the printing press, Niccolo Perroni called for Pope Paul II to censor Andrea Bussi's edition of Pliny the Elder's Natural History, an anthology of then-ancient writings about the natural world. This marked the first recorded instance of censorship of a more-or-less secular scholarly work (Monfasani, 1988). In the ensuing centuries, "editors" initially were the popularizers, and later the gatekeepers of texts worth (and not worth) reading. In the [End Page 1] ensuing centuries into the present, editors have been venerated both as defenders of good reading and reviled as censors or intellectual selfaggrandizers.The current moment, in my view, represents a crisis in the history of editing and editorship. Digital communications have liberated communications worldwide. However, this liberty has come at the cost of colossal amounts of material not worth reading and an explosion of divisive, destructive discourse. Even worse, internet "trolls" on social media have moved bullying out of the schoolyard and into international cyberspace. Determining what is worth reading has moved away from a cluster of (hopefully) responsible editors to anyone who wants to go to the small effort of silencing others through online harassment and even violent threats. Such cyberbullying does not eliminate elitism, but instead substitutes a toxic online "elite" without principle other than self-promotion and the alienation of others. Our contemporary online culture has yet to figure out how to shape what is, and is not, worth reading.My wish and intent for the future of PPP is to maintain and grow our place of rational, deliberative, and open discourse, even in the face of such disruptive cultural change.John Z. Sadler John Z. Sadler, MD, is the Editor-in-Chief of PPP. He is the Daniel W. Foster, MD, Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, as well as a Professor of Psychiatry there. He has been a PPP editor since its inception.ReferenceMonfasani, J. (1988). The first call for press censorship: Niccolo Perotti, Giovanni Andrea Bussi, Antonio Moreto, and the editing of Pliny's Natural History. Renaissance Quarterly, 41, 1–31. Google ScholarCopyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This article interprets emotional change as a transition in a complex dynamical sys- tem. We argue that the appropriate kind of dynamical system is one that extends recent work on how neural networks can perform parallel constraint satisfaction. Parallel processes that integrate both cognitive and affective constraints can give rise to states that we call emotional gestalts, and transitions can be understood as emotional ges- talt shifts. We describe computational models that simulate such phenomena in ways that show how dynamical (...) and gestalt metaphors can be given a concrete realization. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of mainstream formal semantics. It begins with a statement of widely assumed adequacy conditions: namely, that a good theory must (1) explain relations of entailment, (ii) show how the meanings of complex expressions derive from the meanings of their parts, and (iii) characterize facts of meaning in truth-theoretic terms. It then proceeds to criticize the orthodox conception of semantics that is articulated in these three desiderata. This critique is followed by a sketch of an alternative (...) conception—one that is argued to be more in tune with the empirical objectives of linguistics and the clarificatory aims of philosophy. Finally, the paper proposes and defends a specific theoretical approach—use based rather than truth based—that is suggested by that alternative conception. (shrink)

In 1990, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a consent order to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The order decreed the AICPA to lessen its longstanding ethics code which had until then banned the receipts of commissions, referral fees and contingent fees. The FTC alleged that the AICPA banned receipt of the fees as an attempt to restrain trade (FTC, 1990).In the present study, we sought to determine if CPAs'' preference for bans on commissions, referral fees and (...) contingent fees is related to their moral reasoning whereby CPAs perceive the bans to serve as a means of resolving ethical issues. While determining this matter cannot prove whether the bans did or did not actually result in restrained trade, it can offer insight into the perceived ethical importance to CPAs of the overturned rules. Based on a random sample of AICPA members and using Rest''s Defining Issues Test (DIT) to measure moral reasoning, we did not find a CPA''s moral reasoning to be related to his/her preference for ethics rules which ban commissions, referral fees or contingent fees. However, our results did indicate that most CPAs prefer banning commissions, referral fees and contingent fees, with those CPAs holding a higher financial stake in public accounting, namely partners, favoring banning referral fees and contingent fees significantly less than CPAs with a lesser stake. Further, we noted a significant negative relationship between financial stake and moral reasoning. These results seem to suggest that self-interest among CPAs may influence their moral reasoning.Further study is needed to examine the relationship between self-interest of CPAs and their moral reasoning. If self-interest clouds moral judgments made by CPAs, capital markets are in danger. Rendering an independent audit opinion must exclude self-interest. (shrink)

