Makings of the Sea is an inquiry into the makings of the Mediterranean imagination in the 20th century, focusing on specific cases in the visual and performing arts, music and literature. Following a thematic structure that falls broadly under the headings of journey, doubt and nostalgia, this is an essay on Mediterranean aesthetics.

This paper argues that in foregoing the questions that emerge from the dialectical relationship between form and meaning, an intrinsic fallacy mistakes the relationship between the arts and education for a simplistic mechanism of signification—a false “ease”—where empty forms are supposedly given meaning by ethical and aesthetic givens as if the pedagogy of art were analogous to an empty room that was (or still needs to be) inhabited. Art’s false “ease” presents a tautology that presumes the relationship between the arts (...) and learning on assumptions that force a false equivalence between (a) the perception of implicit causes that constitute a number of externalised artistic attributes (such as creative, critical, and intuitive forms of thinking and making) by which the arts are instrumentalised, and (b) a number of desired effects that are seen as being equal to the relative value that an arts subject (or discipline) commands in a perceived relationship with the world in terms of its use and therefore function. To counter this distortion this paper makes a case for a pedagogical aesthetics that would unlearn—and thereby exit—the educationalist tautology of art’s false ease. While politically this would mean that the arts are recognized in their ability to think and act outside the traditional notion of schooling as a walled polis, philosophically this represents a challenge to move arts education away from the “spatial” concepts by which dialectical narratives, such as those of form and content, have been hitherto assumed as constructivist signifiers. (shrink)

This essay looks at the relationship between formative aesthetics, language and the historical anticipation that begins with Antonio Gramsci's discussion of Kant's idea of noumenon. In Gramsci both education (as formazione) and aesthetics stem from a concern for power in terms of the hegemonic relations that are inherent to history as a political horizon. The title cites Gramci's suggestion that Kant's noumenon should be read as a proviso set apart by a ‘relative ignorance’ of reality [‘relativa ignoranza’ della realtà] to (...) be resolved by a future science. Yet far from another epistemological layering, a future science must also resolve those hegemonic relations of power that emerge from formation as a political act figured in the agonistic character of language as lingua and linguaggio. Further down the lane of our ‘relative ignorance’ we are confronted by a Post-Taylorist condition that precludes any false hopes of a reversal of society's educational, economic and political misfortunes. Yet, while Post-Taylorism confirms that this state of affairs is irreversible, a deeper inquiry into the aesthetic-agonistic character of formation could afford us answers that are in no way solutions but, because adept to struggle and are characteristically aesthetical, might provide an understanding of the logic of irreversibility. Because it remains conscious of its ‘relative ignorance’, this assumption offers a hopeful approach that comes to us sideways; thereby avoiding the predicament of what Lyotard and Thébaud regarded as a condition where ‘the prescriptive is derived from the descriptive’. (shrink)

Established scholarship in arts education is invariably related to theories of development founded on notions of multiple intelligence and experiential learning. Yet when contemporary arts practice is retraced on a philosophical horizon, one begins to engage with other cases for learning. This state of affairs reveals art’s inherent paradox where the expectation of learning is substituted by forms of unlearning. This paper begins to approach unlearning through the tension between art and education, and more specifically through the dialectical relationship between (...) education’s dialogic agonism and art’s negative antagonism. What is here being proposed as unlearning reflects a critique of the moral-pedagogical outlooks that are imposed on art where artworks are expected to tell stories of truth through their propensity towards the beautiful and the good. In re-reading experiential anticipation as a form of anamnesis through a process of negation and contradiction, unlearning is also located in forms of mimetic scoping by which art’s assumed pedagogical trajectory turns into the opposite of recollection: as an act of willed forgetfulness. This peculiar ‘movement’ from a state of learning to that of unlearning constitutes the basis for a special kind of pedagogical aesthetics where the challenges of criticality and laterality articulate a special ‘world’ where learning may well work backwards. (shrink)

