Existen diversos factores influyentes en la autoeficacia parental, mediada por la motivación personal de los padres de familia hacia la escuela. Se utilizó el modelamiento de ecuaciones estructuradas de cuadrados mínimos parciales para el análisis. El estudio se realizó con 446 participantes, principalmente mujeres con un 81.2% y hombres con un 18% en tiempos de postpandemia. El estudio concluye que la comunicación con la escuela influye positivamente en la autoeficacia parental y la motivación personal hacia la escuela en (...) los padres de familia y la comunicación con los hijos influye en la autoeficacia parental y la motivación hacia la escuela. (shrink)

More and more studies and research have found a positive relationship between the participation of young people in altruistic activities and helping others, but it is interesting to discover a relationship of that personal and vocational satisfaction in the preparation and training in a profession as important to society as teaching. For students who begin university studies related to teaching, their psychological well-being and motivation towards this activity are very relevant aspects to consider. The access to and (...) attainment of a University Degree with a great vocational character, such as that of Pre-School Teacher or Primary Education Teacher, can benefit the students who will be in charge. These future educational professionals will have adequate motivation and maintain a psychological well-being that, in short, will favour their personal balance and will impact their future students. This research aims to analyse the degree of psychological well-being and its relationship with the motivation towards starting the teaching career. A sample of 233 students and students aged between 17 or 19 years of age who are beginning university studies at the School of Education of Ciudad Real was selected. All participants are enrolled in the first year of the Degree in Pre-school and Primary Education. The relationship between the psychological well-being of the students and their motivation towards attaining a professional teaching career was analysed. Other variables such as age or sex were also taken into account. A quantitative study was carried out and the Ryff Psychological Welfare Scale and the Intrinsic Motivation Questionnaire (IMI) were used. Once the results were analysed, it was observed that there is a positive correlation between the perception of psychological well-being that the participants have and their motivation towards the beginning of university studies, whose professional focus is mainly direct teaching with the students of the early stages of Pre-school and Primary Education. There are also some significant differences, considering the age and sex of the participants. The vocational character of university preparation for the teaching profession may determine that students who begin their Degree studies have an important motivation towards the performance of their professional future. (shrink)

What drives and moves an individual towards certain goals and activities is a familiar question for scholars dealing with motivation in the context of schooling or work practices. However, non-school contexts such as Internet-enabled volunteer-based technical DIY communities are also important to understand since a growing part of everyday social life is spent on the Internet. This article offers the analytical concept of 'motivation path' for understanding changing and dilemmatic motives in innovative pellet DIY development. It (...) also introduces the concept of 'innovative DIY' to show the blurring of the boundaries between profession/hobby and and past work life/retirement of technically competent, innovative people. The findings indicate that Internet-enabled making can be an important medium for continued personal growth, competence development, and reflection. The findings could also help us understand how motivations may be carried over from professional work to private DIY work. (shrink)

A wealth of social psychology studies suggests that moving in synchrony with another person can positively influence their likeability and prosocial behavior towards them. Recently, human-robot interaction researchers have started to develop real-time, adaptive synchronous movement algorithms for social robots. However, little is known how socially beneficial synchronous movements with a robot actually are. We predicted that moving in synchrony with a robot would improve its likeability and participants’ social motivation towards the robot, as measured by the (...) number of questions asked during a free interaction period. Using a between-subjects design, we implemented the synchrony manipulation via a drawing task. Contrary to predictions, we found no evidence that participants who moved in synchrony with the robot rated it as more likeable or asked it more questions. By including validated behavioral and neural measures, future studies can generate a better and more objective estimation of synchrony’s effects on rapport with social robots. (shrink)

This paper explores the perceptions of senior high school pupils in Shanghai regarding their motivation towards learning English and their perceived influence on this of important others . The study is based on 610 questionnaire responses and 64 interviews. The findings indicate that their English learning motivation is dominated by life and career‐based reasons rather than intrinsic or integrative reasons. The influence of important others was perceived as being positive but small, with teachers being viewed as (...) the most influential. (shrink)

This study examined individual differences in mathematics learning by combining antecedent (A), opportunity (O), and propensity (P) indicators within the Opportunity-Propensity model. Although there is already some evidence for this model based on secondary datasets, there currently is no primary data available that simultaneously takes into account A,O and P factors in children with and without Mathematical Learning Disabilities (MLD). Therefore the mathematical abilities of 114 school-aged children (grade 3 till 6) with and without MLD were analyzed and combined (...) with information retrieved from standardized tests and questionnaires. Results indicated significant differences in personality, motivation, temperament, subjective well-being, self-esteem, self-perceived competence and parental aspirations when comparing children with and without MLD. In addition, A, O and P factors were found to underlie mathematical abilities and disabilities. For the A factors, parental aspirations explained about half of the variance in fact retrieval speed in children without MLD, and SES was especially involved in the prediction of procedural accuracy in general. Teachers’ experience contributed as O factor and explained about 6% of the variance in mathematical abilities. P indicators explained between 52 and 69% of the variance, with especially intelligence as overall significant predictor. Indirect effects pointed towards the interrelatedness of the predictors and the value of including A, O and P indicators in a comprehensive model. The role parental aspirations played in fact retrieval speed was partially mediated through the self-perceived competence of the children, whereas the effect of SES on procedural accuracy was partially mediated through intelligence in children of both groups and through working memory capacity in children with MLD. Moreover, in line with the componential structure of mathematics, our findings were dependent on the math task used. Different A, O and P indicators seemed to be important for fact retrieval speed compared to procedural accuracy. Also, mathematical development type (MLD or typical development) mattered since some A, O and P factors were predictive for MLD only and the other way around. Practical implications of these findings and recommendations for future research on MLD and on individual differences in mathematical abilities are provided. (shrink)

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between academic stress and motivation toward physical education through a longitudinal design with cross-lagged panel analyses. A sample of 556 Chinese secondary school students participated in the research and completed Perceived Locus of Causality Scale and Educational Stress Scale for Adolescents at the beginning of the semester and 3 months later. The results demonstrated that academic stress factors were positively related to less self-determined motivations except that worry about grades was (...) positively related to more self-determined motivations within each time point. In addition, we found that academic stress negatively predicted more self-determined motivations but positively predicted less self-determined motivations, whereas worry about grades negatively predicted amotivation 3 months later. Meanwhile, the influence of amotivation on despondency was also found. These results suggest that academic stress can obstruct students’ participation in PE through an impact on self-determined motivation. Our findings also indicate that self-determined students in PE will seek academic achievement as well, which in turn improves students’ academic status. (shrink)

Manifestations of school shooting or ‘columbine’, constituted by armed mass attacks and murders in educational institutions perpetrated by adolescents, have proliferated in recent years. They are marked by their unpredictability, spontaneity and cruelty. This phenomenon has been subject to scholarly examination from various perspectives, enabling the elucidation of its multifarious traits and characteristics as a means of diagnosis and prevention. This study surveys established academic approaches to the study of school shootings (psychological, legal, sociological, semiotic, existential) and delineates (...) their specificity and scope. Drawing on analysis of incidents of school shootings in Russia from 2014-2022, key signs and tendencies in the occurrence of mass attacks on educational institutions are delineated. Adopting existential approaches in philosophy and psychology, notably the works of A. Camus, E. Fromm, M. Boss, V. Frankl and L. Berkowitz, the semantic stages and constituents of school shootings as existential crimes and subsequent suicides are elucidated. The present study aims to identify and characterise the roots and essence of school shootings ('columbine') as an existential crime type, in order to comprehend the semantic motivational origins of school shootings and analyse the ‘boundary situation’ engendering individual destructive rebellion against the world. The nexus between unresolved existential needs and quandaries of the individual and the factors triggering self-destructive personality mechanisms is expounded, whereby the individual enacts an ‘escape’ from reality against the backdrop of media-disseminated aggressiveness and legitimation of violence as a means of overcoming problems and self-presentation. The existential analysis and modelling of school shooters’ actions offered here has enabled conclusions to be drawn regarding potential countermeasures to such crimes. (shrink)

Teachers of science-based education in Malaysian secondary schools, especially those in the field of physics, often find their students facing huge difficulties in dealing with conceptual ideas in physics, resulting thus in a lack of interest towards the subject. The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the Brain-Based Teaching Approach (henceforth BBTA) in dealing with the issues of the conceptual understanding of Newtonian physics of Form Four students in secondary science schools in the state of (...) Kedah, situated in the northern region of Peninsular Malaysia, and also their learning motivation towards the subject of physics. The BBTA is based on the Brain-Based Learning Principles, where detailed attention is given to seven main steps: (1) activation; (2) clarify the outcome and paint big picture of the lesson; (3) making connection; (4) doing the learning activity; (5) demonstrate student understanding; (6) review for student recall and retention/closure; and (7) preview the new topic. The effectiveness of the BBTA within the targeted context was then assessed in a quasi-experimental research approach involving 100 Form Four students from two secondary science schools. Data collected using the Test of Conceptual Understanding of Newtonian Physics and the Questionnaire of Physics Learning Motivation were then analysed descriptively and inferentially. The results obtained revealed that the BBTA was in fact exceedingly effective in dealing with the problems aforementioned. It was found that students who received physics education taught using the BBTA possessed a better conceptual understanding of Newtonian physics and also a higher learning motivation in the subject of physics, compared to students who received physics education taught using conventional teaching methods. (shrink)

