This chapter contains sections titled: An Initial Response The Challenge Reconfigured Passivity Within Spontaneity Mood Mood, Salience and Shape Music Education Conclusion.

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

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:What's so Important about Music Education?Leonard TanJ. Scott Goble, What's so Important about Music Education? (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010)In What's so Important about Music Education, J. Scott Goble proposes a new philosophical foundation for music education in the United States based on the theory of semiotics by American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Following a brief summary, I will note several merits in Goble's (...) book before sketching four recommendations for future editions.In Chapter One, Goble notes how the inclusion of non-Western musics in the public schools as espoused in the 1967 Tanglewood Declaration has raised two crucial questions: "Whose music should be included in the curriculum?" and "What is the role or social importance of public school music education in the United States as a postmodern society?" Noting that music education was established in the United States during the modern era, and that the Tanglewood Declaration did not account for vast differences in beliefs about music, Goble argues that there is a need to establish a new philosophical foundation that can accommodate the varied beliefs and practices of diverse cultural groups in postmodern United States.In Chapter Two, Goble sketches and critiques five cultural anthropologists. Of the five, he singles out Clifford Geertz's conception of culture as "semiotic [End Page 201] webs" (p. 20) as the conceptual foundation that is appropriate for this study. He then links Geertz's notion of culture to the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce which is to become the theoretical underpinning of the book. Subsequently, he unpacks many key Peircian themes: human conceptions are maintained not individually but collectively in cultural groups, provisional truth (as opposed to absolute Truth) is relative and dependent on conceptions of communities, and the scientific method is the sole mode of inquiry by which people in communities may use to satisfy their doubts to formulate beliefs. Most importantly, Goble expounds the "pragmatic maxim" that since humans live in communities united by common beliefs, "the 'clear' meaning of an idea held by a member of the community will almost inevitably stem from the beliefs—or ways of understanding—held by members of that community" (p. 30). Goble concludes the chapter by presenting the Peircian semiotic system of cognition which posits that a "sign" is conceptualized in a triadic relationship: the Sign or "Firstness," the Object or "Secondness," and the Interpretant or "Thirdness" (p. 33).In Chapter Three, Goble considers how music is a sign based on the theoretical framework laid in Chapter Two. Drawing on the work of ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and a neuroscientist, he formulates a Peircian pragmatic approach to musical practices which posits that "the musical practices of different cultural communities represent a diverse cluster of community-specific ritualized behaviors involving sound" (p. 252). Furthermore, each of the musical practices "serves those persons who meaningfully participate in it as a means of psychophysiological, psychosocial, and/or sociopolitical equilibration relative to the worldview—or ordered conception of Reality—they tacitly share" (p. 252). For Goble, this pragmatist conception of musical practices is neither ethnocentric, universalist, nor relativist, and can serve as a conceptual framework for all diverse musical practices in postmodern United States.With the Peircian pragmatic conception in mind, Goble examines historical factors that contributed to current conceptions of music in the United States in Chapter Four. He laments that as a result of European Enlightenment and three socio-political phenomena in the United States (the separation of church and state, promotion of no other worldview than democracy, and adoption of democratic capitalism), music is no longer pragmatically oriented but trivialized and pursued by self-serving musicians.In Chapter Five, Goble traces the philosophical justifications for music education throughout the history of the United States. While the sign "musical practice" was conceptualized as "worship" in colonial America, the sign "music" was conceived as "art" during the age of Enlightenment, and as "product" during the age of science and technology. Noting that Bennett Reimer's music education as aesthetic education is limited in its Western focus on music as works [End Page 202] of artistic objects, Goble aligns his Peircian conception along praxial lines—in particular, with... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 11.2 (2003) 141-156 [Access article in PDF] Music Education as Critical PracticeA Naturalist View Lauri Väkevä University Of Oulu, Finland I This essay defends naturalism as a framework for philosophy of music education. I have three general reasons for supporting naturalism. First, by taking naturalism seriously we can keep our philosophies up-to-date with scientific inquiry. Second, naturalism can emancipate (...) us from transcendental pseudo-questions and instead help us to deal with the empirical problems of everyday life. Third, with naturalism, we can free ourselves from a priori theories of morals and aesthetics and thus view the active part that normative and aesthetic concerns play in human praxis. Even if I endorse naturalism, I do not subscribe to scientism. 1 Rather, I submit to a pragmatist view that stresses the role of philosophy (and science) in dealing with the questions of our life practices. Of the recent perspectives in the philosophy of music education my approach comes closest to the critical praxialism discussed in the MayDay group. 2All in all, I find a lot in common with the praxialist discussion (within or outside the MayDay group) and the kind of pragmatism that follows John Dewey's mature philosophy. 3 However, it seems to me that the naturalist bent of Deweyan pragmatism has not been thoroughly analyzed in our field. 4 One reason for this [End Page 141] might be the bad report that 'hard' or reductive naturalism has been given in connection with the experimental paradigm of music education research. 5 I want to argue that the critical potential of Deweyan pragmatism should not (and cannot) be separated from a naturalist approach. Taken together, critical and naturalist views can contribute to any philosophy, especially in fields that have a long tradition of leaning on otherworldly explanations.In what follows, I begin by outlining (in broad brushstrokes) the historical position of pragmatism and its status in present day philosophy. Next, I focus on the implications of Deweyan naturalist pragmatism and the possibility of maintaining a critical pragmatist attitude with naturalist presumptions in a pedagogical context. In the final part of the essay, I outline an interpretative framework for a critical pragmatism of music education that takes advantage of the naturalizing tendencies in contemporary philosophy without losing its grasp on the things that matter musically. II For a while, pragmatism had a bad name in academic philosophy. This was especially true after the linguistic turn in the first half of the last century. 6 By making the linguistic turn, many philosophers hoped to disassociate themselves from the speculative tradition(s) once and for all. Logical analysts also made it more difficult for philosophers to ignore the findings of scientists. Thus they paved the way for contemporary reductive naturalism that takes science as the measure of what can be known. 7However, analytic philosophers were not alone in their attempt to provide philosophy with scientific rigor. Classical pragmatists, too, had integrated a naturalist penchant in their output. Embracing naturalism with an open-ended experimental spirit, they wanted to focus on "the problems of men" as the chief subject matter of philosophy. 8 To many analytic philosophers, this seemed like a return to armchair speculation with an ingredient of sentimental ethics thrown in for good measure. Worse still, it looked as though the classical pragmatists were giving in to the spirit of the corporate West: speaking of the truth as "cash-value" surely seemed like a blasphemy to intellectuals who sought from formal logic and mathematics a purity of mind to clear up the messiness of everyday experience. 9Logical analysis also had its shortcomings. While many mainstream philosophers turned to logical analysis for clarity and certainty, at the same time they submitted to Cartesian-Kantian mind-body dualism with its problematic epistemology. Thus, they kept supporting the tensions between the rationalist and empiricist or analytic and synthetic domains of knowledge that haunted modernist neo-Kantian arguments.These distinctions turned out to be easy targets for postanalytic critics. 10 [End Page 142]Classical pragmatists anticipated this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy—Aesthetics—Education:Reflections on DanceTyson Lewis (bio)To create is to lighten, to unburden life, to invent new possibilities of life. The creator is legislator—dancer.—Gilles Deleuze, Pure ImmanenceThe Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is perhaps best known for his ongoing interest in the problem of "biopower." Taking up where Michel Foucault ended, Agamben argues that the principle political and philosophical questions of the moment concern the connections between life and power. (...) In this sense, he stands in diametric opposition to one of the leading French intellectuals of our times: Alain Badiou. For Badiou, the key question of the present is not so much power and the body as it is the ethics of truth. According to Agamben, Badiou's project has abandoned thinking about the biopolitics of life and as such is both philosophically and politically suspect. But does Agamben's critique prematurely dismiss Badiou? In other words, does his critique prevent us from recognizing the precise location of biopolitics in Badiou's work? It is my contention that we must read Badiou not against but from within a biopolitical framework in order to realize both the validity of Agamben's criticism and its limitations. In fact, it is through the critical lens of biopolitical theory that we can begin to see the unique links in Badiou's thinking between aesthetics, the body, and education. In conclusion, I argue that Agamben provides insights missed by Badiou's reduction of the animal body to the disavowed grounds for the grace and beauty of truth, while at the same time Badiou provides Agamben's own theory of biopolitics with a unique educative practice: the practice of dance.Here I would like to justify this philosophical inquiry for educational theorists. With the fate of art-based educational programs uncertain in the [End Page 53] face of standardization, it is perhaps time to reassess legitimating claims for retaining arts education programs. By reading Badiou through Agamben, I hope to provide a new reason for advocating the centrality of dance in educational programs and assert the inherently educative qualities of movement-based curricula. Second, I hope to suggest in my conclusion that dance is an important form of educational practice antithetical to current forms of capitalist "bioproduction." As such, I will link together my own theory of dance education with the critical pedagogical tradition in order to anchor the "utopian imagination" in a practice of the body. This is an attempt to fill in a rather vague sphere of critical pedagogical research and theory: aesthetic practice. Overall, this article will bring together two important philosophical traditions—Agamben's biopolitical theory and Badiou's theory of truth—in order to examine their relation to education and, in turn, how education is a central concept for thinking through contemporary continental philosophical traditions.Biopower and Event: Situating the Subject in Relation to TruthMichel Foucault first coined the theoretical concept "biopower" in his work on the history of sexuality.1 In order to understand Foucault's meaning we must first separate biopower from sovereign power, which is characterized by the "right to decide life and death."2 The sovereign—which for Foucault is not simply a form of territorial rule but is a principle of power relations—decides who lives and who dies. Power here is the power of the sword that marks the body directly through overt forms of public torture and violence. But in the classical age and with the rise of capitalist social relations, the form and function of power switched. Famously, Foucault wrote that the highest function of power "was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through."3 This new form of power—whose concern was no longer death but the maintenance and regulation of life—operates on two interconnected levels. First, biopower conceives of the body as a machine, which must be disciplined in order to be made more efficient. Here, power acts as microphysics, training the individual body in order to reach a high level of social efficiency. Second, on the macro level, biopower transforms the populous into a population that has to be carefully regulated in terms of propagation rates, health levels... (shrink)

The quality of education is currently considered to be a concern of the highest political priority. However, quality assurances of all kinds seem to be built on and result in a number of quantitative measures. In this essay, I discuss the traditional and philosophical meaning of the concept of quality and how it is being used today, but above all how our current understanding of "quality" may influence pluralism and diversity in education and music education. The worrying (...) trends discussed in this essay are too complex to be solved with quick efforts by philosophers, researchers, and/or teachers. Nevertheless, I illuminate some aspects of the issue which are in need of further discussion and analysis in relation to the field of music. I also indicate a number of philosophical concepts that can contribute to creating awareness of as well as evoke some resistance to this trend. (shrink)

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

The outcomes of educational assessments undoubtedly have real implications for students, teachers, schools and education in the widest sense. Assessment results are, for example, used to award qualifications that determine future educational or vocational pathways of students. The results obtained by students in assessments are also used to gauge individual teacher quality, to hold schools to account for the standards achieved by their students, and to compare international education systems. Given the current high-stakes nature of educational assessment, (...) it is imperative that the measurement practices involved have stable philosophical foundations. However, this article casts doubt on the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary educational measurement models. Aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and Bohr’s philosophy of quantum theory are used to argue that a quantum theoretical rather than a Newtonian model is appropriate for educational measurement, and the associated implications for the concept of validity are elucidated. Whilst it is acknowledged that the transition to a quantum theoretical framework would not lead to the demise of educational assessment, it is argued that, where practical, current high-stakes assessments should be reformed to become as ‘low-stakes’ as possible. This article also undermines some of the pro high-stakes testing rhetoric that has a tendency to afflict education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Music Education for Social Change–Constructing an Activist Music Education by Juliet HessMartin BergerJuliet Hess, Music Education for Social Change–Constructing an Activist Music Education (New York, Routledge, 2019)Juliet Hess’s book is written with great passion and composed for a very good reason. It is published in troubling times when music educators are looking for new perspectives on old problems and in search of a (...) revived relevance for the subject. Although music educators appear to be better qualified for their jobs than ever before, there is still an underlying concern that we have lost the positive political influence on society we might have had in the past, that our contributions to enhancing tolerance and social justice are at stake again, and that our voices are not being heard. Or, in other words, that we lack relevance if we do not act.Juliet Hess raises her voice, reclaiming this relevance at a time when “[h]ate continually manifests in both new and familiar ways” and “the presence of oppression is consistent across time.”1 According to her, rising-up against oppressive ideologies, injustices, and material violence is imperative and urgent. Hess calls on finding ways for music education to contribute to resistance and hails concepts that allow educators to devise a distinctly anti-oppressive pedagogy. Her purpose is to offer a framework for what she calls an “activist music education,” a pedagogy that “aims to address the sexism, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, classism, ableism, anti-immigrant [End Page 207] sentiments, and other oppressions so prevalent in our society.”2 Inspired by the impact of their musicking, Hess conducts interviews with twenty activist musicians, exploring common themes, perceptions, values, philosophies, and ideas. All individuals interviewed are involved in social change movements across the United States and Canada. Hess positions them as “catalysts for change in music education,”3 providing “a means to conceptualize activist music education for school music.”4 Activism and music, says Hess, are “enmeshed and inextricably connected,”5 since both intrinsically involve exploring historical, political, social, and cultural contexts.Inspired by the relevance of activist music to a society, Hess is in search of a similar meaning for music education. As a result, she sketches a possible K-12 curriculum with three essential goals: fostering connection with Others, honoring and sharing lived experience, and enabling critical reflection on the world.6 In search of a conceptualization for her idea, Hess draws mainly on Freirian and critical pedagogy as a theoretical framework, placing lived experience at the center of education, and with conscientization and praxis being her key terms.7 According to Hess, praxis, defined as “the integration of thoughtful reflection and action,”8 is fundamental to any kind of transformation, while conscientization refers to processes through which learners “become aware and reflect upon the conditions that shape their lives.”9 Although Hess acknowledges the valuable scholarly contribution to critical pedagogy in the past, she remains careful in its application, urging music educators to “avert any dogmatic implementation.”10 As a result, she suggests a “tri-faceted pedagogy for future activism,”11 which is connective, communicative, and critical: “a pedagogy of community, based on activist musicians’ emphasis on connectivity, a pedagogy of expression rooted in honoring lived experiences and sharing them through music, and a pedagogy of noticing that emerges from activist-musicians’ work on critical thinking.”12 This combination will, according to her, set “the conditions for future activism among youth and offers a possible practical enactment of critical pedagogy for music education.”13 A valuable and most inspiring read!Although I strongly agree with the intention of this book, I do have some questions. The dream of a classroom that exercises social criticism both through thinking about music and through musicking itself has always been an aspiration. Scholars have regularly encouraged music educators to be public intellectuals and agents of change, ideally striving for social justice (or at the very least for social awareness), and preparing learners to be global citizens, able to think critically and ready to engage with the world.14 It is widely agreed that “music education deserves to be seen as a serious form of cultural... (shrink)

