The question of measuring growth in human and spiritual formation in Catholic seminaries has a history. In this article, we walk through three recent stages of that history to illuminate the potential of current approaches and clarify what still remains to be done.

This fine collection of essays is dedicated to Paul Guyer. It includes work by distinguished experts and younger scholars across a range of topics in Kant’s theoretical, moral, and political philosophy.Karl Ameriks’s “On the Many Senses of ‘Self-Determination’” responds to two misreadings of Kantian autonomy. One dismisses its notion of self-determination, the source of the auto-in autonomy, as an excessively subjective basis for morality; the other interprets its nomos as involving excessive determination of will by reason or sensibility. Ameriks responds (...) with careful analysis of Kant’s “provocative language” concerning the authorship and legislation of morality. This includes Kant’s famous description of... (shrink)

Reviews : Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach ; Robert E. Goodin, Green Political Theory ; Peter Hay and Robyn Eckersley, Ecopolitical Theory: Essaysfrom Australia, ; Peter Hay, Robyn Eckersley and Geoff Holloway Environmental Politics in Australia and New Zealand ; Drew Hutton, Green Politics in Australia ; Michael Muetzelfeldt, Society, State and Politics in Australia.

John Dewey attempted a pragmatic aufhebung of the disparate methodological aims of social science-explanation, understanding, and critique- in his 1938 Logic: the theory of Inquiry. There, in his penultimate chapter ‘Social Inquiry’, Dewey performed a trademark implementation of his deflation of absolutistic and universalistic pretensions in intellectual and theoretical discourse, in this case with respect to any one approach to social science. This deflation--as elsewhere in his analogous treatments of epistemology, ethics, and the theory of action-- involved the reconstruction of (...) the claims of the naturalist, interpretivist, and critical schools of social science into one overall pattern of social inquiry. This recasts the different and seemingly irreconcilable aims of these schools into a series of steps in a practice. That these claims, then, simultaneously stand independently but in varying degrees of tension with, and support of, each other is a hallmark of pragmatism’s embrace of pluralism in intelligent problem solving. Dewey’s discussion of interpretation needs supplementation from his broader philosophical commitments in order to see the full sense of both the compatibility and the incompatibility of his theory with philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives is a welcome intervention into the ongoing discourse, both public and academic, on the issues of raised by the movement. The book will be of great interest to scholars interested in philosophical issues surrounding racial inequality and it is also suitable for adoption in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. This volume is evidence of the fruitfulness of philosophical reflection on and engagement with social movements, as well as being an important contribution to the (...) literature on racial justice. For those looking for philosophical insights into the Movement for Black Lives, this book is essential reading. (shrink)