In the study, it was aimed to examine the attitudes and religious attitudes of the students studying at the imam hatip high school (IHHS) according to some variables and to determine the relationship between their attitudes towards school and their religious attitudes. The research was conducted in accordance with the relational screening model. The study group determined from IHHSs in Çorum city center with the "Simple Sampling" method consists of 438 students. In order to collect the study (...) data, the Personal Information Form prepared by the researcher, the Attitudes Scale towards School (ASTS) developed by the Alıcı, and the Religious Attitude Scale developed by Ok were used. Analyzes were made by transferring the study data to the SPSS package program. Research problems were analyzed using t-test and one-way ANOVA for independent groups. In multiple comparisons, the LSD test, which is one of the post-hoc tests, was used. As a result of the research, the participants got a score above the middle from the general of ASTS, and high score from the general religious attitude scale. While the attitudes towards school and religious attitude levels of the sample do not differ according to the variables of gender and grade level (p>.05), they differ significantly in terms of family communication and reasons for choosing IHHS (p.05). In addition, a moderate, positive and significant relationship (r=.35) was found between students' school attitudes and religious attitudes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Navigating Hard Situations that Medical School Cannot Prepare You ForJenna BennettI imagined my first experience with grief as a medical student would be peaceful and measured, prompted by the quiet and peaceful [End Page 88] passing of an elderly individual who lived a long life, surrounded by loving family members comforting each other and reminiscing. Of course, I knew things would get harder—I just didn't expect it to (...) be during my first clinical experience as a medical student.My vision for my first experience with grief as a medical student was idealistic, but I was not unfamiliar with grief on a professional or personal basis. Prior to medical school, I was an aide at a long-term care facility. Many patients were on hospice, so end-of-life care and conversations took place daily without fear or shame. Deaths in this setting had happened as I envisioned—a natural course after a long life. Most of the time, the patients and their families were prepared and accepting. It was, of course, a somber occasion no matter how prepared everyone was, but death was almost never unexpected or met with anything other than tearful acceptance. As an aide, I felt honored to provide care at the end of one's life.In my personal life, I had similarly lost elderly family members. Although it was upsetting to have my loved ones pass away, no matter how much time we had to prepare, my family and I were never blind-sided and had time to discuss final wishes and cherish time together; however, for my family, there was one exception to this. When I was young, my father unexpectedly passed away from a heroin overdose. He was alone when he died, not even 30 years old.For a long time, I was ashamed of my father's death. I was very young, and I didn't understand the nature of addiction. I was angry, confused, and embarrassed. As a result, I created my own version that I thought was more palatable, for years telling everyone he had passed away surrounded by a loving family after a long battle with lung cancer.Over the years, I came to terms with my father's death. I learned that substance use is a disease, not a choice. I forgave my dad, along with eventually also forgiving myself for my years of denial and shame. His struggles and death ended up being a large motivation to pursue a career in the medical field, along with being a key part of my identity that I no longer hesitate to share. Despite having matured in this way long before starting medical school, I now recognize I still had some lingering rejection of the wide reality of tragedies that exist in our world.My first clinical experience as a medical student was a 3-week rotation with pediatric hospitalists. By the halfway point of this rotation, I was having a great time and was excited to finally be working with patients after months of sitting in lecture halls and late nights in the library. Of course, all the children we saw were sick, which was hard to see, but all the patients either had viral infections or chronic, but usually non-life-threatening, conditions. Therefore, everyone in our service rapidly improved with minimal interventions, and almost everyone was able to go home after just a few days. I was also encouraged by how loving and knowledgeable all of the family members of the patients were. Even when family members were upset and occasionally took frustrations out on the physicians I was working with, I was not shaken and empathized entirely, as I knew the families' reactions resulted from love and concern for their children. Overall, these initial experiences with patients and their families maintained my optimism that things wouldn't get emotionally hard for me anytime soon, but life, and subsequently medicine, do not wait for you to be ready.I was chatting with my attending one morning toward the latter half of this rotation. Another care team came into our small workroom, which was not unusual, but I could immediately tell something was different... (shrink)

The number of new “Special-post teachers” has decreased considerably, especially at China’s rural schools in recent years. This study applies the semi-structured interview data of new “Special-post teachers” in China’s rural schools to explore their perceptions on the rural new teachers’ problems and challenges at nine developing rural provinces in China. It finds that the new rural teachers were confronted with severe challenges and difficulties for their professional adaptability in rural areas, such as the interpersonal relationship, heavy workload and dissatisfied (...) salary, and unqualified teaching capacities. Those interviewed new “Special-post teachers” also learned lots from those challenges in reality, such as the diversified personality characteristics, professional beliefs and career motivation. It also suggested that, Chinese government should offer sufficient and diversified educational policies to stimulate rural teacher development, especially for new “Special-post Teachers” at rural areas. Chinese central government plays a significant role to guarantee the sustainable funding support for the development of new “Special-post teachers”. In addition, the principals in rural schools should pay close attention to new Special-post Teachers’ personability characteristics, hobbies and needs to create a supportive teaching environment for them to move toward successful rural teacher development. (shrink)

This article presents the research on three issues. First, revealing the features of Russian culture’s semantic picture of the world in relation to a person’s positioning in society and attitudes t...

In this age of migration and transnationalism, it is imperative to take account of migratory experiences and lives of transmigrant teachers, who exhibit multiple ways of belonging and knowing. Informed by the theoretical framework of transnationalism and flexible citizenship, this study investigates two Asian transmigrant teachers who work in urban bilingual schools in the U.S. and examines how and why they are involved in their particular transnational mobility, professional choices, and educational activities. The findings show that transmigrant teachers’ border crossings (...) were motivated by economic as well as personal and educational necessities. After relocation to the U.S., they adopted specific residential and professional strategies to create transnational and multilingual networks with their homelands. They also demonstrated flexible attitudes towards citizenship, aspiring to continue their mobile lives. This study makes a contribution to the growing literature on contemporary migrants by shedding light on transmigrant teachers’ personal, professional, and teaching lives, which are marked by spatial fluidity and ongoing transnational practices. (shrink)

Elementary school teacher has an important role as a learning agent to motivate, facilitate, educate, and train students to be qualified persons who can actualize their human potency optimally. One factor that can influence teacher to be good teacher is her/his job satisfaction. Teacher who has high job satisfaction will have positive attitude and action toward the job. Many research showed that psychological climate, as one of environmental factor, affect the teacher’s job satisfaction. The aim of this research is (...) to know the relationship between psychological climate and job satisfaction of Al-Azhar Islamic Elementary School Teacher at Bekasi. Psychological Climate Questionnaire (PCQ) and Job Satisfaction Survey (RSS) are filled by 80 teachers who have worked over one year. Result shows that there is a significant correlation between psychological climate and teacher’s job satisfaction. However, there is no significant correlation between demographic variables (age, gender, educational level, job status, and tenure) and job satisfaction.  . (shrink)

Since students' academic success is tied to their academic motivation and engagement, determining the predictors of these two variables seems critical. So, several inquiries have inspected the role of students' emotional and personal variables in their academic motivation and engagement. Nonetheless, the function of L2 enjoyment as an important emotional factor has remained elusive. Moreover, no inquiry has reviewed this issue neither systematically nor theoretically. To fill these lacunas, this review study aims to explain definitions, dimensions, and (...) theoretical frameworks of L2 enjoyment, student academic motivation, and student academic engagement. This study also intends to outline the positive consequences of L2 enjoyment for students' academic engagement and motivation. Relying on the theoretical and empirical evidence, the positive role of L2 enjoyment in raising EFL students' engagement and motivation was firmly affirmed. Finally, the implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

The present study examines the extent to which sociohistorical and political contexts influence the language attitudes of Israeli-Druze students to Hebrew as L2 and to Modern Standard Arabic in Arabic-speaking schools. It is a pioneer explorative research study that compares students’ attitudes toward diglossia and L2. Using the Foreign Languages Attitudes and Goals Survey, the attitudes of second, fifth, and ninth graders in two different Druze schools were assessed. The results indicate a positive attitude towards L2 Hebrew, not only (...) for instrumental purposes but also for integration into Israel’s multicultural society. The positive attitude to L2 Hebrew is greater in older students, while the attitude to MSA becomes more negative among older students. Their low motivation to learn cultural heritage MSA may contribute to an understanding of how to teach it better or differently, as well as how to encourage future generations to learn it. (shrink)

