This paper explores the academic and psychosocial outcomes of immigrant students from the former Soviet Union in an ethnic school in Toronto. Based on interviews with the principal, teachers, students and parents, together with questionnaire responses, the paper describes school programmes and practices that contribute to FSU immigrant students' high academic achievement, within the categories of curriculum, pedagogy, discipline policy and teacher–student relationships. The creation of this ethnic school suggests that Canada's educational system has not met (...) the needs of the immigrant group. The paper seeks to further understanding of educating FSU immigrant students, and discusses the implications of ethnic schools for educating children in a multicultural society. (shrink)

Efforts to embed anti-heterosexist curriculum at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) can become confused and contradictory because of the persistent subjection of the student to the curriculum, and by maintaining sex as a subject of danger and prohibition. Examples from the new TDSB anti-discrimination curriculum resource that were perceived as politically controversial in 2011 are briefly assessed with the popular queer(ed) theories of Foucault (1978/1990), Butler (1990; 1993), and Rubin (1984/1993). Deleuze's (1988) interpretation of Spinoza’s work is (...) also plumbed to explain the consequences of heterosexist discourse in schools. The Deleuzian-Spinozan example of the caricatures of the “moralist trinity” shows that heterosexist discourses promote the production of “sad passions” throughout social relationships by creating “sad” characters within each individual. Finally, anti-heterosexist action in schools is described as modelling consent in curriculum and exposing relationships of subjection. (shrink)

An instrument to assess 'ethical sensitivity' has been developed. The instrument presents four clinical vignettes and the respondent is asked to list the ethical issues related to each vignette. The responses are classified, post hoc, into the domains of autonomy, beneficence and justice. This instrument was used in 1990 to assess the ethical sensitivity of students in all four medical classes at the University of Toronto. Ethical sensitivity, as measured by this instrument, is not related to age or grade-point (...) average. Sensitivity increases between the 1st and 2nd year and then decreases throughout the rest of undergraduate medical training, such that the 4th-year students identify fewer issues than those entering medical school. Students expressing a career choice of family medicine identify more issues than their peers. Several problems with the use of the instrument and the interpretation of the data were found. Nonetheless, these findings, if reproducible, are important and their meaning needs further discussion. (shrink)

The Toronto experience suggests that there may be several general lessons for academic health sciences complexes to learn from the Olivieri/Apotex affair regarding the ethics, independence, and integrity of clinical research sponsored by for profit enterprises. From a local perspective, the OAA occurred when there already was a focus on the complex and changing relationships among the University of Toronto, its medical school, the fully affiliated teaching hospitals, and off campus faculty because of intertwined interests and responsibilities. (...) The OAA became a catalyst that accelerated various systemic reforms, particularly concerning academic/industry relations. In this article, the evolving governance framework for the Toronto academic health sciences complex is reviewed and these policy and process reforms discussed. These reforms have created collaborative activity among research ethics boards and contract research offices of the partner institutions, and allowed the joint university/hospital ethics centre to play a role in governance and policy, while respecting the missions and mandates of the involved institutions. Although few of the policies are dramatically innovative, what is arguably novel is the elaboration of an overarching governance framework that aims to move ethics to a central focus in the academic complex. Time alone will tell how sustainable and effective these changes are. (shrink)

The Toronto experience suggests that there may be several general lessons for academic health sciences complexes to learn from the Olivieri/Apotex affair regarding the ethics, independence, and integrity of clinical research sponsored by for profit enterprises. From a local perspective, the OAA occurred when there already was a focus on the complex and changing relationships among the University of Toronto, its medical school, the fully affiliated teaching hospitals, and off campus faculty because of intertwined interests and responsibilities. (...) The OAA became a catalyst that accelerated various systemic reforms, particularly concerning academic/industry relations. In this article, the evolving governance framework for the Toronto academic health sciences complex is reviewed and these policy and process reforms discussed. These reforms have created collaborative activity among research ethics boards and contract research offices of the partner institutions, and allowed the joint university/hospital ethics centre to play a role in governance and policy, while respecting the missions and mandates of the involved institutions. Although few of the policies are dramatically innovative, what is arguably novel is the elaboration of an overarching governance framework that aims to move ethics to a central focus in the academic complex. Time alone will tell how sustainable and effective these changes are. (shrink)

The article is a detailed review of the books by Maria daVenza Tillmanns “Why We Are in Need of Tales” (Toronto, Iguana Books, 2020—2021). The books appeared as a result of the author’s many years’ experience in conducting philosophy classes with children (elementary school level). The books are written in the form of a dialogue, which creates the effect of the reader’s presence in the fairy tales plots, stimulating reflection on their philosophical content. The author of the article (...) examines the plots from the standpoint of some key ideas of the world philosophical thought. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making is often evaluated in the literature through deontological and teleological approaches, commonly referred to as ethical positions. Ethical decision-making requires an awareness of ethical sensitivity and ethical dilemmas. It involves understanding the emotional experiences of others and assisting them. In cases of alexithymia, where there is difficulty in understanding and expressing emotional experiences, empathy may be limited, and emotions may not be effectively used. In this research, the impact of the level of alexithymia on ethical positions in students (...) of the School of Health Services, along with demographic variables, was evaluated. In this descriptive research using a quantitative research approach, data was obtained using the "Ethical Position Scale-EPQ" and the "Toronto Alexithymia Scale-TAS." Analysis was performed using the reliability testing, t-test, One-Way ANOVA Test, LSD multiple comparison test, and Pearson Correlation and Regression Analysis test were used. In ethical decision-making, it has been found that women are more idealistic than men, while men tend to be more alexithymic and deficient in outward thinking. As students' levels of alexithymia increase, they are determined to adopt a more relativistic approach. It has been observed that relativism increases and idealism decreases significantly among individuals with high alexithymia scores. These findings indicate that the level of alexithymia has a significant impact on ethical positions. The fact that individuals with high levels of alexithymia adopt a subjective position that is less concerned with the consequences of an action on others and resembles egoism suggests that these individuals may have difficulty in empathizing due to emotional inadequacy. (shrink)

The problem of the Toronto School’s theoretical identity emerges from the recognition that the most influential figures of this orientation do not agree regarding the general idea of the School as a coherent theoretical trend. Moreover, the idea of “medium” central to this orientation is fundamentally ambiguous. Therefore the aim of the paper is to consider the identity of the Toronto School by referring to the so called materialistic interpretation of the media. The paper supports (...) the thesis that the minimal definition of communication technologies in terms of physical artifacts comprises the conceptual core of the Toronto School’s identity. The failure to consider the minimalistic definition of media results in the general blurring of the Toronto School’s theoretical identity. (shrink)

The coercive authority of the Kantian state is rationally grounded in the ideal of equal external freedom, which is realized when each individual can choose and act without being constrained by another's will. This ideal does not seem like it can justify state-mandated economic redistribution. For if one is externally free just as long as one can choose and act without being constrained by another, then only direct slavery, serfdom, or other systems of overt control seem to threaten external freedom. (...) Yet Kant endows the freedom-based state with considerable powers of economic redistribution. I argue that recent commentary has misunderstood both Kant's account of why poverty is a form of freedom-threatening dependence and the extent of the Kantian state's powers for remedying poverty. Criticizing Arthur Ripstein and the Kantianism of the “Toronto-School,” I argue that the most salient notion of dependence at issue within the Kantian framework is not the direct control of the choice-making capacities of another but asymmetrical influence in a power relationship. For Kant, poverty is fundamentally a problem of structural disempowerment. (shrink)

У статті аналізується потенціал наукових ідей представників Торонтської школи комунікації для дослідження сучасного релігійного дискурсу, особливістю якого є масовий характер та використання технічних засобів. Розглянуто діяльність школи у другій половині ХХ століття, ідеї її представників Гарольда Інніса, Еріка Хевлока, Дороті Лі, Едмунда Карпентера, які досліджували різні аспекти засобів комунікації. Особлива увага приділена творчості філософа та літературного критика Маршала Маклюена. Виокремлені головні блоки у доробку вченого, які можна ефективно застосовувати для дослідження масової релігійної комунікації: зміна форм комунікації визначає основні характеристики суспільної (...) взаємодії; мас-медіа активно впливають на творення сучасної культури; розвиток електронних засобів масової комунікації призводять до зміни суспільства і сучасної людини. Нову площину для аналізу релігійних мас-медіа становить думка про домінування засобу комунікації над її змістом. Радіо та телебачення створюють і формують актуальну релігійну комунікацію, яка є кардинально відмінною від класичних форм релігійного спілкування. Робиться висновок про вплив електронних мас-медіа на конструювання соціальної реальності, зміну способів передавання інформації у релігії, модифікацію самої релігії. (shrink)