Resumen En el presente artículo reflexiono sobre cómo el concepto de “obra” ha llegado a ocupar un lugar determinante en el pensamiento sobre el arte y en el modo de experimentarlo y comprenderlo. Presento igualmente algunos elementos de reflexión sobre la ontología de la “obra” para centrarme en el caso de las obras musicales, “mutantes ontológicos”, que han sido objeto de atención preferente de la filosofía analítica. Esta reflexión, sin embargo, al poner en primer término las consideraciones ontológicas relativas las (...) condiciones de identidad de la obra han acabado desarrollando tesis que renuncian a los componentes estéticos y atentan contra nuestras convicciones y prácticas más asentadas. Por ello, finalmente apelo a la conveniencia de privilegiar un enfoque histórico para comprender que hay más música que obras musicales.In this article I reflect on how the concept of "work" has come to occupy a determining place in our thinking about art and in the way we experience and understand it. I also present some elements of reflection on the ontology of the "work" in order to focus on the case of musical works, "ontological mutants", that have been the object of preferential attention of analytical philosophy. This reflection, however, by putting in the foreground the ontological considerations concerning the conditions of identity of the work, has ended up developing theses that forget the aesthetic components and go against our most established convictions and practices. For this reason, I finally appeal to the convenience of privileging a historical approach in order to understand that there is more to music than musical works. (shrink)

This brief paper aims to underline which are the philosophical limits of mereotopology, when one takes it as a basic unitary theoretical framework for formal ontology. Mereotopology is a first-order theory of the relations among wholes, parts and the boundaries between parts, that combines mereological and topological concepts. Nowadays, with the expression “formal ontology” one intends either the computational (engineering) version, or the philosophical (categorial) one. It is important, then, to avoid terminological confusions. The main philosophical reason that keeps (...) me from developing the connection between computational and philosophical formal ontologies on mereotopological basis is the following: anti-Representationalism and Monism are two ontological stances very difficult to join together, as mereotopology does, if one takes into account the ontological implications of the emerging dynamical dual paradigm in the information theoretic approach to quantum physics. In general, it is this approach to the current fundamental and experimentally extremely successful physical theories about the microphysical realm, namely Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory, that allows to overcome the “gap” between the two disciplinary fields of formal ontology, making information a physical magnitude. I do not oppose anti-Representationalism, but its connection with the monistic stance, because of the fact that nowadays information appears as a basic component of the microphysical realm just like energy-matter. This fact justifies a realistic but information-matter dual ontology as the proper formal ontology of the emerging paradigm in the information theoretic approach to contemporary quantum physics. The primacy that Aristotle gives to the theory of principle (act/potency) as to the theory of categories is a very helpful tool to solve the main question that arises within a realistic dual ontological theoretical framework: the question of the non-stable nature of the categories, that reflect the increasingly complexity of the physical dynamic realistic orders. Here is the importance of an historical approach to the topic, given also the fact that mereological formal ontology originates with the works of three authors (Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl) that studied, directly or indirectly, Aristotle’s ontology. (shrink)

The intention of Atomic Order is to encourage and contribute to the dialogue between philosophers and scientists by discussing a concrete example of scientific discovery according to a method acceptable and understandable to both sides. This discussion takes simultaneously into account the scientific and philosophical methodologies and mentalities. By regarding "pure" science or "pure" philosophy as limiting cases, it becomes evident that basic questions are best posed and answered by emphasiz ing the deeply embedded complementary relationship between the two. (...) The example chosen is atomic physics, and a systematic method is developed to illuminate the philosophical structure of this science--and science generally--from within.The book consists of two parts. The first part is devoted to the problem of atomic order as discovered and verified by physics, from the speculations of Dalton to the consequences of modern quantum mechanics. These chapters will afford a telescopic, historical review to the scientific reader and a reliable, understandable account of the physical discoveries and theories to the nonscientist. The second part analyzes the presuppositions, guiding principles, and implications that made possible the development of atomic physics and that impart a humanistic meaning to it. In separate chapters are discussed the epistemological structure of atomic physics, the new conception of matter implicit in the quantum theory, and the ontological implications of atomic order. It is seen that, in this area, science and philosophy are inextricably interpenetrated. A philosophic problematic is immanent in creative atomic science, as is evidenced by the numerous reflections and speculations of scientists that are quoted in the book. Conversely, an interest in scientific research is indispensable for a modern philosopher, and the philosopher may well be surprised and encouraged on recognizing the role already being played by philosophy in the supposedly pragmatic world of science.Dr. Cantore brings an ecumenical cast Lof mind to the healing of the bjcultural split between the humanists and the scientists. The recipient of a doctorate in physics and another in philosophy, he has drawn from both fields in a book dedicated to "making the educated public more aware of the need and method for a new synthesis between the two cultures.". (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

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

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward Mindful Music Education:A Response To Bennett ReimerSandra L. StaufferIn her book Composing a Life, Mary Catherine Bateson reminds us to acknowledge our antecedents—those who have gone before in whatever way or whatever path.1 I believe we should also acknowledge our co-conspirators—those who have listened to us and wrestled with our ideas. Following Bateson, I wish to recognize the contributions of my teachers and my colleagues, particularly the (...) members of the doctoral seminar at Arizona State University. I am grateful for your contributions to the life of my mind and the words of this morning. For the record, I also want to say that Bennett Reimer is both antecedent and co-conspirator for everyone in this room, and we are indebted to him."The first task of philosophy involves learning to ask a good question," says Walter Feinberg in his essay on the philosophical scholar.2 Reimer asks us, "Who is philosophy of music education for?"—a provocative question indeed. He also gives us an answer: K-12 students.I agree, but not really. How can that be? Imagine this. A music teacher I know, Stephanie, was engaged with some first-grade children in singing songs and moving and reading rhythms. She turned to write on the white board. When she turned back to the children, one boy, Alex, was standing, perfectly still, on his head. What happened next? I will tell you in few minutes. Reimer says, "Philosophical issues are not disconnected to or incidental to musical experience. [End Page 135] They are foundational for musical experience, because one's values, beliefs, desires, preferences, and so forth, directly affect how one engages with music and what one gets from doing it." Abridging those two sentences at my own peril, Reimer appears to be saying that philosophical issues are foundational to musical experience.That idea works for me only if I am standing, figuratively and metaphorically, not literally, on my head. It seems to me that experience is the foundation of philosophy or, put another way, that one's philosophy derives from one's experiences; the richer the experiences, the richer the philosophy. A philosophy based on limited or weak experience is a limited or weak philosophy. This, however, is only surface-level logic for a deeper epistemological question—where does one's philosophy come from? If I take the Deweyan perspective that philosophy derives from experience, then surely I am obligated, in this forum, to define my terms—particularly "experience." It would be easy to say that experience means making music and listening to music, and surely it does. By experience, however, I mean not only these actions—the doing of music—but also thinking, or what Ellen Langer calls mindfulness.3 Langer describes mindful learning as having three characteristics: "the continuous creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective."4 I like how Robert Duke articulates the same idea: "Teach things that are intellectually interesting and functionally valuable."5 Engage students not just in doing, but also in thinking—in mindful learning. Rich experience makes for rich philosophy. If we are talking about music education at all levels that is not only participatory, but also mindful, then I am all for it.Reimer asks a second question: how are we to accomplish the teaching of philosophy to K-12 students? I want to know what we are trying to accomplish. Are we trying to teach the content of philosophy or are we trying to help students develop their own abilities to think about their experiences as musicians, whether as listeners or as music makers, in whatever contexts they find themselves? The former seems to be a reification of philosophy in which I am not eager to engage most K-12 students. I hope we are aiming for the latter. If so, then our task is to provide rich and mindful experiences in every music setting. Our task is to model the disposition of a philosopher—one who asks questions, is curious, and is engaged in the life of the mind.This seems so obvious. Why aren't we doing it already? There... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Valerie Trollinger, “A Reconception of Performance Study in the Philosophy of Music Education”Paul LouthAs an educator who is a former professional trombonist I can certainly appreciate the issues raised in this discussion. Because I am inclined to agree with the spirit (if not always the substance) of Trollinger's remarks, I would like to respond with some thoughts on the manner in which she tends (...) to frame this debate, because I believe that this has crucial implications and may explain the cause of some of the very problems she mentions.Charlene Morton writes that a "bias for procedural knowledge... unwittingly immerses school music in the polemic arising from the false hierarchical dichotomy between 'hard' and 'soft' forms of knowledge."1 By this she means that the Cartesian mind/body split, which has led to our conception of thinking and doing as exclusive matters, is not remedied by our discovery of the importance of purely procedural knowledge, because we merely reinforce this dichotomy through acknowledging the latter term as a separate category from theoretical knowledge. Trollinger is correct in asserting that the act of performance is often overlooked and is not treated as a serious concern in music education and I believe that this may be largely due to this dichotomy, which manifests itself in the way that we divorce performance from its original holistic context.In general, if we accept this argument, then debates about performance versus listening, theorizing, and so on are inherently problematic because the discourse itself reinforces an artificial dichotomy. If we fail to address the remnants of this "Cartesian anxiety," then in our attempts to address a lack of concern over performance, we may be left with a performance model that is purely utilitarian, in the sense that the body can only justifiably occupy a central place in the curriculum if there are direct, utilitarian outcomes that we can associate with it and so long as those outcomes are supported by the free market. In North America, progressive educators have been struggling for some time against the concept of school as a locus of training for the market place. This model becomes more difficult to resist, I would argue, as long as we continue to compartmentalize performance and other aspects of musicianship. Such practices reinforce an artificial distinction between procedural and theoretical forms of knowing (and, by extension, between mental and manual forms of labor) that Apple, Giroux, and other critical pedagogues would argue atomizes student knowledge in preparation for the marketplace; yet musicianship can serve many other valuable purposes.2 [End Page 231]Trollinger, in using the word "holistic," reminds us of the connection between body and mind that exists in performance. Further, she correctly states that until relatively recently, those who taught music were musicians. I would add that in Canada (where I teach), the idea that music should be taught by musicians has often been used to justify its exclusion from schools, which is indicative of our tendency to exclude those things that we deem corporeal from the life of the mind. In my home province of Ontario, recent emphasis on "the basics" has meant that music programs have vanished in great numbers, while music study is relegated to the conservatories which, with their widespread tendency to essentialize musical experience as performance in the most limited sense of the word, have contributed further to this dichotomy.My point is that all of us, including Trollinger, may wish to reconsider the nomenclature that we carry into this debate from the outset. Because the word "performance" has become strongly associated with this particular pole (it is no accident that we use this word to describe car engines and stock returns) I suggest we can best elevate our estimation of the term by replacing it with the word "musicianship." In this way we can repair some of the damage done by the Cartesian split and the consequent de-valuing of performance that has occurred through separation from its original context. Within such an integrated model, it would become problematic to debate the relative importance of performing, listening, theorizing, or any number of activities with regard to the overall goals of musicianship... (shrink)

Controlling defects in educational policies established by the state is a formidable challenge. The state invariably believes that the solution lies in developing and improving educational outcomes. However, evaluating and monitoring these outcomes is not a straightforward process that unfolds over a year or two; it requires a span of 14–16 years, encompassing two years of preschool, 12 years of basic and secondary education, and four years of university education. Despite this extensive period, the discovery of “the quality (...) of educational policies” and subsequently “the quality of education” often proves elusive, amounting to mere rhetoric without tangible impact. In the realm of educational philosophy, drawing upon Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment principles from December 1784 emerges as both necessary and urgent. This approach could guide us back to the foundational infrastructure and core principles of learning design, where reason and critical thought commence a critique of current educational policies in any context. With greater freedom, this enables the innovation of new concepts. Traditional education policies rendered obsolete across generations, bear striking resemblance to the religious institutions that Kant, along with scholars before him during the Dark Ages, found constraining. The critique of existing educational frameworks and the advocacy for freedom and autonomy in learning draw on the foundational work of Heckman, James and Carneiro, Pedro, (2003), who delve into human capital policy, suggesting that education systems need to be more responsive to individual needs and potential (Heckman & Carneiro, 2003). The paramount question arises: Have traditional education policies succeeded in making students subservient to their systems, structures, and models, burdened with theories of educational reform and development? It is evident that from early childhood through the stages of basic and secondary education, students are deprived of the choice in systems, structures, and curricula that suit them best. This limitation extends to university education, which is contingent upon high school grades and reliant on inadequately designed, intimidating examinations. Furthermore, it is ineffectively tethered to public policies, socio-economic conditions, and linguistic competencies (as determined by TOEFL, IELTS, etc.), or international assessments (e.g., PISA). The focus on the individual — his or her abilities, skills, aspirations, hobbies, and concerns — remains conspicuously absent from the calculus of all educational policy considerations. This research endeavors to revisit foundational questions: Why do societies necessitate education initially, followed by policies governing it? It then delves deeper into examining the relationships between educational policies and the future job market, which remains ambiguous and unknown. Keywords : Enlightenment, Educational Policies, Kantian Philosophy, Critical Thinking, Human Capital, Strategic Insight, Artificial Intelligence, Educational Reform, Lifelong Learning, Global Citizenship, Technological Revolution, Equity in Education, Educational Philosophy, Intellectual Freedom, Skill Development, Inclusive Education. (shrink)

Current conceptions of the integration of computers into society often depend on the view that the human mind, as well as the computer, is a computational system. This view is widely taken to have broad implications for educational policy. We present a critique of the premise and some of the conclusions of the above argument. It is here shown that the thesis that the human mind is a computational system is, in principle, not scientifically supportable. It is also shown (...) that, even if the computational theory of mind were held for non-scientific reasons, the educational implications often derived from it do not follow. (shrink)