The present pilot study investigates the relationships between scientific ignorance and several individual attitudes, personality traits and cultural behaviors. Starting from well-established practices and standards of psychometric analysis, our work has produced a complex cross-scalar survey of scientific competency between students attending an art and multimedia high school. Data are classified through six scales about self-esteem, scientific attitudes, paranormal beliefs, scientific competency, social desirability and personality traits. The results are considered in relation to three hypotheses: the correlation between positive (...) scientific attitude and lower paranormal beliefs plus higher scientific competencies; the scientific attitude is enhanced by cultural and scientific activities and negatively related to superstition; people who show specific personality traits have higher positive attitude and interest toward science, while other traits are more related to superstitious beliefs. The outcome of our poll confirms our hypotheses and shows additional traits correlations. (shrink)

Research has uncovered consistent gender differences in attitudes toward gay men, with women expressing less prejudice than men (Herek, 2003). Attitudes toward lesbians generally show a similar pattern, but to a weaker extent. The present work demonstrated that motivation to respond without prejudice importantly contributes to these divergent attitudes. Study 1 revealed that women evince higher internal motivation to respond without prejudice (IMS, Plant & Devine, 1998) than do men and that this difference partially mediates the relationship between (...) gender and attitudes toward gay men. The second study replicated this finding and demonstrated that IMS mediates the relationship between gender and attitudes toward lesbians. Study 2 further revealed that gender-role variables contribute to the observed gender differences in motivation to respond without prejudice. These findings provide new insights into the nature of sexual prejudice and for the first time point to possible antecedents of variation in motivation to respond without prejudice. (shrink)

This article reviews existing approaches to defining and distinguishing communication styles and proposes a common frame of reference for future research. The literature review yields two schools of thought: the behavior-centered perspective and the personality-oriented perspective. Although these lines of research differ in their ways of defining communication styles, they show considerable similarities with respect to their classification. Many researchers build their taxonomies on two key dimensions: assertiveness and responsiveness. We propose embedding communication styles into the Five-Factor Theory and defining (...) them as characteristic adaptations of personality. We also suggest the Interpersonal Circumplex as a reference model for distinguishing communication styles as it is able to integrate substantial dimensions and facets of existing taxonomies in a parsimonious way. (shrink)

The uniqueness of Psychiatry as a medical speciality lies in the fact that aside from tackling what it considers as illnesses, it has perchance to comment on and tackle many issues of social relevance as well. Whether this is advisable or not is another matter; but such a process is inevitable due to the inherent nature of the branch and the problems it deals with. Moreover this is at the root of the polarization of psychiatry into opposing psychosocial and biological (...) schools. This gets reflected in their visualization of scope, in definitions and in methodology as well. Whilst healthy criticism of one against the other school is necessary, there should be caution against hasty application of one's frame of reference to an approach that does not intend to follow, or conform to, one's methodology. This should be done within the referential framework of the school critically evaluated, with due consideration for its methods and concepts. Similarly, as at present, there is no evidence to prove one or the other of these approaches as better, aside from personal choice. We can say so even if there is a strong paradigm shift towards the biological at present. A renaissance of scientific psychoanalysis coupled with a perceptive neurobiology which can translate those insights into testable hypotheses holds the greatest promise for psychiatry in the future. This suggests the need for unification of diverse appearing approaches to get a more comprehensive and enlightened worldview. It requires a highly integrative capacity. Just as a physicist thinks simultaneously in terms of particles and waves, a psychiatrist must think of motives, emotions and desires in the same breath as neurobiology, genetics and psychopharmacology. However, the integration must be attempted without destroying the internal cohesiveness of the individual schools. This will give a fair chance for polarization in which a single proper approach in psychiatry could emerge, which may be a conglomerate of diverse appearing approaches of today, or one which supersedes the rest. A synthesis of cognitive psychology and neuroscience offers the greatest promise at present. (shrink)

This book is conceived as part of a systematic philosophy of values. Neither philosophies of value nor systematic philosophies are in fashion. It is hoped that this work will make a contribution toward their reappraisal. Classically, political philosophy was considered a part of philosophic systems, as the basic ideas of the philosophy applied to politics. Its relative neglect by the predominant school of philosophy in America and Britain has meant that certain ideas and issues in philosophy are in danger (...) of erasure by default. The neglect of political philosophy has meant, however, that ideologies dominate political discussion. The field of political discourse has, in effect, been yielded or ceded to the ideologues. Their views, concepts, statements of the issues, and solutions—in a word, the ultimate legitimacy of their approach—have been tacitly accepted. Many philosophers have never discussed ideology in relation to, and in the context of political philosophy in our time. More importantly, the connection between ideology and contemporary events has not received serious philosophic examination. One basis for this attitude may be the ideal of a "value free" social science. The well known thesis of Daniel Bell's book, "the end of ideology," has diverted attention from its study. Yet ideological politics is still with us in the form of ideologically defined political parties and political conflicts in which the ideology of the conflicting groups define the issues. Part I examines the link between ideology, totalitarianism and Plato’s ideal of the “philosopher-king.” Ideology is articulated by intellectuals seeking power, or attached to a party or faction seeking power. It is applied totalistically through bureaucracy and technology. We will go on in Part II to a critique of political essentialism. Essential models, combined with political motives and ideological formulas are the basis for total politicization. Thus totalitarianism will have been analyzed into root essential models, articulated into totalistic ideologies, by politically minded intellectuals, using a formula which politicizes all categories. Chapter five contrasts the moral values of political philosophy with the politicized standards of ideology. Chapter six contrasts the privacy and freedom requisite to evaluation of personal values, and to genuine happiness, with the total publicity of ideology. An entirely new grounding relation for politics is explicated in this book. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Message to Buddhists for the Feast of Vesakh 2007:Christians and Buddhists: Educating Communities to Live in Harmony and PeacePaul Cardinal Poupard, President and Archbishop Pier Luigi Celata, SecretaryDear Buddhist Friends,1. On the occasion of the festival of Vesakh, I am writing to Buddhist communities in different parts of the world to convey my own good wishes, as well as those of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.2. We, Catholics (...) and Buddhists, enjoy a good relationship and our contacts, collaboration and implementation of diverse programmes have helped to deepen our understanding of each other. Dialogue is the sure path to fruitful interreligious relations. It deepens respect and nurtures the desire to live in harmony with others.3. The Second Vatican Council teaches that the entire human race shares a common origin and a common destiny: God, our Creator and the goal of our earthly pilgrimage. Similarly, Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2007 Message for the World Day of Peace, observed: "As one created in the image of God, each individual human being has the dignity of a person; he or she is not just something, but someone, capable of self-knowledge, self-possession, free self-giving and entering into communion with others" (n. 2).4. Building a community requires concrete gestures which reflect the respect for the dignity of others. Furthermore, as religious people, we are convinced that "there is a moral logic which is built into human life and which makes possible dialogue between individuals and peoples" (ibid, n. 3). Yet, there are people today who still need to learn about others and other people's beliefs in order to overcome prejudices and misunderstandings. This sad reality, if it is to be overcome, demands much effort [End Page 131] on the part of both civic and religious leaders. Even in places where people experience daily the ravages of war, fueled by sentiments of hatred and vengeance, trust can be restored. Together we can help to create the space and the opportunities for people to talk, listen, share regrets and offer forgiveness for each other's past mistakes.5. Education for peace is a responsibility which must be borne by all sectors of society. Of course, this starts in ordinary homes where the family, the fundamental pillar of society, strives to transmit traditional and sound values to children by a deliberate effort to inform their consciences. The younger generations deserve and indeed thrive upon value-based education which reinforces respect, acceptance, compassion and equality. It is important therefore that schools, both government and faith-based, do all possible to support parents in the delicate but satisfying task of raising children to appreciate all that is good and true.6. The media's power to shape minds, especially of the young, cannot be underestimated. While the irresponsible elements within it are increasingly being recognized for what they are, it is also the case that much good can be effected through quality productions and educational programmes. When people working within the media exercise their moral conscience, it is possible to dispel ignorance and impart knowledge, preserve social values, and portray the transcendental dimension of life which arises from the spiritual nature of all people. Religious believers serve society admirably by collaborating in such projects for the common good.7. Ultimately, the aim of true education is to bring the individual to encounter the ultimate purpose of life. This motivates the person to serve broken humanity. Together may we continue to contribute toward peace and harmony in our society and the world. We Catholics join you with our heartfelt greetings as you celebrate this feast and I wish you once again a happy Vesakh. [End Page 132]Paul Cardinal Poupard, President and Archbishop Pier Luigi Celata, SecretaryPontifical Council for Interreligious DialogueCopyright © 2007 The University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

‘Becoming all things to all persons’ is a key primal insight into the potential healing of the wound and the rift in the human family caused by long years of devaluation of one sex by the other. In this light, this article examines the theological implications of male-dominant language and imagery for God and God’s people in daily usage and community worship and its cumulative psychological effects on women. The main assumption in this article is that unconscious beliefs and symbols (...) rule the human imagination far more than do words and conscious declarations. The over-riding question is: How can believers be motivated to embrace the Gospel call to the mission of reconciliation in the area of gender, human identity, and language so as to increase everyone’s access to the unique healing power of Christ’s resurrection? (shrink)