This paper was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Christian Ethics, Toronto School of Theology, Toronto, Ontario in January 1977. Robert Shelton aims to focus on the concept of 'right to health care,' its related principle, 'distributive justice' in an attempt to suggest 'where we are' at present and where we perhaps ought to be heading. The paper is divided into three parts, which in their turn explore the moral grounds, the US (...) general public's policy and the part justice and government are likely to play in the development and distribution of health care. He concludes by highlighting 'omissions', an intentional one of his own and the other a major gap in the literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:498 BOOK REVIEWS generations of theologians across denominational lines. Both Placher and Hunsinger at the end of their essays choose quotations from within Frei's own writings to give a synoptic portrait of the man and his work. Placher chooses a remark about Niebuhr's sense of vocation as a theologian (20), and Hunsinger one about knowledge of that seemingly elusive reality, a person's identity (257). However one might come away (...) from this challenging collection of essays, further confused or more enlightened, more in agreement or disagreement, I think every reader will recognize the coincidence of intellectual perspicuity and generosity with passionate faith. Regis College, Toronto School of Theology Toronto, Ontario, Canada GEORGE P. SCHNER, S.J. Reasoned Faith. Edited by ELEONORE STUMP. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. x + 364. As the editor remarks in her "Introduction," it is not so long ago that the analytical philosophy of religion consisted very largely of discussions of the meaningfulness of religious language, and of arguments about the existence of God. Nowadays it is more adventurous, ranging over such topics as creation, providence, and God's responsibility for sin. According to Robert Merrihew Adams, the statement "truth is subjectivity," though one of the most famous, is also one of the most misunderstood in Kierkegaard's writings. He argues that, taken in context within the Concluding Unscientifu: Postscript, the statement is by no means incompatible with the objective truth of religious belief. From the point of view of the Postscript, a member of an idolatrous community who prays to her God with "the entire passion of the infinite" has more of the truth than one who prays in a false spirit from within Christendom; but this implies that the latter does have some truth. Whatever the deficiencies in her faith, she is clearly admitted to be in possession of the true concept of God objectively speaking (223 ). Adams maintains, quite rightly in the reviewer's opinion, that the Postscript is excessively pessimistic about the integration of the ideals of subjectivity and objectivity, of passionate commitment on the one side and rational assessment of evidence on the other, in religious faith (21). A useful distinction is made by Scott MacDonald between "occurrent" and "dispositional" belief; this seems to resolve some of the more puzzling paradoxes about the relation of the more cognitive and propositional side of faith to other aspects which may be thought essential to it. The demons alluded to by St. James (2:19) might believe dispositionally that their highest fulfillment BOOK REVIEWS 499 was to be found in obeying the divine will, and so performing acts of charity and service to other creatures. But to avoid the inconvenience of acting in such a way, they could think of God occurrently as just a powerful being who makes burdensome demands (55). For MacDonald, the cognitive component of faith has only two elements, belief that certain propositions are true, and belief that the kind of response of the will which is also essential to faith may be grounded on these (56). "We can make sense of Christian faith if we think of it simply as belief that Christianity is true plus an appropriate volitional response to that truth" (69). Against mainline Christian accounts like those of Augustine and Aquinas, he sees no good reason to suppose that one cannot have faith in propositions for which one has conclusive proof, but only in those for which one's justification is relatively weak. He provides interesting grounds for contradiction of a view which has been expounded by both Robert Adams and John Hick, that only such uncertainty can ground the trust which is essential to the relationship which human beings ought to have to God (59). "My ability to love and trust my wife, to commit myself without reservation to her well-being and to the goals and purposes we have chosen as definitive of our common life seem in no way dependent on my being uncertain about what she is like or what she will do" (60). On the question of how faith ought to be related to the demands of reason, Robert Audi remarks that, up to the middle 1970s... (shrink)

The paper discusses the role of networks in cognition on two levels: on the level of the organization of ideas, and on the level of interpersonal communication. Any interesting system of ideas forms a network: ideas presented in a linear order (the order forced upon us by verbal expression) will necessarily convey a distorted picture of the underlying patterns of thought. Networks of ideas typically consist of a great number of nodes with just a few links, and a small number (...) of hubs with very many links; that is, they are, to employ Albert-László Barabási's term, "scale-free." Barabási fits into a specific tradition: Hungarians had an early influence on the philosophy of networks, and on the philosophy of communication as developed at Marshall McLuhan's Toronto Circle. In fact, this was the circle in which certain Hungarian and Austrian ideas on mediated collective thinking first came together—a telling testimony to the conditions of disturbed communication and idiosyncratic networking typical of East-Central Europe, past and present. The nodes-and-hubs pattern is characteristic, too, of social networks, in particular of scholarly and scientific networks. The paper analyses the role of "invisible colleges"—informal groups of scientific elites through whom the communication of information both within a field and across fields is channelled. By way of conclusion the notion of a new type of personality, the "network individual," is discussed: the network individual is the person reintegrated, after centuries of relative isolation induced by the printing press, into the collective thinking of society—the individual whose mind is manifestly mediated, once again, by the minds of those forming his/her smaller or larger community. (shrink)

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Based on case studies from public schools in Toronto, Canada, this book chronicles an inspiring five-year journey to develop thinking about and teaching literacy for the 21st century. The research, which was classroom-based and developed by public school teachers in collaboration with university researchers, was stimulated by an ethnographic study at Joyce Public School to track children learning to read in an era of multiliteracies. Following the kindergarteners' interest in Goldilocks and (...) the Three Bears, Lotherington asked the principal: What would Goldilocks look like, retold through the eyes of the children? The resulting classroom experiment to transform learning to read a storybook into multimodal collaborative story-telling sparked the development of an award-winning school-university learning community dedicated to the development of multimodal literacies in the culturally diverse, urban classroom. Pedagogy of Multiliteracies tells the evolving story of teachers' trial-and-error interventions to engage children in multiple modes of expression involving structured play with contemporary media. Using the complex texts created, the teachers carve spaces to welcome the voices of children and the languages of the community into the English-medium classroom. (shrink)

As late as 1870 a Toronto professor, William Hincks, schooled pupils in a circular system of classification. Although his system was derived from Macleay's quinarianism of the 1820s, Hincks had altered it in several ways, influenced by botanical morphology. He persistently promoted it throughout the 1860s as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.

Used as the basis of the program at the Equinox Holistic Alternative School in Toronto, The Holistic Curriculum advocates for an integrative approach to teaching and learning with a focus on developing a deep connection between mind and body.