This article reviews John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect, A Critical Engagement with Dewey's Democracy and Education, edited and spearheaded by David T. Hansen, with contributions by Gert Biesta, Reba N. Page, Larry A. Hickman, Naoko Saito, Gary D. Fenstermacher, Herbert M. Kliebard, Sharon Fieman-Nemser and Elizabeth Minnich. This review will not only praise and evaluate the merits of this book, but will also attempt to frame this new study of Dewey within the challenges that continue to engage education (...) in the realms of democracy, as the latter continues to strive for its own survival. While highlighting salient aspects of Hansen et al.'s rereading of Dewey's great work, this review seeks to frame both Dewey's text and this Deweyan study within the breadth of those other challenges by which education—and in turn philosophy of education—has come to take on issues such as: the nexus between theory and practice, the prevalent domination of the social scientific paradigm in education and the continuous threat of the standardisation and institutionalisation of human learning. It will be argued that, to meet this challenge, philosophy of education must sustain a continuous engagement with Dewey's work. A rereading of Dewey also involves a revaluation of his pragmatic theory of education and its lineage, moving from Emerson's metaphilosophy to Cavell's ethics. As Hansen et al. invariably engage with the latter, this review will question, through Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of pragmatisation, whether Deweyan pragmatism can still challenge the current state of affairs by which education is not only systematised away from learning, but also subsumed into a more institutionalised state—a condition that immediately jars with Dewey's own philosophical instincts and pedagogical labours. (shrink)

Though I am not a linguist by trade, writing “of” (rather than “about”) literary philosophy in Maltese with the intent of exploring the interrelationship between the experience of the contingent self, displacement, and the pain of beauty, becomes a linguistic affair. In this paper I explore how doing philosophy in Maltese brings one to engage with disciplines in which one was entirely educated in other languages (in this case, primarily in English and Italian), and how this opens new opportunities that (...) move inwards as well as outwards. This aspect of directional thinking, as it were, also enters those immanent and external spheres by which phenomenology and aesthetics are put in play. This refers to how the “musk” of one’s language (a term whose linguistic use I first encountered in Seamus Heaney’s take on poetry’s indigeneity), is bound to carry one’s aesthetic imaginary onto a wide horizon whose boundaries could only be likened to the porousness of rubble walls. Such rubble walls – these ħitan tas-sejjieħ (in Maltese) – tend to mark territories while facilitating a high degree of fluency between them, to the extent that we could speak of the pattern of bocage as a contingency of meaning just as the pattern of bricolage implies an act of an intentional weaving. This paper reflects on the process of writing in Maltese as a means by which contingency as an approach to living and thinking, remains core to the understanding of how the self is immersed in what we broadly identify with the poetics (and therefore, the making) of the Mediterranean imaginary. (shrink)

This essay starts off with a modern-day court jester praising a Pope. Fo presents us with an historic moment: Luciani scandalises his Church by calling God “Mother.” With utmost seriousness, Fo appreciates the Pope’s kindness and warmth by which the artist perceives a way of scandalising the world out of complacency. In their idealised and situated presentations of the world, the sacred and the profane return the necessary to the contingent as moments of equal attention and distraction. Likewise, irony and (...) satire mark our situated sense of the ideal by an inability to unlearn the certainties by which we are urged to construct our world. This is done by first presenting a situated pedagogical context that refuses to provide solutions presumed on measurement, certainty or finality. Secondly this begins to lay claim to the political, aesthetic and moral values that are gained through art’s ironic disposition. Thirdly, through our contingent states of being we begin to understand how education is culturally conditioned and why we need to shift it to another gear – that of unlearning through a weak pedagogy. An atheist, Fo suggests that thanks to Pope Luciani, we now could endear to the Holy Spirit as a spirito ridens, a spirit that laughs. Here one finds a kenotic sense that gives us a glimpse in how an ironic disposition owes its strength and effectiveness to a weak pedagogy. By dint of such weakness, the jester’s pedagogical disposition becomes a form of resistance, exiting the Court in order to be with the people and consequently transformed by the people. (shrink)

Art’s Way Out invites readers to examine how what we call “art” enters a conditioned relationship with the polity that leaves the occasion of education and the condition of culture in a quandary that is at best inept and at worse oppressive. There are two reasons for this: because any relationship between art and education is aporetic by dint of how they have emerged in between their respective autonomous and heteronomous forms of being and knowing; and because in the volatility (...) of representation, any cultural and educational conditioning is bound to vacillate between the same teleological states by which expressions of a political objective find themselves bookended by fascism .This is often overlooked by the constructivist expectations that are commonly invested in art and education. Moreover, any crossing of art with philosophy is bound to fall foul of the excessive desires that we project on them. This has nothing to do w .. (shrink)

Prompting this book is the paradox of belonging. What pushes the author to write are art's questions. Rather than take the route of writing, artists in academia could opt for the studio, teaching students, and occasionally indulge in conferences and symposia. However, beyond such rituals, writing art's questions remains akin to art's acts of belonging. In these lessons of belonging this is done through art's paradox. Belonging is a matter of art because art belongs to the aporia that writes it.