Despite similar health problems, older persons show different care seeking behaviours for a variety of reasons. The aim of this study was to identify motives underlying the attitudes of older persons to seek nursing care and to develop a theoretical rationale which allows viewing their mutual interaction. Theory development according to Walker and Avant was used as a method to derive a model from the reviewed literature. Six categories were identified that may influence seeking of nursing care: perceived threat, disposition, (...) external options & barriers, current coping abilities, influence of significant others, and outcome value. Findings do not allow determination of factors that may predict care seeking attitude but provide a loosely structured conceptual model for culture specific investigations. Qualitative studies guided by the model should be conducted in order to develop testable theories of care seeking for different cultures and settings. (shrink)

The fundamental reason for this research study is to point out the challenges encountered by the teachers, students, schools, and parents in facing and handling the oral speech communication subjects during the pandemic. Given that, most of the medium of instruction used is distance learning. It poses issues and concerns on how our respondents dealt with the situation. A descriptive- survey research design was used to obtain themes and phenomena to the questions provided. The questionnaire includes questions that seek to (...) gather information on their basic profile, current experiences, and behavior towards the problem. It was found out that the different problems encountered by the teachers, students, school, and parents include the validity of the issue, the lack of motivation which was a very complicated problem because it deals with emotional readiness and stability, and the difficulty in comprehending the topics of the module because lessons are not explained personally by the teachers. Therefore, oral speech communication requires an in-depth shift of lesson delivery to cater to the needs for improvement. (shrink)

In this paper I characterize the problem of first-person authority as it confronts the proponent of the belief box conception of belief, and I develop the groundwork for a belief box account of that authority. If acceptable, the belief box account calls into question (by undermining a popular motivation for) the thesis that first-person authority is not to be traced to a truth-tracking relation between first-person opinions themselves and the beliefs which they are about.

European policy has seen a number of changes and innovations in the field of early childhood preschool education over the last decade, which have been reflected in various forms in the policies of individual EU countries. Within the Czech preschool policy, certain innovations and approaches have been implemented in the field of early children education, such as the introduction of compulsory preschool education before entering primary school from 2017, emphasis on inclusive education, equal conditions in education and enabling state-supported (...) diversity in the education concepts of kindergartens. The aim of our study was to assess the influence of various preschool education systems in the Czech Republic in the context of psychological variables reflecting selected children’s outcomes which may contribute to future school achievement. The monitored variables were the attitudes, motivations and executive functions of children in the last year of preschool education. A comparison was made between the traditional preschool education program and the so-called alternative types of preschool education, such as Montessori, Waldorf and religious schools. The total sample was divided into four subgroups, namely a group of children attending traditional kindergartens, religious, Montessori, and Waldorf kindergartens. To determine empirical data, the following research methods were used: Attitude Questionnaire, School Performance Motivation Scale, and Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function. The results of our survey show the fact that the type of kindergarten attended has a significant effect on the child’s level of school performance motivation, attitudes toward school as well as executive functions. Significant differences were found between the different types of kindergartens attended in the monitored variables. (shrink)

The uniqueness of Psychiatry as a medical speciality lies in the fact that aside from tackling what it considers as illnesses, it has perchance to comment on and tackle many issues of social relevance as well. Whether this is advisable or not is another matter; but such a process is inevitable due to the inherent nature of the branch and the problems it deals with. Moreover this is at the root of the polarization of psychiatry into opposing psychosocial and biological (...) schools. This gets reflected in their visualization of scope, in definitions and in methodology as well. Whilst healthy criticism of one against the other school is necessary, there should be caution against hasty application of one's frame of reference to an approach that does not intend to follow, or conform to, one's methodology. This should be done within the referential framework of the school critically evaluated, with due consideration for its methods and concepts. Similarly, as at present, there is no evidence to prove one or the other of these approaches as better, aside from personal choice. We can say so even if there is a strong paradigm shift towards the biological at present. A renaissance of scientific psychoanalysis coupled with a perceptive neurobiology which can translate those insights into testable hypotheses holds the greatest promise for psychiatry in the future. This suggests the need for unification of diverse appearing approaches to get a more comprehensive and enlightened worldview. It requires a highly integrative capacity. Just as a physicist thinks simultaneously in terms of particles and waves, a psychiatrist must think of motives, emotions and desires in the same breath as neurobiology, genetics and psychopharmacology. However, the integration must be attempted without destroying the internal cohesiveness of the individual schools. This will give a fair chance for polarization in which a single proper approach in psychiatry could emerge, which may be a conglomerate of diverse appearing approaches of today, or one which supersedes the rest. A synthesis of cognitive psychology and neuroscience offers the greatest promise at present. (shrink)

A large body of experience and expertise on the implementation of sustainable public school food procurement policies has developed in recent years. However, there has been little investigation of the values and motivations of the public officials implementing the policies. To address this gap, we examine how the city of Avignon took a step toward transition to local fresh food procurement for public schools, under French government calls for sustainable food products in public canteens. Our analysis combines the Multi-Level (...) Perspective on sustainable transitions with the Public Service Motivation construct. Unlike other studies addressing the MLP at a macro level, we focus on individual motivations behind public action. We demonstrate that staff motivations have a major impact on how policies supporting transition to local fresh food procurement for public schools are implemented. These public officials’ approach to food shows concern for the public interest regardless of financial return. It is not the rational choice that primarily drives the implementation of urban food policies, but normative conformity and affective bonding. Interestingly, we conclude that the success of Avignon’s politically-driven school food procurement policy is essentially due to the catering and procurement staff who overcame the barriers to its implementation. (shrink)

The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has promoted the popularity of online learning, but has also exposed some problems, such as a lack of interaction, resulting in loneliness. Against this background, students' attitudes toward peer interaction may have become even more important. In order to explore the impact of attitude toward peer interaction on students' mindset including online learning motivation and critical thinking practice that could affect their problem-solving self-efficacy during the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed and administered a questionnaire, (...) receiving 1,596 valid responses. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire were re-tested, and structural equation modeling was applied. It was found that attitude toward peer interaction could positively predict middle school students' online learning motivation and critical thinking. Learning motivation and critical thinking also positively supported problem-solving self-efficacy. It is expected that the results of this study can be a reference for teachers to adopt student-centered online learning in problem solving courses. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

Softlifting, or the illegal duplication of copyrighted software by individuals for personal use, is a serious and costly problem for software developers and distributors. Understanding the factors that determine attitude toward softlifting is important in order to ascertain what motivates individuals to engage in the behavior. We examine a number of factors, including personal moral obligation (PMO), perceived usefulness, and awareness of the laws and regulations governing software acquisition and use, along with facets of personal self-identity that (...) may play a role in the development of attitudes and therefore intentions regarding this behavior. These factors are examined across multiple settings expected to be pertinent to our survey respondents: home, work and school. Personal moral obligation and perceived usefulness are significant predictors of attitude across all settings. Past behavior is a significant predictor of intention across all settings, and a significant predictor of attitude in the home setting. We find evidence that awareness of the law causes a less favorable evaluation of softlifting in the school setting only, but has little effect in the home and work settings. As in previous studies, attitude is a significant predictor of intent. We do not find indications that one’s personal self-identity influences one’s attitude towards the behavior and the intention to perform it, except in the case of legal identity, where marginally significant effects are found in the work environment. (shrink)

One of the most influential figures in the history of Islamic thought is Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210). The identities of mushakkik, which creates problems on many subjects, especially metaphysical and theological ones, the muhaqqiq who tries to solve the problems above the sects, and the jâmî who brings many different views together in the highest concepts, have seriously affected all the thinkers after him. Therefore, in the tradition, all schools had to inherit the philosophical and scientific dynamism that he (...) created and displayed an attitude about the problems he created and the solutions he offered. The real important motive that makes Râzî so indispensable and effective is his problematic identity (mushakkik), which carries the kalām to philosophy and philosophy to kalām, and criticizes philosophy on the basis of the kalām, and the kalām on the basis of philosophy. For this reason, when we look at the works of Râzî, who has been evaluated politically and sociologically within Ash'arism throughout his life, it is clearly seen that he is a thinker who is suitable to be embraced by different schools and to be interpreted in different ways. The fact that many Ahl as-sunnah theologians emphasized the works written by Râzî with a theological-Ash'ari theme, caused his supra-sectarian identity to be overshadowed. On the other hand, it is seen that some thinkers are making an effort to know and recognize Râzî as a philosopher-theologian and muhaqqiq. This effort is clearly seen especially in scientific figures who benefited from Kamaladdin Ibn Yûnus (d. 639/1242) in some way. Afḍal al-Dīn Khūnajī (d. 646/1248), Athir al-Din al-Abharî (d. 663/1265), Najm al-Din al-Qazwinî al-Kâtibî (d. 675/1277) can be given as examples. These personalities, on the one hand, played an active role in the spread of Râzî's scientific heritage and they were effective in bringing Râzî to the fore with his supra-sectarian identity on the other. Sirāj Al-Dīn Al-Urmawî (d. 682/1283), who inherited his scientific legacy, is among the important names who established his identity as a muhaqqiq who mostly solved supra-sectarian problems. Human actions are at the forefront of the issues in which this facility has clearly emerged. Urmawî tries to revise al-Arba'în's expressions, which seem to ignore the power and influence of human beings in terms of human actions as well as criticizing Razi's arguments very seriously. In his work Lübâb, on the one hand, he summarizes al-Erba'în of Razî he seriously criticizes Razi's Ash'ari attitude towards human actions on the other. He does this largely on the axis of the arguments that Râzî himself expressed from his encyclopedic works such as al-Matâlibu'l-'âliyya mina'l-'ilmi'l-ilâhi. It is clear that this is not an ordinary situation. Because human actions are at the forefront of the issues that determine the thinkers' conception of divinity and the relationship between God and man. In this study, Râzî's attitude on this issue and Urmavi's philosophical and theological criticisms will be tried to be determined. Thus, it is clearly seen that he is trying to establish Râzî as a muhaqqiq in the axis of human actions. (shrink)