MARINA PAOLA BANCHETTI-ROBINO is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and zoosemiotics. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Synthese, Husserl Studies, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and The Review of Metaphysics. She has also contributed essays to The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy (1997), Feminist Phenomenology (2000), and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial (...) Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (2006). She co-edited Philosophies of the Environment and Technology (1999) and is currently working on a book-length project entitled The Birth of Science Out of the Spirit of Myth: A Historico-Phenomenological Re-Examination of the Crisis of the European Sciences. BERNARD BOXILL was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1971. He has published numerous articles, a book, Blacks and Social Justice (1992), and is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ED BRANDON was born and educated in England, studying philosophy and linguistics at The University of York, England, and later philosophy at The University of Oxford with the late John Mackie. After teaching in Sierra Leone and briefly in England, he went to teach philosophy of education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1978. From 1992 he has been attached to a policy unit of the Vice-Chancellery, based at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, where he has been assisting since 2000 with a new major in philosophy. His academic work can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/personalpage.html CAROLYN CUSICK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of the Phenomenology Roundtable. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology, Africana philosophy, and phenomenology. LEWIS GORDON is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Laura H. Carnell Professor, the most distinguished chair, at Temple University, where he holds appointments in philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies and directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). CLEVIS HEADLEY is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master's in Liberal Studies. Professionally, he serves as the Vice-President and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in Analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege. PAGET HENRY is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and the co-editor of C. L. R. James' Caribbean. Professor Henry also serves as the editor of the C. L. R. James Journal, and has published numerous articles on the political economy of the Caribbean as well as on African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. ESIABA IROBI is Associate Professor of International Theatre/Performance Studies at Ohio University, Athens. His groundbreaking book: A Theatre for Cannibals: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1441 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, in 2007. He has been invited to be an External Resident Fellow at the prestigious Dartmouth College Humanities Institute for the 2007-2008 academic year. CHIKE JEFFERS is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. His interests are in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. He is originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CATHERINE JOHN is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press and UWI Press in 2003. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature and culture and her current book project is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She spends her summer working in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica helping with a summer school for children and participating in the community's emancipation celebration. KENNETH KNIES is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus are phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is also a contributing editor for Political Affairs magazine. EDIZON LEN is a photographer and coordinator of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2006, he was curator of the photo exhibit "The Color of the Diaspora" presented at the Cultural Center of the Catholic University of Ecuador and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently completing his doctorate at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar with a focus on Maroon thought. REKHA MENON is Associate Professor of Art History at State University of New York, Buffalo State. She is the author of Seductive Aesthetics of Post Colonialism (forthcoming). Her area of research focuses on current philosophical investigations in colonial and neocolonial aspects of Indian art, artistic/cultural practices and philosophies and their relationship to Western arts and philosophies. Her manuscripts under review are: Ashamed of Our Nakedness, Is There Ever a Naked Body? Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Expressive Aesthetics and Insatiable Desire. MICHAEL R. MICHAU is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, and during the 2006-2007 school year, a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies and Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He is the co-founder and co-secretary of the North American Levinas Society. CHARLES W. MILLS is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). MABOGO P. MORE is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has published articles on African philosophy and social and political philosophy in a number of academic journals, such as South African Journal of Philosophy, Dialogue and Universalism, Alternation, Theoria, and African Journal of Political Science. MARILYN NISSIM-SABAT, Ph.D., M.S.W. is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Lewis University. Dr. Nissim-Sabat is also a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the author of numerous book chapters and papers in the fields of philosophy (Husserlian phenomenology), psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical race theory. Citations of her works can be found on her website: marilynnissim-sabat.com. FREDERICK OCHIENG'-ODHIAMBO is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Coordinator of the discipline at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. His major research areas are African philosophy and social philosophy. He has published several articles on philosophic sagacity. IVAN PETRELLA is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is author of The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Orbis Books, 2005) as well as co-editor of the series Reclaiming Liberation Theology (SCM Press) RICHARD PITHOUSE is a research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, 2006). SATHYA RAO is Assistant Professor in French translation at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research fields include: theory of translation, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, discourses on Africa, and Francophone cinema and literature. He has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and written chapters in several collective books such as: De l'Ecrit Africain a l'Oral le Phenomene Graphique Africain, Simon Battestini (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006) and Thèorie-rèbellion. Un Ultimatum, Gilles Grelet (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005). He has a co-edited a book on Francophone African cinema L'Afrique fait son cinema (Montreal: Memoires d'encrier, forthcoming). Sathya Rao is vice-president of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), member of the Canadian Association of Translatology (CATS), coordinator of the research team Poexil, and Secretary of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is co-founder of an online journal Alternative Francophone. CATHERINE WALSH is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean Diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crìtico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), "Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference," in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) and "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes," Cultural Studies (forthcoming). KRISTIN WATERS has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her anthology Enlightened Conversations: Women and Men Political Theorists (Blackwell, 2000) challenges political theorists to be more inclusive of race and gender in their research and teaching. Her book Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol Conaway (University of Vermont Press, forthcoming), addresses the varied intellectual traditions of black women's thought that spans more than two hundred years in North America. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University. (shrink)

This offering in Routledge's acclaimed History of Philosophy series completes the acclaimed 10-volume collection. This work explores the schools of thought that developed in the wake of Platonism through the time of Augustine. The 11 separately authored in-depth articles include: Aristotle the scientist-- David Furley, Princeton University; Aristotle: logic and metaphysics-- Alan Code, Ohio State University; Aristotle: aesthetics and philosophy of mind -- David Gallop, Trent University, Ontario; Aristotle: ethics and politics-- Stephen White, University of Texas at Austin; The peripatetic (...) school-- Robert Sharples, University College, London; Hellenistic science and mathematics-- Alan C. Bowen, Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and Science, New Jersey; Epicureanism-- Philip Mitsis, Cornell University; Stoicism-- Brad Inwood, University of Toronto; Ancient skepticism-- Michael Frede, Keble College, Oxford; Neo-Platonism-- Eyjdfur Kjalar Emilsson, University of Iceland; Augustine-- G.J.P. O'Daly, University College London. Order the entire Routledge History of Philosophy series and save 10% off each volume! (shrink)

Scholars of modernity have taken a particular interest in processes of urbanization and—thinking of Simmel, Benjamin, Mumford and Weber—the character of different varieties of city. From a different angle, notions of urban imaginary have gained greater purchase in the field of contemporary urban studies in comparative analysis of varieties of city. This essay begins with notes on both classical accounts of the city in social theory and current concepts of urban imaginaries. The notes revolve around the essay’s main topic: the (...) institution of cities of New World, specifically those of the United States and Canada. Paralleling Castoriadis’ conception of the imaginary institution, the present author argues for a more exact notion of metropolitan imaginaries, differentiated from the broader subject of urban imaginaries. ‘Metropolitan imaginaries’ denotes processes of urbanization at the heart of networks of migration, transport, and flows of capital and culture. As part of larger imaginaries, metropolises generate immigrant cities. The specific kind of creation in question produces creativity also by concentrating intellectual and creative schools of design in architecture and visual culture. In sum, metropolises are not merely part of networks of connection and creation; they produce networks and act as the hubs of interaction and creativity within larger social imaginaries. The essay explores this argument in the contexts of US and Canadian modernity and state formation, with specific foci on New York, Chicago, and Toronto. The conclusion notes two limitations to the case presented here and sketches planned directions for future research. (shrink)

A professor of philosophy at Western University in Ontario, with joint appointments in Philosophy and the School of Health Studies, Louis Charland unexpectedly passed away on May 9, 2021. In addition to Western, he taught at the Universities of Toronto, McGill, and Concordia. He had visiting appointments at Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion in Perth, and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Beyond (...) his teaching and research, he also undertook consulting work for several hospitals and governmental and social service agencies.Louis was the son of a diplomat and was raised as a citizen of the world, with Paris... (shrink)

Social justice needs a home, a place where it can be found, especially for young people growing up in fragmented and increasingly inequitable societies. Community youth arts organizations have secured a certain prominence in this context over the past three decades and are now part of the urban infrastructures that shape connected learning networks in highly industrialized nations. In this capacity, youth arts organizations regularly engage a language and aesthetics of authenticity and trust as part of how they call out, (...) represent and make a home for children and youth. This paper examines how authenticity in youth culture and youth cultural expression is negotiated by arts organizations and how organizations locate their own trustworthiness as allies of young people through the curation of online media archives. The analysis draws on the internet media archives of two youth arts organizations in Canada’s largest English-speaking cities. The Oasis Skateboard Factory in Toronto, ON is an extension program of the Toronto District School Board that enables participants to create their own brands and learn to run a skateboard or professional design business. ReelYouth started in Vancouver in 2005 as a community media empowerment project, and now delivers programs across Canada and internationally.The claims to youth authenticity articulated in each media archive reveal how authenticity and trust are negotiated ideologically by each organization and how organizations mark their ontological status, as a home from which young people can think and respond to an unjust world. I examine how youth authenticity is produced by analyzing how discourses of youth identity, connection and trust are deployed across each archive. Whilst showcasing how authenticity is negotiated by each group, I show how the production of authenticity discourses by OSF and ReelYouth simultaneously convey a deeper reality: the way youth arts groups operate as care structures that offer ontological security, and places of increasing “awareness of previously unnoticed interconnections” for youth. In this way, they operate as sites of border work, places of routing from which the work of social justice can be borne. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada by Angele Alook et al.Evangeline KroonAngele Alook, Emily Eaton, David Gray-Donald, Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman, and Bronwen Tucker. The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2023. 240 pp., paperback, $25.95. ISBN 9781771136129.[End Page 280]The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada by Angele Alook, Emily Eaton, David Gray-Donald, (...) Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman, and Bronwen Tucker is both an imagining of a utopic, fossil-fuel-free world and a spirited call to action. Written in plain language and aimed at a wide audience, the book examines contemporary so-called Canada through an indigenous-centered,1 decolonial lens and frames the current climate crisis that we are in as one of relationship failure. The authors state: "We believe it is important for a just transition discussions to be accessible to all audiences because, fundamentally, what we're talking about in this book is repairing relationships. Repairing relationships with each other and with the land" (13). Key to repairing this relationship is putting indigenous rights and sovereignty at the center of any proposal or policy, instead of appearing as an add-on or afterthought. As the authors lead us through their plan for a just energy transition, they assert that any change, any movement, and any economic strategy that does not assert indigenous rights is not only "greening theft," it is also doomed to fail (7).The book is organized into two parts. The first part consists of the introduction and the first two chapters, where the authors outline broken promises and political and private decisions that have led to the current climate crisis in so-called Canada. The second half then outlines indigenous-informed solutions and possible paths forward, with the most concrete and "winnable" strategies in the last two chapters (153). The End of This World is a collaborative piece, written in one voice, while the individual authors' voices can be heard through various examples and anecdotes given throughout the book.In the first half of the volume, they lay out the rise and reliance on fossil fuels, the ongoing empowerment of the industry, and the swaths of broken promises the Canadian government has made since public concern for climate has been on the rise. The authors focus on two dynamics that they believe are the worst contributors to this crisis in so-called Canada: "the violation of indigenous people's inherent rights and sovereignty, and the fossil fuel economy that relies on this violation" (11). This is done by tracing the sordid history of indigenous-settler relations through official documents such as the [End Page 281] Indian Act and the residential school system, which systematically destroyed traditional indigenous relationships with each other and the land and replaced them with patriarchal capitalist colonial hierarchies. The authors argue that this destruction, along with the forced removal of indigenous people from their lands, effectively brought about an apocalypse, the aftereffects of which indigenous people across all of so-called Canada are still dealing with. This is an incredibly effective rhetorical strategy, pulling on the popular cultural imagination of the apocalypse and reframing the settlers' view of this world as an indigenous dystopia.The authors then lay out how the official policies and privatization of the industry by the Canadian state laid the groundwork for weakening resistance against fossil fuel projects on traditional indigenous territories, and for stripping the lands of resources and further alienating all people from their relationships with the land. They point out that when indigenous mobilization was finally recognized in the 1970s and 1980s, a swell of popular support from unions, labor activists, and environmentalists pushed back against rampant development and extraction. However, instead of strict regulation and limitation, the authors make it clear how the government and industry simply switched from climate denialism to "climate delayism," using terms like "sustainable development," "net zero goals," and "carbon neutrality" to push responsibility to the future and make no real changes, all while actually increasing development and projects in the industry.The greatest strength of this section is how... (shrink)