With the creation of the European Higher Education Area, universities are undergoing a significant transformation that is leading towards a new teaching and learning paradigm. The competencies approach has a key role in this process. But we believe that the competence approach has a number of limitations and weaknesses that can be overcome and supplanted by the capabilities approach. In this article our objective is twofold: first, make a critical analysis of the concept of competence as it is being (...) used in higher education, identifying its limitations and weaknesses; and second, present the potential of the capabilities approach for higher education and review its complementarity to the competence approach.We begin with a brief characterisation of the capabilities approach and its implications for education. Then we examine some implications of the competencies approach in higher education and the reasons that led us to choose the DeSeCo proposal for comparison with the capability approach. We then go on to compare the two approaches, addressing 1) the aims of education and 2) the concept of competence and capability. Finally, we address the implications of incorporating the capabilities approach in learning and teaching in higher education. (shrink)

Over the past decade or so within this journal, there have been critical debates concerning the role of mindfulness within education, the influence of neoliberalism on education in general and well-being interventions specifically, and the relevance of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger for critiquing modernity including the nature and purpose afforded education. In this article, we propose that these debates are sufficiently interrelated to develop a more unified argument. We will show how a Heideggerian perspective is (...) conceptually rich, in both its heritage, as it draws upon both East-Asian wisdom and western thinking, and its engagement, as it confronts the implications of what Heidegger called a ‘technical-era’, for offering such a unified critique. The focus of this critique is on instrumental forms of mindfulness (mindfulness ‘in’ education), which when framed by neoliberalism has rather narrow goals concerning individual well-being and performance. In contrast, more critical and integral forms of mindfulness (mindfulness ‘as’ education) offer the potential for more holistic and authentic learning. Throughout the article, we discuss how Heideggerian philosophy offers a number of useful concepts (e.g., enframing, Dasein, authenticity, meditative thinking), which are able to both critique the instrumentalisation of approaches like mindfulness by neoliberalism and speak to more holistic education oriented toward more authentic being in the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 1-3 [Access article in PDF] Symposium:Aesthetic Education in Japan TodayThe purpose of this symposium is to provide readers with a general understanding of Japanese art and aesthetics education and its interaction with other cultures. The essays cover a variety of topics, including historical, cross-cultural, theoretical, and practical perspectives.First, the development and establishment of art education in the Japanese (...) education system is introduced. Kingo Masuda's essay provides a brief history of art education policy and how a formal system of art education has been organized from the modern era to the present. Takuya Kaneda examines the foundation for the historical evolution of the major reform movements in Japanese art education. He focuses on the philosophies of three pioneers who guided the movements and sheds light on to the role that "freedom" has played in the context of aesthetic education. Their historical studies show how the modern Japanese educational system incorporated the Western notion of art education into its foundation. Western art educators have given Japanese art educators the impetus to modernize the theory and practice of art education.The attempt to go beyond the modern framework of arts and aesthetic education is discussed in some authors' essays. Yoko Hino examines a key educational term, "Creative Play (Zokei Asobi)," and points out the dilemma educators face working within the modern framework that divides subject matter completely from individuality. Yasuaki Okamoto, in his philosophical essay, discusses the change in the nature of self-understanding in theage of media expansion. His point is that our sense of reality is no longer confined to physical existence, and that media provides us with a new kind of experience of self and reality. Kinichi Fukumoto illustrates the essential structure of art education with the metaphor of Disneyland, and emphasizes art education as an incomplete, further evolving project. Motoki Nagamori discusses Rousseau's concept of nature as a foundation for modern theory and practice of art education and suggests an alternative concept that incorporates cultural, linguistic, and media aspects. Based on a historical study on evaluation methods, Kazumi Yamada suggests that qualitative factors should play a significant role for improving art education.Some authors emphasize the current concern for integrating art with other disciplines in order to alter our understanding about aesthetic education. [End Page 1] Advocating for the integration of art and media literacy based on the educational principles of the Bauhaus, Kenta Motomura explores the possibility of media technology for a new type of expression. Kazuhiro Ishizaki and Wenchun Wang describe their cross-cultural study on children's aesthetic development to stress the importance of the communal, cultural, and linguistic considerations of integrated study, historically overlooked in traditional aesthetic education. Focusing on blending music and visual arts, Masashi Okada introduces his theory and practice of integrated study developed over many years.In addition, globalization and its effect on art education has become an important topic. Engaging in a cross-cultural dialogue is a critical part of this issue. Akio Okazaki discusses what Arthur Wesley Dow, an Americanart educator, recognized and learned by encountering the otherness of Japanese art. Yoshimasa Kaneko's study shows how Japanese aesthetics and Johannes Itten (the founder of Ittenschule in Germany) had a significant philosophical influence on each other. Toshio Naoe's comparativestudy between Japanese and British educational systems highlights somecrucial differences and similarities and points out overarching themes across the two countries. Mitsuru Fujie compares and contrasts the different educational meanings of "play" between Japan and the United States, and articulates the nature of play in the context of Japanese art education. Masako Iwano's study describes a case of cross-cultural aesthetic education in a small Japanese community and how this cultural interaction through art impacts that community.The perspectives of all of these authors are decidedly international. They are not only committed to, and engaged directly in, the current practice of Japanese education but have developed an international viewpoint through experiences overseas. Some have conducted research at educational institutions in other countries, and others have participated in the activities of international professional... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Problems with a Weakly Pluralist Approach to Democratic EducationSheron Fraser-BurgessIntroductionPluralism embodies wide acknowledgement of various forms of difference. Appeals to pluralism involve arguments for the proliferating of differences as a social and moral ideal. Rather than being a formal political regime such as with democracy or social liberalism, in the extant political philosophy literature, pluralism brings considerations of diversity and equality to bear in philosophical analysis of traditional (...) systems of government.As a critique, pluralism falls along a continuum, which can be conceived of as iterations of the standing of particular ways of life, with respect to constraints of both equality and justice. At one end of the spectrum, all conceptions of the human good share a prima facie equality that belie overarching moral norms as a criterion of ranking. Questions about the incumbency of individual liberty motivate movement toward the opposing end, as allowing for the most just society warrants giving precedence to such values. The source of pluralism’s critical role is its inherent demand of a cogent resolution of the moral and, at times, political tension between equality and freedom.This article considers two forms of pluralism that lie near opposing extremes of the continuum and their implication for education. According to Horace Kallen’s and John Gray’s strong pluralism, the claim to the fact of differing values, cultures, etc., has primacy. As a corollary, maintaining the integrity of the social groups as holders of those values becomes central. In conflict with liberal democratic principles, however, protecting group values may occur at the expense of individual detractors within the group or may pose a threat of harm to others outside of the group who do not share these values.On the other hand, one form of weak pluralism, Amy Gutmann’s deliberative democracy, constrains pluralism on political grounds of individual [End Page 1] freedom. Deliberative democracy subsumes the holding of all values, including those shared with a social group, to the requirements of democracy. Both theories are considered as attempts to reconcile principles of treating everyone equally with not unjustly limiting individual freedom in a democracy. I raise principled and practical issues from education that call into question whether each theory satisfactorily resolves the conflicting demands of both equality and liberty. A third alternative is proposed as a salient consideration for democratic education. I begin with the pluralism of Horace Kallen and its relationship to that of John Gray.Strong PluralismHorace Kallen’s Cultural PluralismIn this section, I discuss Horace Kallen’s seminal account of cultural pluralism from the early twentieth century, classifying it with the strong value pluralism articulated by John Gray. Gray’s and Kallen’s pluralism have in common both the sanctioning of the fullest expression of difference and difficulties with making sense of the intuitive pull toward a criterion for the ranking of values that democracy dictates. I then consider the educational implications of Kallen’s view, particularly with respect to its actual influence upon multi-cultural initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s.Kallen coined the term “cultural pluralism” in the early twentieth century (Kallen 73). At this time, America was experiencing a great deal of social upheaval because of the huge influx of European and Asian immigrants. Movements such as nativism and Americanization fueled xenophobic sentiment. In this milieu, the full acculturation of new immigrants became a priority. In education, schooling policies penalized immigrant expressions of cultural identity, such as speaking one’s native language and practicing cultural traditions (Kallen 4).Kallen was one of the voices advocating not only that new immigrants should be allowed to maintain their cultural identity but also that a formal political solution be initiated which accommodated the predilection to do so. Nathan Glazer explains that there was at that time a general blindness to the possibility that “these groups or elements within them would not want to acculturate and assimilate but would want to preserve their corporate characters and distinctiveness even if prejudice and discrimination disappeared.” According to Glazer, such was the doctrine of assimilation for the first forty years of the twentieth century (7). [End Page 2]Kallen’s pluralism is a departure from the prevailing view in... (shrink)

This paper considers questions of continuity and change in education from the perspective of complexity theory, introducing the field to educationists who might not be familiar with it. Given a significant degree of complexity in a particular environment , new properties and behaviours, which are not necessarily contained in the essence of the constituent elements or able to be predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions, will emerge. These concepts of emergent phenomena from a critical mass, associated with notions (...) of lock‐in, path dependence, and inertial momentum, suggest that it is in the dynamic interactions and adaptive orientation of a system that new phenomena, new properties and behaviours, emerge. The focus thus shifts from a concern with decontextualised and universalised essence to contextualised and contingent complex wholes. This is where complexity theory seeks the levers of history. The paper posits the notion of inertial momentum as the conceptual link between the principle of emergent phenomena as developed principally in the natural sciences and the notion of socio‐historical change in human society. It is argued that educational and institutional change is less a consequence of effecting change in one particular factor or variable, and more a case of generating momentum in a new direction by attention to as many factors as possible. Complexity theory suggests, in other words, that what it might take to change a school's inertial momentum from an ethos of failure is massive and sustained intervention at every possible level until the phenomenon of learning excellence emerges from this new set of interactions among these new factors, and sustains itself autocatalytically. The paper concludes with a summary consideration of the conditions that contribute to the emergence of new properties and behaviours in a system. (shrink)

Explores the concept of historical intermittency in 5 recent French philosophers. Andrew Gibson engages with five recent and contemporary French philosophers, Badiou, Jambet, Lardreau, Francoise Proust and Ranciere, who each produce a post-Hegelian philosophy of history founded on an assertion of the intermittency of historical value. Gibson explores this `anti-schematics of historical reason' and its implication for politics, ethics and aesthetics in a wide range of modern intellectual contexts, finding its necessary complement and most powerful expression in a (...) wealth of modern art, chiefly modern literature. The result is a sustained reflection on the possible character of a contemporary philosophy of history and an important contribution to our knowledge of contemporary French philosophy. (shrink)

1. EXPLICATING THE CONCEPT OF REFLECTION (under review) -/- To understand how ‘reflection’ is used, I consider ordinary, philosophical, and scientific discourse. I find that ‘reflection’ seems to refer to reasoning that is deliberate and conscious, but not necessarily self-conscious. Then I offer an empirical explication of reflection’s conscious and deliberate features. These explications not only help explain how reflection can be detected; they also distinguish reflection from nearby concepts such as ruminative and reformative reasoning. After this, I find that (...) reflection is not obviously limited to only practical or only theoretical reasoning. The chapter ends with reasons to prefer ‘unreflective’ and ‘reflective’ to dual process theorists’ labels about systems or types. -/- 2. BOUNDED REFLECTIVISM & EPISTEMIC IDENTITY (in Metaphilosophy) -/- Reflection features centrally in philosophy (e.g., Korsgaard, 1996; Rawls, 1971; Sosa, 1991) and psychology (e.g., Pennycook, 2018). Bounded reflectivism is an empirically adequate model of reflection that explains reflection’s capacity to either help or hinder reasoning—e.g., reflective equilibrium vs. reflective polarization (e.g., Kahan et al., 2017). One innovation of the model is epistemic identity: an identity that involves particular beliefs—e.g., religious and political identities. When we feel that our epistemic identity is threatened, we can reflectively defend its beliefs rather than update our beliefs according to the best arguments and evidence. The solution, I argue, is not to suppress epistemic identity but embrace it by appealing to shared, superordinate epistemic identities. -/- 3. ALL MEASURES ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL (under review) -/- A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? “10 cents” comes to most people’s minds immediately. However, upon reflection, we can realize that “5 cents” is the correct answer. There are many reflection tests. Each has its limitations. Some reflection tests are mathematical—like the bat-and-ball problem (e.g., Frederick, 2005) and others are logical (e.g., Janis & Frick, 1943). So there are concerns that reflection tests track logical and mathematical competence rather than reflection per se. Also, some psychologists assume a priori that correct answers are reflective and lured answers are unreflective. New evidence raises additional concerns about the plausibility of these assumptions. I argue that think aloud protocols (Ericsson & Simon, 1998) and process dissociation (Jacoby, 1991) can assuage some of these concerns. -/- 4. GREAT MINDS DO NOT THINK ALIKE (in Review of Philosophy and Psychology) -/- Two large studies (N = 1299), one pre-registered, found that many correlations between reflection and philosophical beliefs among non-philosophers replicated among philosophers. For example, less reflective philosophers preferred theism to atheism and utilitarian rather than deontological responses to the trolley problem (Hannikainen & Cova, in prep.; Pennycook et al., 2016; Reynolds, Byrd, & Conway, forthcoming). However, philosophical judgments were sometimes better predicted by factors like education, gender, and personality than by reflection test performance. So although some relationships between reflection and philosophy were robust, there is more to the link between reflection and philosophy. Normative implications are also discussed—e.g., how we can infer the quality of philosophical views from their correlations with reflective or unreflective reasoning. -/- 5. WHAT WE CAN (AND CAN’T) INFER ABOUT IMPLICIT BIAS (in Synthese) -/- Contrary to some philosophers and psychologists, I argue that implicit bias is probably associative. However, I also argue that debiasing is not thereby entirely unconscious and involuntary. Indeed, strong evidence suggests that reflection can change implicitly biased behavior—e.g., conscious and deliberate counterconditioning. This has implications for the science and morality of implicit bias—e.g., evidence suggests that we can reform biases; so. intuitively, we can be responsible for biases. (shrink)

Philosophy seems to have gained solid ground in the hearts and minds of educational researchers and practitioners. We critique Philosophy for Children as an experimental programme aimed at improving children’s thinking capacity, by questioning the concept of critique itself. What does it mean when an institutional framework like the school claims to question its own framework, and what is the consequence of such a claim for thinking, in education, philosophy and the child? Implications for the (...) concept of critical thinking follow. (shrink)