This is the first reference work to explore and define what continental philosophy of education is and what its boundaries are. The book includes 28 chapters written by leading scholars based in Belgium, Canada, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, Taiwan, The UK and the USA. It is subdivided into three sections covering the metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics of education and the chapters focus on philosophical concepts such otherness, empathy, (...) personhood and problems including political influences on education and the limits of education. (shrink)

More than a book about Illich, this is a conversation with Illich's work as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, just under twenty years after his passing, and almost fifty years since his Deschooling Society was first published. As Illich is beatified and demonised in equal measure, Educing Ivan Illich chooses to focus on the relationship between reform, contingency and disestablishment. As reform stands for a plurality of reiterations that seek effective forms of accordance, in our recognition (...) of contingency we freely claim that even as we might recognize the presence of universality in how everything appears on a shared horizon, we are not denied the existence and dynamic reality of plural possibilities in their inherent contradictions. In this bargain of synchronicity, we find that disestablishing the reified universe by which we have, for so long, traded, staked and even lost our freedom and intelligence, is not just a desire but it becomes a must. Unlike other commentators of Illich's work, Baldacchino argues that what is radical about Illich is not a freestanding concept of deschooling but in how, in disestablishing social life, he exits the walls of the polis by upholding tradition as a disruptive force. In such light Illich's work is read in what remains overdue. Odd though it may sound, this is an urgent need for anyone interested Illich's unique and irreplaceable contribution. To that end, Educing Ivan Illich has far more to offer than is usually expected from a commentary on someone else's work. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci is one of the major social and political theorists of the 20th century whose work has had an enormous influence on several fields, including educational theory and practice. Gramsci and Education demonstrates the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's thought for contemporary educational debates. The essays are written by scholars located in different parts of the world, a number of whom are well known internationally for their contributions to Gramscian scholarship and/or educational research. The collection deals with a broad range (...) of topics, including schooling, adult education in general, popular education, workers' education, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, multicultural education, and the role of intellectuals in contemporary society. (shrink)

What are the possibilities for art to provide non-reactionary, productive spaces for pedagogical endeavors? How can culture function pedagogically and critically beyond the continuing constraints of positivism on the one hand and fixed systems on the other? In what ways can art’s impasse open spaces, its weakness move beyond the teleological, and its exit provide pedagogical possibilities beyond its current horizons? These and other such questions about the limitations and potential for pedagogy and culture through the lens of art lie (...) at the core of Baldacchino’s Art’s Way Out: Exit Pedagogy and the Cultural Condition. This review of his work is divided into two overarching sections, a summary of his work and questions that his arguments have raised for this reader, and questions that address the ideas presented in Art’s Way Out and the philosophical tools utilized to make them.Summary, Questions, and ArgumentsAt one level, this work asserts that art is central to pedagogy and p .. (shrink)

Une centaine de fragments inédits attribués au plus célèbre représentant de l'Ecole cynique sommeillait depuis près de 2 500 ans sous le doux soleil d'Orient. La voix de Diogène de Sinope, le philosophe-chien, l'homme au tonneau qui embrasse les statues l'hiver, retraverse les âges. Au terme d'une véritable chasse au trésor remontant jusqu'aux penseurs arabes du Xe siècle, Adeline Baldacchino propose pour la première fois en langue française ces nouveaux fragments. On y retrouve avec délice le Diogène insolent dont (...) les paraboles sont si riches d'enseignements. Maître de l'invective, il témoigne de son amour de la vie, de son intransigeance et de sa résistance au pouvoir. Une occasion unique de redécouvrir l'esprit cynique, sa force critique, sa passion pour la liberté et son invraisemblable modernité. (shrink)