I was an undergraduate studying bioethics in Toronto during the SARS pandemic in what seem like, in retrospect, much simpler times. Now, living in Texas, I'm finishing my PhD degree in the medical humanities. This current pandemic has provided me with an education in trust, scientific expertise, provider burnout, and social justice. It has invigorated my research examining how moral tensions in the therapeutic relationship are heightened when physicians write about patient care. Still, the inevitable comparisons, not just with (...) being in school back then but also with student life before the pandemic, bring... (shrink)

Learn to think critically with the leading introduction to reasoning and argumentation. Highlights In clear, reader-friendly language, The Power of Critical Thinking provides an engaging introduction to argumentation, deductive and inductive reasoning, inferencing, and evaluating scientific theories New Critical Thinking and the Media boxes in each chapter apply the principles of critical thinking to the realms of media, advertising, and news New content on "fake news," the COVID-19 pandemic, and other important contemporary topics reflects the changing world in which today's (...) students must apply their critical thinking abilities New and updated exercises offer extensive opportunities for students to practise the skills through which they will become active, engaged critical thinkers Additional online resources-including a study guide and practice quizzes for students as well as an instructor's manual, a test bank, and PowerPoint slides for instructors-offer stimulating materials to enhance the learning and teaching experiences. About the Authors Chris MacDonald is an associate professor and chair of the Law and Business Department at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University. Lewis Vaughn is an independent scholar and author of several textbooks on philosophy, ethics, and critical thinking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Inventing Philosophy’s Other: Phenomenology in America by Jonathan StrassfeldGregory FloydSTRASSFELD, Jonathan. Inventing Philosophy’s Other: Phenomenology in America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 363 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $30.00Recent years have witnessed an increase in scholarly attention paid to the intellectual history and development of socalled Continental philosophy. That attention has turned to not only key figures and philosophical schools but also to the historical factors, social (...) conditions, and institutions that have aided, hindered, and otherwise directed its itinerary across the European continent and eventual migration to the “new world.” Edward Baring’s Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2019) is a well-researched and intricate account of the European development of phenomenology’s growth from “a provincial philosophy of southwest Germany into a movement that spanned Europe.” Baring argues convincingly that European networks of Catholic scholars and institutions were essential to the dissemination of the ideas and works of early phenomenologists, and his work offers a salutary reappraisal of neoscholasticism as a vibrant, internally diverse, and philosophically sophisticated movement attentive to and engaged in the dominant questions of its day. The various contributors to the 2020 volume, The Catholic Reception of Continental Philosophy in North America (University of Toronto Press) take up the story as it begins again amid American and Canadian Catholic institutions of higher learning. They offer an extended account of the historical, institutional, and conceptual relationships between Catholicism and Continental philosophy on North American soil up to the present day.To these, Jonathan Strassfeld’s Inventing Philosophy’s Other: Phenomenology in America offers a necessary complement. Strassfeld tells another and essential side of the story focused on eleven “elite” universities—Harvard in particular—and the way in which American scholars in the first half of the century and European émigrés in the second half set the conditions for an at times fruitful at times fraught engagement with Continental thought in America. Key to that analysis is the contention that in the first half of the twentieth century, Harvard and other leading institutions that would later become bastions of analytic philosophy were the first to take interest in phenomenology sending scholars to study with its founders and engaging a tradition that they [End Page 366] “encountered as a work in progress” and as possessing natural points of contact with various strands of American philosophy such as new realism, critical realism, pragmatism, and the philosophy of language.Strassfeld then documents the reversal of that early philosophical pluralism and the foreclosure of the possibility of philosophical integration due to the rapid ascendancy of analytic philosophy between 1950 and 1969, showing that foreclosure to be neither a necessary outcome nor the triumph of a superior philosophical approach: “[B]oth the intra-university mandates of new interdisciplinary formations and changing inter-university dynamics of hiring and promotion after World War II transformed the ecosystem of philosophical reproduction catalyzing the rise of analysis and decline of humanistic pluralism in American philosophy.”The consequence of the decrease in faculty specializing in phenomenological and Continental areas from elite institutions was twofold. First, Continental philosophy increasingly “relied on a network of departments and organizations that were defined by the resistance to the practice and influence of mainstream American philosophy.” Second, it became of increasing interest to nonphilosophical disciplines such as sociology, psychology, geography, architecture, and anthropology, which sought to transcend culturally ascendant forms of scientific reductivism. In both ways, Strassfeld argues, Continental thought became “an unassimilated other” within the American academy.In telling this story, Inventing Philosophy’s Other uses a distinctive alphanumeric structure. One set of numbered chapters introduces the essential doctrines and early figures of phenomenology and chronicles its varied transpositions on American soil. These numbered chapters are punctuated by a set of shorter alphabetic chapters that present portraits of American-born or expatriated phenomenologists. The dual structure of the work tells the story of phenomenology in America along two axes: an intellectual history of ideas, institutions, and social practices as well as an interpenetrating history of constitutive figures.A major strength of Strassfeld’s work is that he brings a historian’s care... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 135-137 [Access article in PDF] The 2002 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies Alice Keefe University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point "Religious Responses to Violence" was the theme for the program at the SBCS Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada, on November 22-23, 2002. Speaking from Christian and Jewish perspectives, the presenters in Session I were Harold Kasimow, Professor Emeritus of Grinnell College; Elaine MacInnes, O.L.M.; (...) Sarah Pinnock of Trinity University; and Rebekah Miles from the Perkins School of Theology. Responding from a Buddhist perspective was Virginia Strauss of the Boston Research Center. Session II offered reflections on Buddhist responses to violence from Gene Reeves of the International Buddhist Congregation; Christopher Ives of Stonehill College; and John Makransky, professor of Religious Studies at Boston College and a Buddhist teacher, with a Christian response from Theodore Walker of Perkins School of Theology, noted for his work in Black theology.Opening Session I, Harold Kasimow explored Jewish responses to violence, which he finds similar in many ways to responses to violence in Mahayana Buddhism. Both traditions unequivocally condemn violence. Basic to Jewish reflection on violence is the great commandment that one shall love one's neighbor as oneself, along with the principle that all humans are created in the image of God; therefore, as Rabbi Akiva taught, whoever sheds blood diminishes God's presence in the world. But like Mahayana Buddhism, the Jewish tradition admits to rare cases where violence may be legitimately used in a spirit of compassion when the lives of others are at stake. On this point, Kasimow, himself a Holocaust survivor, cited Abraham Heschel, who said that "indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself." Heschel dreamed of a world rid of evil by human effort, and he suggested that interfaith dialogue serves as a step toward this goal as it works against the evil of demonizing the "other."Sarah Pinnock, who has written on the religious journeys of Holocaust survivors, explored the themes of memory, solidarity, hope, and mystical faith as compelling Christian modes of survival and resistance in the face of evil. Logic cannot solve the problem of evil, but through memory, suffering is not forgotten; through solidarity, we identify and join with the victimized in resistance to evil; and through hope, we find the energy for resistance. Mystical faith discovers divine transcendence in all things, while abandoning egotistical demands that God be the world's puppet master; [End Page 135] in mystical faith, Christians do not look for divine intervention, but for human beings to act for God against evil.Rebekah Miles, a Christian ethicist, offered a lucid outline of three distinct Christian approaches to violence: (1) absolute pacificism, which rejects the use of violence for any reason; (2) the "crusade" perspective, which justifies war when it can be construed as a conflict between good and evil and which calls for the total eradication of evil in the form of the enemy; and (3) the "just war" perspective, which stipulates precise criteria for instances when the use of violence may be justified and places restraints on any exercise of violence. In addition to this helpful overview, she engaged arguments (put forth by Rosemary Ruether, SharonWelch, and ReginaSchwartz) that there is something inherent in the nature of Western monotheism that serves to legitimate and encourage violence, and argued for divine transcendence as undergirding the effective power of the prophetic critique against all forms of idolatry and tyranny.The final Christian presenter was Elaine MacInnes, O.L.M., a Catholic nun and Zen master who is noted for her activist work in prison ministry in the Philippines and in Canada. She reminded us that even as violence brings suffering, it is at the same time a mystery in that it carries a redeeming potential to rid us of all that is false. It is the cultivation of silence that allows the sacred inner life to do its work.Responding from a Buddhist perspective, Virginia Strauss returned to the problem of the human desire for retributory justice and looked to Buddhism... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd Reviews 179 THE EARLY “IRON CURTAIN” Michael D. Stevenson Schulich School of Business, York U. / Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. Toronto, on m3j 1p3 / Hamilton, on l8s 4l6, Canada [email protected] Patrick Wright. Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. xvii, 488. isbn 978-0-19-923150-8. £18.99 (hb); £12.99 (pb). In his famous (...) Westminster College address on 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill Wred one of the opening salvos of the Cold War by proclaiming that from “Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain” had been lowered across Europe. Patrick Wright’s intriguing and provocative book does not examine the phrase “iron curtain” in its popular Cold War context. Instead, he maintains that many characteristics of this metaphor, “including the pronounced sense of theatricality it would bring to international politics, were inherited from the period before the Second World War” (p. 18). Wright divides Iron Curtain into two primary chronological sections, the Wrst covering the period from 1914 to 1920. An iron curtain originally referred to the steel safety screen that descended in English theatres, beginning in the lateeighteenth century, to separate the audience from the often catastrophic Wres that broke out on the stage. The phrase entered the lexicon of international relations in January 1915 when British author and paciWst Violet Page (writing under the pseudonym Vernon Lee) published an article lamenting that “War’s cruelties and recriminations, War’s monstrous iron curtain” (p. 80) had alienated European nations such as England and Germany sharing a common cultural heritage. But the barrier quickly moved east in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and “took the form not just of exaggerated political rhetoric, but of an economic blockade enforced by naval power” (p. 171), as the Allies sought to contain the infection of Bolshevism. Wright devotes most attention in this section to documenting the 1920 visit to Russia by the British delegation jointly sponsored by the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, which sought to penetrate the dense fog of Allied anti-Bolshevik propaganda and validate the delegation members’ own preconceived views about the nascent socialist utopia in Russia. British delegates witnessed images both of progress carefully stagemanaged by their hosts and of terrible economic dislocation and poverty caused by the Allied blockade and the civil war, which allowed the majority of them to return home to lavish praise on the Soviet experiment that would, in their minds, inevitably fulWl its potential once the Bolshevik government became stable. February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd 180 Reviews 1 “The Future of Europe”, European AVairsz 1, no. 1 (April 1949): 3. The second section of Wright’s book examines Western reports of life behind the iron curtain between 1920 and 1939. Here, the author focuses heavily on the theatrical nature of Soviet attempts to create modern-day Potemkin villages that werez—zwith a limited number of exceptionsz—zaccepted as reality by an endless parade of left-wing visitors. A second British Trades Union Congress delegation in 1924, for example, received a dramatically embellished picture of Soviet economic progress that included a train journey past a long-abandoned factory belching smoke created by burning wet straw frantically provided by Russian peasants; the resulting report of the delegation “repeatedly collapsed into the most abject conformity with the Soviet view of reality” (p. 245). The most tragic examples of Western visitors’ blindness to the truth occurred during the 1930s famine deliberately induced by Stalin, and Wright exposes a wide cast of characters who adopted a blinkered view of conditions in the ussr. Among intellectuals, Wright documents the 1931 visit of George Bernard Shaw, who cavalierly dismissed reports of widespread food shortages while dining sumptuously in Moscow’s Hotel Metropole. Among journalists, Wright develops the case of Walter Duranty, the New York Timesz correspondent who knuckled under to demands of Soviet censors to produce sanitized accounts denying or ignoring the famine in order to protect his privileged place in that... (shrink)

