RESUMO Discutimos neste trabalho a cultura no espaço público da escola com base em ensaios de alunos de licenciatura em Letras-Português em que expressam suas representações sobre a relação eu-outro no ato da docência em estágio supervisionado. Questionamos se esses alunos, no cotidiano do labor magisterial, nos momentos constituintes do agir ético em diálogo com a estética da profissão, vivem a realidade viva do ato da docência de sujeitos, pelo primado da individualidade e da alteridade no plano do reencontro, no (...) mundo real, do ato particular da experiência vivida com o mundo social da profissão. Os fundamentos da teoria dialógica de Bakhtin e seu Círculo respaldam a discussão proposta.ABSTRACT In this paper we discuss culture in the public space of schools based on essays by pre-service student teachers in a Portuguese Language and Literature Teaching Credential Program. In these essays, the pre-service student teachers form representations of self-other relations while practicing their student teaching in supervised internships. We questioned whether these pre-service student teachers, in the practice of their field experience, in decisive moments of ethical practice in dialogue with the aesthetics of the profession, experience themselves as actual teaching subjects, through the primacy of individuality/otherness in the encounter between the physical world of life experience, and the professional world of social experience. This discussion is based on the Dialogical Theory of Bakhtin and his Circle. (shrink)

Drawing on debates about Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) safeguarding at the local and international level, Intangible Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development: Inside a UNESCO Convention, explores the theoretical and practical implications of the intertwinement between these policy fields. Considering how Sustainable Development (SD) priorities are influencing representations of ICH, the volume questions how they are expanding the frontiers of the heritage realm and unsettling accepted understandings of the social uses of heritage. The contributing authors, who hail from a variety of (...) different contexts and disciplinary backgrounds, explore these issues from a unique vantage point as both scholars and actors of the processes they analyze. Playing different roles in the implementation of the Convention, their positioning as insiders allows for a unique analytical perspective that is based on first-hand engagement with the practices of the Convention. Intangible Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development: Inside a UNESCO Convention sheds light on the complexity, potential and consequences of combining ICH and SD at the policy-making level and in heritage practices on the ground. It will be of interest to academics and students working in heritage studies, development studies, anthropology, archaeology, international law, political science, international relations and sociology. (shrink)

An intriguing interresonance plays out between various forms of Mahayana Buddhist ontology and Žižek’s dialectical materialism. His disdainful critique of Buddhism is well-known. As a cultural critic, Žižek might be onto something in his contention that Western Buddhism functions as the perfect ideology for late capitalism. As an ontologist, however, he seems to be ambivalent regarding the parallels between the Buddhist Void, to which the Western Buddhists supposedly withdraw, and his elaboration of a new foundation of dialectical materialism. Žižek is (...) one of the few contemporary continental philosophers who do not hesitate to engage Buddhism. My claim is that, notwithstanding his criticism, Žižek is much closer to Mahayana than he thinks. My aim therefore is to demonstrate how this is so. To do this, I will mainly focus on the following forms of Mahayana thought: śūnyatā in the context of Nāgārjuna's the Two-Truth doctrine, Tiantai School of Chinese Buddhist concept of li, and Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy of basho, which was heavily influenced by the Japanese Zen/Pure Land Buddhism. After going through some of the preliminary affinities among Mahayana forms and Žižek in its absolute contradiction, and materialism as the contradictory/paradoxical field conceived as an atheistic religious field, and so on), I will analyse each school of Mahayana mentioned above and point out the parallels between these and Žižek’s own thought. (shrink)

We are no longer in a position to attribute a positive essence to humanity and its presumed centrality. What it means to be human cannot be ascertained once and for all or in any a priori fashion....

In their defence of the school Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons define it as a source of ‘free time.’ Drawing on Catherine Malabou's compelling reading of Heidegger in her The Heidegger Change, I aim to provide a strong ontological justification for the claims made on behalf of the school concerning free time, common goods, and renewing (changing) the world: the school provides free time; it transforms knowledge and skills into common goods; and it has the potential to give everyone the (...) time and space to renew the world. The paper enquires into what ‘free time as non-productive time,’ ‘common goods,’ and ‘changing the world’ mean on an ontological register, and why therefore the school is so precious and warrants our utmost care in the face of its conservative and progressive critics alike. I discern a single underlying notion, the notion of essence as mutability, constituting the link connecting free time, common goods, and renewal of the world. (shrink)