Patrick Colm Hogan announced in 2002 that "cognitivist methods, topics, and principles have come to dominate what are arguably the most intellectually exciting academic fields today". Today, what dominates those "cognitivist methods, topics, and principles" is likely to be Distributed Cognition. The term was initially addressed by Edwin Hutchin in Cognition in the Wild and currently has been developed to encompass an intertwined group of theories including embodied cognition, embedded cognition, extended cognition, and enactive cognition. The distributed views of (...) cognition generally hold that mind is "spread out over the brain, the non-neural body and an environment... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education ed. by David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman and Gary E. McPhersonCara Faith BernardDavid J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Gary E. McPherson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019)Three leading voices in music education, David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Gary E. McPherson, consistently work to (...) reconceive how music educators create and challenge the discourses of music learning and the ways in which people engage with music. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education furthers their contributions and serves as a break from the familiar and common “default philosophy of assessment” of tests, standards, regimens, and rankings to invite new ways of approaching music assessment.1 They, along with their coauthors, apply their theoretical, research, and teaching experience to examine music assessment through social praxis and how individuals and communities “deepen their growth as knowing and compassionate human beings.”2 In short, this Handbook is an invitation for music educators of all levels to reengage with their values and name them in their current and future practices.Using the current neoliberal state of education as a backdrop, Elliott, Silverman, and McPherson portray schools as spaces that yield corporate types of learning practices and assessments which “place little value on arts education.”3 Countering these realities, the diverse cadre of authors examines assessment [End Page 123] from different settings, roles, policies, and practices, organized around four themes. The first theme examines assessment through theoretical ideas including critical pedagogy, pragmatism, and Deleuzean frameworks. Next, in methodological practices, new ideas for assessment are considered through teacher evaluation, working with students with disabilities, and incorporating habits of mind. Creativity explores assessment through technological possibilities, popular music, and drawing, among others. Closing with international perspectives, the authors explore assessment through German and Scandinavian bildung/bildning, care as a driving force of assessment in South Africa, and an Iranian non-regulated perspective of assessment.Alexandra Kertz-Welzel asks: “Who decides what is assessed? How it is assessed? By whom is it assessed?”4 These questions are embraced and challenged throughout the Handbook. Instead of conceiving of assessment as something diagnostic—reaching musical benchmarks and aptitudes deemed by outside authorities—the authors welcome an epistemological shift of assessment. What might happen when music educators replace written self-assessments, quizzes, and playing tests in favor of, say, habits of mind (as Jillian Hogan and Ellen Winner describe in their chapter5) such as listening, noticing, being part of a community, persisting, expressing oneself, imagining, and making decisions? These changes might transform a community, one where students and teachers embrace music making beyond mere replication.6 The authors suggest ways of engaging in acts of subversion, resistance, care, and pragmatism to push past the product-driven view of assessment dictated by neoliberal and for-profit discourses.Historically, assessment has been contextualized, discussed, and critiqued through its practices; its purpose has been to gain information which aids in making decisions about teaching. In many contexts, particularly in the U.S., assessment practices stem from current educational policies, namely those noted in teacher evaluation systems.7 Such practices are intended to show student growth and drive instruction, to better label teaching quality and student success.8 In my own research on teacher evaluation, I found that music educators struggle with definitions and strategies of assessment; as a result, they defer to assessments based on hierarchies of musical skill and technique.9 Yet, Charlotte Danielson, a creator of many U.S. teacher evaluation frameworks, reminds that teaching “is not simply a matter of following a script of carrying out other people’s instructional designs.”10 Having to uphold the demands of assessment and evaluation forced many of the participants in my research to become compliant, even when they knew their teaching strategies were ancillary to who the students were and what they needed. They fabricated their assessments— often in the form of exit slips and inauthentic writing and musical compositional activities—to comply with policies. As a result, teachers’ values for music [End Page 124] teaching and learning were omitted from... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.2 (2000) 182-186 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication. Ed. J. Michael Hogan. Series ed. Thomas W. Benson. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1998. Pp. xxxviii + 315. $39.95. Based on papers and critical responses presented at the Fourth Biennial Public Address Conference, which (...) was held at Indiana University in 1994, this collection of fourteen essays by leading rhetoric scholars concentrates on the relationships among rhetoric, community, and fragmentation. Organized into three broad sections entitled "Race, Gender, and Community," "War and Community," and "Artistic and Scientific Community," the book contributes to ongoing conversations about the roles of language, symbolism, differences, metaphors, myths, hegemony, economic class, pluralism, and multiple consciousness in unifying the United States. A preface and a conclusion by J. Michael Hogan, who edited the collection, provides an orientation and summary for this new volume in the University of South Carolina Press series devoted to Studies in Rhetoric/Communication.The preface frames the book's contribution as a response to a belief that "a growing number of social and political commentators fear that the United States has lost all sense of 'community'--that repository of shared purpose, values, and traditions which historically has defined the American character" (xii). Hogan amplifies, "The signs of stress and fragmentation appear everywhere, not just in our national political and cultural dialogue but in all of the various communities that define our social lives--our families, our neighborhoods, our towns and cities, our professions, and our social and cultural associations" (xii). The preface situates the book in this concern about a "lost" unity that once upon a time typified the United States. But this "lost" community is a mythic representation of a past that has never existed in the United States, except possibly in the imaginations of people habituated to dominant roles. Stephen H. Browne's comments about restoration projects in general are germane: "The work of restoration has [End Page 182] never come easy for Americans, not least of all because it presumes a state that never existed and the appeal to which is almost always self-interested" (75).Describing the fourteen contributors as sharing "a common bond," Hogan asserts, "recognizing that communities are largely defined, and rendered healthy or dysfunctional, by the language they use to characterize both themselves and others, all share an abiding concern with how communities are constituted and sustained--or, in some cases, threatened and disrupted--by the words their leaders choose to characterize both themselves and others" (xv). Hogan emphasizes a question that he reiterates with slight changes in the conclusion: "Can feminist or ethnic and racial communities successfully sustain and celebrate their own identities without alienating themselves from the larger community?" (295; similarly, xxiii). But if all members of a community are responsible for unity and fragmentation, if we are unwilling to assign responsibility for fragmentation to subordinated community members, it may be necessary, consciously, to reverse the dynamics of power implicit in Hogan's question, by asking: "Can groups that have had a history of dominating others--both beyond and within the borders--sustain their own identities and still relate productively to the community?" In addition, because the English language is a communal inheritance, it may be revealing to ask, in a reversal of the book's focus on "community," how are notions of individualism sustained in the United States?Roderick P. Hart's introduction, "Community by Negation--An Agenda for Rhetorical Inquiry," focuses on a rhetoric of hate as practiced by both the political right and the political left. Hart inquires "whether it is possible to have community without hate" (xxv). This question is necessary in any serious discussion of rhetoric, fragmentation, and community; yet calculated opportunism and economic exploitation may be misnamed and obfuscated in language depicting a rhetoric of "hate." Indeed, Lu-in Wang, a legal scholar, suggests that these other motives may be more common than animus in so-called "hate crimes." Live interviews with convicted killers... (shrink)