Psychoanalysis has traditionally had difficulty in accounting for the existence of evil. Freud saw it as a direct expression of unconscious forces, whereas more recent theorists have examined the links between early traumatic experiences and later ‘evil’ behaviour. _Humanizing Evil: Psychoanalytic, Philosophical and Clinical Perspectives _explores the controversies surrounding definitions of evil, and examines its various forms, from the destructive forces contained within the normal mind to the most horrific expressions observed in contemporary life. Ronald Naso and _Jon Mills_ bring (...) together an international group of experts to explore how more subtle factors can play a part, such as conformity pressures, or the morally destabilizing effects of anonymity, and show how analysts can understand and work with such factors in clinical practice._ _Each chapter is unified by the view that evil is intrinsically linked to human freedom, regardless of the gap experienced by perpetrators between their intentions and consequences. While some forms of evil follow seamlessly from psychopathology, others call this relationship into question. Rape, murder, serial killing, and psychopathy show very clear links to psychopathology and character whereas the horrors of war, religious fundamentalism, and political extremism resist such reductionism. Humanizing _Evil_ is unique in the diversity of perspectives it brings to bear on the problem of evil. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers, and Jungians. Because it is an integrative depth-psychological effort, it will interest general readers as well as scholars from a variety of disciplines including the humanities, philosophy, religion, mental health, criminal justice, political science, sociology, and interdisciplinary studies. Ronald Naso, Ph.D., ABPP is psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in independent practice in Stamford, CT. The author of numerous papers on psychoanalytic topics, he is an associate editor of _Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies_, and contributing editor of _Division/Review _and _Journal of Psychology and Clinical Psychiatry_. His book, _Hypocrisy Unmasked: Dissociation, Shame, and the Ethics of Inauthenticity_, was published by Aronson in 2010. Jon Mills, Psy.D., Ph.D., ABPP is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at Adler Graduate Professional School, Toronto. A 2006, 2011, and 2013 Gradiva Award winner, he is Editor of two book series in psychoanalysis, on the Editorial Board for _Psychoanalytic Psychology_, and is the author and/or editor of thirteen books including his most recent works, _Underworlds: Philosophies of the Unconscious from Psychoanalysis to Metaphysics_, and _Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis_, which won the Goethe Award for best book in 2013. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) v-vi [Access article in PDF] In Memoriam: Wilfred Cantwell Smith Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian who taught for most of the first half of his career at McGill University in Montreal and for most of the second half at Harvard, died February 7, 2000, in his native Toronto at the age of eighty-three. His wife and companion of sixty years, Muriel, survives him, as (...) do five children and a dozen grandchildren.Smith, a Protestant Christian and clergyman, played an influential role among both academics and church bodies in advocating open dialogue and personal encounter with the adherents of diverse religious traditions. As one of his students, Professor John Ross Carter of Colgate University, put it, "Before I met Wilfred, I had studied Buddhism as a system. Under him, I came to appreciate the faith of Buddhists as persons."As an undergraduate, Smith studied Middle Eastern languages at the University of Toronto. He then studied theology in Cambridge, England, and taught during the early 1940s at Forman Christian College, Lahore, in what was then India but is now Pakistan. He became involved in the vital contemporary life of Muslims, and in the Hindu-Muslim-Sikh interface in the Punjab. The partition of India along communal lines in 1947 reinforced his strong sense of the moral urgency of interreligious understanding.After completing a Ph.D. degree at Princeton University with a dissertation on modern Islam, Smith took up the chair of comparative religion in McGill University's Faculty of Divinity and soon organized McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies, which he directed until 1963. The institute was innovative in two respects. First, it treated Islam as the faith of millions in southern Asia today, where the numerical majority of Muslims live, in contrast with the emphasis of most Orientalist scholarship on classical Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literature. Second, it strove to include roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Westerners in both its faculty and its student body.Though he had already made seminal contributions to comparative studies, Smith moved fully into that realm when in 1964 he took over the directorship of Harvard Divinity School's Center for the Study of World Religions, and later, of Harvard's entire graduate program in religion in arts and sciences. Through two decades, until his 1984 retirement, the world religions Ph.D. graduates emerging from Harvard, including a significant cohort of specialists in Buddhist studies, were inspired by Smith to focus on the faith dimension of the traditions they studied.Religious bodies turned to Smith for scholarly advice. To take one important example, he served in 1967 on a commission on world mission of the United Church of Canada. As a result of his input, the commission's report, adopted by the denomination, [End Page v] affirmed God to be working creatively and redemptively in the religious traditions of humankind. Some view this as the first declaration by any church to go so far in the entire history of Christianity.Numerous responsibilities and honors came to Smith. He became president of practically every organization to which he belonged, such as the American Academy of Religion, the American Society for the Study of Religion (which he said was his favorite), the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, and the Canadian Theological Society. His writings have been translated into many languages, as diverse as Spanish, Turkish, Urdu, and Korean. He received a dozen honorary degrees, was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, and less than a month before the end of his life was inducted in a special bedside ceremony as an Officer of the Order of Canada, the nearest honor that country has to a title of nobility awarded for merit.Smith was primarily a historian, ever fascinated by process and change. He observed it not only in the societies and traditions of world culture, but in the conceptual vocabulary with which we describe it. His landmark book, from this point of view, is TheMeaning and End of Religion(1963), in which he traced both the emergence of the view of particular traditions... (shrink)

