Online research in philosophy

Jewish learning and thought in Languedoc -- 1250-1300: implications of original philosophic work and the diffusion of philosophic learning in Languedoc -- 1250-1300: Jewish contacts with Christian intellectuals and Jewish thought regarding Christianity -- Meiri's transformation of Talmud study: philosophic spirituality in a halakhic key -- 1300: on the eve of the controversy -- 1300-1304: knowledge and authority in dispute -- 1304-1306: the controversy peaks -- The effects of the expulsion: Jewish philosophic culture in Roussillon and Provence.

Ramon Llull (1232-1316), born on Majorca, was one of the most remarkable lay intellectuals of the thirteenth century. He devoted much of his life to promoting missions among unbelievers, the reform of Western Christian society, and personal spiritual perfection. He wrote over 200 philosophical and theological works in Catalan, Latin, and Arabic. Many of these expound on his "Great Universal Art of Finding Truth," an idiosyncratic dialectical system that he thought capable of proving Catholic beliefs to non-believers. This study offers (...) the first full-length analysis of his theories about rhetoric and preaching, which were central to his evangelizing activities. It explains how Llull attempted to synthesize commonplace advice about courtly speech and techniques of popular sermons into a single program for secular and sacred eloquence that would necessarily promote love of God and neighbor. Llull's work is remarkable testimony to the diffusion of clerical culture among educated lay-people of his era, and to their enthusiasm for applying that knowledge in the pursuit of learning and piety. This book should find a place on the shelf of every scholar of medieval history, religion, and rhetoric. (shrink)

The world changes and we are encouraged to change with it, but is all change good? This book asks us to stop and consider whether the higher education we are providing, and engaging in, for ourselves and our societies is what we ought to have, or what commercial interests want us to have. In claiming that there is a place for a higher education of learning, such as the university, amongst our array of tertiary options the book attempts to (...) explore what this might be. Drawing from the existential literature and in particular Heidegger, the book investigates the case for such a form of higher education and settles on existential trust as the ground upon which the community of scholars that ought to be the university can flourish. This book is written for those who are concerned about the trends towards performativity and for those who are not yet so concerned! It offers a controversial and, some might say, idealistic view of what might be but makes no apology for that since the book proposes that higher education is becoming evermore unacceptable for those who value democracy, tolerance and learning. (shrink)

JOHN E. MURDOCH AND EDITH DUDLEY SYLLA INTRODUCTION Conferences and colloquia are held and their results often published, but very rarely is any account ...

Not much of this work was done at Leip ig.

Between 1100 and 1600, the emphasis on reason in the learning and intellectual life of Western Europe became more pervasive and widespread than ever before in the history of human civilization. Of crucial significance was the invention of the university around 1200, within which reason was institutionalized and where it became a deeply embedded, permanent feature of Western thought and culture. It is therefore appropriate to speak of an Age of Reason in the Middle Ages, and to view it (...) as a forerunner and herald of the Age of Reason that was to come in the seventeenth century. The object of this study is twofold: to describe how reason was manifested in the curriculum of medieval universities, especially in the subjects of logic, natural philosophy and theology; and to explain how the Middle Ages acquired an undeserved reputation as an age of superstition, barbarism, and unreason. (shrink)

Recently there has been a renewed interest in moral inquiry among American scholars in a variety of disciplines. This collection of accessible essays by scholars in philosophy, political theory, psychology, history, literary studies, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, and legal studies affords a view of the current state of moral inquiry in the American academy, and it offers fresh departures for ethically informed, interdisciplinary scholarship. Seeking neither to reduce values to facts nor facts to values, these essays aim to foster (...) discussion about inquiry and moral judgment, and demonstrate that moral inquiry need not be either dispassionate and value-free or moralistic and preachy. (shrink)

The scholar and his public in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.--Thomism and the Italian thought of the Renaissance.--The contribution of religious orders to Renaissance thought and learning.--Bibliography (p. [115]-120).