‚Und jedes Tröpfchen, das aus dem köstlich-kühlen Quell des Entsagens fließt, das sammle sorgfältig, mit eifernder Wachsamkeit, daß die Tröpfchen sich zum Bach füllen, der Bach zum Fluß, der Fluß zum Strom, der nun in mächtig stillen Wogen dem offenen Weltmeer zurauscht – jenem klaren, ehrlichen, reinlichen restlosen NICHTMEHR.‘ Paul Dahlke, der Pionier für den Buddhismus in Deutschland, beschäftigt sich in diesem Werk mit den großen Fragen der Menschheit, gestellt vor dem Hintergrund der buddhistischen Weltsicht. Sein Buch ist eine (...) spannende Einführung in den Buddhismus, der noch nicht den westlichen Einflüssen unserer modernen Gesellschaft unterliegt - geschrieben in einer Zeit, in der der Buddhismus in Deutschland kaum bekannt war und in der er um die Abgrenzung der `echten ́ Lehre zu anderen Religionen kämpfte. (shrink)

This book disrupts disciplinary boundaries to make a case for the future direction and growth of martial arts studies as a unique field.

Research Articles Paul A. Rahe, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

Federal efforts beginning in the 1990's have successfully increased pediatric research to improve medical care for all children. Since 1997, the FDA has requested 800 pediatric studies involving 45,000 children. Much of this research is "non-beneficial"; that is, it exposes pediatric subjects to risk even though these children will not benefit from participating in the research. Non-beneficial pediatric research (NBPR) seems, by definition, contrary to the best interests of pediatric subjects, which is why one state supreme court has essentially prohibited (...) it. It also appears that the only plausible rationale for this research is utilitarian, as it risks some children for the good of all. But that rationale is troubling. This Article answers two related questions: (1) What is the appropriate legal relationship between NBPR and the "best interests of the child" standard? (2) What is the ethical justification for this research? I argue that courts should hold that the "best interests" standard governs pediatric research. But, contrary to existing case law, courts must consider the benefits to each child, including pediatric subjects, from a policy that permits NBPR, and not simply consider that a non-beneficial protocol presents more risk than potential benefit to a child. Moreover, I argue that the justification for the practice need not be utilitarian. There is no need to appeal to the greater good to justify the research because each child has reason to endorse a policy permitting NBPR where there is a very low ceiling on acceptable risk, and each child has reason to participate in a practice from which she benefits. More controversially, I argue that each child, like other persons, has reason to help others when she can do so at little to no cost to herself. The Article then highlights practical implications of the offered justifications. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1974, given by Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher.

As an approach to a Theory of Everything a framework for developing a coherent theory of mathematics and physics together is described. The main characteristic of such a theory is discussed: the theory must be valid and and sufficiently strong, and it must maximally describe its own validity and sufficient strength. The mathematical logical definition of validity is used, and sufficient strength is seen to be a necessary and useful concept. The requirement of maximal description of its own validity and (...) sufficient strength may be useful to reject candidate coherent theories for which the description is less than maximal. Other aspects of a coherent theory discussed include universal applicability, the relation to the anthropic principle, and possible uniqueness. It is suggested that the basic properties of the physical and mathematical universes are entwined with and emerge with a coherent theory. Support for this includes the indirect reality status of properties of very small or very large far away systems compared to moderate sized nearby systems. Discussion of the necessary physical nature of language includes physical models of language and a proof that the meaning content of expressions of any axiomatizable theory seems to be independent of the algorithmic complexity of the theory. Gödel maps seem to be less useful for a coherent theory than for purely mathematical theories because all symbols and words of any language must have representations as states of physical systems already in the domain of a coherent theory. (shrink)

In 1894 the anthropologist Otis Tufton Mason called for research in an area he dubbed ‘technogeography’, and he lauded the potential benefits of the knowledge to be acquired under this heading: The...