In the post‐Kohlbergian era of moral education, a ‘moral gap’ has been identified between moral cognition and moral action. Contemporary moral psychologists lock horns over how this gap might be bridged. The two main contenders for such bridge‐building are moral emotions and moral selves. I explore these two options from an Aristotelian perspective. The moral‐self solution relies upon an anti‐realist conception of the self as ‘identity’, and I dissect its limitations. In its stead, I propose a Humean (...) class='Hi'>conception of the moral self which preserves Aristotelian insights into the difference between self and identity, yet remains closer to modern sensitivities. According to such a conception, the moral‐self versus moral‐emotions dichotomy turns out to be illusory. Finally, I show some of the practical implications of this conception for moral education. (shrink)

In this article, Anniina Leiviskä argues that the educational relevance of Hans-Georg Gadamer's concept of tradition has remained unacknowledged because of the conservatism that has been associated with Gadamer's hermeneutics, particularly his notion of tradition. Therefore, Leiviskä seeks to reveal the reflective, nonconservative nature of Gadamer's concept of tradition in order to illuminate its significance with respect to the philosophy of education. Utilizing Gadamer's reinterpretation of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis, she outlines a concept of situated rationality that (...) rests upon the idea of the historicity of human existence, and she suggests that this concept may be used to define a central aim of education. Leiviskä argues that instead of disengaged objectivity, rationality as phronesis stands for the reflective reappropriation of one's tradition, which is enabled by one's situatedness in history and requires encountering other horizons — including the horizons of the past — through which one may be addressed and challenged. (shrink)

Logic in Action/Doron Avital Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide (Napoleon Bonaparte) Introduction -/- This book was born on the battlefield and in nights of secretive special operations all around the Middle East, as well as in the corridors and lecture halls of Western Academia best schools. As a young boy, I was always mesmerized by stories of great men and women of action at fateful cross-roads of decision-making. Then, like as today, (...) I felt the full weight of the moment of truth as it confronts the individual, the man or woman of action, with the imminent necessity to decide. Alongside, as I was climbing up the ladder of education, I found myself just as well captivated by the great intellectual stories of our times, in particular 20th century analytic philosophy and, at its core, the machinery of modern logic. How do then the cool contemplative modes of the philosophical and analytic outlooks, that are better fitting of the philosopher's armchair at the fireplace, hang together with the heat of the battlefield or the angst of the ticking clock of time left to the completion of a daring special operation? Growing up I was pondering exactly that. Not accidently, and in fact as consequence, I have chosen a course in life that challenged me to visit the poles of both theory and practice. I set myself on a mission to unravel the tension between the contemplative inquiry, supposedly theoretical, aiming at the logical structure of things, and the uncompromising test of life and action. The puzzle of the gap between theory and practice has become ever since the guiding question of my life. -/- Not long ago, I met two friends, Avner Shor, a veteran combat soldier of the special forces unit I eventually commanded, and Aviram Halevi, a fellow officer with whom I served. Why will we not put into writing the ideas that guided us during our years of military action, we wondered. At that time, I used to deliver the keynote lectures to the senior officers' course of Israel central intelligence organization, the Mossad. For this I already had to put some of these ideas in writing. Avner was quick to introduce me with a notable publisher and even helped me write the first chapter. With Aviram I sat to many meetings, where he would challenge me with key questions, and we followed them with memories of operations and battles, aiming to draw the required lessons. This served me well when I finally sat down to write the first draft of the book. The result was more extensive than me and my friends had expected. I had to add a particularly long chapter dealing with the story of modern philosophy and logic. This was required, I felt, as no decision-making process lives in an intellectual vacuum. Knowingly or subconsciously, the intellectual climate of the time guides us for better or worse with the decisions we finally take. The initial draft was naturally cumbersome and inaccessible. But here I had the privilege of meeting a particularly talented editor, Rami Rothholtz. I found in Rami both an editor and a critical reader. As an infantry combat soldier at youth and now a senior journalist and editor, Rami insisted on simplifying and refining my ideas. Had it not been for his work, this book would have been literally unreadable. *** I opened my book with a brief description of a single night of a special operation deep at the Lebanon Bekaa valley, far away from Israel northern border. The mission was to kidnap a senior terror leader known to be holding in captivity an Israeli pilot. This was also the last special operation I commanded in my military career. A single special operation night, but what had to precede it? For sure, many months of intense and skillful preparations. What is Planning? This is the question with which I open up chapter (2) of the book. I confront in this chapter two approaches to planning. The first is the one I saw as a mission to myself to cultivate in my many years of military service. The second is the one I saw as representing a deep-rooted fallacy that holds a firm grip on today's conventional wisdom about planning. To further examine the logic of the competing models, I was required in chapter (3) to analyze the concept of "The Standard". I argue that the false model of planning has its roots in an attitude of an uncompromising adherence to the power of literal obedience to standards and rules. The standard, or what is outlined by a rule as prescribing a future course of action, is seen as an answer to the fundamental tension between theory (planning) and practice (execution). I argue in contrast that the standard does not produce an answer but rather what I call: "A Well-Defined Question". In essence, it is a meticulously-well-planned invitation to exercise a fresh judgment. A judgement that has as an anchor the default answer that the standard produces but is open to extension as it confronts the new frame of reference of the test of reality. In chapter (4), I present a new tool for planning and execution: "The Polygon of Risks" or "The Polygon of Execution". The Polygon is a geometric illustration of the underlying tension that exists between all dimensions of the operational project. The construction and conceptualization of the trade-offs that exist between the various dimensions - segments of the polygon - is the first topic on the planner's agenda. I position the concepts of "Daring" and "Taking Proactive and Well-Informed Risks" as necessary logical constituents of the polygon and show how in contrast the false model of planning is responsible for an operational culture that is risk-averse. It encourages, in fact, the piling up of false securities at the segments' level that eventually lead to the collapse of the polygon. The necessary trade-offs relationships that exist between the segments of the polygon express the fundamental tension between partnership and competition: partnership in a joint goal and competition over resources, both material and abstract. When this tension is not managed well, that is, when the players' local optimizations overshadow the global optimization required for the success of the project, the execution polygon collapses. In this scenario, we may find the setting of the bar of "High Standards" in a players' spheres of responsibility to conceal a hidden agenda of personal insurances taken against a possible failure. Once the overall risk is not mitigated by way of collaborative joint executional dialogue, the process that leads to a collapse of the polygon is literally unstoppable. *** In chapter (5), I discuss "(Fateful) Decisions". I examine the way in which we should translate the polygon into sequential critical decisions on the timeline. The execution polygon is not a rigid scaffolding but a dynamic conceptual illustration of the -/- project. It will need now to be converted into successive decision junctions. We will find the content of a decision and its timing on the timeline to be inseparable. The right decision is the one that is taken at the right time. The moment of decision is in fact the last moment of deliberation, the first moment available for action, i.e. the first possible "Can" is also the latest possible "Must". Deciding too soon is analog to the "Jumping of the Gun". The decision maker is forcing a pre-conceived answer to a state of affairs not ripe for an answer, e.g. the target in the shooting range is not yet erected. Late to decide and the decision maker may envision what he or she should have done but reality is no longer available for them to harness it right, e.g. consider a tennis player's frustration when reviewing a too-late-to-react move in the video replay. I review in this chapter many fateful decisions, both historical, from Napoleon's Waterloo, to a Bridge Too Far of WWII, to the failed rescue attempt of American hostages at the time of the Iranian Revolution, as well as fateful decisions I had to take in the course of my military life, both in combat and in special operations, and show the sense in which they all answer to our analysis. The theme of chapter (6) is "The Moment of Truth". This is the moment when everything is on the line and from which there is no turning back. I discuss the formative repetitive structure of the schooling and simulation phase and contrast it with the "One Shot, One Opportunity" nature of the moment of truth. This is extremely helpful when we analyze the logical structure of failures as unwarranted repetitions of past lessons. The schooling curriculum indeed consists of important abstractions drawn from lessons of the past. However, it is when we project them in a fashion that is literal or mechanical that we cross path with the possibility of a failure. The paradox of education is that what we must repeat in school and simulation must be extended and not repeated in real life. What is required of us so we do not fall into the fallacy of repetition in face of the moment of truth is the core subject of the discussion of this chapter. In chapter (7), I took a lengthy philosophical detour surveying the intellectual drama of modern logic, and in general, the story of 20th century analytic philosophy. Readers who choose to bypass the somehow demanding narrative of this drama can do so and still keep the argumentative thread of the book. However, even by way of skipping the more technical parts, I would still urge the readers to delve into the discussion in this chapter as I believe this would grant them a deeper understanding of the overall conceptual framework. I explore here the work of two key figures: the logician Kurt Gödel and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, both were crowned in 2000 by TIME Magazine, as the leading Logician and Philosopher, respectively, of the 20th Century. I review the fascinating logical result of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and examine its relevance as setting a theoretical limit to the power of formalization. This amazing logical result - a result that shakes the logical foundations of 20th century thought in as much as the discovery of irrational numbers shook the foundations of the Pythagorean program of the ancient Greeks - bears significantly on the question of action and the blind trust we place in the power of formalization in the form of protocols and rules. It is here that Wittgenstein's philosophy enters in full force. We follow Wittgenstein as he dismantles our conception of rules as if there were "Railroads to Infinite", i.e. as prescribing for us in-advance their proper employments in all possible -/- future eventualities. Instead we propose that the dilemma of action demands of us an extension of rules rather than a mechanical or blind repetition of their literal imperative. In turn, this extension can serve as a new lesson added to the curriculum of school and simulation. The theme of chapter (8), the concluding chapter, is Strategy, Logic, and Ethics. The chapter comes to place the ethical dilemma in the conceptual map we presented in the book. I discuss here the tension between strategy as a process of setting goals and deriving backward as it were the steps that are necessary for achieving these goals, to the inescapable dictation of the ethical imperative. This unavoidable tension is particularly important against the backdrop of contemporary culture that is guided by a vision of personal success and achievement that may threaten our ability to do what is right. Most of all, I am troubled in this chapter, with the role logic may play, first as a liberating force enabling a change that is tuned to the ethical imperative, and second, as a force designed to justify on logical grounds, as it were, the existing power structure. It is in this junction that brave individuals will be called to challenge the governing logic of the zeitgeist - logic that operates now as an oppressive force that serves the vested interest of beneficials of the existing order. When success is favored over doing what is right, as we must admit is the prevailing cultural mood of our times, that the words of Emanuel Kant carry their full weight: "Do the Right thing and leave the Consequences to God". For this we need heroes and heroines that challenge the time by bearing the full weight of responsibility that comes with the doing of what is Right. *** This book was written more than anything from the perspective of the heroes and heroines of action. Sometimes they may be missing the exact words or the full insight into the solid logical complexity that stands between them and the doing of what is right. They feel what is right to do on the battlefield of life, whether in real battle, in political or economic life or whether in the life of creativity and the quest of the intellect. They do need, in analogy, proper logical and intellectual artillery. I hope they will find the logical cannons they require as they travel through the pages of this book. The rest is in their hands at the Moment of Truth. -/- Doron Avital, Tel Aviv 2011 -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 443-455 [Access article in PDF] Romanticism's Gray Matter Nancy Easterlin British Romanticism and the Science of Mind, by Alan Richardson; xx & 243 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, $55.00. THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN science and the humanities is an old story, one whose basic themes were inspired by a new understanding of the utility of science that emerged from the Enlightenment. If faith (...) in the efficacy of human reason to renew human society was no longer quite so robust after Robespierre's Reign of Terror, science itself did not suffer but instead assumed the central place in intellectual inquiry. Half a century later, the opposition between humanistic inquiry and science not only carried over into the conception of literary studies in its embryonic phase as an academic discipline; the rise of science provided, ironically, a primary impetus for the institutionalization of English studies, since the study of language and literature was envisioned as an arena of spiritual values and social polish. But according to Gerald Graff, the picture is even more complicated than this: the oppositions between literature and science are largely matched by those within English/literary studies from the very beginning. If English was envisioned as a repository of value and cultivation on the one hand, it was driven, under the influence of science, to professionalize and develop a research industry on the other—which itself fostered a divide between criticism and academic research, areas that have only recently come together. 1 [End Page 443]Since conflicted attitudes toward science were thus at the heart of literary studies from the very beginning, it is hardly surprising that debates about the relevance of science to literary theory and criticism are vital today. These debates are the healthy result of the twentieth century's attempts to apply scientific research and models to literature, for early efforts at scientific criticism help locate both the potential benefits and possible drawbacks of interdisciplinary approaches. Yet some humanistic research paradigms have remained largely immune to the influence of science, maintaining the two-cultures tradition by virtue of the body of knowledge they adopt—and therefore by what they implicitly exclude—to frame our understanding of written works. Chief among these are literary history and the history of ideas, which have drawn principally on the fellow humanities of philosophy and history, and only superficially or sporadically on the history and philosophy of science. (Interestingly, despite differences in theory, method, and values, recent projects like the new historicism are in this respect generally continuous with traditional literary historical practice.) In British Romanticism and the Science of Mind, Alan Richardson expands the parameters of the history-of-ideas approach within literary criticism, rendering it more fully congenial to developments within scientific thought. With great diplomacy, Richardson points to the limited conception of context that has informed historical accounts of British literary romanticism, and proceeds to demonstrate what a knowledge of romantic-era brain science can bring to our understanding of the ideas and works of a selection of romantic-era writers. The result is a book that, in providing a detailed account of the major theories of brain-mind and in constructing the plausible grounds of influence on several major literary figures, largely succeeds in the difficult task of appealing to an interdisciplinary audience.As Richardson notes in his preface and first chapter, the overlap between literary and scientific representations of mind has been generally neglected in romantic scholarship. Work on the romantic mind has, for the most part, drawn selectively on Hartleyan associationism, psychoanalysis, and the German idealist tradition within epistemology, even though the historical period of British literary romanticism (roughly 1789-1832) corresponds with an unprecedented development of theories of the brain and nervous system, many of which were vigorously discussed—in no small part for their ideologically inflammatory implications—in the major literary periodicals of the day. To [End Page 444] remedy the neglect of contemporaneous science, Richardson supplies a discussion of the major brain scientists in his first chapter, following this with four chapters on major figures and works of literary romanticism (Coleridge... (shrink)

Heinrich Rickert was one of the leading neo-Kantian philosophers in Germany and a crucial figure in the discussions of the foundations of the social sciences in the first quarter of the twentieth century. His views were extremely influential, most significantly on Max Weber. The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science is Rickert's most important work, and it is here translated into English for the first time. It presents his systematic theory of knowledge and philosophy of science, and deals (...) particularly with historical knowledge and the problem of demarcating the natural from the human sciences. The theory Rickert develops is carefully argued and of great intrinsic interest. It departs from both positivism and neo-Hegelian idealism and is worked out by contrast to the views of others, particularly Dilthey and the early phenomenologists. (shrink)

This commentary points out some theoretical lacuna in the argument and then evaluates, in a preliminary way, its main comparative empirical hypotheses. It finds very limited support for the observable implications of the evolutionary theory. By contrast, the historical remoteness of foundational myths is closely associated with how long a society has been ruled by a centralized state, pointing at the important role of political history.

