The precise position to be assigned to the Categories in the Aristotelian system has always been somewhat of a puzzle. On the one hand, they seem to be worked into the warp of its texture, as in the classification of change, and Aristotle can argue from the premiss that they constitute an exhaustive division of the kinds of Being . On the other hand, both in the completed scheme of his logic and in his constructive metaphysic they retire into the (...) background, giving place to other notions, such as causation, change, actuality and potentiality. Investigation has, moreover, been hampered, especially in Germany, by attempts to correlate them with the Kantian Categories, with which they have obvious points of contact. But Kant's formal a priori concepts by which the mind makes for itself a world, to use Mr. Bosanquet's phrase, imply an attitude to knowledge and reality so utterly opposed to the Aristotelian that the comparison has tended to confusion rather than elucidation. Scholars now realize better that the Aristotelian Categories can only be understood in connexion with the problems of Aristotle's own age. (shrink)

The ontological turn in the humanities and social sciences has prompted some scholars of education to shift their focus of inquiry away from questions of epistemology (i.e., knowledge) to metaphysical matters related to being and the nature of existence. In this paper, I turn to ontology and make an argument for integrating and explicitly teaching theories of immanence in teacher education courses. I argue that integrating and explicitly teaching theories of immanence in teacher education courses can radically reorient students’ thinking, (...) being, and doing, which can fundamentally change how they are able to see, perceive, and make sense of events that unfold in their classrooms. Using vignettes of two encounters at an Italian preschool, I think with theory (Jackson and Mazzei 2012; St. Pierre, 2008, Ringrose and Renolds 2014) to demonstrate how philosophies of immanence reorient thought and produce “a lively new ontology” in which “the world’s radical aliveness comes to light” (Barad 2007, p. 33). The theoretical concepts I use include political theorist Jane Bennett’s (2010) concept of thing power, along with physicist Karen Barad’s (2007) concepts of entanglement and intra-action. (shrink)

This essay investigates Gadamer's hermeneutic theory and its application to theatre. Attention to Gadamer's views of theatre and performative interpretation provides a foundation to theorize a more sustainable canon. Classics that constitute a sustainable canon operate within a tradition through a community of interpretation that continually returns to interpret them anew. This structure also describes the theatrical repertoire. Several of Gadamer's central themes find easy analogues on stage: play, the history of effect (Wirkungsgeschichte), the participation of an audience in the (...) fusion of horizons, and art's making present continuity the past. Gadamer provides a framework for understanding the work of interpretation of a dramatic text as a shared participatory event. In particular, Gadamer's hermeneutic theory can make sense of the how performance history makes discoveries that "sticks" to a script, particularly as when and how it enters and influences the canon. Gadamer's hermeneutics help to interpret how innovative performance choices and stage spectacle are part of a play's meaning; these interpretive interventions in drama's reception history are significant and not simply ornamentation to some "truth of the play" accessed only via the reenactment of the original compositional context. Occasional reparative interpretations of the canon, in turn, help to sustain the community. (shrink)

After reading carefully the essay which, in his recently-published Varia Socratica, Part I., Prof. A. E. Taylor has written on the use of the words and in the Greek literature of the Socratic and Platonic periods, I find myself on the one hand in agreement with him as to the importance of such linguistic investigations for the understanding of Plato, and on the other in frequent disagreement with him as to the meaning of the words in the passages he cites, (...) and the inferences he draws from them. Thinking that Prof. Taylor's analysis of the use of the terms in Hippocrates is very far from final, I offer in this paper a further contribution to their interpretation, confining myself as far as possible to the question, What do and mean in the Hippocratean writings? (shrink)