Many political and economic forces are driven by the desire to eliminate democratic plurality in today’s political juncture. Democratic republicanism itself in its contemporary forms has failed to address many of the daunting moral, political, economic, social, technological, and ecological challenges we face today. It is argued that to fulfill its essence of egalitarian freedom and social justice, democratic republicanism must first decouple from the global neoliberal capitalist regime and secondly embrace some form of postcapitalist and posthumanist orientation guided by (...) a new attractor, a teleological approach anchored in a new telos of superhumanity. Democracy without a telos of superhumanity is a democracy in name only. It is time to lay our teleophobia aside and propose a strong teleological account in the vein of a Buddhist no-self doctrine at the heart of the onto-politico-economy. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, and in particular, his concept of consummatory experience, should be engaged anew to rethink the merits of the Philosophy for Children programme, which arose in the 1970s in the US as an innovative educational programme that aims to use philosophy to help school children improve their ability to become more conscious of and make judgments about the aspects of their experience that have ethical, aesthetic, political, logical, or even metaphysical meaning. Although (...) an international success, the PFC programme has attracted many criticisms from a variety of directions. I claim that Deweyan concept of consummatory aesthetic experience is broad and flexible enough to provide a robust framework to make sense of the pedagogical horizon of PFC and therefore fruitfully engage the various critics of the movement coming from religious and social conservatives, educational psychologists, critical theorists, postmodernists/posthumanists, and professional philosophers themselves. The goal of this paper is to offer in a preliminary fashion the basic elements of Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which was principally elucidated in his Art as Experience, to defend PFC as a viable pedagogy. (shrink)

In this paper, I intend to discuss what I would like to call “the ideal of teaching as consummatory experience” in relation to John Dewey’s concept of “experience,” as the latter was elucidated in his later works, especially Art as Experience. What I have in mind with the phrase “the ideal of teaching as consummatory experience” basically points to what it means to be fully alive as a teacher and what happens when teaching is experienced in such a manner. In (...) other words, what is the relationship between teaching that is truly fulfilling for the teacher and experience that is truly educative for the student(s)? There is no doubt in my mind that the two are intimately connected. Truly fulfilling teaching and truly .. (shrink)

This book presents an original exploration of philosophical questions pertaining to the ways we grasp the Absolute by bringing together the Buddhist notion of interpermeation of all phenomena into contemporary strains of thought in continental philosophy. This text introduces an ontological concept, granularity, deploying it to probe questions concerning the intersection of ontology, ethics, and education. A wide range of issues in metaphysics are covered—including being, nothingness, unity, plurality, truth, change, transformation, subjectivity, contradiction, coherence, potentiality—from the perspective of thinkers such (...) as Hegel, Heidegger, Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Žižek, and Harman. The text deploys granularity in arguing for an ethics of unconditional hospitality within education. This volume is intended for students and researchers working in the areas of philosophy of education, philosophy of religion, and continental philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, an account of two novel ontologies is given to point to the need to revise the status of facts in school curriculum. It is argued that schooling is in dire need of re-enchantment. The way to re-enchant schooling is to re-enliven the world we inhabit. We need to fall head over heels in love with the world again. In order to do that, we need to shake up our conception of “the hard and cold facts of the (...) world” to make the latter come alive radiating vibrancy and luminosity out into the world. Facts have to be liberated from their “cold and hard” status and become things that captivate us with their uniqueness and dynamism. To the extent that facts enchant (instead of merely re/present the world), working with them leads to educative experience. To work out how to let the facts do that, two thinkers and two ways to reconceptualize ‘facts’ are discussed: Graham Harman and his objects, and Ken Wilber and his holons. (shrink)