A crucial socio-political challenge for our age is how to rede!ne or extend group membership in such a way that it adequately responds to phenomena related to globalization like the prevalence of migration, the transformation of family and social networks, and changes in the position of the nation state. Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant assumed that international connectedness between humans would inevitably lead to the realization of world citizen rights. Nonetheless, globalization does not just foster cosmopolitanism but simultaneously yields the (...) development of new group boundaries. Group membership is indeed a fundamental issue in political processes, for: “the primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community” – it is within the political community that power is being shared and, if possible, held back from non-members. In sum, it is appropriate to consider group membership a fundamental ingredient of politics and political theory. How group boundaries are drawn is then of only secondary importance. Indeed, Schmitt famously declared that “[e]very religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is suffciently strong to group human beings e#ectively according to friend and enemy”. Even though Schmitt’s idea of politics as being constituted by such antithetical groupings is debatable, it is plausible to consider politics among other things as a way of handling intergroup di#erences. Obviously, some of the group-constituting factors are more easily discernable from one’s appearance than others, like race, ethnicity, or gender. As a result, factors like skin color or sexual orientation sometimes carry much political weight even though individuals would rather con!ne these to their private lives and individual identity. Given the potential tension between the political reality of particular groupmembership defnitions and the – individual and political – struggles against those definitions and corresponding attitudes, citizenship and civic behavior becomes a complex issue. As Kymlicka points out, it implies for citizens an additional obligation to non-discrimination regarding those groups: “[t]his extension of non-discrimination from government to civil society is not just a shift in the scale of liberal norms, it also involves a radical extension in the obligations of liberal citizenship”. Unfortunately, empirical research suggests that political intolerance towards other groups “may be the more natural and ‘easy’ position to hold”. Indeed, since development of a virtue of civility or decency regarding other groups is not easy, as it often runs against deeply engrained stereotypes and prejudices, political care for matters like education is justified. Separate schools, for example, may erode children’s motivation to act as citizens, erode their capacity for it and!nally diminish their opportunities to experience transcending their particular group membership and behave as decent citizens. This chapter outlines a possible explanation for such consequences. That explanation will be found to be interdisciplinary in nature, combining insights from political theory and cognitive neuroscience. In doing so, it does not focus on collective action, even though that is a usual focus for political studies. For example, results pertaining to collective political action have demonstrated that the relation between attitudes and overt voting behavior or political participation is not as direct and strong as was hoped for. Several conditions, including the individual’s experiences, self-interest, and relevant social norms, turned out to interfere in the link between his or her attitude and behavior. Important as collective action is, this chapter is concerned with direct interaction between agents and the in$uence of group membership on such interaction – in particular joint action. Although politics does include many forms of action that require no such physical interaction, such physical interaction between individuals remains fundamental to politics – this is the reason why separate schooling may eventually undermine the citizenship of its isolated pupils. This chapter will focus on joint action, de!ned as: “any form of social interaction whereby two or more individuals coordinate their actions in space and time to bring about a change in the environment”. Cognitive neuroscienti!c evidence demonstrates that for such joint action to succeed, the agents have to integrate the actions and expected actions of the other person in their own action plans at several levels of speci!city. Although neuroscienti!c research is necessarily limited to simple forms of action, this concurs with a philosophical analysis of joint action, which I will discuss below. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of the virtuous person, which I take to be the same as the good person. I argue that goodness in a person is based on her desires. Contra Aristotelians, I argue that one does not need practical wisdom to be good. There can be a perfectly good person with mental retardation or autism, for example, whether or not such conditions are compatible with the Aristotelian kind of wisdom. Contra Kantians, I argue that the sense of (...) duty - which does exist! - is compatible with a desire-based moral psychology. (shrink)

The aim of the research was to find out whether participants completing an SCM questionnaire to assess attitudes towards the Roma would give different answers in response to different sets of instructions. Three sets of instructions were tested using cognitive interviews: answer from your personal viewpoint, from the viewpoint of the majority of Slovaks, from the viewpoint of those close to you. The research sample comprised 24 respondents, of whom 12 were upper secondary school students and 12 (...) working adults. Responses from the personal viewpoint differed markedly from responses from the viewpoint of the majority of Slovaks, but were very similar to responses from the viewpoint of those close to the person. In the research, internal and external motivation to respond with/without prejudice was also investigated. Participants with internalised unbiased beliefs showed a preference for assessing the Roma minority from their own viewpoint, while participants with internalised biased beliefs thought the instructions were unimportant. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XX, Number 2, November 1994, pp. 211-218 Symposium A version of this paper was presented at the symposium on A Progress of Sentiments by Annette C. Baier, held at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association, Los Angeles, March 1994. Response to My Critics ANNETTE C. BAIER I thank my critics for their generous compliments on what they find good about my book, and (...) thank them even more for their criticisms. Both my critics query the role given to reason, in my version of Hume's version of our nature. If David Owen is right, I downplay Hume's scepticism, in Treatise Book I, about what we can expect of what he there calls our reason, and, if Rachel Cohon is right, I downplay Hume's scepticism in Books II and III about the role of reason in our passionate and active lives. Cohon even charges that my Hume is barely distinguishable from Samuel Clarke. Grave charges! In response, I want first to concede that in A Progress of Sentiments I should have given more space to the section "Of scepticism with regard to reason" than I did, and that, even though I did not purport to more than touch on Hume's attitude to other philosophers, I should have more explicitly acknowledged the background role of Clarke as Hume's target, throughout the Treatise, and given more emphasis to Hume's anti-religious aims, which I mention from time to time, but do not dwell on. I could also have given more prominence to Hume's treatment of liberty and necessity, and have said a bit more about Hume's section, "Morality not based on reason." As Rachel Cohon says, I dismiss what, for some, is the distinctively Humean claim that morals excite passions and produce or prevent actions as largely an ad hominem move against rationalists who expect their pronouncements about eternal fitnesses, or divine commands, to produce or prevent actions, possibly by exciting fear of divine punishment. The Humean moral sentiment, I claimed, is not an Annette C. Baier is at the Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260 USA. 212 Annette C. Baier especially motivating passion, although it does normally produce good will towards those whose character traits it approves, and some dislike of those whose character traits are disapproved. So it may excite some self-dislike, when it is our own character that we find distasteful, or produce some pride, if we pass muster. Hume writes: "There may perhaps, be some, who being accustom 'd to the style of the schools and pulpit, and having never consider'd human nature in any other light than that in which they place it, may here be surpriz'd to hear me talk of virtue as exciting pride, which they look on as a vice..." (T 297). So Humean morals does often excite passions. But pride and humility, Hume claims, are "compleat in themselves," not "attended with any desire" (T 367), so are not directly motivating passions. And even the love and hatred that are felt towards fellow persons for their virtues and vices may, as motivating influences on the will, have to compete with other loves, such as esteem for the rich and powerful. Hume is a realistic and often rather cynical moralist, and has no easy story about how the moral sentiment can produce the virtues of which it approves. Still, there is some active power in the moral sentiment. It is an impression, namely a sentiment or "peculiar pleasure," not an idea, and so not a belief. In my book I first contrasted Humean sentiments with beliefs in Chapter 1, discussing the conclusion of Book I, and then continued to discuss passions in Chapter 2, on association. There it is said plainly enough that, for Hume, it is pleasure and pain on which most of our passions are founded. (He exempts some instinctive desires.) His own decision to continue with his philosophical journey, after the near shipwreck of Part 4 of Book I, is based, he claims, on the fact that he would be the loser in point of pleasure if he inhibited his philosophical impulses. But... (shrink)