Margaret Monahan Hogan; Catholic Health Care Institutions: Dinosaurs Awaiting Extinction or Safe Refuge in a Culture of Death, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenic.

That Claudian imitates Virgil's Georgics in the De raptu Proserpinae is well known. Most of his allusions are restricted to Golden Age or Underworld imagery, largely from Books 1, 2, and 4. However, one imitation of the third Georgic that appears not to have been noted previously occurs at De raptu Proserpinae 1.82. The context is Claudian's famous description of Pluto enthroned: ipse rudi fultus solio nigraque uerendusmaiestate sedet: squalent inmania foedosceptra situ; sublime caput maestissima nubesasperat et dirae riget inclementia (...) formae;terrorem dolor augebat. I argue that this recalls the following passage in Virgil: optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aeuiprima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectuset labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis. Inclementia occurs some twenty times in extant classical and late antique Latin verse. Claudian himself uses it three other times. None the less, the construction of Claudian's line makes it clear that the line from the Georgics is being imitated here: the lines are metrically equivalent, and the sound-pattern and identical grammatical structure make the imitation unmistakable. (shrink)

Eric Voegelin's _Israel and Revelation_ is the opening volume of his monumental _Order and History,_ which traces the history of order in human society. This volume examines the ancient near eastern civilizations as a backdrop to a discussion of the historical locus of order in Israel. The drama of Israel mirrors the problems associated with the tension of existence as Israel attempted to reconcile the claims of transcendent order with those of pragmatic existence and so becomes paradigmatic. According to Voegelin, (...) what happened in Israel was a decisive step, not only in the history of Israel, but also in the human attempt to achieve order in society. The uniqueness of Israel is the fact that it was the first to create history as a form of existence, that is, the recognition by human beings of their existence under a world-transcendent God, and the evaluation of their actions as conforming to or defecting from the divine will. In the course of its history, Israel learned that redemption comes from a source beyond itself. Voegelin develops rich insights into the Old Testament by reading the text as part of the universal drama of being. His philosophy of symbolic forms has immense implications for the treatment of the biblical narrative as a symbolism that articulates the experiences of a people's order. The author initiates us into attunement with _all_ the partners in the community of being: God and humans, world and society. This may well be his most significant contribution to political thought: "the experience of divine being as world transcendent is inseparable from an understanding of man as human.". (shrink)