Although it seems natural to consider the last fifty years the contemporary period, because this year (1995) punctuates a historical period celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, this essay will limit the term “contemporary” roughly to the last twenty‐five years. The reason for this demarcation is that at the beginning of the 1970s, we witnessed a new philosophical mood emerging in Japan. Prior to that period, the Japanese philosophical scene was dominated by the (...) study of European thinkers, such as Husserl, Heiddeger, Sartre, and Merleau Ponty. The end of the students' movement in the early 1970s also marked the end of the ideological disputes launched by Marxism since the early 1930s. Instead, it appears that the Japanese intelligentsia in the early 1970s began to acutely sense problems inherent in the Eurocentric philosophy which had served as a foundation for Western science and technology. This occurred largely through a recognition that scientific technology had yielded, as its unexpected byproduct, a “mind/heartless” society, pollution, and global ecological crises, which had permeated almost all parts of the Japanese archipelago to threaten the psyche of the Japanese people and their mode of living. In this essay, I should like to briefly introduce three representative contemporary Japanese thinkers who have addressed some aspects of these problems in their writings. They are Nakamura Yujiro, Sakabe Megumi, and Yuasa Yasuo. (Because of the limitations of space, this article will restrict itself to these three thinkers, but this should not suggest that there are no other representative thinkers in Japan. Consider particularly those belonging to the neo Kyoto school, such as Nishitani Keiji, Kosaka Masaki, Koyama Iwao, Umehara Takeshi and Ueda Shizuteru. Nishitani's works are well known in the English speaking world, along with those of Abe Masao. Out side of the Kyoto school, we can also mention other thinkers, such as Matsumoto Masao, Hiromatsu Wataru and Ichikawa Hiroshi.). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editorial Reflections on Philosophizing in Music EducationEstelle R. Jorgensen and Iris M. YobIn this article, we reflect on issues that go to the heart of teaching and scholarship in the philosophy of music education. After thirty years of editing Philosophy of Music Education Review, it is a good time to take stock of the philosophical work that has been and is being published and of (...) challenges that remain.Over the years, there has been a growing quality of philosophical articles published in the journal, due in significant part to the efforts of reviewers and the willingness of writers to work with their suggestions. Authors regularly express appreciation for the informed, critical, and constructive reviews their work receives. An exemplary body of philosophical scholarship in music education has been published over this time and PMER is regarded as a premier journal internationally devoted exclusively to the philosophy of music education. In thirty volumes of uninterrupted publication, we have sought to be responsive to important issues in music education. Our writers have engaged relevant subjects of interest to our readers, citations of articles remain strong, and articles are included in [End Page 109] university and college course reading lists. PMER is available in print and online via subscription; it has a wide digital exposure in search engines and leading indexes, and our readership continues to grow.Despite this progress, although the number of submissions has increased, their quality has sometimes been uneven. Our pedagogical commitment to foster philosophical writing and the philosophical inexperience of some writers has significantly impacted the work required to bring submissions to publication standard. Submissions sometimes evidence a lack of attention to formulating a tight argument, citing relevant sources, and polishing and editing the manuscript. The published style guidelines are too often ignored, creating a poor first impression with reviewers and editors. Writers are occasionally in a hurry to publish and less willing to entertain multiple revisions of their articles required to produce work of lasting value. The growing number of music education journals that publish philosophical work, while opening more fora, in some cases perversely result in ideologically driven, polemical, and philosophically uninformed articles in the name of philosophy. This is a good moment to reconsider the importance of philosophical fundamentals that should undergird our philosophizing in music education and what these mean for our academic responsibilities. To this end, we suggest several principles that need to be central to our philosophizing in music education. These principles also have broader implications for the expectations of scholarship in music education generally.WRITING PHILOSOPHYLike other subject areas in the academy, philosophy has its own intellectual structure, a canon of significant writings, its own interpretative methods, and its distinctive role and purpose. A philosophical paper in music education reads differently from papers in the history of music education, methods of teaching music, sociology of music education, empirical research in music education, multi-cultural, gender, and ethnic studies, music education curriculum building and policy making, and so on. And yet, the boundaries between these disciplines, which are artificial constructions when human knowledge is considered wholistically anyway, are somewhat porous with concepts and ideas and claims seeming to move easily from one discipline to another.To help distinguish between philosophy and other areas of study and research, it may be helpful to consider philosophy as a second-order activity. That is, first-order activity examines the raw data of research and experience and attempts to make sense of them. Using inference, pattern-seeking, deduction, hypotheses, statistical analysis, and so on, these activities result in claims, interpretations, and theories that give meaning to what we see, hear, and feel. [End Page 110]The second-order activity takes a step away from these first-order activities. It does not concern itself so much with raw data or with creating theories about them, but critically analyzes the claims and inferences that are made in regard to them. Where first-order disciplines analyze inputs from observation and experimentation, second-order disciplines analyze these analyses—that is, they function as meta-analyses. Philosophers do not need laboratories or fieldwork (which makes applications for grants to support philosophical research difficult to secure!). They need libraries... (shrink)

Positive Psychology Interventions as an Opportunity in Arab Countries to Promoting Well-being AbstractIn this perspective paper, we emphasize the importance of further research on culturally-sensitive positive psychology interventions in the Arab region. We argue that these interventions are needed in the region because they not only reduce mental health problems but also promote well-being and flourishing. To achieve this, we shed light on the cultural elements of the Arab region and how the concept of well-being differs from that of Western (...) culture. We review the research conducted in Arabia, briefly evaluate the quality of this research and list some adapted measurements. We furthermore propose guidelines and recommendations for future evidence-based positive psychology interventions research to align with the national culture in various sectors and community samples that contribute to the development of well-being in the Arab world.Introduction Extensive research on Positive Psychology Interventions (PPIs) - defined as activities focus on promoting positive feelings, thoughts, or behaviour (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009) - has shown their effectiveness in well-being and mental illness (e.g., Chakhssi et al., 2018; Hendriks et al., 2020). A recent review of 347 studies showed that PPIs have a significant effect on promoting quality of life and well-being and reducing anxiety and depression (Carr et al., 2020). However, the issue is that most of these studies (82%) remain narrow in focus only on Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) countries (Hendriks et al., 2019). Therefore, they may not be effective for other countries such as the Arab countries where there are various cultural differences. This highlights the key role that culture can play in enhancing PPIs engagement, acceptability, and eventually, effectiveness (Hendriks & Graafsma, 2019). Recently, the field of PP in the Arab region has begun to grow (Basurrah et al., 2021; Rao et al., 2015). However, studies conducted in these countries are scant and of poor methodological quality. We have found humble quantity and quality of empirical studies. Yet, Arab countries, home to 5% of the world’s population, have a burden of mental health problems above global levels (GBD 2015 Eastern Mediterranean Region Mental Health Collaborators, 2018). Prevalent stigma, war and conflict were some of the contributors (Maalouf et al., 2019). Thus, to properly address this cultural stigma against mental health problems, PPIs could provide an additional role alongside traditional psychology approaches (e.g., Cognitive Behavioural therapy - CBT). Further, in light of the political conditions that some Arab countries are going through and the negative effects that they cause, it has become necessary to use the method of prevention that is the focus of PP and not only of treatment as a strategy for applications and practice. It has been noted that the mental health care system in the Arab region focuses highly on illnesses treatment and neglects the significant role that PP plays in enhancing human potential and well-being. We - here in Arabia –are becoming more influenced by many global issues particularly the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on mental health and well-being (e. g. prevalence of stress, anxiety, depression among the general population during the pandemic (Salari et al., 2020). In response, Waters et al. (2021) have recently presented how positive psychological factors can play a significant role in buffering mental illness, enhancing mental health throughout the pandemic, and building positive processes and capacities that can help to promote future mental health.Here in this perspective paper, we highlight the cultural aspects of Arab countries. Specifically, we present previous PPIs research conducted in Arabia and briefly evaluate the quality of this research. Importantly, we discuss the need of developing an indigenous and culturally sensitive PP among the Arab region (Lambert et al., 2015).Arab Culture “Arab World,” which comprises 5% of the world’s population, refers to the Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Despite the increasing pace and progress of different businesses in many Arab countries, individual communities are still limited in certain prominent economic places. Arab people rather gather in collective communities. They generally share the same Arabic Islamic culture, speak the same language, and descend from the same Arab families when going back in history no matter what nationality they have nowadays. Yet, very many changes came to communities before borders were drawn between countries and after. For instance, geography, topography, demography, and socio-economic status affect peoples’ nature of jobs and lifestyles. For example, Arabs in the east, west, or the middle have similar tongues; however, almost every Arab country has its accent. Therefore, people need to go back to the formal Arabic language ‘Fus-ha’ or learn more about different Arabic dialects when communicating cross-countries. According to Hofstede’s model (2011) based on the individualism-collectivism dimension, the Arab countries (Eastern society) have been classified as a collectivist culture, where their identity and decisions are influenced by social systems. In contrast, the United States (Western society) has been classified as an individualist culture focusing on individual decisions. Although there are degrees of individualism among Arabs in certain countries, they still share collective common characteristics. Here, we explore the meaning of collectivistic conceptions of the self, emotions, values, and religion in Arab countries and how they differ from those in individual Western cultures. The Self Since the field of PP focuses on the development of self, it is vital to recognize that self-concept varies across cultures. Individualism generally emphasises the self-directed and autonomous individual (Realo et al., 2002). People in individualist countries focus primarily on their personal characteristics (e.g., motives, abilities) to build their self-concept. On the other hand, collectivism refers to several social structures that highly value the groups to which people belong, such as family and tribe (Realo, 2003). People in collectivist countries such as the Arab countries focus primarily on their relationships with others to build their self-concept (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Hence, research from Arab countries should focus on the core elements of collectivism when implementing PPIs to make a significant, meaningful impact. For example, people from a collective culture may experience a greater enhancement in well-being when practising interventions that are more prosocial and group-oriented such as compassion, performing acts of kindness, writing a gratitude letter, and using character strengths in everyday context including social context, compared with self-oriented interventions such as identifying character strengths. Emotions, value, and Religion Research shows that Western culture emphasises the goal of maximizing positive emotions, while Eastern culture emphasises embracing and balancing positive and negative emotions (Leu et al., 2011). To illustrate, culture plays an important role in influencing perceptions of happiness. People in individualist countries value happiness highly. In contrast, people from the collective countries value low arousal positive emotions (Leu et al., 2011) and exhibit a fear of happiness (Joshanloo & Weijers, 2014; Joshanloo, 2013). Hence, the influence of positive emotions plays a limited role in the mental health of Eastern society. Speaking of Value, for an Arab, the family is the centre of honour and the most important social unit. This loyalty has an impact on every part of an Arab’s life. Arabs honour their families and highly value their friendships. Therefore, future research could shed more light on group-oriented interventions (e.g., kindness) that focus more on the relationship with family, friends, and community. When it comes to religion, Arab society has a rich culture in values and believes that place a high emphasis on spirituality. Religion is the most important and distinctive aspect of Arab culture. Arab countries vary in terms of religion, with Islam being the predominant religion in most of them. Well-being (Hedonic and Eudaimonic) It is necessary here to clarify what is meant by hedonic and eudaimonic definitions of well-being. While the term ‘Hedonic’ is based on the pursuit of maximum levels of pleasure (feeling good), the term ‘Eudaimonic’, on the other hand, is based on meaning and the development of virtues (functioning well; Keyes & Annas, 2009). Research indicates that cultures are not equally supportive of hedonic and eudaimonic aspects (Joshanloo & Jarden, 2016). In comparison to collectivism, hedonism appears to be more congruent with individualism (Joshanloo, 2014). Pleasure and positive emotions are considered a way to pursue happiness in Western culture, while this method is not highly favoured in Eastern cultures (Lee et al., 2013); Because they consider suffering and negative emotions as contributing factors to spiritual development. Therefore, the eastern perspective is more in line with a eudaimonistic view which emphasises virtues, meaning, and feeling of belongingness. However, although we believe that both approaches can be found to a certain level in both cultures, the differences suggest that there are different routes to happiness. Positive Psychology in the Arab region Positive psychology - "the scientific study of what makes life most worth living" (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) - is one of the newest branches of psychology. It focuses on three main pillars: (1) positive subjective experiences (such as happiness and love); (2) positive individual characters (such as gratitude and compassion); and (3) positive institutions (for the application of positive principles within institutions and organizations; Seligman & Csikszentmiha lyi, 2000). Some of the main topics of interest in positive psychology include character strengths, gratitude, hope, happiness, mindfulness, optimism, positive thinking, and resilience. Within the applications of this science, various domains of well-being (such as happiness, engagement, positive emotions, and meaning) can be enhanced by practising positive psychology interventions (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009). Interestingly, these interventions have also produced benefits beyond well-being, such as reduced mental health issues (Chakhssi et al., 2018; Hendriks et al., 2020).Nowadays, PP is increasingly noticed in the Arab world (Lambert & Pasha-Zaidi, 2019; Rao et al., 2015). In recent years, there has been a great effort to explore the PP field across Arab countries. Several initiatives have emerged aimed at promoting well-being and flourishing. For example, the Middle East Journal of Positive Psychology published its first volume in 2015. On the International Day of Happiness in 2017, United Arab Emirates University launched its Emirates Center for Happiness Research. Meanwhile, Effat University in Saudi Arabia started the first Positive Psychology and Well-being Research Lab, the first symposium, and the first PP course. In 2019, Louise Lambert and Nausheen Pasha-Zaidi published the first regional text entitled “Positive Psychology in the Middle East/North Africa.” There are other efforts spent in the region as well; such as the work conducted in Egypt. Ibrahim Younus established the Arab Association for Positive Psychology https://www.psycholearn.com/en/associative.php which provides several courses on PP and also published a book entitled “The Power of Positive Psychology” (Younus, 2017). Despite this development, nothing can compare to the quantity and even quality of research in other countries. In light of our observations, the few PP studies may be attributed to the lack of awareness of the constructive approach and prevention compared to problem-solving. An Arab dentist once said: “people do not come to me until they are badly in pain.” In any case, many studies have taken place in Arab countries in the last decade, more of which are descriptive and less of which experimental. For example, Abdel-Khalek (2010) found positive correlations between quality of life, subjective well-being, and religiosity among students in Kuwait. Abdel-Khalek (2016) developed “the Arabic Scale of Religiosity,” which significantly correlated with PP variables among students in Algeria, Kuwait, and Egypt. Recently, empirical studies on PPIs have arisen in Arab-Islamic countries. More attention has been focused on promoting well-being and alleviating the high burden of mental health problems in the region (GBD 2015 Eastern Mediterranean Region Mental Health Collaborators, 2018). For instance, several studies examined the effectiveness of mindfulness among university students (e.g., Al-Ghalib & Slim, 2018; Awad, 2019; Thomas et al., 2016), parents of children with autism (Rayan & Ahmed, 2016) and addicted adults (Al-Rashidi, 2018). Such an intervention has positive effects. Participants who practised mindfulness reported reduction in stress and depression as well as improvement in well-being and resilience. Moreover, the results of a recent pilot study found positive impacts on enhancing emotional regulations and reducing stress among Arab teachers (Berkovich-Ohana et al., 2020). Some studies have also begun to examine various interventions targeting character strengths (Basurrah et al., 2020; Chérif et al., 2020), self-compassion (Elaiwah, 2017), positive thinking (Mohammed et al., 2014; Hadad, 2014), and hope (Zaki, 2016). Interestingly, a new finding considering the fear of happiness among people from collective countries has been examined. Lambert et al. (2019) provided evidence that a 14-week PPIs programme has an impact on reducing the fear and fragility of happiness beliefs among university students in the United Arab Emirates.Since Arab countries place great emphasis on spirituality, several authors have considered the aspect of religion when implementing PPIs. For instance, an empirical study by Al-Seheel and Noor (2016) found that expressing gratitude towards God “Allah” increases the happiness of the Muslim more than the usual gratitude intervention. Additionally, Al-Ghalib and Salim (2018) examined a religiously sensitive mindfulness-training programme with university students and found a positive effect on life satisfaction and a slight reduction in stress, depression, and anxiety. Hence, the role of religion is vital to make the interventions more relevant to Arab culture where people can connect Islamic philosophy with PP theories and practices. These studies reviewed here provide further support for the need for culturally sensitive interventions among the Arab population. More recently, the first systematic review of PPIs in Arab countries was conducted by Basurrah et al. (2021; the protocol has been published in BMJ Open and the final manuscript has been submitted for publication). Reviewing a total of 39 studies, the most commonly studied interventions were mindfulness, positive thinking, and resilience. Only a handful of studies examined gratitude, character strengths, forgiveness, self-compassion, savouring, or finding flow. Further analysis revealed that most studies from Arab countries have several methodological limitations. This included a lack of protocol guidelines, few well-designed randomized controlled trials (RCTs), blinding issues, small sample sizes, lack of active control groups, and lack of research into certain populations (e.g., teachers, employees, and people in distress in refugee camps). Discussion PP was founded on an individualistic framework (Christopher & Hickinbottom, 2008). To ensure that PPIs are culturally meaningful, this paper includes some cultural elements of the Arab region that should be considered to serve the needs of the Arab population. In the Arab world, some people may believe that PP is solely about happiness and being positive. If so, it is important to educate the public about the findings of rigorous studies evaluating PPIs such as gratitude, hope or flow on health, well-being and performance. To explain the value and effectiveness of these evidence-based approaches, examples might include studies linking gratitude with benefits for people with heart disease (Cousin et al., 2021), or how PPIs can promote quality of life in cancer patients (Casellas-Grau et al., 2014). There is some evidence about PPIs being effective in improving well-being in the Arab region, but research in this region is still in its infancy and little information is available regarding PPIs and the experience of Arabs participating in such interventions. Hence, there is still much more to investigate in this regard. Future research should empirically examine the effectiveness of various unstudied interventions such as savouring, gratitude, self-compassion, character strengths or finding flow. A combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches is required to provide an in-depth understanding of Arabs’ experience and impressions of PPIs and how and why they work. This may provide useful information to inform the appropriate design of PPIs to suit Arab culture and needs. Furthermore, while some research on PPIs has been carried out in the region, most of these studies have been of poor quality that suffered from small sample sizes, confounding factors, and a high degree of bias. To overcome these issues, future research should improve research quality, including protocol guidelines and well-designed RCTs. In particular, research should include randomization, allocation, blinding, power analysis to determine adequate sample size, active control groups to reduce bias, and follow-up periods of at least 12 months.Among the most popular resources that future PP practitioners may refer to are the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) and the International Positive Education Network (IPEN). Also, we recommend the Middle East Journal of Positive Psychology and the first regional book (Lambert & Pasha-Zaidi, 2019). To develop and/or adapt a multi-component PPIs, we would recommend referring to Character Strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), the theory of well-being (PERMA Model: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment; Seligman, 2011), and the Five Ways to Well-being: Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, Keep Learning, and Give (Aked et al., 2008). Finally, single-component PPIs are based on theories like Broaden-And-Build (Fredrickson, 2004), Hope (Snyder et al., 2002), and Self-Determination (Deci & Ryan, 2012) can be also considered. Two other concepts that would be usefully applied are ‘Savouring’ (Bryant & Veroff, 2007) and Phillip Zimbardo’s Time Perspective (Stolarski et al., 2015). For instance, savouring has a positive temporal orientation to reminiscing the good memories from the past, enjoying the hedonic present moments, and willing proactively to make a better future. Now, what is even maybe more interesting for Muslims is “Transcendent Future” where all intentions, words and actions are devoted to that life after death. In addition, there is a model already prepared for the clinical purpose called Positive Psychotherapy (PPT). Tayyab Rashid and Martin Seligman published a PPT manual for clinicians in 2018. And for cross-cultural applications, including Muslim Arab culture, Rashid and Al-Haj Baddar (2019) have written a paper presenting PPT and its efficacy. PPT overview in detail shows sessions, themes, skills, practice, and cultural considerations where a mixture of PPIs based on PERMA, Strengths, and other PP concepts can be found. Regarding PP measurements, it is highly recommended to generate indigenous tools based on cultural backgrounds reviewed here in the article. An example of this is a tool for measuring Muslim well-being by including domains beyond what is found in Western literature. So far, in the Arab region, several attempts have been made to adapt PP tools. For example, Marei Salama-Younes (2018) validated the Arabic versions of different measures of well-being (e.g., satisfaction with life scale, the subjective vitality scale). Other validated scales as well include the self-compassion scale (Alabdulaziz et al., 2020), and the passion scale (Salama-Younes & Hashim, 2018). Conclusion This paper has discussed the cultural aspects of Arab countries and the need of developing culturally sensitive PPIs. The past decade has seen an increase in mental health problems in the Arab region. Stigma and lack of awareness have been always there. Among the issues are also wars, conflicts, and displacement in many Arab countries such as Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine (Hassan et al., 2016). These indicate an urgent need to prevent mental illness and promote well-being. Indeed, we highlighted the importance of integrating culture with PPIs, following the guidelines for the cultural adaptation of PPIs (Hendriks & Graafsma, 2019) and the ethical guidelines for PP practice (Jarden et al., 2020). Another significant contribution of this paper is to highlight the importance of improving the quality of research conducted in Arab countries. In brief, this paper has several practical implications. It is an open invitation for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners alike to be more exposed to PP; as well as to better conceptualising and adapting interventions and measurement tools to the local culture in different sectors to maximize their effectiveness. And as we consider it as an invitation for us too, here we are starting a PPIs practice guide in Arabic language and for Arab practitioners. The insights gained from this paper may be useful for placing well-being on top of priorities for achieving individual, organizational, and optimal national functioning in different sectors. There is also a need to change the stigma or negative beliefs about seeking health for psychological support, which is an issue for countries in the Middle East (Baess, 2018). (shrink)