The Milestone Education Society (Regd.) Pehowa (Kurukshetra) working since 2005 in the field of school education, social work and higher education through its research initiatives. It started Center for Positive Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies (CPPIS) in 2010 and contributing continuously in the field of higher education through research journals, various programmes, and published books. -/- The present initiative Centre for Studies in Educational, Social and Cultural Development (CSESCD) will work on the issues related to downtrodden people though its various (...) activity like discussions, programmes and publications etc. It also promotes the ideology of the educational thinkers who positively contributed in the society. -/- The present book, “Ideological Crisis in Indian Society “is the first initiative of the Centre. It includes six essays of the students who participated in the essay competition organized by the Centre for Positive Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies (CPPIS) and the Department of Philosophy, P.G.Govt College for Girls, Sector-11, Chandigarh to celebrate World Philosophy Day with the theme “Indian Society and Ideological Crisis” on 21st November, 2013. These essays highlight writers’ thinking and need further improvement on the basis of ideas. -/- On the occasion of Death Anniversary of Dr. B.R.Ambedkar, we dedicated this volume to this great personality who is the real motivation for us. His vision of social democracy and equality was closely related to good society, rationality and the scientific outlook. -/- I must congratulate all the members of Milestone Education Society (Regd.) Pehowa (Kurukshetra) for this new initiatives and submit my humble gratitude towards their positive efforts and kind-cooperation. -/- Dr. Desh Raj Sirswal -/- December 06,2013 -/- Download the book from: http://msesaim.wordpress.com/2013/12/06/ideological-crisis-in-indian-society-a-tribute-to-dr-b-r-amb edkar-on-his-death-anniversary/. (shrink)

1 Introduction1 In the 1980s, hermeneutics was often incorporated into deconstructionism and literary theory. Rather than focus on authorial intentions, the nature of writing itself including codes used to construct meaning, socio-economic contexts and inequalities of power,2 Gadamer introduced a different perspective; the interplay between effects of history on a reader’s understanding and the tradition(s) handed down in writing. This interplay in which a reader’s prejudices are called into question and modified by the text in a fusion of understanding and (...) topic revitalized the study of the printed word. Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being also appealed to the post-modern antipathy toward modernity and metaphysics.3 If the truth and validity of interpretations are limited to communities of language, then our mode of being in history cannot but be historical. This point of view rendered Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics vulnerable to the critique of moral and epistemological relativism. However, Gadamer’s theory of interpretation also stems from re-examination of the beginning of knowledge in the Pre-Socratics and Plato, and on this basis, is receptive to another dimension of inquiry than that which was trending in North America. -/- At the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1982, Chung-ying Cheng for the first time introduced onto-hermeneutics to an audience of esteemed philosophers including Li Zehou, Ren Jiyu, Feng Youlan, and Zhang Liwen.4 In contrast to schools of deconstruction and literary theory that had disengaged the interpreter from trans-historical sources of meaning and truth, Cheng explained that interpreters exist within a cosmological order inextricable from responsibility to harmonize Heaven and Earth in creative acts of interpretation. By integrating Chinese cosmology into hermeneutics through ontology, he tacitly challenged philosophers in the West to re-examine assumptions about humanity’s place in nature and by implication, Gadamer’s recovery of the beginnings of knowledge in Western philosophy. -/- Cheng’s Neo-Confucianism is inspired by the method and goals of Thomé H. Fang. The following words by Fang seem to prefigure, although in an indistinct and bundled way, aspects of Cheng’s philosophy including a Mencian theory of human nature, comprehensive observation, and creativity: “In the very process of living in concord with creative Nature, Man is charged with an ideal to be fully realized in the light of the principle of comprehensive harmony.”5 Like Fang, Cheng reinvigorates Chinese culture and language, but not solely in order to vindicate the insights of Neo-Confucianism. He has studied Western thought, from pragmatism and the analytic school to German idealism and phenomenology, to unlock and clarify philosophical concepts within the Yijing tradition and thereby render them intelligible to Anglophones. The result has been an awakening of Western scholars to the moral and cultural consequences of decoupling their thought from metaphysical foundations that are neither dogmatic nor doctrinal. -/- Not unlike the dialectic of Gadamer’s dialogue form, onto-generative hermeneutics integrates contrary positions on the same topic in order to blend both sides into a world philosophy, or as Cheng says, a “totalizing or integrative theory,”6 not to be confused with a theoretical rewording of a theory. On the contrary, the universal scope and relevance of hermeneutics stems from personal experience. Just as Gadamer, in response to faction and strife, immersed himself in Plato during the war years, and developed a method with which to harmonize opposites, so too, according to On-cho Ng, was Cheng moved by faction, strife and political persecution to develop a path toward unity.7 Gadamer taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Cheng at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa among other institutions in North America. They facilitated trans-continental educational and cultural ties. Similar experiences yield similar insights irrespective of differences of time and place. Hence, authors in this issue who reside in Europe, China and North America, delineate the differences between Gadamer and Cheng, yet also, in light of Cheng’s onto-generative method and cosmology, develop integrative theories. Due to the page-budget restriction of the publisher, certain articles of this special theme will be subsequently published in the next issue. -/- 2 Integrative Theory This special issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy confirms a dimension of hermeneutics that Cheng has both motivated and inspired. The contributors do not abide by the conviction that since thought is mediated by language, interpretations cannot transcend culture. On the contrary, their research exemplifies the fruits of trans-historical onto-dialogical hermeneutics within limits defined by their field inquiry, organized into Parts I and II, around three themes: language, the philosophy of history and ethics. -/- Andrew Fuyarchuk introduces the theme of ontology in relation to Gadamer’s turn to language. Fuyarchuk argues that Chung-ying Cheng’s criticism of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is informed by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and thereby overlooks how Gadamer’s Platonic-Pythagorean problem of the division between the One and Many is harmonized in the event of language, which in turn positions Gadamer in proximity to the presupposed grounds of receptivity in Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. Lauren Pfister’s contributing article addresses the year 2000 meeting between Cheng and Gadamer in Heidelberg and expands the transhistorical grounds of meaning in Gadamer to matters of theology. Pfister’s summary of the written Chinese record of their conversation indicates that Cheng does not address the role of Christian philosophy and hence, the role of the inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. This is important not only for detecting changes in Cheng’s philosophical development, but also for modifying his hermeneutics along the lines of a living conversation, possibilities explored by Pfister in a sequel to the article submitted to this issue. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of how Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being extends possibilities in Cheng’s thought, Pfister anticipates the article by Katarina Gajdosova. She returns to the roots of Chinese thought during the Warring States period and broadens the meaning of names in recently excavated texts. Contrary to the conventions about how to understand terms, she appeals to both Heidegger’s ontology and Cheng’s notion of receptivity and creativity to reinterpret naming in relation to cosmology. Along the same lines, insofar as the event of Being is lingual, Jay Goulding captures its emergent structure in an evolving community of scholars and scholarship. He recalls his philosophical journey toward Cheng’s philosophy that begins in conversations with Gadamer at McMaster University in Hamilton, leads to Heidegger and Asian thought, expands into turning points with teachers and colleagues from various backgrounds that by increments contributed to Goulding’s formulation of “Daoist phenomenology.” -/- Although differing traditions guide their inquiries and research, Cheng and Gadamer recall the wisdom of the past to ameliorate the fragmentation in contemporary life. This leads them to re-examine the origins of philosophy; historical roots and thus sources of creative re-interpretations East and West whose affinities are developed in contributions by Hyun Höchsmann and Friederike Assandri. Höchsmann assesses convergences and divergences in the origins of Chinese and Western philosophy (Confucius and Socrates, the Yijing and Pre-Socratics) that culminates in pairing Gadamer’s understanding of paideia in the context of Plato’s political cosmology in the Timaeus with moral and social cultivation in The Western Inscription. She delineates the limits of this comparison which in turn justifies introducing Vattimo’s notion of locality. Assandri’s comparative analysis moves between India and China, Buddhism and Tang Daoism. Based on Gadamer’s argument that writing detaches concepts from their cultural moorings, she defines and applies three levels of understanding in onto-generative hermeneutics to Buddhist terms that were assimilated into the Benji Jing and in so doing clarifies essential dimensions of Daoism. -/- Contributions by Stephen Palmquist and Nicholas Brasovan position Cheng in relation to Kant and Gadamer by way of Aristotle’s ethics respectively. On the one hand, Palmquist plots Cheng’s evolving criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy and draws on crucial dimensions of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reposition that criticism in a constructive relation to Kant’s emphasis on the philosophical conditions of morality while also indicating how religious dimensions of his thought answer Cheng’s concerns for lived moral action. For Palmquist, Gadamer enables a constructive criticism of Cheng. On the other hand, Brasovan compares Cheng’s Yijing-based account of moral deliberation with Gadamer’s Aristotelian-based ethics and reasons that in contrast to Cheng, Gadamer’s hermeneutical consciousness is disengaged from practical knowledge. For Brasovan, Cheng is a constructive critic of Gadamer. Palmquist and Brasovan’s divergent angles on Gadamer and Cheng map onto a dialectic of contrast and complementarity that constitutes the inner logic of Cheng’s philosophy. In other words, Gadamer and Cheng ought to be read alongside one another for the sake of removing discrepancies and contradictions, which constitutes the organic structure of their thinking. -/- 3 Our Mode of Being in History Is Not Historical The conversations between Cheng and Gadamer in this issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy pivot on language, philosophy of history and ethics within a comparative framework of analysis, but also explore the grounds that make the comparisons possible. Those grounds are informed by Chinese cosmology, and function to wrest Gadamer from the shadow of Heideggerian facticity and reposition him within the range of Cheng’s ideas about our place in nature that is embedded in his question about how mind emerges from inorganic matter.8 -/- For Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, human finitude, our ownmost individuating death ensures that hermeneutics is always open to the other as other, always on the way toward understanding the meaning of Being. To arrest the process in a concept of “the Absolute” cannot but represent someone’s point of view, and thereby render hermeneutics indistinguishable from ideology. However, insofar as finitude is defined by them in terms of an onto-theological concept of immorality, finitude is a metaphysical concept consistent with epistemologies and confuse beings with the meaning of Being. As a result, the celebrated political value of hermeneutics to always be on the way toward an understanding of the meaning of Being admits subtle variations on the same worldview that are insufficiently self-critical. -/- Gadamer scholars of Heidegger are right. A transformation in ethos and opening to the meaning of Being depends on awareness of finitude. Yet this awareness does not yield openness to more of the same, i.e., discourse structurally incapable of coming to unity but instead, for both Gadamer and Cheng, openness to a distinctly different ontological dimension of reality. As Sandra Wawrytko and So-Seong Park indicate,9 this ontological dimension is prefigured in the experience of being-as-a-whole or the totality of all possible relations in both Chinese totemic shamanistic rituals,10 and Greek Dionysian festivals.11 Through these religious experiences human ethos and therefore consciousness is expanded and elevated from being centered on one’s ownmost concerns toward an affinity with all sentient beings from insects and plants to animals. The channel for this affinity is an auditory disposition and hence, the emotions, compassion, and feeling response. -/- The capacity for an auditory disposition, or as Gadamer calls it, listening consciousness to respond to the inter-relationality and therefore inherent balance of nature is developed through music, song and dance of the religious rituals and festivals. They facilitate the unity of mind with nature. This use of music, that transforms ordinary consciousness, explains Cheng’s emphasis on the receptivity of feeling response in comprehensive observation, and Gadamer’s emphasis on openness to the other in attunement. However, an auditory disposition characteristic of pre-literate oral cultures that reveals the “All” need not rely on religion. As theorists about the evolution of language have explained,12 modern languages preserve their pre-historical past in music or prosody. That is to say, the song and dance that revealed the totality of inter-related beings to an ethos of comprehensive observation and attunement toward beings in classical civilizations is retained in the back-and-forth movement or rhythm of the dialogue form. Our mode of being in history is a mode of being in nature – through the music of language. -/- While alerting the reader to the limits of a nominalist interpretation, Gadamer expresses the inner law of the nature as follows: “in perishing there is always becoming, and in becoming there is always perishing.”13 Considered in process, opposites generate and blend into each other. This law of nature applies to everything.14 Hence, in a manner comparable to Pfister’s concluding insights, onto-dialogical hermeneutics is not only open to discrete events of otherness but moreover, to the moving structure of reality expressed, as Gajdosova suggests, in the existential moment of naming. Considered as interplay of tension and resolution with a life of its own, the dialectic of a dialogue is self-similar to the way in which an organism grows (by instinct). There is, therefore, a sense in which the art of interpretation extends the human mind into the eternal cycles of nature such that we participate in the articulation of the inner telos/homeostasis toward which all beings strive and importantly for Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, within the material limits of energy to which our embodied minds are self-evidently subject. In mortality there is always immortality. (shrink)

