In his classic text, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues that the structural principles of a society are just when they issue from a procedure that is fair. One crucial feature that makes the procedure fair is that the persons who will be subjected to these principles choose them after they have deliberated together in a condition marked by a certain balance of knowledge and ignorance. In particular, these people know enough to consider principles that are workable, yet converse (...) behind a “veil of ignorance,” unable to predict what their place in society will be and hence discouraged from slanting the principles toward any preferential interests. My paper questions whether this attempt to ensure the disinterestedness of the conversation of justice is feasible. I worry that when we approach this question practically, we discover that the education that furnishes us with the knowledge necessary to choose viable principles must at the same time preclude genuine ignorance about our social position and interests. As an alternative, I suggest that we convene the conversation of justice behind a “veil of existence.” In this condition, people possess knowledge about how their society works and even about their places in it; however, this knowledge does not foster preferential interests because all interests are subjected to the question of their existential meaning. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains in his essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” for our interests to be truly meaningful, they must be affirmed as free responses to our thrownness into existence. Yet how do we find the wherewithal to make such responsible choices rather than lapse into paralysis before their essentially arbitrary differences? My positive thesis is that we may do so by acknowledging how all of us in this existential predicament critically and mutually provoke each to commit oneself to depart from the others in specific ways. This process of provocation is thus educational. It broaches a conception of non-instrumental, non-mimetic, liberal study, one which I try to enact in a writing that employs direct address, regular returns to questions that put discourse at a loss, and expanding webs of association. In this manner, I hope to demonstrate that liberal study may deepen our appreciation of our communal nature, our camaraderie, and thus motivate us to participate unselfishly in the conversation of justice. (shrink)

René V Arcilla; Modernising Media or Modernist Medium? The Struggle for Liberal Learning in Our Information Age, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 36.

Have the critiques of humanism of the 1960s and 1970s buried this idea once and for all? Or is there a way that humanism can absorb some of this antihumanist thinking and thereby renew itself? Drawing on writings of Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger in order to illuminate artworks by Robert Smithson and Hans Holbein, René Arcilla argues for a revised idea of the human that is rooted not in some authentic, essential identity of ours, (...) but in an unruly language in which we all participate. He suggests that educatively cultivating a society that appreciates the Human language could be the aim of humanism in our time. (shrink)

This paper aims to open up a problem for discussion and further research based on the three concepts of its title. It examines how these concepts are linked by a line of reasoning developed by the French philosopher, Louis Althusser. Althusser argues that liberal education is an ideological practice that serves to reproduce capitalist social formations. It directs people into preestablished, functional, class positions in society, yet it disguises this operation by keeping attention focused on the myth of our essential (...) subjectivity. This myth, which permeates the discourse of liberal education, is what constitutes humanism. In response to this skeptical view of liberal education and humanism, I start to develop Althusser’s formulations in a different direction. I argue that a humanism that takes fuller responsibility for theorizing the practice of liberal education may be able to revise that practice so that it serves socially transformative, rather than reproductive, ends. Such a humanism may be able to ground itself on an understanding of our subjectivity that emphasizes its reliance on a community of learning, one whose values intrinsically oppose those of capitalism. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.

Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology.

New concepts may prove necessary to profit from the avalanche of sequence data on the genome, transcriptome, proteome and interactome and to relate this information to cell physiology. Here, we focus on the concept of large activity-based structures, or hyperstructures, in which a variety of types of molecules are brought together to perform a function. We review the evidence for the existence of hyperstructures responsible for the initiation of DNA replication, the sequestration of newly replicated origins of replication, cell division (...) and for metabolism. The processes responsible for hyperstructure formation include changes in enzyme affinities due to metabolite-induction, lipid-protein affinities, elevated local concentrations of proteins and their binding sites on DNA and RNA, and transertion. Experimental techniques exist that can be used to study hyperstructures and we review some of the ones less familiar to biologists. Finally, we speculate on how a variety of in silico approaches involving cellular automata and multi-agent systems could be combined to develop new concepts in the form of an Integrated cell (I-cell) which would undergo selection for growth and survival in a world of artificial microbiology. (shrink)