With precision and profundity born of 30 years of devoted study, John Boyle offers an essential introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas on Scripture, shedding helpful light on the goals, methods, and commitments that animate the Angelic Doctor's engagement with the sacred page. Because the genius of St. Thomas's approach to the Bible lies not so much in its novelty but rather in the fidelity and clarity with which he recapitulates the riches of the preceding interpretive Tradition, this initiation into (...) St. Thomas's vision of Scripture is itself an orientation to the Church's vision of Scripture, from the Fathers through and beyond the Middle Ages. St. Thomas's embeddedness within the Church's Tradition and his own historical context is integral to his approach to Scripture, yet it sets him at some distance from modern readers, for whom his interpretive vision may seem perplexing or even impenetrable. In this Primer, Boyle first provides an acclimation to this medieval context through a survey and explanation of pertinent technical terminology used by St. Thomas and characteristic of the scholastic theology of the time. With an eye to the medieval practice of considering Scripture according to the fourfold division of causes, Boyle builds on this initial foundation by exploring in turn St. Thomas's accounts of the end or use of Scripture (final cause), its divine and human authorship (efficient cause), its order and division (material cause), and its literary styles or genres (formal cause). Drawing on writings from across St. Thomas's corpus, but especially his work On the Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture and the prologues to his biblical commentaries, Boyle masterfully elucidates both the hermeneutical principles and deep wisdom of the Angelic Doctor's approach to Scripture, imparting invaluable guidance not only for reading and understanding St. Thomas and other great masters of the Tradition, but also-and ultimately-for understanding Scripture in light of this Tradition and reading it with greater benefit and joy. (shrink)

The notion of proof is central to mathematics yet it is one of the most difficult aspects of the subject to teach and master. In particular, undergraduate mathematics students often experience difficulties in understanding and constructing proofs. Understanding Mathematical Proof describes the nature of mathematical proof, explores the various techniques that mathematicians adopt to prove their results, and offers advice and strategies for constructing proofs. It will improve students’ ability to understand proofs and construct correct proofs of their own. The (...) first chapter of the text introduces the kind of reasoning that mathematicians use when writing their proofs and gives some example proofs to set the scene. The book then describes basic logic to enable an understanding of the structure of both individual mathematical statements and whole mathematical proofs. It also explains the notions of sets and functions and dissects several proofs with a view to exposing some of the underlying features common to most mathematical proofs. The remainder of the book delves further into different types of proof, including direct proof, proof using contrapositive, proof by contradiction, and mathematical induction. The authors also discuss existence and uniqueness proofs and the role of counter examples. (shrink)

Despite recurring efforts, a gap exists across a variety of contexts between the protection of patients' safety in theory and in practice. This timely Research Handbook highlights these critical issues and suggests both legal and policy changes are necessary to better protect patients' safety. Multidisciplinary in nature, this Research Handbook features contributions from eminent academics, policy makers and medical practitioners from the Global North and South, discussing the essential facets concerning patient safety and the law. It highlights how the role (...) of legislation and case law has the potential to influence, both positively and negatively, medical practice and the quality of care. Chapters explore patient safety and the global health agenda; physiotherapy; 'non-therapeutic' clinical research with children; patient safety awareness in healthcare education; and the increasing use of robotics and artificial intelligence in healthcare. Outlining a wide range of international perspectives on patient safety and the law, this Research Handbook will appeal to academics and researchers specialising in health and medical law, human rights and healthcare regulation. It will also serve as a valuable resource for legal and medical practitioners alike, as well as clinicians and professionals working in healthcare governance. (shrink)

There is a widespread misinterpretation of kant according to which an analytic judgment is one that follows from a definition. Through a study of kant's theory of definition, And the role in knowledge that he ascribes to definition, It is shown that this is indeed a misinterpretation. Much criticism of kant's theory of analytic judgments is vitiated by substituting a modern definition of "analytic" for the one kant gave.

The city has featured as a central image in utopian thought. In planning the foundation of the new and ideal city there is a close interconnection between ideas about urban form and the vision of the moral good. The spatial structure of the ideal city in these visions is a framing device that embodies and articulates not only political philosophy but is itself an articulation of moral and cosmological systems. This paper analyses three different utopian moments in three different historical (...) epochs – Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), the Choson dynasty foundation of the city of Seoul (1395) and the modernist utopian urbanism of the controversial Le Corbusier (1887–1965). In this analysis attention is drawn to the cosmological and moral visions articulated in these three ‘images of the city’ (Lynch). The opposition between rationalistic/mechanistic and religious/traditional urban design can prove to be an oversimplification that obscures the complex interrelations between the moral geometry and the natural alignments of the ideal urban form. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the way affect has featured in discussions of identity, focusing on ethnic and national identities. While affect features in most discussions of ethnicity it has mostly been dismissed as a testament to the irrationality and dangerous qualities of the identity in question. Such discussions adopt a simplistic model of human psychology, usually based on a hydraulic model of the emotions. After considering some recent and pioneering work that foregrounds the role of affectivity in group formations, (...) I proceed to outline the basis for a phenomenological psychology of affect and group identities incorporating insights from psychoanalysis and phenomenology. One cannot begin to discuss the proper role of identity in the public sphere without first considering the emotional dynamics that underlie such group formations. (shrink)