A central doctrine of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason holds that the content of human experience is rooted in an affection of sensibility by unknowable things in themselves. This famous and puzzling affection doctrine raises two seemingly intractable old problems, which can be termed the Indispensability and the Consistency Problems. By what right does Kant present affection by supersensible entities as an indispensable requirement of experience? And how could any argument for such indispensability avoid violating the Critique's doctrine of noumenal (...) ignorance? This essay develops a new solution to both problems, setting out from the continuity between Kant's early and mature views on sensibility and mind-world relations. Kant's early writings subscribe to an interactionist cosmology opposed to both Leibniz's preestablished harmony and Malebranche's occasionalism. The modern debate on mind-world relations shaping Kant's early cosmology points us to a widely recognized motivation for interactionism, turning on a constraint on agency within certain noninteractionist cosmologies. In particular, Kant's early conversion to a libertarian theory of freedom, together with his rejection of occasionalism, provides the basis for a compelling argument for the indispensability of world-mind affection relations. Extended to the transcendental idealist framework, the same argument reveals noumenal affection as an indispensable presupposition of some knowledge claims consistently upheld by Kant. This leads in turn to a satisfying solution to the Consistency Problem, showing that the doctrine of noumenal affection is not merely consistent with, but is partly motivated by, Kant's commitment to noumenal ignorance. (shrink)

This essay seeks to show that teaching and learning are to be properly understood, not as an undertaking carried out on the will of a higher power or party, but as a way of life with an integrity of its own, arising from its own integral purposes. The essay thus seeks to provide an understanding of educational practice and of educational thought that contrasts in key respects with Alasdair MacIntyre's understanding, though also with a some notable parallels. A largely forgotten (...) ‘Socrates of Athens’ is identified as furnishing the original inspiration for the understanding of education explored in the essay. Some influential modern (and postmodern) negations of this understanding are then reviewed. Arising from its investigation of teaching and learning as a singular kind of relationship, the essay concludes with a brief sketch of some virtues that might constitute the way of life in question, in its more active and its more reflective moments. (shrink)

Literature provides us with otherwise unavailable insights into the ways emotions are produced, experienced and enacted in human social life. It is particularly valuable because it deepens our comprehension of the mutual relations between emotional response and ethical judgment. These are the central claims of Hogan's study, which carefully examines a range of highly esteemed literary works in the context of current neurobiological, psychological, sociological and other empirical research. In this work, he explains the value of literary study for (...) a cognitive science of emotion and outlines the emotional organization of the human mind. He explores the emotions of romantic love, grief, mirth, guilt, shame, jealousy, attachment, compassion and pity - in each case drawing on one work by Shakespeare and one or more works by writers from different historical periods or different cultural backgrounds, such as the eleventh-century Chinese poet Li Ch'ing-Chao and the contemporary Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. (shrink)

Hogan argues that the basis of interpretive method is ordinary inferential reasoning - that there is no general methodological difference between interpretation in the humanities and theory construction in the physical sciences. Further, the nature of interpretation does not entail cultural, historical, or other forms of relativism, as is commonly thought. However, this does not imply that there is only one way of approaching interpretation or that there is one true meaning of any particular work. Rather, there are many (...) kinds of interpretation and many kinds of meaning and the interpreter is free to stipulate one of these in the context of a particular enquiry. More exactly, discussing the constraints upon stipulation, Hogan says that, although there are a large number and variety of intents (those of authors and readers, conscious and unconscious), there are no nonintentional meanings - Platonic, social, essential, or otherwise. (shrink)

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (KrV) presents a priori knowledge of synthetic truths as posing a philosophical problem of great import whose only possible solution vindicates the system of transcendental idealism. The work does not accord any such significance to a priori knowledge of analytic truths. The intelligibility of the contrast rests on the well-foundedness of Kant’s analytic–synthetic distinction and on his claim to objectively or correctly classify key judgments with respect to it. Though the correctness of Kant’s classification is (...) vital to his philosophical project, it has been vigorously challenged since he introduced his famous distinction of judgments. The aim of this essay is to explore several metaphysical motives contributing to Kant’s objective classification claim that have been underemphasized and in part overlooked in the large literature on the topic. (shrink)