The Essential Herman Kahn offers the public for the first time an anthology consisting of the best of Herman Kahn's work. It brings together, out of the several thousands of pages published in his life, the "essential Kahn"—the most relevant, consequential, and interesting themes, ideas, and arguments of his work in areas such as international relations, public policy, environmentalism, strategic thinking, and futurology.

Why, then, do we huddle in the dark around the campfires of our flickering narratives? There are obviously many different reasons for doing so. Yet, having heard various récits—whether "stories" or "accounts"—during the narrative conference, I am more inclined than ever to see self-assertive entertainment and self-transcending commitment as two kinds of ultimate motivation for our countless narratives. Stories and histories and other narrative or descriptive accounts help us to escape boredom and indifference—ours as well as that of other people. (...) Those nearly vacant states of mind at the zero degree of entertainment and commitment bring us frightfully close to the experience of nonexistence. Hence our desire to replace boredom by thrilling or gratifying entertainment and to replace indifference by the social or cosmic commitment either to change the world or to change ourselves. In a world of unmixed colors and pure literary genres, tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance might answer distinct needs for thrill, gratification, indignation, and admiration. But, as Roy Schafer and Victor Turner have reminded us, the private and social dramas underlying psychoanalytical and anthropological accounts are even less pure than most works of literature. Couldn't we conclude that life's internal and external dramas stem from a compound desire for self-assertion and self-transcendence—a desire which, in the realm of literary entertainment and commitment, motivates the emergence and appreciation of tragicomedy? Paul Hernadi teaches English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification and the editor of What is Literature? and What is Criticism? His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Literary Theory: A Compass for Critics," appeared in the Winter 1976 issue. (shrink)

This article identifies some of the important issues that underlie student-teacher conflicts regarding animal experimentation and dissection in psychology education. Understanding the reasons why students object to animal laboratories, why some teachers may refuse students access to non-animal alternatives, and why other teachers support student choice is an important first step in resolving student-teacher disputes regarding the use of animals in the psychology classroom. The article discusses why establishing an openly declared student choice policy at schools that use animals in (...) psychology education is a reasonable thing to do and describes how a student choice policy works in practice. (shrink)

It has been disputed whether an externalist conception of the individuation of intentional states, such as beliefs and desires, is compatible with self-knowledge, that is, the claim that one's judgments about one's intentional states are non-evidential, non-inferential, and authoritative. I want to argue that these theses are indeed incompatible, notwithstanding an important objection to this incompatibility claim. The worry has been raised that if externalism is true, then for a subject to know, say, that he or she believes that p, (...) the subject would need to know, on the basis of some evidence, the external conditions which determine the belief's content. Thus, externalism would be incompatible with self-knowledge. But many philosophers have accepted an objection suggesting that this worry is mistaken because in order to have a belief one need not know the metaphysical conditions determining its content, even if they are externalist. And thus, the subject's reflexive judgment about the belief would not need to rest on evidence about those external conditions. But this objection rests on a crucial assumption according to which mental content is reflexively transparent in the sense that a subject could not judge that she or he has an intentional state and be mistaken about the content of her or his state, even if the content is externally determined. My main purpose is not reflexively transparent on the assumption of externalism and, thus, self-knowledge and externalism are incompatible. (shrink)

This book deals with the aftermath of the enlightenment and its legacy in the political, social, and racial context. It discusses the incomplete project of modernity in terms of social contract theory, racial justice issues, and political theology in the postcolonial context. Hermeneutical realism and cultural linguistic inquiry become substantial features in elaborating postcolonial political theology and its ethical stance against the colonization of lifeworld and its pathologies. A study of critical theory and political theology is of a reconstructive character (...) in seeking to relocate critical theory and political ethics in the context of alternative modernities at the level of postcolonial theory. (shrink)