Preface ix Acknowledgements xi 1 Introduction: towards an acceptable fideism 1 The metaquestion: what is the issue about the ‘justifiability’ of religious belief? 4 Faith-beliefs 6 Overview of the argument 8 Glossary of special terms 18 2 The ‘justifiability’ of faith-beliefs: an ultimately moral issue 26 A standard view: the concern is for epistemic justifiability 26 The problem of doxastic control 28 The impossibility of believing at will 29 Indirect control over beliefs 30 ‘Holding true’ and ‘taking to be (...) true’ 33 A second—direct—locus of doxastic control 35 Moral doxastic responsibilities 41 The moral significance of faith-beliefs 47 Linking moral to epistemic justifiability: reinstating the standard view? 48 3 The epistemic justifiability of faith-beliefs: an ambiguity thesis 53 Plausibility of requiring epistemic for moral justifiability under a realist interpretation of faith-beliefs 53 Interpreting the link principle: epistemic entitlement as requiring evidential justification 55 Evidentialist requirements specified by an implicit evidential practice 65 Rational empiricist evidential practice 66 Applying rational empiricist evidential practice to theistic faith-beliefs: an ambiguity thesis 68 vi contents 4 Responses to evidential ambiguity: isolationist and Reformed epistemologies 77 Two strategies for defending the moral probity of theistic faith-belief in the face of evidential ambiguity 78 Appealing to a special theistic evidential practice/improved epistemologies 79 An isolationist epistemology 79 Reformed epistemology 86 Conclusion: the need for a fideist response to ambiguity 99 5 Faith as doxastic venture 101 Agenda for a defence of doxastic venture 102 The nature of theistic faith 103 The doxastic venture model 106 The psychological possibility of doxastic venture 111 A Jamesian account 112 ‘Passionally’ caused beliefs 113 6 Believing by faith: a Jamesian position 122 An initial hypothesis for a Jamesian thesis on permissible doxastic venture 123 The notion of a ‘genuine option’ 125 A ‘degrees of belief ’ challenge 128 Evidentially undecidable forced options 129 Permissible doxastic venture: supra- not counter-evidential 135 How theistic religion could present essentially evidentially undecidable genuine options: the notion of a highest-order framing principle 137 Restricting thesis ( Ji) to faith-propositions: thesis ( J) 145 7 Integrationist values: limiting permissible doxastic venture 151 Can counter-evidential fideism be non-arbitrarily excluded? 151 A coherence requirement and integrationist values 155 Moral integration of faith-commitments 163 Implications for reflective faith-believers 167 Coda: A reflection on Abraham as forebear in faith 170 contents vii 8 Arguments for supra-evidential fideism 174 The importance of defending the epistemic permissibility of faith-ventures 176 Strategies for supporting fideism 178 An ‘assimilation to personal relations cases’ strategy: experimental ventures in interpersonal trust 180 The ‘assimilation to personal relations cases’ strategy: cases where ‘faith in a fact can help create a fact’ 182 A consequentialist strategy 185 A note on Pascal’s Wager 187 The tu quoque strategy 189 Is hard-line evidentialism self-undermining? 190 Attitudes to passional doxastic inclinations 194 Epistemological externalism again: a presumption in favour of fideism? 196 Scepticism about passional doxastic inclinations as guides to truth: how passions may be schooled 197 The significance of scientific theories of passional motivations for faith-commitment 204 An impasse? 206 9 A moral preference for modest fideism? 208 Implications of accepting ( J+) for orthodox and revisionary theistic faith-ventures 209 The apparent fideist/evidentialist impasse and its implications 211 Beyond impasse? Direct moral evaluation of the fideist/evidentialist debate 215 Self-acceptance and authenticity 216 Hard-line evidentialism as grounded in doctrinaire naturalism 220 Coherence amongst moral and religious passional commitments 225 Conclusion 227 Bibliography 230 Index 237. (shrink)

The purpose of the research study is to determine a comparative analysis between evil and suffering. Comparative studies of these Western and Eastern religious philosophies demonstrate different results. In Western philosophies, the cause of evil is related to human free will and the law of the universe, focusing on justice driven by God and moral values chosen by humans. On the other hand, the Eastern philosophical theories of various religions focus on the series of experiences that humans face depending upon (...) the cycle of karma, rebirth, and cosmological context. They tend to move toward practical approaches taken by humans to eliminate suffering in their lives by utilizing ethical values and practices. Despite these differences, both philosophies tend to impact human conditions and paths, with the only difference being that Western religions have firm faith in God's plan of justice, whereas Eastern religions focus on the cosmetology and self-motivation of humans. On the other hand, the study of Western religion provides the availability of grooming laws for individuals to attain spiritual goodness personally. Another important factor of Western religions is the involvement of different religion-related institutes like mosques, churches, and schools that help shape the communities living in different areas and increase their social ethics for playing a role in communal enhancement. For education gaining ideas, the Eastern religion is more focused on expanding intellect and gaining wisdom through education. The education is delivered to incorporate such healthy meditations to increase intellect, memory, and spiritual knowledge. In Western religious philosophies, education is taken to illuminate and clarify different purposes and aspects of life. This aspect has also helped develop technology and enhance science background regions also play a proper role in religious teachings for character building, along with the academic type of education. (shrink)

