Surprising as it may appear, the philosophical writings of political economist Karl Marx (1818–1883), and those of philosopher, educator Maria Montessori(1870–1952), show thematic resemblances that invite further exploration. These resemblances reflect both keen awareness of the historical period they shared, but also important common threads in their philosophical anthropology, ethical and political values, and goals. In this paper, I examine one central thread which both take as fundamental, namely, the centrality of work in achieving the harmonious development of humankind. I (...) critique Marx’s description of the dynamic process leading to his classless society, because he fails to supply the proximate, efficient cause or middle term that effects this goal. My thesis is that Montessori supplies this missing causal link through her scientific demonstration of the work and function of the child and her holistic understanding of the human person in its full historical dimension, and human and cosmic telos. (shrink)

Character Education in America's Blue Ribbon Schools is based upon descriptive, documentary, and qualitative research conducted on the award winning school applications in the United Stated Department of Education's Elementary School Recognition Program, i.e. the Blue Ribbon Schools. The purpose of the program is to focus national attention on schools that are doing an exceptional job with all of their students. Areas studied are developing a solid foundation of basic skills and knowledge of subject matter and fostering the development of (...) character, values, and ethical judgement. The first edition of this book reported on the first decade of this program, from 1985 to 1994. The second edition adds the schools that have won the award from 1996-2001. Included are the Blue Ribbon schools that applied for Special Honors in Character Education and five that actually won that recognition in 1998-1999. This edition finds character education much stronger in American schools in recent years and is full of many promising practices. It is a practical book that will guide school administrators, teachers, parents, board members, and concerned citizens interested in starting or strengthening the character education focus of their school. (shrink)

Surprising as it may appear, the philosophical writings of political economist Karl Marx (1818–1883), and those of philosopher, educator Maria Montessori(1870–1952), show thematic resemblances that invite further exploration. These resemblances reflect both keen awareness of the historical period they shared, but also important common threads in their philosophical anthropology, ethical and political values, and goals. In this paper, I examine one central thread which both take as fundamental, namely, the centrality of work in achieving the harmonious development of humankind. I (...) critique Marx’s description of the dynamic process leading to his classless society, because he fails to supply the proximate, efficient cause or middle term that effects this goal. My thesis is that Montessori supplies this missing causal link through her scientific demonstration of the work and function of the child and her holistic understanding of the human person in its full historical dimension, and human and cosmic telos. (shrink)

Scholars who debate the cause of and solutions for the decline in civic engagement have suggested that Americans have increasingly withdrawn from community organizations, reducing their political activity such as voting and interest in the political world, and generally failing to place the common good over individual self-interest. Their analyses are steeped in a tradition that is largely gender blind and consequently ignores care work. We infuse feminist analyses of paid labor and citizenship, which emphasize the merits and burdens of (...) care work, into the civic engagement debate. We argue that care work, predominantly performed by women, paradoxically limits, enhances, and even constitutes a vital form of civic activity. We call for a fuller slate of social policies that will both redistribute the burden of care work and reinvigorate civic engagement. (shrink)

In this paper we compare the strategies applied by two successful biological components of the ecosystem, the viruses and the human beings, to interact with the environment. Viruses have had and still exert deep and vast actions on the ecosystem especially at the genome level of most of its biotic components. We discuss on the importance of the human being as contraptions maker in particular of robots, hence of machines capable of automatically carrying out complex series of actions. Beside the (...) relevance of designing and assembling these contraptions, it is of basic importance the goal for which they are assembled and future scenarios of their possible impact on the ecosystem. We can’t procrastinate the development and implementation of a highly inspired and stringent “ethical code” for human beings and humanoid robots because it will be a crucial aspect for the wellbeing of the mankind and of the entire ecosystem. (shrink)