The paths and the ways: an insight into transdisciplinarity: This is a short study of how the notion of thinking that Heidegger developed in his writing, in the Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking, can be read through a consideration of a Chinese Taoist text Tao Te Ching and the Confucian, though a Taoist inspired text, by Zisi, the Zhongyong, to illuminate the essential nature of openness in transdisciplinarity and the restrictions of disciplinarity of knowing taken as the ritual (...) and rules of methodology. This approach offers a way to understand unconcealment in the onto-cosmology of the harmony of all Being and of personal cultivation which is essential to the ontology of Heidegger. I then suggest how this might be offered in what could be called a transdisciplinary pedagogy. Key words: Heidegger. Confucianism. Taoism. Transdisciplinarity. Harmony. Os caminhos e os meios: uma visão da transdisciplinaridade Resumo: Este é um breve estudo sobre como a noção de pensamento que Heidegger desenvolveu em seus escritos, em Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking [Uma Conversa no Caminho do Campo sobre o Pensar], pode ser lida através da consideração de um texto taoísta chinês Tao Te Ching e de um texto confucionista, embora inspirado por taoístas, de Zisi, o Zhongyong [A Doutrina do Meio], para iluminar a natureza essencial da abertura na transdisciplinaridade e as restrições da disciplinaridade do conhecimento a serem tomadas como ritual e regras da metodologia. Essa abordagem oferece uma maneira de entender a desocultação na ontocosmologia da harmonia de todo o Ser e do cultivo pessoal, essencial à ontologia de Heidegger. Sugiro então como isso pode ser oferecido no que poderia ser chamado de pedagogia transdisciplinar. Palavras-chave: Heidegger. Confucionismo. Taoísmo. Transdisciplinaridade. Harmonia. Los caminos y los medios: una visión de la transdisciplinariedad Resumen: Este es un breve estudio de cómo la noción de pensamiento que desarrolló Heidegger en sus escritos, Conversación sobre un camino rural sobre el pensamiento, puede leerse mediante la consideración de un texto chino taoísta Tao Te Ching y un texto confuciano, aunque inspirado por los taoístas de Zisi, el Zhongyong [La Doctrina del Medio], para iluminar la naturaleza esencial de la apertura en la transdisciplinariedad y las limitaciones de la disciplina del conocimiento a tomado como ritual y reglas de metodología. Este enfoque ofrece una forma de entender la falta de cultivación de la ontocosmología de la armonía de todo Ser y el cultivo personal, esencial para la ontología de Heidegger. Luego sugiero cómo se podría ofrecer esto en lo que podría llamarse pedagogía transdisciplinaria. Palabras clave: Heidegger. Confuciano. Taoísmo. Transdisciplinariedad. Armonía. Data de registro: 30/07/2020 Data de aceite: 21/10/2020. (shrink)

Notwithstanding its prominence in the title of Gadamer’s major work, the concept of truth remains implicit and underspecified in Gadamer’s writings. Consequently, it is often assumed that, for Gadamer, as for Heidegger, the emergence of truth is adequately characterised as a sudden flash of enlightening insight, an impression reinforced by the prominence accorded by Gadamer in the first part of Truth and Method to the experience of aesthetic truth and the model of play. But in addition to leaving the hermeneutic (...) truth concept open to charges of arbitrariness and subjectivism, this assessment overlooks Gadamer’s emphasis in the second part of TM on the need for investigating a topic dialogically. Accordingly, this paper contends that it is only when these two elements are counterbalanced, as Gadamer intends, that a defensible conception of hermeneutic truth emerges, impervious to charges of arbitrariness and subjectivism. Notably too, this hermeneutic truth concept transcends both coherence and correspondence truth in important respects. (shrink)

Abstract: William James argued that we ordinarily think of the objects that we can observe—things that belong to 'the world of sense'—as having an unquestioned reality. However, young children also assert the existence of entities that they cannot ordinarily observe. For example, they assert the existence of germs and souls. The belief in the existence of such unobservable entities is likely to be based on children's broader trust in other people's testimony about objects and situations that they cannot directly observe (...) for themselves. (shrink)

"This autobiographical reminiscing started more than ten years ago," wrote German-American philosopher Paul Arthur Schilpp at the age of ninety-five.

The author responds to the interpretations and criticisms of his thought as presented in the eleven essays in "Love and Society: Essays in the Ethics of Paul Ramsey ". He defends and refines his position on ethical theory, war and political ethics and medical ethics.