The present research seeks to utilize Implicit Theories of Intelligence and Achievement Goal Theory to understand students’ intrinsic motivation and academic performance in mathematics in Singapore. 1,201 lower-progress stream students, ages ranged from 13 to 17 years, from 17 secondary schools in Singapore took part in the study. Using structural equation modeling, results confirmed hypotheses that incremental mindset predicted mastery-approach goals and, in turn, predicted intrinsic motivation and mathematics performance. Entity mindset predicted performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals. Performance-approach goal (...) was positively linked to intrinsic motivation and mathematics performance; performance-avoidance goal, however, negatively predicted intrinsic motivation and mathematics performance. The model accounted for 35.9% of variance in intrinsic motivation and 13.8% in mathematics performance. These findings suggest that intrinsic motivation toward mathematics and achievement scores might be enhanced through interventions that focus on incremental mindset and mastery-approach goal. In addition, performance-approach goal may enhance intrinsic motivation and achievement as well, but to a lesser extent. Finally, the study adds to the literature done in the Asian context and lends support to the contention that culture may affect students’ mindsets and adoption of achievement goals, and their associated impact on motivation and achievement outcomes. (shrink)

School inclusion embodies an educational philosophy aimed at ensuring that each and every student, regardless of individual characteristics, abilities, personal circumstances, or social conditions, is fully engaged and actively involved in the educational experience. This approach emphasizes diversity as a value and promotes the acceptance and appreciation of individual differences within the school environment. Despite the desirability of inclusive education systems being enshrined in many international and national Declarations and regulations, practical approaches still often lean towards (...) school “integration”, understood as a paradigm of “assimilation”, which involves adapting disabled students to a school structure primarily designed for typical students. This article underscores the essential functions of assessing inclusion policies within individual educational institutions and, more broadly, evaluating mechanisms within the larger educational system to achieve continuous improvement in the real inclusion of all students, dedicating an in-depth analysis to the Italian context. The effective and adequate assessment in this field is challenging and methodological reflection is absolutely indispensable to define shared frameworks for evaluation policies. Building upon the recent OECD framework proposal (2023), this work suggests expanding the set of indicators to provide a more comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of school inclusion policies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 273-274 [Access article in PDF] Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, and William R. Newman, editors. Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. viii + 610. Cloth, $186.00. The nineteen papers of this weighty (handsomely produced, but expensive) volume are mostly devoted to the views of one thinker or group of persons on "corpuscularism" (see 17ff.), in (...) either physics or mathematics, with few synthetic or diachronic studies. Only a quarter of the volume is devoted to the medieval period: Danielle Jacquart on minima in the Salerno school of medicine (twelfth century); the late George Molland on Roger Bacon's and Grosseteste's "corpuscular tendencies"; Charles Lohr on Ramon Lull; John Murdoch on minima naturalia in the medieval and Renaissance periods; and the greater part of William Newman's study of corpuscularian conceptions in "Aristotelian alchemy" from Geber to Sennert. The early-modern part includes studies on mostly expected figures: Francesco Patrici, Giordano Bruno, the Northumberland circle, Francis Bacon, David Gorlaeus (a little-known Dutch theology student; 1591-1612, sic), Daniel Sennert, Honoré Fabri, Galileo, Gassendi, Charleton, Boyle, Locke, and Homberg. Alan Gabbey more generally distinguishes different patterns of explanations in mechanical philosophy.As far as I can judge, the authors are knowledgeable and competent, and the studies make important contributions. But just because this is a high-quality volume produced with the ambition of making a step toward rewriting the history of a major chapter in the history of science, its two significant and principled deficiencies must be pointed out.The volume follows the intention of "show[ing] the debt of early-modern matter theory to previous traditions and thereby [explaining] its bewildering heterogeneity" (back cover). Now, the study of the corpuscular traditions in the pre-modern period is certainly an important desideratum (although this volume again attends chiefly to the early modern corpuscularians). But the motivation and perspective here announced—the medieval period [End Page 273] is to be studied because early modern science is indebted to it—are astoundingly Whiggish. Worse: the study of the entire Arabic-Islamic tradition is dismissed, on the grounds that "Islamic atomism does not seem to have been of any influence upon Christian fourteenth-century atomism" (8): this is not only Whiggism, but also frank and explicit euro- and Christian-centrism, which in the beginning of the twenty-first century is simply stunning. The method amusingly consists in affirming the consequent: presupposing that "Islamic atomism" did not influence the West and early-modern science, no scholar was asked to examine whether or not this was indeed the case, with the congenial result that the volume seemingly confirms the initial presupposition. Q.E.D. Similarly and no less regrettably, the fact that (ps.-) Geber's Summa Perfectionis is not, as Lasswitz had thought, the translation of an Arabic work is here used as grounds on which to dismiss altogether his claim concerning the importance of the Arabic input (13, but see also 293). This way, incomprehension between civilizations is reinforced instead of being reduced, and I believe we did not need September 11 to know this.The thusly dismissed Mu'tazilite school of Islamic theology had important repercussions in Judaism, so that referring to it as "Islamic atomism" is misleading (see notably Hagai Ben-Shammai, "Studies in Karaite Atomism," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 6 [1985]: 243-93). The volume's forty-page cumulative bibliography, for which the editors are to be congratulated, reflects the volume's parochial viewpoint: H. A. Wolfson's important The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), with some 150 pages on atomism, is not included; nor is the (English version of the) landmark study by the late S. Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1997; the original 1936 German version is mentioned). Wolfson's study, incidentally, shows that the editors' presupposition (8) that the Kalâm tradition could have influenced the West only via the Latin translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is unwarranted, for Isaac... (shrink)

This article considers the motivations of teachers to pursue ongoing professional learning. During recent decades, the international policy context has been characterised by high-stakes accountability, but the implications of this agenda for teachers’ motivations toward professional learning remains under-explored. In this mixed methods study, combining a large teacher survey and in-depth teacher interviews, a new and significant concept of ‘instrumental motivation’ is generated to capture how high-stakes performance management policies damage the motivation of teachers to learn professionally. This (...) innovative approach, employing ordinal factor analysis and inductive/deductive hybrid thematic analysis inclusive of self-determination theory, reveals how the ‘instrumental motivation’ of teachers should be constrained and argues for the adoption of alternative motivational strategies to support effective professional learning in schools. (shrink)

Gender inequalities in education – in terms of systematic variations in access to educational institutions, in competencies, school marks, and educational certificates along the axis of gender – have tremendously changed over the course of the 20 th century. Although this does not apply to all stages and areas of the educational career, it is particularly obvious looking at upper secondary education. Before the major boost of educational expansion in the 1960s, women’s participation in upper secondary general education, and (...) their chances to successfully finish this educational pathway, have been lower than men’s. However, towards the end of the 20 th century, women were outperforming men in many European countries and beyond. The international contributions to this book attempt to shed light on the mechanisms behind gender inequalities and the changes made to reduce this inequality. Topics explored by the contributors include gender in science education in the UK; women’s education in Luxembourg in the 19 th and 20 th century; the ‘gender gap’ debates and their rhetoric in the UK and Finland; sociological perspectives on the gender-equality discourse in Finland; changing gender differences in West Germany in the 20 th century; the interplay of subjective well-being and educational attainment in Switzerland; and a psychological perspective on gender identities, gender-related perceptions, students’ motivation, intelligence, personality, and the interaction between student and teacher gender. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Educational Research. _. (shrink)

Across cultures, in most parts of the world, one come across traditions that employ unique and unusual pedagogies as skilful means to powerfully craft and re-craft our lives and in realizing the self. Using creative meaning-making, individuals evoke wholesome ideas and then motivate their personal selves to perform to them. The Vajranŕtyam or Cham is one of the unique expressions that has been employed from immemorial times to holistically convey the phenomenon of the dance form as a skilful spiritual (...) tool. While the authors recognize that other cultures too engage in spiritual dances as skilful means, here they dwell in greater length on Cham dance or the Tibetan Lama dance, which is performed in the traditional Vajrayana or Tantric schools of Buddhism in India, Bhutan, Mongolia, Nepal, and Tibet. With the advent of various contemporary influences, there is an observable change in the attitude towards the traditional, impacting its pure form. Whether it is undesirable or acceptable is a matter of reflection in another place, yet there are some observations that authors choose to share in the last section of this paper. Also, arising from several yet similar cultural influences, the purists voice accusation of dilution and warn that the traditional Cham dance may be slowly dying and morphing into tourist-friendly theatrics that is pleasing to the eye. In this paper, the authors attempt to elucidate its historical and contemporary role and place, to instigate an inquiry that hopefully provides a robust narrative, rich in value, and with a substantive interpretation from which lessons could be culled or harvested. Authors look at Vajranŕtyam in a generic wisdom-method space cutting across religious and social-cultural spaces. They also seek possible alignments and connect with science, essentially to study, explore, propagate core beneficiaries of the Dharma dance in terms of a sacred mindful and meditative art form. (shrink)