Recent changes in access to contraceptive and infertility treatments in the state of Illinois, and across the United States more generally, have heightened class cleavages in access to reproductive health care benefits in the United States. Using data gleaned from government testimonies, public documents, and telephone interviews, the authors found that poor women have broad access to contraceptive coverage but very little access to infertility treatments, while working-and middle-class women have increasingly broad coverage of infertility treatments but spare coverage of (...) contraceptives. These findings suggest that while the extreme measures of the eugenics movement are less frequently in evidence, class differences in access to reproductive services lead to an equally dualistic, albeit unstated, fertility policy in the United States: encouraging births among working- and middle-class families and discouraging births among the poor, particularly those on Medicaid. (shrink)

Class-based theories of the welfare state suggest that welfare states stratify by social class, thus universal benefits are praised for fostering social equality and class solidarity whereas poverty-based benefits are criticized for fostering greater inequality and class conflict. Feminist theorists suggest that, in addition to social class, universal and poverty-based benefits are organized around dimensions of gender and race. I examine these arguments in conjunction with old-age reliance on Medicaid—the poverty-based long-term care system in the United States. Compared to white (...) men, older Blacks, Hispanics, and women of all races have greater long-term care needs and fewer economic resources with which to meet those needs. Even when differences in income, education, age, marital status, and nursing home use are taken into account, gender and race are significantly related to Medicaid use. As Medicaid recipients, Blacks, Hispanics, and women of all races disproportionately face persistent poverty and discrimination. Even when they are not Medicaid beneficiaries, these groups are particularly likely to suffer other consequences of a poverty-based long-term care system related to state variations in coverage, informal care giving, and spousal impoverishment. (shrink)

This article aims to provide a semiotic analysis of environmental law and youth protests. More precisely, drawing on speech act theory this article regards both as types of communication and teases out the inherent voice and message, specifically with regard to the interests of future generations. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, the article looks into speaker and speech of environmental law and argues that it speaks, as legislation does, in the first-person plural voice of a ‘we’. Second, the (...) article examines a speech of Greta Thunberg through the lens of Stanley Cavell’s theory of passionate utterances. This interpretation will unlock the political stakes of Thunberg’s speech as she claims standing with those responsible for enacting environmental law. Finally, the consequences of this reading will be analysed by relating message and voice of environmental law. As youth protests question ordinary forms of political representation, new ways of safeguarding the interests of future generations are called upon. (shrink)

En jetant la sonde de l’interrogation philosophique au lieu de soi, Jean-Luc Marion nous donne une approche organique et originale à la pensée d’Augustin, en entrecroisant entre eux deux plans herméneutiques : sur le premier, l’on poursuit un itinéraire de rapprochement au cœur de la confessio augustinienne permettant de réduire le vaste univers sémantique d’Augustin à un noyau génétique unifiant; sur le second plan, le parcours philosophique de l’auteur se développe ultérieurement, tendant à désarticuler un bloc théorique d’ontologie et métaphysique (...) et atteignant ainsi par une voie phénoménologique une idée de philosophie finalement affranchie de la présupposition du caractère central de la question de l’étant et du fondement. En tout cas, même si l’on ne veut pas donner trop d’éclat à la critique anti-ontologique et antimétaphysique caractérisant l’approche à la pensée augustinienne proposée dans cet ouvrage, l’acquis spéculatif de celle-ci ne semble pas diminuer. Un parmi les mérites principaux de ce livre est d’avoir restitué à la confessio sa dignité théorique, en y apercevant un lieu phénoménologique originaire où la relation entre moi et Dieu se noue; une relation dont le caractère paradoxal, autrement insoutenable, est résolu par le primat du don et de l’amour. Ce sont tous ces traits originaux qui nous mènent à dire qu’Au lieu de soi n’est pas seulement un livre sur Augustin, car il est plus qu’un livre sur Augustin. (shrink)