The widespread adoption of new technologies has led to changes in worldview that impact the effectiveness of education and require new forms of teaching. This article demonstrates that the loss of academic motivation, growing pragmatism, and emerging new ethics characteristic of the current generation of students, loosely referred to as millennials, contradict the fundamental principles of research activities. The author notes that research-based education with the creation of a generative environment and problem-based learning is the most reasonable strategy (...) in the natural sciences, engineering, and applied research. However, creating an analogue of this type of education in the humanities appears problematic due to the specifics of the studied objects. Although philosophy cannot be reduced to research, research-based education in its goals and declared educational ideals largely converges with philosophy. However, this convergence risks an unjustified pragmatization of philosophical knowledge, understanding philosophy only as a method and tool for better mastering other disciplines. This is most clearly demonstrated by a teaching strategy based on the use of philosophical games. The article analyzes the strategy of two types of philosophical games and other features of these games that develop critical thinking; it compares the educational goals declared by the developers (including the rationale for their relevance and compliance with the chosen teaching methodology) and the results obtained, according to the participants’ feedback. It also argues that, although philosophical games develop imagination and the ability to precisely formulate and defend theoretical positions, they do not presuppose a research position either from the point of view of the object (which turns out to be random and changes during the game) or from the point of view of the subject. The author introduces the concept of “natural generative environment,” emphasizes the importance of the axiological aspect of philosophy, and suggests paying attention to a number of existing strategies for teaching philosophy that are oriented toward this environment and partially solve the problems associated with the formation of a new type of worldview. (shrink)

RésuméIl n'y a pas de sujet plus idoine à justifier la philosophie ouverte qui est celle de Dialectica que l'étude de l'évolution du concept de raison dans la pensée occidentale.C'est avec la création de la géométrie déductive que le mot raison prit un sens chez les Grecs du ***Ve siècle av. J.‐C. A l'évidence sensible qui résulte du témoignage de nos sens et ne constate que le comment d'un fait observé, les géomètres grecs substituent l'évidence intelligible qui en explique le (...) pourquoi, en montrant qu'il est la conséquence nécessaire d'un petit nombre de propositions admises comme évidentes. S'élevant du concret à l'abstrait, ils dégagent l'essence intelligible de l'accident sensible et substituent au réel le possible. Les disciplines empiriques des Orientaux font place aux sciences théoriques et explicatives: l'astronomie, la mécanique, l'optique, la théorie musicale. Toutefois, au lieu de voir dans les concepts mathématiques une création de l'esprit, les penseurs‐géomètres de la Grèce les assimilent à une découverte par les yeux de l'ǎme d'essences préexistantes. Ils méprisèrent, en outre, les applications pratiques qui seules peuvent stimuler les sciences expérimentales. De là procèdent les limites, puis l'arrět de la science hellénique.Les conquětes d'Alexandre déversèrent sur l'Occident méditerranéen les religions de salut de l'Orient. A la recherche désintéressée du vrai se substitue la gnose, la révélation de mystères transcendants à la raison. Lorsque le message chrétien devint une philosophie puis une théologie, on en vint à distinguer » la démonstration hellénique « par le raisonnement et la dialectique, et » la démonstration hébraique « par les prophéties et les miracles des articles de la foi. La Scolastique rechercha l'accord de la raison et de la foi, en entendant par raison l'apport de la science et de la philosophie helléniques, assimilées, à partir du XIIIe siècle dans la Latinité, à l'encyclopédie aristotélicienne. La Scolastique échoua dans cette tentative. La doctrine de » la double vérité « fut l'aveu de cette impuissance.Pour se libérer de la mentalité scolastique, il fallut s'affranchir dans l'étude des phénomènes naturels de l'autorité d'Aristote, du joug de la théologie et parvenir à une théorie correcte de la connaissance, en particulier de la valeur des idées abstraites et de la distinction des vérités formelles et des vérités empiriques. Il fallut interpréter comme une création de l'esprit ce que les Grecs assimilaient à une découverte de vérités préexistantes. La désagrégation de l'a priori synthétique, conçu à la façon des Cartésiens et des Kantiens, conduit à se demander ce qui subsiste des exigences a priori de la raison. C'est à quoi s'évertue de répondre la dernière partie de l'article.ZusammenfassungEs gibt keinen geeigneteren Gegenstand zur Rechtfertigung der offenen Philosophie, die von der Dialectica vertreten wird, als das Studium der Entwicklung des Vernunftsbegriffes im abendländischen Denken.Mit der Entstehung der deduktiven Geometrie erhält das Wort Vernunft bei den Griechen des 5. Jahrhunderts vor Christo einen Sinn. An Stelle der gefühlsmässigen Evidenz, die auf der Gewissheit unserer Sinne beruht und lediglich das Wieeiner beobachteten Tatsache feststellt, setzen die griechischen Geometer die logische Evidenz, die das Warum erklärt, indem sie zeigt, dass es eine Folge einer kleinen Zahl von Voraussetzungen ist, die als evident angesehen werden können. Sich vom Konkreten zum Abstrakten erhebend, befreien sie das intelligible Wesen von der Zufälligkeit des Sinnlichen und ersetzen das Reelle durch das Mögliche. Die empirischen Disziplinen der Morgenländer schaffen Platz für die theoretischen und erklärenden Wissenschaften wie Astronomie, Mechanik, Optik, Musiktheorie. Immerhin, anstatt in den mathematischen Konzepten eine Schöpfung des Geistes zu sehen, setzen die geometrischen Denker Griechenlands diese der Entdeckung präexistenter Essenzen durch die Augen der Seele gleich. Sie verachten im übrigen die praktischen Anwendungen, die nur die Experimentalwissen‐schaften anregen können. Daher kommt es, dass die griechische Wissenschaft bei einer gewissen Grenze Halt machen musste.Die Schlachten Alexanders verschlangen im Abendland des Mittelmeeres die Heilsreligionen des Orients. An Stelle des uneigennützigen Suchens nach der Wahrheit tritt die Gnosis, das Erheben des mysteriös‐Transzendenten in den Bereich der Vernunft. Als die christliche Botschaft eine Philosophie, darauf eine Theologie wurde, begann man zu unterscheiden zwischen der » griechischen Beweisführung « mittels Vernunft und Dialektik und der » hebräischen Beweisführung « mittels Prophezeiungen und Wundern des zu Glaubenden. Die Scholastik forschte nach dem Zusammenhang zwischen Vernunft und Glaube, indem sie unter Vernunft den Beitrag der griechischen Wissenschaft und Philosophie verstand, der Aristotelischen Enzyklopädie angeglichen in der Folgezeit des 13. Jahrhunderts im Römischen Reich. Die Scholastik scheiterte in diesem Versuch. Die Lehre der » doppelten Wahrheit « war das Geständnis dieses Unvermögens.Um sich von der scholastischen Mentalität zu befreien, hiess es sich im Studium der Naturereignisse von der Autorität des Aristoteles befreien, vom Joch der Theologie und zu einer korrekten Theorie der Erkenntnis zu gelangen, speziell des Wertes der abstrakten Ideen und der Unterscheidung zwischen formellen und empirischen Wahrheiten. Was die Griechen einer Entdeckung von präexistenten Wahrheiten gleichsetzten, musste als Schöpfung des Geistes interpretiert werden. Die Desagregation des synthetischen Apriori, aufgefasst im Sinne von Descartes und Kant, führte zur Frage, was vorhanden sei von den apriori‐Erfordernissen der Vernunft.Dies zu beantworten, bemüht sich der letzte Teil des Artikels.There is no subject more suitable to the open philosophy of Dialectica than the study of the development of the concept of reason in Western thought.The word » reason « acquired a meaning with the creation of deductive geometry by the Greeks of the Vth cent. B. C. These geometers substituted for the sensible evidence, which only establishes the » what « of an observed fact, the intelligible evidence which explains the » why « of such an observed fact, by showing that it is the necessary result of a small number of statements, accepted as self‐evident. Rising from the concrete to the abstract, the geometers isolated the intelligible essence from the sensible accident, and substituted for the real the possible. The empirical technics of the Orientals made place for the theoretical sciences of the Greeks: astronomy, mechanics, optics and musical theory. Instead, however, of seeing mathematical concepts as creations of the mind, the Greek geometers considered them as preexisting entities, discovered by the eyes of the soul. They furthermore disregarded the practical applications which alone can stimulate experimental sciences. These were the limitations and the causes of the eventual end of hellenic science.The conquests of Alexander brought to the Western Mediterranean the religions of salvation of the East. The gnose, revelation of mysteries transcending reason, took the place of the disinterested search for truth. As the Christian message became a philosophy and then a theology, the distinction came to be made between the » hellenic demonstration of the faith « by logic and dialectics, and the » hebrew demonstration « by the prophecies and the miracles. The scholastics sought to reconcile reason with faith, by defining reason as the legacy of Greek science and philosophy, identified, after the XIIIth century, with the Aristotelian Encyclopedia. They failed in this endeavour. The doctrine of the » double truth « was the admission of this failure.In order to progress beyond the scholastic outlook, it was necessary to reject the precepts of Aristotle in the study of natural phenomena, to become free of the tyranny of theology, to develop a correct theory of knowledge, especially as regards the role of abstract ideas and the distinction between formal and empirical truths. It was necessary to interpret as a creation of the mind what the Greeks considered the discovery of preexisting truths. The breakdown of the synthetic apriori of the Cartesians and the Kantians leads one to wonder what remains of the a priori requisites of reason. The last part of the article suggests an answer to this question. (shrink)