This book explores how the creations of great authors result from the same operations as our everyday counterfactual and hypothetical imaginations, which cognitive scientists refer to as 'simulations'. Drawing on detailed literary analyses as well as recent research in neuroscience and related fields, Patrick Colm Hogan develops a rigorous theory of the principles governing simulation that goes beyond any existing framework. He examines the functions and mechanisms of narrative imagination, with particular attention to the role of theory of mind, (...) and relates this analysis to narrative universals. In the course of this theoretical discussion, Hogan explores works by Austen, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Racine, Brecht, Kafka and Calvino. He pays particular attention to the principles and parameters defining an author's narrative idiolect, examining the cognitive and emotional continuities that span an individual author's body of work. (shrink)

James Bohman’s Democracy across borders: from demos to demoi is a rich and deep text. It is also deceptively short in length in comparison to those authors he engages and compactly reconstructs. Bohman puts forward strong normative arguments for a ‘reconstructed’ ideal of transnational democracy and provides models for realizing these ideals that also aim to meet standards of practicability. Bohman articulates the minimum necessary conditions for any democratic ideal in terms of freedom from domination and freedom to initiate and (...) engage in efficacious democratic deliberation across the borders of currently existing political communities. The argument charts a novel democratic ideal in terms of the global deliberative situation that is fundamentally different from the authors he discusses in light of existing facts about globalization, institutions, and the pluralism of demoi. In these comments I will focus on two main areas. (shrink)

Throughout most of the history of Western civilization, Christianity and Classical ideals played a dominant part in education. In most western countries, however, this is no longer the case. In modern pluralist Democracies, church influence struggles with pervasive influences from elsewhere for the hearts and minds of the public. Educational policy remains, however, an instrument to be used by major power groups, and in many countries has become, to a greater or lesser extent, an active or unwitting accomplice in furthering (...) acquisitiveness and the accumulation of material advantage. (shrink)

The paper examines Kant’s views on divine foreknowledge of contingent truths, in particular truths concerning free actions of creatures. It first considers the shape this traditional philosophical problem takes in the transcendental idealist context. It then situates Kant’s views relative to three competing theories of foreknowledge discussed by Leibniz. These are Molina’s theory of middle knowledge, the Thomist theory of foreknowledge through divine predeterminations, and Leibniz’s own ‘possible worlds’ theory. The paper concludes that no consistent theory of divine foreknowledge emerges (...) in Kant’s philosophy. His discussions alternate between two inadequate and incompatible models. One is a post-volitional model suggested by his conception of the intuitive intellect’s relation to creation. Extended to creaturely free action, it is incompatible with his commitment to the relative autonomy of free action. The other is a version of Leibniz’s possible worlds solution; it cannot underwrite certain foreknowledge of determinate outcomes in a libertarian setting. (shrink)

John Cleary, Pádraig Hogan; The Reciprocal Character of Self-Education: Introductory Comments on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Address ‘Education is Self-Education’, Jou.