This succinct but illuminating book defends the free market, while criticizing a narrowly economistic understanding of man and society. Baldacchino argues that a sound economy has ethical and cultural prerequisites that are integral to its survival. Includes an introduction by Russell Kirk. _From the Introduction: _ “Any society’s moral order develops from its religion, its philosophy, its humane literature. The discipline of political economy, little understood until the latter half of the eighteenth century, is no independent creation: what economic (...) views one holds must depend upon one’s apprehension of human nature. An economic system indifferent to morality will not long endure. For proof of these theses, read with attention Baldacchino’s succinct study, the work of a sound scholar endowed with a philosophical habit of mind.”–_Russell Kirk_. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

This work reflects philosophically on the nature of beauty, examining such questions in Kant's aesthetic theory as: what is beauty?; how are natural and artistic beauty related?; what is sublimity in art and nature? This critical study in Kant's aesthetics offers insights to areas of his philosophical enquiry and familiarity with relevant fundamentals of his thought.

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age generated a great deal of attention—and has stimulated important debates—among a diverse range of scholars in sociology, history, politics, religious studies and to a lesser extent, anthropologists. Much of the debate has focused on the implications of Taylor’s work for the so-called secularisation thesis and the place of religion in the so-called public sphere. The essays in this volume arise less out of such concerns and more from Taylor’s discussion of secularism in a third, ‘experiential’ (...) sense. Each paper addresses the question of what it is like to ‘believe’ in the modern world. Among other things the authors of the essays published in this Special Issue are concerned to develop better understandings of the conditions under which belief and unbelief may be experienced as open, rather than closed, to the possibility of other ontological construals, thereby building on Taylor’s insights into the phenomenology of modern secularism. (shrink)

In _Educating for Virtue_, five scholars address one of the most pressing issues of our time: the relationship between education and the development of moral character. With essays by Claes G. Ryn, Russell Kirk, Paul Gottfried, Peter J. Stanlis, Solveig Eggerz. _From the Foreword:_ _ _ “If there is a single thread that runs through these essays, it is the recognition of a universal order that transcends the flux of human life and gives meaning to it. Insofar as men act (...) in accordance with this order, they experience true happiness and are brought into community with others who are similarly motivated. But men are afflicted with contrary impulses that are destructive of universal order. When acted upon, these impulses bring suffering and a sense of meaninglessness and despair; the result is disintegration and conflict--within both the personality and society at large. Yet so tempting are the attactions of these impulses that they frequently prevail and must be taken into account in any realistic assessment of human affairs. This tension within the person between competing desires--the conflict between what Plato called the One and the Many--is the ultimate reality of human experience. To apprehend this reality, and to act in the light of the transcendent purpose with appropriate reverence and restraint, is the essence of wisdom; and to help deepen and strengthen this apprehension--through philosophy, history, literature, and the arts and sciences--is the overarching purpose of any education worthy of the name.”. (shrink)

Through the close analysis of musical performance and tradition, the scholarly contributiors to Island Songs provide a global review of how island songs, their lyrics, and their singers engage with the challenges of modernity, migration, and social change uncovering common patterns despite the diversity and local character of their subjects"--Cover p. [4].

This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in _A Theory of Justice_ but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines--religious, philosophical, and moral--coexist within (...) the framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines? This edition includes the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," which outlines Rawls ' plans to revise _Political Liberalism,_ which were cut short by his death. "An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on _A Theory of Justice_...a decisive turn towards political philosophy." --_Times Literary Supplement_. (shrink)

A Norton Library edition of Locke's Second Treatise of Government, edited by A. John Simmons.

Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and ...

Previous edition, 1st, published in 1971.

"What is a military aircraft? John Law shows in his beautiful analysis that it is a constant oscillation between multiplicity and singularity.

John Searle's Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979) developed a highly original and influential approach to the study of language. But behind both works lay the assumption that the philosophy of language is in the end a branch of the philosophy of the mind: speech acts are forms of human action and represent just one example of the mind's capacity to relate the human organism to the world. The present book is concerned with these biologically fundamental capacities, (...) and, though third in the sequence, in effect it provides the philosophical foundations for the other two. Intentionality is taken to be the crucial mental phenomenon, and its analysis involves wide-ranging discussions of perception, action, causation, meaning, and reference. In all these areas John Searle has original and stimulating views. He ends with a resolution of the 'mind-body' problem. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.