The Sense of I: Conceptualizing Subjectivity: In Indian Philosophy (Sāṃkhya-Yoga) This book discusses the sense of I as it is captured in the Sāṃkhya-Yoga tradition – one of the oldest currents of Indian philosophy, dating back to as early as the 7th c. BCE. The author offers her reinterpretation of the Yogasūtra and Sāṃkhyakārikā complemented with several commentaries, including the writings of Hariharānanda Ᾱraṇya – a charismatic scholar-monk believed to have re-established the Sāṃkhya-Yoga lineage in the early 20th (...) century. The textual analysis of the classical Sanskrit sources and their constructive interpretation is enhanced by some crucial questions and points of dispute commonly picked up in the contemporary philosophy of mind, such as the challenge of ontological and categorical reductionism, the criteria of personal identity, the limits of agency and free will, the ineluctability of self-deception, etc. However, defining the sense of ego (ahaṃkāra) and ‘I-am-ness’ (asmitā) is the main focus of this research. Four chapters composing the study are subsequently devoted to: (1) the methodological assumptions of the present author and the basic historical distinctions relevant to the subject matter, (2) linguistic preconditioning of I-consciousness as well as metaphysical coherency and ambiguity of the concept of subjectivity presented by Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophers, (3) cognitive and ontological issues concerning the embodied ego being opposed to inactive and contentless consciousness, or the pure self (puruṣa), (4) axiological evaluation of self-discipline and significance of liberation from ego. 1. The method, scope, and problem. In the first chapter, the method of comparative philosophy adopted in this book is introduced by a phenomenological analysis of ‘otherness’ and ‘alienness’ inspired by the considerations of Bernhard Waldenfels and his understanding of xenology. This section is followed by a critical reflection on the incommensurability of the alternative conceptual frameworks, supported by some arguments provided by Ludwik Fleck and Richard E. Nisbett. When explaining the term ‘comparative philosophy’, the author pays special attention to those proponents of the aforementioned current who contributed to the rapprochement of Western and Indian philosophical traditions by tracing both their similarities and divergences. The author makes references to numerous prominent researchers, such as Paul Masson-Oursel, Paul Deussen, Stanisław Schayer, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Bimal K. Matilal, Raimundo Panikkar, Daya Krishna, Wilhelm Halbfass, and many others representing a younger generation. The historical introduction presents a concise survey of the evolution of the Sāṃkhya-Yoga textual tradition, and distinguishes five phases of its development: proto-Sāṃkhya (7th c. BCA – 1st c. CE), pre-classical phase (1st – 5th c. CE), classical Sāṃkhya (3rd – 9th c. CE), post-classical phase (till 14th c.), and neo-classical phase (since 1927). Here, the author also evaluates the primary sources, including Sanskrit commentaries, and the secondary sources in the light of their relevance and usefulness to the constructive interpretation of Yogasūtra and Sāṃkhyakārikā. Then, she makes some methodological remarks concerning the specificity of their reading. This section is concluded with highlighting three main strategies usually applied when interpreting Patañjali’s sūtras: (1) anti-philosophical approach – treating the text as a merely mystical report or the yogic vademecum, (2) anti-mystical perspective – which reads the text as a highly speculative divagation of no much use to a practitioner, (3) mystic-and- philosophical approach – emphasizing the fact that the theory of consciousness presented in Yogasūtra is both philosophically coherent and empirically (or mystically) verified. The author argues for the third, heuristic, perspective mentioned above. The last section of the first chapter aims to problematize the I-concept (aham) and the paradoxical situation of the ego searching for self-knowledge. This part starts with the acknowledgement of the deliberation on non-self (anātman) by Śāntideva, a Buddhist philosopher claiming that one’s own ego ought to be identified with the ego of any other. Then, the author unfolds the fundamental assumptions and scope of the constructive interpretation she wants to develop following K.C. Bhattacharyya’s clues. When explaining her reasons, she stresses both the need to reveal the philosophical meaning of the source materials and, at the same time, the need to make them meaningful on the ground of our contemporary philosophical enquiry. Thus, among the main purposes there is a reliable, scrupulous and careful reconstruction of the historical conception of the self as elaborated on in the classical period of Sāṃkhya-Yoga tradition, as well as reinterpretation of the sense of I as it was grasped by the Sāṃkhya-Yoga thinkers in terms of modern comparative and ‘polylogical’ discourse. 2. Naming I. In the second chapter, a variety of linguistic categories capturing different aspects of subjectivity is discussed in detail. A textual examination is preceded by clarification of the semantic distinctions made by Patañjali, such as a verbal convention (saṃketa) which stands for uniting or overlapping a word (śabda), its meaning (artha) and a mental state of comprehension (pratyaya) that ascribes the word to a particular object. Among the key concepts there is also explained a spontaneous mental activity referring to pseudo-objects posited only by words (vikalpa), which is unwittingly involved in every process of conceptualizing, designating, and naming objects. Such mental states can neither be ‘valid’ nor ‘invalid’, and are believed to unavoidably accompany one’s use of language. These presuppositions testify to Patañjali’s severe criticism towards all verbal conventions that not only affect the way we formulate and construct our views, but also determine the very process of perception. A major section of the chapter contains the analysis of the ambiguous sense of subjectivity and its basic aspects distinguished by the author in the result of a contextual and comparative study of the Sanskrit terms used in Yogasūtra and Sāṃkhyakārikā for naming I-consciousness. The six basic aspects of the self comprise: essentializing oneself, perceiving (something), getting conscious (of something), mastering or owning (something), and being capable of self-identifying as well as disidentifying oneself. A majority of the enumerated predicates ascribed to the self refer to different functions and activities of the empirical ego and the embodied mind. Yet, apart from this intentional, active, reactive, sensing, and objectifiable self Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophers distinguish a sense of subjectivity going beyond all these psycho-physical characteristics: the self that remains unmanifest, non-active, free from experiencing any joy or pain, said to be the principle of consciousness. The plausibility of its existence as the final cause of the world is to be determined by the embodied ego by virtue of abductive reasoning based on the analysis of all material and psycho-physical phenomena preconditioned by three guṇas that compose the domain of nature (prakṛti). In the subsequent section, three Sanskrit notions – ahaṃkāra, asmitā, and puruṣa, most significant for the Sāṃkhya and Yoga understanding of subjectivity, are discussed closely one after another to expose their semantic, epistemic and metaphysical connotations. The chapter is completed by some pivotal remarks bringing out the problem of discrepancy between the metaphysical position implied by Patañjali and Īśvarakṛṣṇa, and the grammatical instruments applied by them to express it. 3. Cognizing I. The third chapter addresses two important issues in the phenomenology of self-perception, namely the question of psycho-physical dualism explained on the grounds of the considered darśanas, and the spiritual quest for the ideal embodiment of consciousness. While emphasizing the unity of human psycho-physical nature the author refers to several contemporary Western thinkers, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Nagel, John R. Searle, David Chalmers and others, by making some comparative remarks on the idea of the embodied mind. Furthermore, three arguments for the plurality of selves (puruṣa-bahutva) are reconstructed and critically considered. The arguments given by Īśvarakṛṣṇa (SK 18) include the diversity of ways in which one experiences one’s life and death, the spatio-temporal distinctness of particular embodied egos, and the variations of features manifested by individual selves. The second section of this chapter presents a thorough inquiry into a non-theistic devotion and spiritual pragmatism defended by the adherents of Sāṃkhya- Yoga. God (īśvara) is defined here primarily as an object of meditative practice and a special tool convenient for yogic pedagogy. In the concluding part of this section four functions of devotional practice (īśvara-pranidhāna) are recognized and explained; they embrace: (1) prevention from mental scattering and dispersion, (2) therapy allowing to form some positive perceptual habits and the right cognitive approach, (3) enhancement of morally and spiritually required qualities, and (4) reinforcement of the sense of subjective identity being a complementary method of self-development. 4. Liberating oneself from I. The final chapter consists of three sections. The first one introduces the concept of liberation through action (pravṛtti-dharma), commonly opposed in Indian tradition to the path of renunciation (nivṛtti- dharma). According to Hariharānanda Ᾱraṇya’s interpretation, both Sāṃkhya- Yoga and Buddhism follow the latter one, which in terms of spiritual practice dynamics makes them much closer to each other than it is usually believed. In the subsequent section the idea of liberating oneself from one’s attachment to ego is explained in detail, along with the significance of gradual self-negation. Then the author raises the interpretation of the Sāṃkhya-Yoga perspective on liberation as self-distinction-through-renunciation. The main focus in this section is placed on the sense of agency (kartṛ), the problem of free will, and the criteria of moral and soteriological evaluation of one’s deeds. Some crucial questions on karmic conditioning of self-knowledge in the form of kleśas are also the subject of careful analysis. The next section undertakes the issue of ownership (mamakāra) of one’s activity and self-esteem (abhimāna) involved in spiritual growth. Again, some comparative remarks are made by referring to the Buddhist philosophers’ positions, such as Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva and Candrakīrti. Among others, the Buddhist refutation of the Sāṃkhya-Yoga concept of eternal, inactive, indifferent, irresponsible, and exclusively conscious self (puruṣa) is quoted and partly rejected in favour of the classical Hindu darśanas. In summary, the author emphasized the significance-generating or sense-creating function of I, its engagement in the search for its own raison d’être, its role in self-identification as well as subverting it, and the expediency of liberation from ego. The philosophers of classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga indicate a twofold sense of the self; on the one hand, the only appropriate designation: ‘I’ is true self (puruṣa), a passive and unknowable principle of consciousness whose existence makes the empirical phenomena meaningful. On the other hand, the ‘I’ clearly designates the current sense of the self, expressed as “I think”, “I doubt”, “I suffer”, etc. This second meaning of ‘I’, the specific sense of ‘mineness’, is recognized as a secondary and relative one – thus illusive and troublesome. However, its delusiveness does not mean that the empirical ego is an unreal or non-existent entity. What it implies is that the empirical self-identity is fundamentally inadequate and – according to the Indian thinkers – ought to be unveiled and, ultimately, given up. (shrink)