If we take a careful look at what happened to our species scientifically and socially during the 20th century a rather unsettling fact quickly becomes apparent. It is that we are entering this awesome 21st century laden with immense challenges and the most serious kind of questions bearing on the human future with a scientific theory of evolution based almost entirely on the study of the past and the prehuman and the subhuman. Is this really true? What about the books (...) one can think of that deal with human evolution and the future? But how many of these books have become part of the established or mainstream paradigm for evolution theory? By this I mean what is generally taught in schools and generally thought of-even by most scientists-as evolution theory. After a moment's thought, I believe anyone sensitized to the problem I am getting at will conclude I am not over-stating the case: that for the whole of science today supposedly bearing on evolution an emphasis on the human and the future still remains a mere fraction of a whole in which the central tendency is as I have stated it. This is the crux of the crisis in the evolution of our species and the crisis in the development of evolution theory that lies behind the Toronto papers. Here, we look at the 15 foundations and 12 guidelines these papers identify for building the fully human theory of evolution needed to end or resolve this closely interwoven pair of crises. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Futures for Music Education PhilosophyEstelle R. JorgensenIn 1990, when I convened the first International Symposium for the Philosophy of Music Education at Bloomington, Indiana, there was one dominant philosophy of music education in the United States and another was about to make its appearance. The five succeeding symposia (Toronto, Canada, in 1994, led by David Elliott; Los Angeles, United States, in 1997, led by Anthony Palmer (...) and Frank Heuser; Birmingham, United Kingdom, in 2000, led by Mary Reichling and Forest Hansen; Lake Forest, Illinois, United States, in 2003, led by Iris Yob, Frank Heuser, and Forest Hansen; and Hamburg, Germany, in 2005, led by Charlene Morton, Paul Woodford, Frede Nielsen, and Jürgen Vogt) have promoted other philosophies. And this burgeoning of different voices and perspectives has greatly enriched the philosophical underpinnings of music education and moved us from relying on a narrow range of philosophical views towards a plethora of them.In our infant society, the International Society for Philosophy of Music Education (ISPME), we are creating and institutionalizing a forum that can nurture and critique ideas and practices and sustain the work of philosophical reflection in music education over the longer term. We have also benefited from long-term commitments by the Indiana University School of Music and Indiana University [End Page 15] Press to publishing the Philosophy of Music Education Review, now in its fourteenth volume (building on three years of publication of the Philosophy of Music Education Newsletter), and the Counterpoints: Music and Education series that provides an important venue for publishing cutting-edge scholarship in our field. And over the past two years, we have begun to build an international team of philosophers committed to establishing a strong philosophical society in music education.Beyond institutionalizing philosophical scholarship in music education, our society is committed to creating a genuinely international community that offers a global perspective. In the past, music education grew up within national borders and its work was often nationalistic in emphasis. Now, we face new challenges of thinking beyond these national commitments to a world of music education. This world might be seen as what Maxine Greene aptly terms "multiplicities and pluralities,"1 the many differing groups forged within language groups, religious perspectives, political ideologies, economic strictures, and familial obligations. And as philosophers, we work especially within our various linguistic and cultural traditions as we also seek to transcend these traditions in a common discourse.How shall we address philosophically the multiplicities and pluralities, commonalities and differences in music education internationally? Radical relativism and pluralism offer contrasting perspectives.2 Radical relativism sees the host of different music education beliefs and practices around the world as incommensurable and focuses on differences between them. For example, viewing Japanese and British music education within this stance would suggest that since Japanese and British music education reflect Japanese and British society and culture respectively, each cannot be understood in terms of the other, they are different and incommensurate with the other, and it is important to understand each in its own terms. Pluralism, however, sees differences as commensurable and focuses on shared attributes. Since human beings are the creators of culture and society, common threads amidst the differences emerge from this common humanity. For example, as a reflection of their different societies and cultures, although we expect to encounter differences between British and Japanese music education, we may also observe commonalities since they both bear the imprint of a shared humanity.Notwithstanding that musics and educational systems seem, upon first glance and when considered specifically, to be incommensurable, a deeper and more general examination turns up evidence supporting a pluralist perspective.3 Historically, cultures regularly borrow from different others as if there were common human threads. Maurice Ravel, Carl Orff, and Paul Simon are among twentieth-century composers to draw on cultures from the Far East and Africa. In music [End Page 16] education, Masafumi Ogawa's study of the introduction of Luther Whiting Mason's ideas into Japan in the nineteenth century,4 the dissemination of Shinichi Suzuki's ideas into the United States, the spread of Zoltán Kodály's, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's, and Carl Orff's and Gunild... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Advocacy, Therapy, and PedagogyJohn E. MacKinnonBeyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University, edited by Stephen Richer and Lorna Weir; 272 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995, $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.Anyone who would doubt the relevance of philosophy to public affairs ought to attend to the unhappy evolution of the Canadian university. On campuses across the country in recent years, speech codes have been introduced, the “re-education” (...) of professors urged, visiting speakers on controversial subjects silenced, and classes monitored by administrators eager to do the bidding of various special interest groups. As universities have come more and more to see their role as that of some sort of multipurpose social project, education itself has become less pressing a priority. Thus, while money is found to hire sexual harassment officers, employment equity advisors and “wellness” mavens, academic posts disappear. Those that remain are frequently filled in accordance with crass gender and race-based quotas, and when that fails to guarantee positions for members of bureaucratically favored groups, contrived “schools” and pseudodisciplines proliferate. Many of these developments, however, are simply the manifestation of trickle-down deconstruction, trickle-down Rortyism, trickle-down “politics of difference,” of the sort that Charles Taylor is prone to rhapsodize. Notions of value, nature and merit, of equality, universality and objectivity are dismissed as mere inventions, “imperial” notions designed to favor the powerful and oppress the disenfranchised. The art [End Page 492] of spoken and written argument, with their ideals of detachment and discipline, are taken as evidence of a smug “androcentrism,” while rationality itself is derided as a “regime” that works “to maintain patriarchal control of knowledge and knowledge production.” Even the notion of evaluating students by means of essays and exams is ridiculed as scandalously “non-feminist.” While past attacks on academic independence have tended to come from outside the university, Canadian academics over the past decade have slavishly accepted their own domestication. More disconcerting still has been the role of pliant university presidents, most of whom have proved eager to unburden themselves of the inconvenience of scholarship and to indulge the cosmological musings of the radical left.Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University bristles both with resentment that such criticisms should even be aired and paranoia about their motivation. According to its contributors, the challenge to political correctness—the very use of the term as an epithet—is the result of a “neo-conservative” attack that has been orchestrated in and “imported” wholesale from the United States (to morally smug Canadians, there can be no more dastardly provenance) and insinuated into public debate by a servile media. The first two articles in the collection, by Dorothy Smith and Lorna Weir respectively, pursue this very theme. Each betrays that dreary habit, particularly prevalent among social scientists, of rendering imposingly technical the most bracingly trite. For instance, Smith writes: “The textuality of public text-mediated discourse is essential to its peculiar temporal and spatial properties of ubiquity and constancy of replication across multiple and various actual situations of watching, reading, or hearing” (p. 25). Translation? The more one sees, reads or hears a view expressed, the more one tends to believe it’s true. Her concern here, of course, is to establish that whoever controls the means of public debate controls its terms as well, that those means happen to be controlled by neo-conservative interests bent on retarding social progress, and that growing public disquiet about educational reform simply confirms the success of that neo-conservative strategy. But the failure of Smith’s account goes far beyond the thoroughly rebarbative nature of her expression.According to Smith, the very term, “political correctness,” is shorthand for an “ideological code” that has been expressly designed by “neo-conservatives” to caricature the good works of the visionary left. An ideological code, she says, operates as a “free-floating form of control,” which, once established, is “self-reproducing” (p. 27). Now, [End Page 493] the trouble with this picture is that it can account only for ascendant ideological codes, those that are successfully transmitted and progressively consolidated. And yet, in recent years, the ideological code of the left has to a considerable extent... (shrink)