Although John Dewey has had the most profound effect on education, less is known about the philosophy of education of the original founder of pragmatism, Charles Peirce. Using Peirce's theory of formal rhetoric, I try to show that Peirce's philosophy of education, when fully understood, is aligned with Dewey's pedagogy of experiential learning, and can provide a justification for the promotion of active learning in the classroom. Peirce's rhetoric, as one part of his logical or semiotic theory, argues (...) that reasoning alone is not sufficient to gain knowledge, but that it must be embedded within a community of inquiry, of a certain sort. Applying this to the classroom, I argue that we, as teachers, should endeavor to create the features of a proper community of inquiry in the classroom, one that emphasizes engagement of the students in doing research rather than passively receiving information about its results. (shrink)

Christians and Marxists have co-operated in various forms of political work in recent decades, and, after earlier years of antagonism, thinkers on both sides have come to take the other seriously. The aim of this book is to get Christianity and Marxism to meet on terrain on which they might seem most opposed: their philosophical positions; and to do so without watering either down, but taking then full strength.

The underlying idea presented in this book is that there are similarities as well as differences between Confucianism as Humanistic tradition and Christianity ...

Through an exchange that is both intimate and enlightening, Vattimo and Girard share their unparalleled insight into the relationships among religion, modernity, and the role of Christianity, especially as it exists in our multicultural ...

Ex-Jew, eternal Jew: early representations of the Jewish Spinoza -- Refining Spinoza: Moses Mendelssohn's response to the Amsterdam heretic -- The first modern Jew: Berthold Auerbach's Spinoza and the beginnings of an image -- A rebel against the past, a revealer of secrets: Salomon Rubin and the east European Maskilic Spinoza -- From the heights of Mount Scopus: Yosef Klausner and the Zionist rehabilitation of Spinoza -- Farewell, Spinoza: I. B. Singer and the tragicomedy of the Jewish Spinozist.

This volume brings historians of science and social historians together to consider the role of "little tools"--such as tables, reports, questionnaires, dossiers, index cards--in establishing academic and bureaucratic claims to authority and objectivity. From at least the eighteenth century onward, our science and society have been planned, surveyed, examined, and judged according to particular techniques of collecting and storing knowledge. Recently, the seemingly self-evident nature of these mundane epistemic and administrative tools, as well as the prose in which they are (...) cast, has demanded historical examination. The essays gathered here, arranged in chronological order by subject from the late seventeenth to the late twentieth century, involve close readings of primary texts and analyses of academic and bureaucratic practices as parts of material culture. The first few essays, on the early modern period, largely point to the existence of a "juridico-theological" framework for establishing authority. Later essays demonstrate the eclipse of the role of authority per se in the modern period and the emergence of the notion of "objectivity." Most of the essays here concern the German cultural space as among the best exemplars of the academic and bureaucratic practices described above. The introduction to the volume, however, is framed at a general level the closing essays also extend the analyses beyond Germany to broader considerations on authority and objectivity in historical practice. The volume will interest scholars of European history and German studies as well as historians of science. Peter Becker is Professor of Central European History, European University Institute. William Clark is Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University. (shrink)

1. The Place of Intellectual Life: The University -- The University as an Institutional Solution to the Problem of Knowledge -- The Alienability of Knowledge in Our So-called Knowledge Society -- The Knowledge Society as Capitalism of the Third Order -- Will the University Survive the Era of Knowledge Management? -- Postmodernism as an Anti-university Movement -- Regaining the University's Critical Edge by Historicizing the Curriculum -- Affirmative Action as a Strategy for Redressing the Balance Between Research and Teaching -- (...) Academics Rediscover Their Soul: The Rebirth of Academic Freedom' -- 2. The Stuff of Intellectual Life: Philosophy -- Epistemology as 'Always Already' Social Epistemology -- From Social Epistemology to the Sociology of Philosophy: The Codification of Professional Prejudices? -- Interlude: Seeds of an Alternative Sociology of Philosophy -- Prolegomena to a Critical Sociology of Twentieth-century Anglophone Philosophy -- Analytic Philosophy's Ambivalence Toward the Empirical Sciences -- Professionalism as Differentiating American and British Philosophy -- Conclusion: Anglophone Philosophy as a Victim of Its Own Success -- 3. The People of Intellectual Life: Intellectuals -- Can Intellectuals Survive if the Academy Is a No-fool Zone? -- How Intellectuals Became an Endangered Species in Our Times: The Trail of Psychologism -- A Genealogy of Anti-intellectualism: From Invisible Hand to Social Contagion -- Re-defining the Intellectual as an Agent of Distributive Justice -- The Critique of Intellectuals in a Time of Pragmatist Captivity -- Pierre Bourdieu: The Academic Sociologist as Public Intellectual -- 4. The Improvisational Nature of Intellectual Life -- Academics Caught Between Plagiarism and Bullshit -- Bullshit: A Disease Whose Cure Is Always Worse -- The Scientific Method as a Search for the (Piled) Higher (and Deeper) Bullshit -- Conclusion: How to Improvize on the World-historic Stage -- Summary of the Argument. (shrink)