This article is about a pedagogical movement I discern in Quentin Meillassoux’s ontology. The goal of the essay is to introduce his approach to reality in outline form and offer it as a possible route to conceptualize education as the practice of keeping the bodymind attentive and agile against its unsound ossification by way of providing a unified heightened sense of meaning, that is, consummatory experience, in a radically open and contingent world. Meillassoux offers a new conception of necessity and (...) contingency based on the Badioun principle that ‘nothing is inaccessible to reason.’ This move helps Meillassoux to claim that reason can access the absolute for there is no inaccessible necessary transcendence by providing an intriguing critique of the principle of sufficient reason. As a result, Meillassoux’s argument leads to the conclusion that the only necessity is contingency itself. By excluding any necessary being, but also maintaining the absolute necessity of contingency itself, Meillassoux establishes what he calls the “factial.” Meillassoux’s factiality induce pedagogical interventions that lead to acquiring a new point of view whereby ossification of bodymind is staved off and a state of mind that is endlessly fascinated by the immanence, or the most radical becoming, of the world is achieved. (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that the inordinate amount of time and attention given to the use of textbooks in education inadvertently leads to deadening miseducative experiences and creates a learning environment where what Dewey calls ‘consummatory experience’ is thwarted. In order to unpack this thesis, Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics is engaged, and in particular, his concept of consummatory experience is defined and its temporal nature is elucidated by referring to two modes of time: chronological and phenomenological. Subsequently, the relation (...) between teaching and consummatory experience is elucidated to uncover the reason why using textbooks is counterproductive. (shrink)

This paper discusses the repercussions of a new metaphysics—speculative/weird realism—for education and pedagogy. A historic shift is taking place in present-day continental philosophy, which involves an explicit and renewed call for realism. One of the most salient features of this development is a revitalised interest in ontological questions. As part of this overall trend towards realist and materialist ontologies in current continental thinking, the paper particularly focuses on Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, which claims that aesthetics is first philosophy. Harman’s object-oriented (...) philosophy is an approach to metaphysics and ontology that is enamored by the experience of the vibrant yet inscrutable autonomous reality of objects. In order to come to terms with this new approach to reality, I suggest education be conceived as the cultivation of an aesthetic attitude understood as the ability to uphold the tension between relational and non-relational aspects of objects understood in the Harmanian idiom. (shrink)

Interessamo-nos, neste trabalho, em refletir acerca de uma aproximação entre estética e ecologia por meio do conceito de unidade, tal como anteriormente indicada por Freitas (2005). Diante de um contexto contemporâneo de crise ambiental, propomos lançar um olhar para o campo da arquitetura e do urbanismo, em que observamos uma crescente busca por modelos estéticos e epistemológicos que se caracterizem como ecológicos. Tomamos como referencial teórico a filosofia pragmatista de Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), considerando, em especial, a afinidade apontada por (...) Nöth (1996; 1998; 2001) entre esse pensamento e a ecologia. Partindo daí, organizamos o trabalho em dois momentos distintos: um primeiro, conceitual; e um segundo, voltado para a relação entre conceito e prática. Iniciamos por identificar e selecionar, em escritos de Peirce e de seus estudiosos, alguns entre os usos do termo unidade, buscando compreender o modo como está relacionado a conceitos próprios de sua filosofia, percorrendo a fenomenologia, as ciências normativas e a metafísica, com passagem pelo pragmatismo, pressupondo evidenciar uma compreensão de unidade que fundamenta aquela aproximação inicial. Com base nisso, refletimos, em seguida, acerca dessa concepção com relação à arquitetura e ao urbanismo, a partir do trabalho de Toyo Ito, que se interessou pela transição de uma estética da máquina para uma estética de fluxos e cujo diálogo profissional entre a teoria e a prática nos conduz a considerações mais amplas acerca do conhecimento em arquitetura, com consequências para a formação de novas condutas nesse campo. (shrink)

Marianna PapastephanouUniversity of CyprusSince Plato’s allegory of the cave two educational-philosophical critical modes have stood out: the descriptive (reality as it is) and the normative (reali...

Neste artigo, demonstrei a relação entre a Memória, a História Oral e o Patrimônio Imaterial Afro-brasileiro. Apontei para os aspectos teóricos e para a práxis de uma História Oral capaz de oferecer algumas bases para a salvaguarda do Patrimônio Imaterial. Para tanto, propus um diálogo dinâmico com diferentes conceitos de Memória, sobretudo conforme compreendida por Joël Candau e Maurice Halbwachs. Apresentei diferentes conceitos em diálogo com autores especialistas em Patrimônio Imaterial, como: Maria Amélia Jundurian Corá, Chiara Bortolotto e Ulpiano (...) Toledo Bezerra de Menses. Além disso, identifiquei procedimentos construídos por José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy, Suzana Lopes Salgado Ribeiro e Fabíola Holanda no âmbito do Núcleo de Estudos em História Oral – NEHO/USP. Palavras-chave: Memória, História Oral, Patrimônio Imaterial, Teoria. (shrink)