Michael W. Tkacz - Quaestiones super librum Posteriorum - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 392-393 Book Review Quaestiones super librum Posteriorum Walter Burley. Quaestiones super librum Posteriorum. Edited by Mary Catherine Sommers. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2000. Pp. x + 214. Cloth, $34.95. In his monumental Le Système du Monde, Pierre Duhem notes that it is difficult to link the fourteenth-century scholastic Walter Burley to any particular school (...) on account of his eclecticism. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, Burley has.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN RES SIGNIFICATA AND MODUS SIGNIFICANDI IN AQIDNAS'S THEOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY GREGORY RoccA, O.P. Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Berkeley, California ST. THOMAS AQUINAS often refers to the distinction between res significata and modus significandi. He asserls that, whie the :absolute and analogical predicates of positive theology may be pveditcated of God with regard to their RS,1 they mrust,be denied of God with regard to their (...) MS.2 The distinotion, then, is an imporlant element in his 1 For brevity's sake I will refer to res significata, by RS and to modus significand.i by MS; I will also speak of the res/modus distinction. The following abbreviations for Aquinas's works will be used: BDH=Flropositio in librum Boethii De hebdomadibus (Marietti ed., 1954); DA=the disputed question De anima (ed. J. H. Robb [Toronto: PIMS, 1968]) ; DDN=Flropositi super librum Dionysii De divinis nominibus (Marietti ed., 1950); DP=De potentia (Marietti ed., 1949); DSS=De substantiis separatis (Leonine Commission, vol. 40, 1969); DV=De veritate (Leonine Co=ission, vol. 22, 197276 ); Herm.=Sententia libri Peri hermeneias (Marietti ed., 1955); John= Leotura super Johannem (Marietti ed., 1952); Meta.=Sententia libri Metaphysioorum (Marietti ed., 1950); Phys.=Sententia libri Physioorum (Marietti ed., 1965) ; Quod. = Quaestiones quodlibetales (Marietti ed., 1956) ; BOG= Summa contra gentiles (Marietti ed., vols. 2-3, 1961) ; SDO=Eropositio super librum De causis (Marietti ed., 1955) ; SS=Scriptum super libros Sententiarum (Paris: Lethielleuro, 1929, 1933, 1947); ST=Summa theologiae (Alba/ Rome: Editiones Paulinae, 1962). The English translations are my own. For Thomas's positive theology of the divine names, see Gregory Rocca, "Analogy as Judgment and Faith in God's Incomprehensibility: A Study in the Theological Epistemology of Thomas Aquinas" (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1989) 540-615. 2 A characteristic text: "In every name predicated by us [of God], imperfection is found with respect to the name's mode of signifying [MS], 173 174 GREGORY ROCCA, O.P. theological epistemology and onomatofogy.3 For some, however, the distinction wou1d ultimately lead us back to the univocist camp of Duns Scotus,4 for they see it as hiding within itself 1 a latent core of univocity. One writes that the predication involved in 1anafogy of attribution is both univocal and equivocail: " It is univocal, insofar as it ai1ways denotes the siame proprietas rei; it is equivoca,J since, through a differrent modus significandi, it •connotes ' a different existentiail mode of the denoted proprieta.'J." 5 Another writes, in simil.ar fashion, that "the :same property is signifi·ed, hut the way in which the property inheres in the subject is different." a Another contends tha;t the idis:tinJCtion between RS and MS is a" bogus distinction between what words realily mean and what they mean to us." 7 If the res/niodus distinction is an imwhich does not belong to God, though the thing signified [RS'] is suitable to God in some eminent manner " (SOG l.30.277) ; the same sentiment is found in many other texts such as SS L35.LL ad2 and ST l.13.3. Thomas often explains the saying of Pseudo-Dionysius, that negations about God are true while affirmations are vague, by claiming that affirmations are true as regards their RS but not as regards their MS (SS l.22.l.2. adl; l.4.2.l. ad2; SOG l.30.277; DP 7.5 ad2; ST l.13.12. adl; SDO 6.161). a Hampus Lyttkens, however, thinks the distinction plays no essential role in Thomas's theory of the divine names (" Die Bedeutung der Gottesprltdikate bei Thomas von Aquin," N eue Zeitschrift fur systematisahe Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 6 [1964] 277-80). Klaus Muller claims the application of the res/modus distinction to the divine names " says really nothing at all" (Thomas van Aquins Theorie und Praxis der Analogie. Der Streit um das rechte Vorurteil und die Ana,lyse einer aufsohlussreichen Diskrepanz in der "Summa theologiae ", Regensburger Studien zur Theologie 29 [Frankfurt am Main/Bern/NY: Peter Lang, 1983] 100). 4 See Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon, HJ77) 78-80. s Jan Pinborg, Logik und Semantik im Mittelalter: liJin uberblick, Afterword by... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Taoism, Teaching, and Learning: A Nature-Based Approach to Education by John P. Miller, with Xiang Li and Tian RuanJing Dang (bio)Taoism, Teaching, and Learning: A Nature-Based Approach to Education. By John P. Miller, with Xiang Li and Tian Ruan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. Pp. 134, Paperback $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4875-4095-1.John Miller’s Taoism, Teaching, and Learning: A Nature-Based Approach to Education (hereafter Taoism, Teaching, and Learning) (...) develops a nature-based account of modern education grounded in Daoism (or Taoism), a school of thought often misunderstood in the West. Daoism has historically been categorized both as a religion (dao jiao 道教) and as a philosophy (dao jia zhe xue 道家哲學); in many cases the spiritual and mystical side of Daoism impresses itself on the reader at the expense of its scientific and philosophical side--as happened with the European missionaries who first exported Daoism to the West. Yet Daoism, especially in relation to pedagogy, cuts across this philosophical/mystical distinction. Happily, Miller and his students, Xiang Li and Tian Ruan, betray no such tendency to pigeon-hole Daoism into one or the other of these categories. The authors adopt a connected and holistic concept of Daoism, which they use to inform and justify their approach to modern education. As such, in the eight chapters of this book, we can see a natural and sensible connection between a holistic Daoism--spiritual, mystical and philosophical--and modern philosophical and educational theories, including Montessori’s cosmic education, Steiner Education, holistic education, and the pedagogical practices of meditation and mindfulness.Miller’s modus operandi is to apply Daoist concepts to contemporary (especially Western) educational issues, both theoretically and practically. In terms of the Daoist belief in the interconnectedness of all things, Miller questions modern subject divisions. When we divide education into geometry, mathematics and so on, we fragment the natural oneness of knowledge and reality as the Daoists would have it. Instead, Miller advocates faith in nature and looks to curricula that reflect the wholeness of nature, such as “cosmic education” and “holistic education” (Chapters 2 and 6). Through such education “we see the relationship between the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of life” (p. 27), and feel the support from the invisible and unproven world.Miller makes excellent use of the Daoist concepts of yin (陰) and yang [End Page 1] (陽), which signify the complementary balance and interplay between opposites. He uses the yinyang paradigm to explore the need for balance in a wide range of interesting and important pedagogical situations; for instance, group collaboration versus individual competition, knowledge versus imagination, intuition versus reason, qualitative versus quantitative, etc. (Chapter 5). He also implements yinyang to unpack the model of creative thinking laid down by Graham Wallace (pp. 66 -70); here, yin and yang are applied to a process within the individual. As we move from confusion to enlightenment, we enact within ourselves a dance between our yin and yang factors.Under the heading “Self-Cultivation” (Chapter 3), Miller attempts to evaluate a number of pedagogical strategies with broad ties to Daoism; namely, “silence,” “contemplation,” “calmness,” “sincerity,” “non-violence and embracing the feminine,” and “humility”. These are informed by Miller’s own personal experience of teaching and applying meditation at the University of Toronto. This provides a useful connection between the spiritual and philosophical dao 道, the mystical and the practical. More generally, these strategies recall Daoist wuwei 無爲 (non-coercive or spontaneous action) and ziran 自然 (spontaneity), which Miller subsequently applies to teaching and mindfulness in Chapter 4 (more on which below).Whereas Miller’s contribution is more theoretical, the two chapters written by his students showcase concrete examples of Daoist pedagogy in the classroom. Li’s chapter (Chapter 1) details a class of high school students learning from nature. Here we find a student club centered around a garden, where the students are allowed to wander in the direction of their interests, rather than imbibing the lessons of the teacher according to a top-down lesson plan. Ruan’s chapter (Chapter 7) looks to the various ways play can be utilized in kindergartens for children’s holistic development, including their social, intellectual, spiritual, physical... (shrink)