Climate change has been called both a ‘slow emergency’ and an ‘urgent crisis’, it creates tensions between human and non-human temporalities, it asks some communities to ‘speed up’ and demands others slow down, and requires choices between present needs, historical responsibilities and future consequences. If students are to understand and confront climate (in)justice, then a ‘temporal imagination’ (Adam, 1998) is required that is alert to the ways that time is central to the politics of a warming world. This paper therefore (...) explores how ‘teaching time’ can support the awareness of and attention to (in)justice. The paper discusses the limits of current approaches to teaching time in education and explores a range of practices for developing ‘temporal attunement’ (Jensen, 2023) that can be found in public arts, Indigenous education, educational philosophy, futures studies and decolonial praxis. It maps out five temporal educational practices of: relational time; rhythm; anticipation and reparation; temporal suspension; and critical time keeping. It argues that these practices can be put into dialogue as a basis for a ‘temporal pedagogy’ that comprises three moves: interruption (of habitual and dominant temporal frames and their production of injustice), attention (to the latent, situated, plural timings and rhythms of the situation), and encounter (through invitations to judgement about the temporal practices that should govern more just collective action in response to climate change). It concludes by working through an example of how such a pedagogy might be deployed to negotiate the conflicting temporalities of socio-ecological change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A View on the Future of an International Philosophy of Music Education:A Plea for a Comparative StrategyFrede V. NielsenIn the preface to the revised edition of my book, Almen musikdidaktik (The General Didaktik of Music) published in 1998, I wrote that the bibliography had been supplemented with a great deal of music education literature that had been published since the first edition of the book came (...) out in 1994. I drew attention in particular to, among other things, the journal Philosophy of Music Education Review, which began in 1993. I found that publication of this journal was significant and interesting not least because it continuously supplemented the approach to a theoretical and philosophic music pedagogical reflection with new English language literature. At the same time, it provided an opportunity to ask what sort of concepts and phenomena 'the philosophy of music education' and 'the philosophy of music teaching and learning' really are and what sort of functions they can have in relation to practice-oriented music education, including the education of music teachers. Therefore, the publication of PMER was a great step forward. But, like all such steps, it also revealed interesting issues and raised new questions. [End Page 7]In the Scandinavian countries too the research-based and theory-oriented music education literature has grown considerably since the early 1990s. This is the result of local initiatives in individual countries as well as Nordic cooperation in the form of the Nordic Network for Research in Music Education, which was formalized and institutionalized in 1992. The publication of the network's yearbooks, Nordic Research in Music Education–Yearbook, since 1995 is noteworthy in this context. In our part of the world this was another step forward, but one that also raised some challenging questions. In particular it gave rise to the question: What is the structure of the object of study for music education as a science and how can this object of study be delimited appropriately in relation to other disciplines? I think we have moved further toward giving reflected and well-founded answers to these questions, even though the answers are not unambiguous and may create problems in relation to the institutional affiliations of music pedagogy as a theoretical and scientific discipline.My first encounter with the initiators of the PME symposia took place in 2003 when I attended PME-5 in Lake Forest near Chicago. Even though there were participants from a number of different countries, including the Scandinavian countries (but none, for example, from Germany), it was clear that the event was dominated by North Americans. I contributed with a paper that was based on German and Nordic didactic (didactological) theory, which apparently was quite unfamiliar to most of the conference participants. To me this was a reminder of how important it is that a society that calls itself "international" should strive to embrace and include various traditions from several different points of view if it is to live up to the designation "international."The International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education (ISPME) was formally founded at the symposium in Lake Forest. For the past two years I have enjoyed the honor of being the society's co-chair together with Estelle Jorgensen. As those of you who attended the symposium in 2003 know, I accepted this task only after some hesitation and with some reservations. Since then I have had the opportunity to consider and experience what the task entails.I mentioned that my impression of PME-5 in Lake Forest was that it was dominated by North Americans. This was no wonder, since PME-5 took place in that part of the world. Moreover, the initiative behind the PME symposia originally came from the USA and Canada. Nonetheless, it gave impetus to a broader international orientation when the ISPME was founded two years ago.I come from a Scandinavian country. Scandinavia is a small language area situated in the northernmost region of Europe and has historically been very dependent on external cultural impulses. For centuries these have not least come from continental Europe and this is also true of the fields of education, philosophy, and music culture. The French and... (shrink)

The article offers a critical but sympathetic reflection on the development of classical and post-classical French sociology. From Comte onwards, I suggest, the modern French treatment of the social has been preoccupied with socio-theological questions; and even with the radical deconstruction of any society-god, this continues to be the case. There are distinctive historical reasons for this (including the Catholic inheritance and an enduring legitimacy problem for the Republican state); but the significance of the issues raised by this intellectual tradition (...) as a result goes beyond the limits of national context. In an age of post-histoire and the `death' of everything, the `French' travails of social ontology, including the quasi-religious register in which these have occurred, have deep and continuing import for any would-be progressive social theory as such. We need to rethink the `we'. With such considerations in mind, the body of the article considers Comte's concept of Humanity and Baudrillard's `end of the social' as exemplifying key aspects of the beginning (reconstructive) and ending (deconstructive) phases of the French sociological story. What began as a detour in the `death of God', I argue, has terminated in a `second death of God' in which a replacement divinity and the rationalist faith associated with it have disintegrated and become impossible to think. But the logic of this development has not been straightforward. It is marked by a double paradox. An interrogation of Comte's `Humanity' reveals it to be a semi-conscious exercise in simulation, haunted by the implications of its own emptiness. On the one hand, then, the attempted religious founding founded nothing (it made a transcendent of its own intended re-socializing effects). On the other hand, as exemplified by Baudrillard's pronouncements about the end of the social, the moment of disintegration has itself seemed to offer a new socio-theological opening. Rather than mourn the anomic or hyper-real impossibility of a transcending `we', Baudrillard would shift terrain in a quasi-Nietzschean (or Bataillian) transvaluation. This implies (against Baudrillard himself) not the definitive end of the French `sociological' project, but the possibility of its continuation, albeit under erasure and in a new key. (shrink)

With this new book the gap between Straussian and analytic approaches to Plato’s dialogues begins to look like it is unbridgeable. While the analytic side has been furiously fussing over the critical minutia regarding the dating and authenticity of the Platonic dialogues in order to determine what we can know of Socrates through Plato, Lutz without so much as a nod toward that project simply takes any Platonic dialogue to be a reliable guide to “Socrates” and his thought. This will (...) sit poorly with those who think that we can no more know about Socrates from reading Platonic dialogues than we can about Jesus from reading the Gospels. Further, in the drama-versus-doctrine debate that is the great divide among Anglo-American scholars today, Lutz, like many a Straussian, opts for drama in the dialogues, rather than arguments in them, as the “least arbitrary and most revealing way” to philosophy. Lutz’s thesis is that Plato uses drama to support substantive Socratic theses, one of which is, according to Lutz, that “by nature we are moved by an erotic need to know we are ‘noble and good’”. Also according to Lutz, the recognition of this need is Socrates’ meaningful insight into human motivation, that of philosopher and scientist alike. He warns, however, that Socrates never decisively refutes his interlocutors’ rival conceptions of nobility and goodness. This is especially evident in the ongoing dialectic among the interlocutors in Plato’s Republic, which Lutz believes is dedicated to an examination of civic virtue. In addition, the dramatic portrayal of Socrates’ inability to educate Alcibiades shows, according to Lutz, “a fundamental limit on the power of reason to reform political life”. The value of Socratic education therefore consists in the idea that the content of virtue and efficacy of rationality are open to interpretation and must necessarily remain so. This essentially searching education, Lutz believes, may thus help us in our fragmented postmodern world, especially in bringing together competing conceptions of virtue in literature, politics, law, and science, and perhaps even Straussian and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Residual Individualism Vygotsky's Legacy Reconciling Vygotsky and McDowell Personalism Final Thoughts on Education.

One of the most traditional ways to teach philosophy in secondary school is a historical approach”, which takes a historicist view of philosophy and uses teaching practice based on teacher-centred lessons and textbook study by students. Only recently a debate on different approaches to teach philosophy is developing, considering the discipline as practical and dialogical activity to be fostered in the classroom. What could mean “doing philosophy” in the classroom from an instructional perspective? What are the (...) premises and constraints which allow the transformation of philosophy from a discipline to a community activity? In this paper a teaching model based on cultural-historical theory is proposed and discussed. The model is composed by three level of specification of the activity, from lower to higher, which correspond to three different analysis plans of the philosophical practice in an instructional context. Each level is composed by seven fundamental dimensions which highlight the meanings, the constraints, and the tools implied and developed in philosophizing as socio-cultural activity. Finally, if and how Philosophy for Children should be considered an activity respondent to the model and its educational aims is discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews How Philosophy Uses Its Past. By John Herman Randall, Jr. Foreword by Cornelius Krus~. (The Matehette Lectures, Wesleyan University, 1961; New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1963. Pp. xiv + 106. $3.50.) One could easily characterize this small volume as a minor masterpiece on a major theme. It is an admirable statement from the pen of one of America's leading thinkers in both the history (...) of philosopy and philosophy "proper." Actually the distinction between these two fields of philosophic activity becomes superfluous since Professor Randall has an elaborate theory of his own, whereby to do philosophy and do it well involves, in a serious and inescapable way, competent performance in the history of philosophy. How Philosophy UsesIts Past may have to be read, and I propose here that it should, as the general introduction to Randall's projected three volumes of his monumental The Career of Philosophy, of which only Volume One has been published. The close analyses of specific men and issues presented in the latter work can be seen as the evidence meant to corroborate the thesis asserted in How Philosophy Uses Its Past. In his own words: "It remains true that it is impossible to gain insight into the history of philosophical ideas--into the dimensions of philosophizing--without being led to formulate a philosophy of cultural change" (p. 20). Randall has made in this volume a significant contribution if only by way of focusing his powerful lens on three central issues: (1) how genuine philosophizing is still "metaphysical" thinking; (2) why it is necessary to undertake a thorough investigation of the antecedents leading up to our prevailing philosophies of experience; (3) how to understand the seemingly chaotic situation in our philosophical affairs, under the age-old distinction of the "one and many." In a critical and appreciative article on Lovejoy, Randall stated his reservations toward Lovejoy's "atomistic" conception of intellectual history and proceeded to note that the history of philosophy has a philosophic function iust as philosophy has historical dimensions such that when adequately explored can tell us much about the nature and limits of our own philosophizing.1 A permeative thesis in the volume under review is that to do "history of philosophy" is to do "philosophy." To show how and why Randall believes this to be the case, we must consider in some detail three of his main themes: the redefinition of metaphysics, the broader conception of experience, and the "one and many" aspect of contemporary philosophy. One may go so far as to say that Randall is doing philosophy just as he is formulating a theory of the philosophy, for the sake of responding philosophically to the stated problems. But to respond philosophically is something that one must learn in conjunction with the examination of the historical past of philosophy. Randall thus believes, on the evidence gathered, that philosophy has revealed itself to be "a clarification and criticism of fundamental beliefs involved in all the great enterprises of human culture, science, art, religion, the moral, social and practical activity, when some new idea or some altered experience has impinged upon them and generated intellectual tensions and maladjustments" (pp. 19; 100). This way of understanding philosophy affects his approach to every problem he mentions. Indeed, even the denial of the importance of the history of philosophy is rooted in historical processes which must be understood before the denial can be fully illumined. Without historical knowledge, he argues even our decisions will suffer (p. 14). Randall calls his approach to defining philosophical problems "operational." Accordingly, we do not know whether we have a philosophical problem until a philosophical response has occurred. Looking back from the response to what it was that philosophers responded to, we See Randall's "Arthur O. Lovejoy and the History of Ideas," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,XXII (1963), 475-479; also book under review, p. 36. [1071 108 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY discover that these were problems that emerged "whenever strife of ideas and experiences forced men back to the fundamental assumptions in any field" (p. 18). Briefly put, the response has always been that of analysing, clarifying, criticizing and reconstructing "fundamental assumptions." The problems vary and... (shrink)

The article is devoted to the disclosure of the concept of “humanitarian secu­rity” in its educational perspective as an educational project. The authors state the need to protect against hybrid Russian aggression by means of the humani­tarian sphere, emphasizing the humanitarian nature of hybrid Russian aggres­sion. Based on the peculiarities of understanding and defining the humanitar­ian sphere in Ukraine, education is defined as a key aspect of this security. The authors point out the need for and consider the possibility (...) of creating a special educational component “Human Security”. The article proposes specific steps to form the framework of such a special course: (1) methodological guidelines and (2) methodological guidelines. They represent the two main parts of the article. A certain novelty of the article is that among the methodological guidelines are the author’s own developments in conducting the analysis, such as the “principle of health” of society, and the effectiveness of well-known approaches is emphasized: “historical and geographical principle”, analysis of the intercultural coexistence of national identities, discourse analysis, and for the analysis of national identities – the principles of constructivism and primordialism. The methodological guide­lines contain a clear thematization by divided blocks or modules: spiritual and value, socio-political, and practical and applied. The authors also formulate the task corpus of the special course: methodological, cognitive, and practical com­ponents. On this basis, the authors outline a map of the results to be achieved in the course of study, according to the formula «to know and be able to». At the same time, the authors emphasize the importance of the practical and research aspect of the educational component “Humanitarian Security”, which should be developed into research initiatives. The authors conclude that it is mandatory to form and improve such an educational component as a means of protection and a means of finding one’s own mistakes. (shrink)

Robert Owen was one of the most extraordinary Englishmen who ever lived and a great man. In a way his history is the history of the establishment of modern industrial Britain, reflected in the mind and activities of a very intelligent, capable and responsible industrialist, alive to the best social thought of his time. The organisation of industrial labour, factory legislation, education, trade unionism, co-operation, rationalism: he was passionately and ably engaged in all of them. His community at New (...) Lanark was the nearest thing to an industrial heaven in the Britain of dark satanic mills; he tried to found a rational co-operative community in the USA. In everything he contemplated, he saw education as a key. This selection of his writings on education illustrates his rationalist concept of the formation of character and its implications for education and society; also his growing utopian concern with social reorganisation; and third, his impact on social movements. Silver's introduction shows Owen's relationship to particular educational traditions and activities and his long-term influence on attitudes to education. (shrink)

Charles Taylor has argued that recognition is a vital human need. This essay discusses recognition as a philosophical concept, following a line of argumentation that can be traced back to Hegel’s early philosophy. An important premise of this tradition is that because a subject’s freedom is conditioned by other subjects, individual agency cannot develop without recognition. Moreover, recognition implies struggle, through which self-realization fulfills the conditions of ethical growth. I will examine the educational implications of these ideas in (...) relation to contemporary social philosophy and pedagogical theory, focusing especially on the potential of the theory of social recognition as a critique of calls for symmetric pedagogy. Using Axel Honneth’s work as a reflective surface, I will then draw some conclusions as to how to develop the concept of recognition within the contemporary philosophy of music education. (shrink)

Many edusemiotic writers have begun to closely align edusemitoics to biosemiotics; the basic logic being that, if the life process can be defined through the criterion of semiotic engagement, so can the learning process :373–387, 2006). Thus, the ecological concept of umwelt has come to be a central area of investigation for edusemiotics; allowing theorists to address learning and living concurrently, from the perspective of meaning and significance. To address the conceptual and experiential foundations of the edusemiotic perspective, this paper (...) will focus its attention on the basic semiosic processes that sustain the learner’s primary modelling system or umwelt—the world of meaning and sensory engagement that the organism is immersed in. This focus enables us to identify and explore four basic principles that an ecologically concerned edusemiotic perspective can be said to rest upon; the Iconicity Hypothesis, the Principle of Suprasubjective Relation, the Natural Learning Flow Principle, and the Continuity Principle. The identification and elaboration of these basic philosophical orientations will help establish the importance and relevance of the edusemiotic perspective for educational philosophy and theory in general. This task requires the methodological framework of Sebeok and Danesi’s Modelling Systems Theory, which; provides a biosemiotically grounded approach to understanding the diversity of modelling phenomena across all species, and; contextualizes the specific focus of this study within the broader forms of learning and knowing encompassed by a semiotic theory of learning. Hopefully such attention to the foundational doctrina of this new perspective will encourage more educational research to take what Semetsky has called the edusemiotic turn. (shrink)