Beginning in the Southern Sung, one Confucian sect gradually came to dominate literati culture and, by the Ming dynasty, was canonized as state orthodoxy. This book is a historical and textual critique of the process by which claims to exclusive possession of the truth came to serve power. The author analyzes the formation of the Confucian canon and its role in the civil service examinations, the enshrinement of worthies in the Confucian temple, and the emergence of the Confucian anthology, activities (...) that canonized one conception of the Confucian tradition as orthodox by selecting among persons who shaped the tradition. This lineage became 'the genealogy of the way'. The author draws on contemporary cultural and literary theory to help situate Confucian anthologies in ritual, institutional, sectarian, and ideological contexts. (shrink)

Power is everywhere. But what is it and how does it infuse personal and institutional relationships in higher education? Power, Knowledge and the Academy: The Institutional is Political takes a close-up and critical look at both the elusive and blatant workings and consequences of power in a range of everyday sites in universities. Chapters focus on specific locations in which power shapes personal and institutional knowledge including student-supervisor relationships, research teams, networking, the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK, and literature (...) reviews. (shrink)

On the implementation aspect of the Islamization of knowledge programme, there were also suggestions that my paper should provide readers with Al-Faruqi's ...

In Against the Spiritual Turn: Marxism, Realism and Critical Theory Sean Creaven sets out to reject Christian theism on materialist grounds. This paper critiques Creaven’s argument from a critically realist Trinitarian Christian standpoint. His failure to engage with Christian theologians, philosophers and biblical scholars, on the a priori ground that since Christianity is inherently irrational Christian scholarship must also be inherently irrational, effectively locks his argument in a vicious intellectual circle. His self-imposed alienation from Christian scholarship generates (...) an ideologically driven thesis of questionable academic integrity. This methodological failure is exacerbated by his preference for inductive and deductive reasoning over a critically realistic retroductive epistemology. (shrink)

We (your guest editors) have established a productive professional and personal relationship through discussions of the role of experience and, in particular, basic learning processes in shaping sexuality in humans and animals. We are grateful to Harold Mouras as well as our contributors for allowing us to organize this special issue of Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology , which highlights what we believe to be an underrepresented perspective in the scientific study of sexual behavior and psychology. Craig (1912, 1918) suggested, (...) and Zitovitch (as cited by Pavlov, 1928) as well as - more recently - Hall, Arnold and Myers (2000) have demonstrated that behaviors as straightforward as approaching food, and water require learning. Surely (human) sexuality, for which the approach is even more complicated, is shaped by experience. We offer nine papers from leading researchers in the field that we hope will inspire divergent thinking and scholarship regarding the evolution and development of sexual preferences in both humans and animals. (Published: 15 March 2012) Citation: Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 2012, 2 : 17415 - DOI: 10.3402/snp.v2i0.17415. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to outline some of the thinking behind new e-learning technology, including e-portfolios and personal learning environments. Part of this thinking is centered around the theory of connectivism, which asserts that knowledge - and therefore the learning of knowledge - is distributive, that is, not located in any given place (and therefore not 'transferred' or 'transacted' per se) but rather consists of the network of connections formed from experience and interactions with a (...) knowing community. And another part of this thinking is centered around the new, and the newly empowered, learner, the member of the net generation, who is thinking and interacting in new ways. These trends combine to form what is sometimes called 'e-learning 2.0' - an approach to learning that is based on conversation and interaction, on sharing, creation and participation, on learning not as a separate activity, but rather, as embedded in meaningful activities such as games or workflows. (shrink)

While the study of implicit learning is nothing new, the field as a whole has come to embody — over the last decade or so — ongoing questioning about three of the most fundamental debates in the cognitive sciences: The nature of consciousness, the nature of mental representation (in particular the difficult issue of abstraction), and the role of experience in shaping the cognitive system. Our main goal in this chapter is to offer a framework that attempts to integrate (...) current thinking about these three issues in a way that specifically links consciousness with adaptation and learning. Our assumptions about this relationship are rooted in further assumptions about the nature of processing and of representation in cognitive systems. When considered together, we believe that these assumptions offer a new perspective on the relationships between conscious and unconscious processing and on the function of consciousness in cognitive systems. (shrink)