This article, corresponding to a part of the restitution of a financed international research project between France, Brazil, Canada, Italy and Belgium, aims to offer a modelisation and qualitative evaluation of mediation care settings based on an original methodological tool that involves identifying the typical games at the foundations of creativity, following a multidisciplinary perspective. Therapeutic mediations are settings or devices organised around a “pliable medium”, often artistic, like painting, modeling, writing, ​and theatre, which are very widespread in institutional practices, (...) both in France and abroad. The scientific objectives of this research consist in a multi-disciplinary exploration (anthropology, criminology, neuroscience, clinical psychology) of the process of creative symbolisation understood as a process of transformation involving play. According to this orientation, play can be defined as a psychic process whereby a subjective experience can be explored with pleasure, and consequently symbolised and appropriated. Our fundamental and original hypothesis is that play is at the source of the creative process, conceived as a work of metabolisation by the psyche of playful experiences during the different stages of life. The review of the understanding of play in psychoanalysis, anthropology, criminology and neuroscience emphasises the richness of this model and the importance of reflecting on the typical games in the field of psychic care. A clinical example of treatment in a pictorial therapeutic mediation setting of a child with psychotic disorders makes it possible to identify a number of typical games as well as the modalities of interpretation of the therapists through play. These multidisciplinary studies lead to the presentation of a general table of typical games, and these first results highlight the richness of identifying typical games in clinical settings. Ultimately, the multidisciplinary approach shows the interest of the model of play in the evaluation of therapeutic mediation settings, with a convergence of the different disciplines emphasising the pertinence of this model. The scientific impact of this research overlaps with its societal impact, through the development of innovative tools for evaluating therapeutic mediations, in order to take account of the evolution of the different forms of social expression of psychic suffering. (shrink)

According to anthropological philosopher René Girard, an important human adaptation is our propensity to victimize or scapegoat. He argued that other traits upon which human sociality depends would have destabilized primate dominance-based social hierarchies, making conspecific conflict a limiting factor in hominin evolution. He surmised that a novel mechanism for inhibiting intragroup conflict must have emerged contemporaneously with our social traits, and speculated that this was the tendency to spontaneously unite around the victimization of single individuals. He described an unconscious (...) tendency to both ascribe blame and to imbue the accused with a sacred mystique. This emotionally cathartic scapegoat mechanism, he claimed, enhanced social cohesion, and was the origin of religion, mythology, sacrifice, ritual, cultural institutions, and social norms. It would have functioned by modifying the beliefs and behaviors of the group, rather than of the accused, making the act of accusation more important than the substance. This article aims to examine the empirical evidence for Girard’s claims, and argues that the scapegoat hypothesis has commonalities with several other evolutionary hypotheses, including Wrangham’s execution hypothesis on self-domestication, Dunbar’s hypothesis on the role of storytelling in maintaining group stability, and DeScioli and Kurzban’s hypothesis on the role of non-consequentialist morality in curtailing conflict. Potential implications of the scapegoat hypothesis for evolutionary psychology and psychiatry are discussed. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Au sein du service de placement où exerce en tant que psychologue le premier auteur de cet article a été développée une recherche longitudinale qui vise à explorer le fonctionnement psychique des adolescents auteurs de violences sexuelles et les modalités de leur accompagnement éducatif et thérapeutique. L’article propose de se centrer sur leur placement en famille d’accueil, la dynamique relationnelle témoignant des particularités des liens tissés avec les premiers objets. La présentation de la situation de Nicolas mettra en exergue les (...) difficultés, malentendus et usures qui semblent illustrer un scénario qui se répète et qui conduit à la rupture. Les auteurs ouvrent une réflexion, dans une perspective psychodynamique, pour tenter de comprendre les mouvements psychiques à l’œuvre du côté de l’adolescent, notamment sur un plan intersubjectif, dans la perspective développée par René Kaës, et invitent à s’intéresser aux adaptations nécessaires au sein des dispositifs éducativo-thérapeutiques d’accompagnement. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