This article analyses the use of the term “‘political oeconomy” in the Wealth of Nations, considered by many the founding text of the discipline of Political Economy. It shows that Adam Smith could not accept the use of the term “political oeconomy” that had been made by other authors to indicate the subject matter of his scientific inquiry, devoted to the nature and causes of the wealth of nations; he used the term “political oeconomy” as a synonym for economic policy, (...) especially in the fourth book of the Wealth of Nations. In order to understand this statement, it is necessary to keep in mind the methodological and epistemological perspective developed by Smith; in his view, the inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations would have to discover the almost unchangeable rules that presided over the choices of the legislators in the field of public economy and in the management of public resources. By contrast, the term “political oeconomy” was used by Smith exactly to indicate the policies really adopted in these fields, policies which frequently altered the system of natural liberty. (shrink)

Because of a strong similarity between two passages in Philo Judaeus, Cher. 37 and Her. 206, and the verb ejpikhrukeuvomai which is used in both loci is almost always completed by a dative. The Author proposes to read bivw/ instead of bivou at Cher. 37.

Substantial evidence supports the perspective that the people of Ancient Greece had a language for and some use for drugs, both for the purpose of medicine and poison; however, the question remains whether Ancient Greek civilization held a concept approximating what we today call drug addiction. This article explores the textual evidence for the use of two drugs, nepenthes and cannabis, in Ancient Greece. While the existence of nepenthes remains in doubt, the use of cannabis is well documented. Either drug (...) or both drugs may have been used in the rites of the Bacchic and Orphic mysteries, which might explain why there are so few references to these drugs in the Ancient Greek literature. (shrink)

The discovery of incommensurability by the Pythagoreans is usually ascribed to geometric or arithmetic questions, but already Tannery stressed the hypothesis that it had a music-theoretical origin. In this paper, I try to show that such hypothesis is correct, and, in addition, I try to understand why it was almost completely ignored so far.

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, “I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say.” Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests. He believed that effective education required an adequate (...) background in the Christian tradition, presented within a lived experience that underscored the capacity of the faith to answer universal questions. What he proposed was a process that allowed one to sift through tradition, critically examining it and comparing it against the ultimate criteria for judgment: the desires of the heart. In Giussani's view, the primary concern was to “educate the human heart as God made it.” In The Risk of Education he states that fear leads students to associate this process of criticism with negativity or doubt. Yet, without an education in criticism, students cannot develop conviction. At a time when young people are abandoning the church and questioning the value of faith, Giussani's method of judging and verifying Christianity as an experience seems a necessary intervention. In The Risk of Education he argues that, ultimately, education and the Christian message reveal themselves through human freedom. (shrink)

_Emotional Presence in Psychoanalysis_ provides a detailed look at the intricacies of attaining emotional presence in psychoanalytic work. John Madonna and a distinguished group of contributors draw on both the relational and modern psychoanalytic schools of thought to examine a variety of different problems commonly experienced in achieving emotional resonance between analyst and patient, setting out ways in which such difficulties may be overcome in psychoanalytic treatment, practical clinical settings and in training contexts. A focused review of relevant comparative (...) literature is followed by chapters featuring individual clinical case studies, each illustrating particularly challenging aspects. The uniqueness of this book lays not simply in the espousal of the commonly accepted importance of emotional resonance between analyst and patient; rather it is in the way in which emotional presence is registered by both participants, requiring a working through, which at times can be not only difficult but dangerous. Such efforts involve a theory which enables the lens to understanding, an effective methodology which guides intervention. The book also calls for the art of the analyst to construct with patients meanings which heal, and possess the heart to persist in commitment despite the odds. _Emotional Presence in Psychoanalysis_ is about patients who suffer, struggle, resist and prevail. It offers distinctive, transparently told accounts of analysts who engage with patients, navigating through states of confusion, hatred and more controversial feelings of love. Emotional Presence in Psychoanalysis features highly compelling material written in an accessible and easily understood style. It will be a valuable resource for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, psychologists and clinical social workers as well as teachers, trainers and students seeking to understand the power and potential of the analytic process and the resistances to it. (shrink)