In the current socio-political climate pedagogies consistent with rationalism are in the ascendancy. One way to challenge the purchase of rationalism within educational discourse and practice is through the body, or by re-thinking the nature of mind-body relations. While the orientation of this paper is ultimately phenomenological, it takes as its point of departure recent feminist scholarship, which is demonstrating that attending to physiology can provide insight into the complexity of mind-body relations. Elizabeth Wilson's account of the role of (...) the gut in psychological processes suggests a far less hierarchical relation between brain and body than rationalism allows. Such insights are also supported by recent phenomenological inquiries into cognition and the body. My question is, what implications do these insights have for how the nature of embodiment is understood, and, by extension, learning? This paper explores how informal, non-cognitive modes of knowing, or of engaging with the world, inform learning in higher education contexts. More specifically, it raises the question of what role non-cognitive modes of engagement, such as sensibility, have in augmenting, enabling or delimiting the learning process. (shrink)

This book discusses Ramon Llull (ca. 1232-1316), the Christian missionary, philosopher and mystic, his relations with Jewish contemporaries, and how he ...

The function and method of philosophy.--The nature of religious experience.--Religion and philosophy: naturalism.--Religion and philosophical idealism.--The structure of the universe and the objectivity of values.--The christian conception of god.--The doctrine of the person of christ.--The doctrine of the trinity.

In cognitive neuroscience, dissociating the brain networks that ing—has thus become one of the best empirical situations subtend conscious and nonconscious memories constitutes a through which to study the mechanisms of implicit learning, very complex issue, both conceptually and methodologically.

The definitions and distinctions of thematics in this collection are of intrinsic interest, then, to Classical and Late Antique, Medieval, Renaissance, and ...

Case-based instruction is a stable feature of ethics education, however, little is known about the attributes of the cases that make them effective. Emotions are an inherent part of ethical decision-making and one source of information actively stored in case-based knowledge, making them an attribute of cases that likely facilitates case-based learning. Emotions also make cases more realistic, an essential component for effective case-based instruction. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of emotional case content, and (...) complementary socio-relational case content, on case-based knowledge acquisition and transfer on future ethical decision-making tasks. Study findings suggest that emotional case content stimulates retention of cases and facilitates transfer of ethical decision-making principles demonstrated in cases. (shrink)

In this paper, we present an especially effective tool for helping students to learn and apply the skills of critical reasoning. Our Writing Portfolio Project is a set of nine progressively staged writing assignments that guide students through the formulation and development of an argumentative paper. The set of assignments are designed to reinforce, reintroduce, and repeat critical reasoning skills. In this paper, we articulate the potential uses for the Writing Portfolio Project, give a brief explanation of the reasoning behind (...) the format of the project, and indicate ways one might implement the Writing Portfolio Project into one's curriculum. (shrink)

In this new volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, the author presents a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning. Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independently of the conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one (...) that lies at the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. The author's goals are to outline the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from the many studies that have been carried out in a variety of experimental laboratories over the past several decades; to present the various alternative perspectives on this issue that have been proposed by other researchers and to try to accommodate these views with his own; to structure the literature so that it can be seen in the context of standard heuristics of evolutionary biology; to present the material within a functionalist approach and to try to show why the experimental data should be seen as entailing particular epistemological perspectives; and to present implicit processing as encompassing a general and ubiquitous set of operations that have wide currency and several possible applications. Chapter 1 begins with the core problem under consideration in this book, a characterization of "implicit learning" as it has come to be used in the literature. Reber puts this seemingly specialized topic into a general framework and suggests a theoretical model based on standard heuristics of evolutionary biology. In his account, Reber weaves a capsule history of interest in and work on the cognitive unconscious. Chapter 2 turns to a detailed overview of the experimental work on the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which currently is of great interest. Chapter 3 develops the evolutionary model within which one can see learning and cognition as richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating the other. Finally, Chapter 4 explores a variety of entailments and speculations concerning implicit cognitive processes and their general role in the larger scope of human performance. (shrink)

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: Can perceptual experience be modified by reason?