It Is My Pleasure To Introduce this discussion of Naoko Saito's American Philosophy in Translation. We have contributions from three experts in American philosophy, all of whom have been in conversation with the author for many years: Jim Garrison, Vincent Colapietro, and Steven Fesmire. Prior to their contributions, I would like to set the scene with some brief remarks to introduce the book and to explain something of its background.Over the past two decades, I have worked closely with Saito on (...) a number of projects, and I have been familiar with her ideas for this book since its inception. In some respects, the book is the product of studies in American philosophy that go back to her time as an undergraduate in Tokyo in the 1980s, ideas that were advanced considerably when she did an MA at Harvard, taking classes with Stanley Cavell and Hilary Putnam, and subsequently when she completed her PhD at Teachers College, with René Arcilla as her advisor and Cavell as a member of her committee. It was against this background that, in 2006, Saito published her first singly authored book, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson. As that title indicates, she was already exploring the relation between Dewey and pragmatism, on the one hand, and American transcendentalism, on the other. Her sense back then of some separation between these traditions of thought, and of the nature of the tensions between them, has been refined and, for the most part, strengthened in the years since that earlier publication. No doubt she has been influenced in this by Cavell, who, in one essay, for example, asks: “What's the use of calling Emerson a pragmatist?” In any case, her account of this relationship is extended and altered significantly in American Philosophy in Translation.Through the course of her research, Saito has been conscious of the fact that she is studying American philosophy from a distance—a distance that is geographical, cultural, and linguistic—and she retains a thoughtful humility in relation to this. But she also sees here a possible opening to the perception and release of untapped aspects of these traditions of thought, in ways that might fertilize and extend the ground in which the inheritance of American philosophy has flourished. This is very much the line that she pursues in this book. In the light of this, and as the book's title indicates, there is a particular focus on language and translation. It is important that the latter term is understood not merely as an attractive metaphor for change and transformation: crucial to her developing argument is the experience of translating between languages and the reality of the experience in the lives of so many today, within the academy and without. In the course of this experience, one is sometimes confronted, quite self-consciously, with a word or phrase that resists translation. But sometimes—more often in the life of the accomplished or habituated speaker of the foreign language in question—the experience persists as an undercurrent, subtly opening a world that is other in some respects from the one that comes to light in the mother tongue.By contrast, to the many (especially Anglophone) monolingually minded, the need for translation can appear as an unwanted barrier, something of a nuisance, a problem to be solved. This is by no means a response confined, however, to the uneducated (or the Anglophone or the monolingual). There is also a sophisticated variant of this narrowness of outlook where faith is placed in an artificial or technical language with the power, the fantasy runs, to overcome the vagaries of natural language. Hilary Putnam recalls how Rudolf Carnap, whose stature as a thinker and as a human being he does not doubt, felt strongly that “for all x, planned x is better than unplanned x” and was drawn to the idea of a common world language: Thus the idea of a socialist world in which everyone spoke Esperanto (except scientists, who, for their technical work, would employ notations from symbolic logic) was one which would have delighted him. And I recently had a conversation with a student who remarked quite casually that it would not be a bad idea if there were only one language and one literature: “We would get used to it, and it might help to prevent war.” (Putnam 185)Putnam does not deign to respond to the latter assertion. What is foregrounded in his discussion is that monolingualism is likely to hide the plurality of goods that is realized in different cultures. The importance of that plurality is surely something that the luminaries of American philosophy bring to light. Indeed, Putnam's key point of reference in making these remarks is William James.The undercurrent of translation in the experience of the more accomplished speaker of a foreign language can act then as a sensitization to cultural difference, to different possibilities of thought and being. But in fact, this shifting of thought can apply within any language itself, not just inter- but intra-lingually, opening an insight that is close to the heart of American philosophy. If one can hear the cry of the rooster, then one may be wakened also by Thoreau's turn of expression in the idea of the “father tongue”: through a maturing experience of the language we are brought up with, we come to “a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak” (Thoreau 69). This renewed investment in language, this continual return to our words, is what opens them to new thought and gives them interest. It is first an inheritance from the culture we are brought up in, but it dies in our speech and thinking if we do not turn it to something new. To build, we must begin by borrowing an axe, but we can return it sharper than when we borrowed it.If translation is operative in our language as a whole, as Saito's argument shows, this points to the many little rebirths within ourselves and in our interactions with one another. In fact, the point becomes political in that democracy depends upon this renewal of our words. This renewal resists not only the allure of ideology but also the now familiar etiolated rhetoric of “political realism.” Moreover, it points beyond the reliance, within the politics of recognition, on the defining of groups and categories toward a politics of acknowledgment.In this vein, Saito's outsider perspective is in tune with what Richard Bernstein has called the “global resurgence of American pragmatism.” The borderline or outsider perspective can have a powerful effect on thought, in relation to which Saito invites the reader to recall that America's past was itself an outsider-past: it was outside Europe, a relation with which it was bound to struggle, but it was also ready, as Emerson and Thoreau demonstrate, to draw from greater cultural distances, where it found congenial aspects in East Asian thought.Saito stresses the anti-foundationalist character of American philosophy as of critical importance for both philosophy and politics, and again her discussion of language is crucial to this. Dewey's emphasis on communication, with his relatively flat style of prose, is contrasted with the stylistic experiment and invention that she finds in Emerson, Thoreau, and Cavell. She sees the style of these writers, in some contrast to that of Dewey, as having a salutary, destabilizing effect. She wants to destabilize Dewey. It is entirely consonant with her position, furthermore, that she raises doubts about the bland acceptance of a politics of inclusion. Not only can this become a surreptitious form of discipline and control: it can engender the conformism that Emerson worked so hard to prevent.The book finishes on a more aesthetic note, taking up lines of thought in Dewey's aesthetics but turning this toward the more extravagant elision, in Thoreau, of the functional and the beautiful. The thematization of the aesthetic in this way is, she tries to show, crucial to our (political) world. (shrink)