The present work is substantially a dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Toronto. While aware of the numerous imperfections of the work I have decided, on the urging of many colleagues, to publish it at this time because of the current relevance of the subject-matter and especially of the collection of texts. I am happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to the faculty of the Pontifical Mediaeval Institute of Toronto and especially (...) to the Reverend Ignatius Eschmann, O.P., who first suggested the idea of this study and whose encouragement and assistance brought it to completion. My thanks are due also to the Reverend George Klubertanz, S.J., and Mr. Paul Mathews, both of the Department of Philosophy of Saint Louis University, and" for invaluable secretarial assistance, to Mrs. Savina Tonella and Miss Agnes Kutz. R. J. HENLE, S.j. Saint Louis December, 1954 TABLE OF CONTENTS GENERAL INTRODUCTION... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:“First the Bow is Bent in Study …” Dominican Education before 1350 by M. Michèle MulchaheyJohn InglisM. Michèle Mulchahey. “First the Bow is Bent in Study …” Dominican Education before 1350. Studies and Texts, vol. 132. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998. Pp. xxi + 618. Cloth, $110.00.In his The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas, Leonard Boyle represents one of the more interesting (...) directions in the recent historiography of Latin medieval philosophy (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982). His claim is that if we are to understand Aquinas, we need to pay closer attention to the Dominican intellectual context. With a focus on the moral component of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Boyle establishes that Aquinas did not converse alone with Aristotle and Averroes in some philosophical ivory tower as historians often imply, but that he wrote and disputed in light of Dominican goals. This point helps to clarify the context of Aquinas’s texts—a type of historical context not found in the standard philosophical accounts. In the book under review, the first detailed history of Dominican medieval education, M. Michèle Mulchahey supplies a more extended treatment of this intellectual context.Commonly, intellectuals in the high middle ages are presented as spending their lives at universities studying philosophy, conducting disputations, and lecturing on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard. Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg present such a picture in their helpful contribution to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 11–42). Mulchahey argues that this sort of picture is rather simplistic when applied to the Dominican intellectual life. From the early years of the order, there was to be a “doctor” in each and every local Dominican house (132). One of Mulchahey’s more interesting conclusions is that the schools associated with these local houses were more advanced than has often been thought. For example, each house was to include lectures on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard and on Scripture, that is, on the very texts which historians commonly associate only with the universities (134–136). Furthermore, disputations were conducted frequently at local houses (134, 167) and by the middle of the thirteenth century, the works of Aristotle were often taught (220). Her point is that if we are to understand the intellectual world in which a Dominican like Aquinas spent his life, then we need to be clear about this context and not just about that of the universities.Even at the university, Dominicans studied and lectured at Dominican houses and not at institutions of the secular clergy. For instance, even when Aquinas was a Bachelor of the Sentences and a Master of the Sacred Page at the University of Paris, he lived and taught at the Dominican convent according to the distinct traditions and practices [End Page 361] of the order. Furthermore, select Dominican schools of higher learning, including those associated with universities, produced teachers for local Dominican communities. Mulchahey argues convincingly that the structures of Dominican education came to exist from the bottom up within a Dominican context and not as an extension of the statutes of the universities (351–378).This Dominican context helps to provide a response to an objection that John Jenkins raises to Boyle’s view of the audience of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae—an issue that has important implications for how to read this work. Boyle argued that the Summa arose out of the pastoral needs of ordinary Dominicans and reflects this institutional purpose. Jenkins “rejects” this claim, arguing that Aquinas’s text is so dense and conceptually difficult that it could only have been written for those who were prepared to study the Sentences of Peter the Lombard at the University of Paris. (See John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and faith in Thomas Aquinas [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 81, 89–90.) Mulchahey provides important support for Boyle’s view by establishing that it was the policy of the order to prepare ordinary Dominicans to study the Sentences of Peter the Lombard at the local houses. At a time when there were few universities, the Dominicans established hundreds of sites of higher education at... (shrink)

Desire Joseph Mercier (1851-1926) was founder and first president of the Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Leuven. After his studies in the classics, philosophy, and theology at the seminary of Mechelen, Mercier was ordained (1874), obtained a licentiate in theology at Leuven (1877), and became professor of philosophy at Mechelen the same year. In 1922 he was commissioned to inaugurate the chair of Thomistic philosophy created at the University of Leuven at the request of Pope Leo XIII. (...) Mercier endeavored to realize the program formulated in the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879): to restore the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, harmonize it with the progress of modern science and thought, and extend its influence to the scientific and social disciplines. On the basis of his initial success, he asked for, and received, the support of the Pope for the creation of an Institute of Philosophy that would provide a complete education in the various philosophical areas. When named president of this institute (1899), Mercier gathered collaborators from among his first students and with their assistance formed an international group of enthusiastic and devoted disciples. The Revue Neo-scolastique made the writings of the institute available throughout the scholarly world. On Feb. 7, 1906, Mercier was named archbishop of Mechelen. He took a lively interest in problems of the universal Church and he was also preoccupied with Church Union. (Cf. A.L. Wylleman, 'Mercier, Desire Joseph' in New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol IX. New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Sydney, McGraw Hill Book Company, 1967, p. 671-672.) See: Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir (David A. Boileau, Peeters, 1996, 417 pages. S 35). Jude P. Dougherty, Dean Emeritus of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America and editor of the Review of Metaphysics, had this to say about Fr. Boileau's book: This book should be required reading for anyone who aspires to leadership in Catholic Intellectual Circles Today, Crisis, January 1998. (shrink)

In this model critical edition, Professor John Magee of the University of Toronto has provided specialists in the philosophy of the Middle Ages with one of the classical texts of their period, Boethius’s De divisione. Surviving in over seventy manuscripts, and practically required reading both in monastic schools and universities, Boethius’s De divisione treats the modes of division commonly discussed in ancient philosophy: the per se divisions of genera into species, a whole into its parts, and a spoken sound (...) into its significates; the accidental divisions of a subject into its accidents; an accident into its subject, and accidents into other accidents. With its clear examples and carefully argued rationale for the manner of dividing and defining, the work remained a canonical text to the end of the Middle Ages when Aristotelian learning declined in importance. (shrink)

When Etienne Gilson died in 1978 at the age of 94 he was regarded as one of the twentieth century's most distinguished historians of medieval philosophy. It was his scholarship and his reputation as a great teacher that attracted hundreds of students to the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies which he founded in 1929 as part of St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto. A Gilson school emerged as students of the Institute carried his thought to many (...) parts of the globe. Gilson's intellectual biography is well known. A student of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, he found that he could only understand Descartes against the backdrop of medieval philosophy. Once enmeshed in medieval scholarship he found it hard to leave. He produced major studies of Augustine, Bonaventure, Scotus, Aquinas, and Dante. Though he remained always a historian of medieval philosophy, Gilson was eventually to adopt the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, making it the basis of his own. Being and Some Philosophers established Gilson as a metaphysician in his own right. It was said by a student that Gilson would do research on anything at the drop of a hat. Some of his most charming work was the seemingly philosophically irrelevant studies he made and published under titles such as Choir of Muses, Heloise and Abelard and Dante et Béatrice. The Gifford Lectures given at the University of Aberdeen in 1932 and published as The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy and the William James Lectures given at Harvard University in 1936-37 and published as The Unity of Philosophical Experience remain, perhaps, Gilson's best known and most frequently translated works. His Painting and Reality, the 1955 A. W. Mellon Lectures of the National Gallery of Art, is still a widely used volume. (shrink)

The past two decades of psychoanalytic discourse have witnessed a marked transformation in the way we think about women and gender. The assignment of gender carries with it a host of assumptions, yet without it we can feel lost in a void, unmoored from the world of rationality, stability and meaning. The feminist analytic thinkers whose work is collected here confront the meaning established by the assignment of gender and the uncertainty created by its absence. The contributions brought together in (...) _Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Gender-free Case_ address a cross-section of significant issues that have both chronicled and facilitated the changes in feminist psychoanalysis since the mid 1980s. Difficult issues which have previously been ignored are considered first. The book goes on to address family perspectives as they interact and shape the child’s experience of growing up male or female. Other topics covered are the authority of personal agency as influenced by the language and theory of patriarchy, male-centred concepts that consistently define women as inferior, and the concept of gender as being co-constructed within a relationship. The gender-free case presented here will fascinate all psychoanalysts interested in exploring ways of grappling with the elusive nature of gender, as well as those studying gender studies. (shrink)