Questions about learning and discovery have fascinated philosophers from Plato onwards. Does the mind bring innate resources of its own to the process of learning or does it rely wholly upon experience? Plato was the first philosopher to give an innatist response to this question and in doing so was to provoke the other major philosophers of ancient Greece to give their own rival explanations of learning. This book is the first to examine these theories of (...) class='Hi'>learning in relation to each other. It presents an entirely new interpretation of the theory of recollection which also changes the way we understand the development of ancient philosophy after Plato. The final section of the book compares ancient theories of learning with the seventeenth-century debate about innate ideas, and finds that the relation between the two periods is far more interesting and complete than is usually supposed. (shrink)

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: How does perceptual learning alter perceptual phenomenology?

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: How does perceptual learning alter the contents of perception?

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: How is perceptual learning coordinated with action?

Implicit Learning and Consciousness challenges conventional wisdom and presents the most up-to-date studies to define, quantify and test the predictions of the main models of implicit learning. The chapters include a variety of research from computer modeling, experimental psychology and neural imaging to the clinical data resulting from work with amnesics. The result is a topical book that provides an overview of the debate on implicit learning, and the various philosophical, psychological and neurological frameworks in which it (...) can be placed. It will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and the philosophical, psychological and modeling research community. (shrink)

This is an excerpt from a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from the workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of Toronto, Mississauga on May 10th and 11th, 2012. This excerpt explores the question: How should we demarcate perceptual learning from perceptual development?

The thesis of this bk is that the brain is innately constructed to initiate behaviors likely to promote the survival of the species & to sensitize sensory systems to stimuli required for those behaviors. Intended for behavioral & brain scientists.

The papers in this volume represent the views of a range of experts in a variety of language-related disciplines on the role which context plays in language learning and language understanding. The authors provide various theoretical constructs which help impose order on the apparent chaos of contextual factors which may have an influence on the production and comprehension of speech events. They focus on a variety of types of context, including the context established by different speech communities, interpersonal contexts, (...) the classroom context, and the context provided by the linguistic code itself. The papers illustrate how the treatment of context varies across the disciplines of linguistics, historical stylistics, applied linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Each paper is prefaced by an editorial introduction to help the reader trace out common themes and points of conflict. (shrink)

This article examines the disciplinary status and experiential underpinnings of C. S. Peirce's philosophical rhetoric. The first part explores the relationship between grammar and rhetoric in the context of Peirce's theory of signs. Next, a possible tension in Peirce's conception of the scope and function of rhetoric is identified, and a resolution is proposed. The field of rhetorical research is then provisionally characterised as spanning philosophical studies of communication, learning, and methods of inquiry. Rather than being a secondary application (...) that the grammarian can ignore, the complex rhetorical field can be meaningfully construed as both the pre-theoretical starting point and the principal theoretical end of philosophical semeiotic. In the final part of the article, it is argued that the aim of Peirce's pursuit of rhetoric ought to be the improvement of semiotic habits, and this goal is construed as the third and highest conception of learning furnished by his philosophy. Further, it is contended that Peircean rhetoric can provide means for reflexive investigations into our processes and methods of inquiry, communication, and learning—that is, higher-order conceptual tools with which to imaginatively describe, control, and transform educational habits in view of personal and social ideals. (shrink)

In "Knowledge Triumphant," Franz Rosenthal observes that the Islamic civilization is one that is essentially characterized by knowledge ("'ilm"), for "ilm is ...

Over the past decade, teaching and learning in virtual worlds has been at the forefront of many higher education institutions around the world. The DEHub Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG) consisting of Australian and New Zealand higher education academics was formed in 2009. These educators are investigating the role that virtual worlds play in the future of education and actively changing the direction of their own teaching practice and curricula. 47 academics reporting on 28 Australian higher education institutions present (...) an overview of how they have changed directions through the effective use of virtual worlds for diverse teaching and learning activities such as business scenarios and virtual excursions, role-play simulations, experimentation and language development. The case studies offer insights into the ways in which institutions are continuing to change directions in their teaching to meet changing demands for innovative teaching, learning and research in virtual worlds. This paper highlights the ways in which the authors are using virtual worlds to create opportunities for rich, immersive and authentic activities that would be difficult or not possible to achieve through more traditional approaches. (shrink)

Shang ce. Ru xue yu si xiang -- xia ce. Qing dai xue shu si chao.

Based on ten years of research, The Touch of the Past considers how historically traumatic events uniquely summon forgetting and remembrance. Within a specific focus on events of systemic mass violence, Roger Simon examines how testimonies of historic events influence learning as communities struggle with "difficult histories." The Touch of the Past is a serious and compelling contribution to research in education, historical consciousness, and memory/trauma studies.