« Devant les nombreux changements qui touchent l’école, le rôle de la direction d’établissement se complexifie. Simultanément, le nombre de problèmes éthiques vécus dans les milieux scolaires s’accroît, et il devient nécessaire que les directions d’établissement développent leur agir éthique pour faire face à ces nouveaux défis. Le développement de l’agir éthique ne s’effectue cependant pas de manière spontanée ; il est plutôt le fruit d’une pratique réflexive. Il est donc souhaitable d’accompagner et de guider les professionnels dans ce processus (...) afin d’éviter qu’ils évoluent seuls dans un contexte instable et dans des situations habitées d’enjeux éthiques parfois difficiles à cerner. Le présent ouvrage propose des idées de formation conçues à la suite de diverses recherches menées au cours de la dernière décennie auprès de professionnels de l’éducation. L’auteure souhaite aider la direction d’établissement scolaire à développer son agir éthique, et ce, en abordant différents angles : l’introduction à des fondements théoriques en éthique, la mise en évidence de quelques enjeux dominants actuels dans les écoles afin de mieux circonscrire la source de certains problèmes éthiques ainsi que la présentation de stratégies et d’outils à utiliser dans la formation et dans la pratique. »--. (shrink)

La religion ne serait-elle que déraison ?

Scripturalizing the Human is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that reconceptualizes and models "scriptural studies" as a critical, comparative set of practices with broad ramifications for scholars of religion and biblical studies. Contributors use the category of "scriptures"--understood not simply as texts, but as freighted shorthand for the dynamics and ultimate politics of language--as tools for self-illumination and self-analysis.

Theory of Literature was originally published in 1949. It is not a textbook introducing the young to the elements of literary appreciation nor a survey of the techniques employed in scholarly research. The authors have sought to unite "poetics" (or literary theory) and "criticism" (evaluation of literature) with "scholarship" ("research") and "literary history" (the "dynamics"of literature, in contrast to the "statics" of theory and criticism).

Cet ouvrage propose de retracer le parcours intellectuel et spirituel de l’écrivain roumain d’expression française Emil Cioran (1911-1995). Le texte s’appuie sur une approche biographique pour saisir les enjeux philosophiques et identitaires de la vie et de l’oeuvre de Cioran. Tout d’abord son enfance imprégnée de culture allemande où liberté et insouciance cèdent vite la place à l’ennui ; sa fascination pour les thèses ultra-nationalistes pendant sa jeunesse studieuse et angoissée ; la volonté d’aveuglement que lui inspire ensuite son mépris (...) des affaires humaines ; la fuite de la Roumanie pendant la Guerre et l’affirmation de son incertitude identitaire et intellectuelle ; l’abandon finalement de son pays et de sa langue comme refus de sa propre histoire. L’ouvrage tente d’apporter un regard nouveau sur l’homme et son oeuvre pour résoudre les contradictions inhérentes à son renversement identitaire: bien que la mémoire soit au centre de sa pensée, Cioran se dirigea toujours plus vers la nécessité de l’oubli. La démarche de Vincent Piednoir démontre que cette volonté d’oubli a inscrit le philosophe dans la mémoire collective. De nombreux livres ont commenté la pensée de Cioran. L’originalité de celui-ci est de s’étendre, sans esprit de polémique mais sans tabou, sur sa jeunesse roumaine et profasciste. (shrink)