Pádraig Hogan; What Makes Practice Educational?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 15–26, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.146.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Of Literary Universals:Ninety-Five ThesesPatrick Colm Hogan1. There is no such thing as human culture or human cultural difference without human universality.1 (A parallel point about understanding human cultural difference was made by Donald Davidson.2) Alternatively, cultural difference is variation on human universality.2. It follows that every area of a culture manifests human universality. (Otherwise, those cultural areas would not exist.) It does not follow that all areas of culture (...) are found in all cultures. The empirical study of literature, an area of some cultures, would not exist if it did not manifest human universality. It does not follow that the empirical study of literature exists in all cultures.3. The presence of verbal art in any given culture—thus the determination of whether verbal art is found in all cultures—is dependent on the investigator's definition of the term "verbal art," not on the presence or absence of a parallel term in the culture being investigated. "Verbal art" is no different from any other term or phrase in this respect. We would not conclude that there is no color orange in a place that does not have a word parallel to "orange" or that there is no astigmatism in societies without ophthalmology—or that the English do not experience ennui or Schadenfreude.On Communicative Speech4. To understand or even isolate verbal art, we must first understand the general purposes and properties of communicative speech.5. Communicative speech aims at producing some mental alteration in an addressee. That change commonly has some direct or indirect action as its desired outcome. For example, suppose I am building [End Page 145] a house with Wittgenstein and I say "Plank!" My aim is to produce a mental change in Wittgenstein that will result in him retrieving a plank and bringing it to me.6. Action commonly involves a set of generative principles for bodily motion or mental deliberation, a set of regulative principles for adjusting the motion or deliberation, and a set of motives for initiating the motion or deliberation.7. Communicative speech, then, commonly aims at fostering emotions and ideas or representations that, in combination, activate and specify generative principles for action in an addressee. (The emotion may be very weak—for example, a mild aversion to being uncooperative.) It may involve regulative principles as well.8. Verbal art—as I am using the phrase—also aims at producing a mental alteration in an addressee. However, that mental alteration is not, in the first place, governed by the overarching goal of effecting a particular actional outcome. Thus it is not designed to engage generative rules for action or to trigger emotions that motivate such action.9. Rather, verbal art is commonly designed to communicate regulative principles for action and to inspire emotions that do not have direct actional outcomes in the case at hand.10. There are two sorts of regulative principles that figure prominently in both ordinary life and verbal art—ethical and prudential. They constitute the thematic or didactic aspect of verbal art, an aspect noted in every major tradition of literary theory—European, South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern/North African.311. Here and in other cases, individual works of verbal art need not share all universal properties or share them all in the same degree.Rather, all cultural traditions have a body of works of verbal art that, as a whole, have these properties.On Emotion12. Any sort of emotion may occur in verbal art. Indeed, verbal art involves all varieties of emotion.13. However, verbal art is not about the addressee himself or herself. Therefore a literary work does not inspire narrowly egocentric emotions in its audience. It inspires empathic emotions.14. Empathic emotion may be a function of situational particularity or of group identity. In situational empathy, we share a person's or character's emotion insofar as we have been in a parallel situation. [End Page 146] The shared feeling is based on emotional memories. In group-identity empathy, we share a person's or character's feelings because we tacitly understand him or her as sharing our identity. This shared feeling is, then... (shrink)

Papers on history and cultural identity by scholars who attended a 10 week seminar in Washington, DC in 2006.

In this commentary I attempt to extend the argument made by Atran and Norenzayan in two ways. First, I distinguish between the causes and the consequences of religious belief and speculate on the positive and negative consequences of religion. Second, I raise some questions about individual differences in religiosity and suggest that the origins of nonbelief are worth investigating.

John Cleary, Pádraig Hogan; The Reciprocal Character of Self-Education: Introductory Comments on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Address ‘Education is Self-Education’, Jou.

John Cleary, Pádraig Hogan; The Reciprocal Character of Self-Education: Introductory Comments on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Address ‘Education is Self-Education’, Jou.

By any metric, the twentieth century university was a successful institution. However, in the twenty-first century, ongoing neoliberal educational reform has been accompanied by a growing epistemological crisis in the meaning and value of the humanities and social sciences (HaSS). Concerns have been expressed in two main forms. The governors of tertiary education systems—governments, private investors, university managers and consultancy firms—have focused on how HaSS can adapt to the perceived research needs of the 21st century. At the same time, a (...) competing set of discourses has been generated by scholars and researchers employed within the critical HaSS themselves. This article considers what these differing perspectives mean for reconceptualising HaSS for the twenty-first century. After surveying the contemporary climate, this article examines the findings of key reports on the future of the humanities from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Alongside those of Western Europe, these university systems are arguably the key drivers for the global university system. It is argued that these reports provide an opportunity for emerging universities to reflect on their research priorities and developmental strategies. The article concludes with some reflections on the wider consequences of the globalising of the university system, the increase of China's influence in Asia, and ponders the prospect of post-human/ist futures of the humanities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The question concerning the connection of scientific inquiry to democratic praxis is central to both Antonio Gramsci and John Dewey. They share a common philosophical origin in Hegel and are essentially both in the tradition of Left Hegelian thought. Likewise, their respective analyses of the forces obstructing democratic emancipation were sharply focused on the distortions of social life caused by economic agents cooperating under hugely unequal power relations. As Gramsci wrote from his prison cell from 1929 to 1937 in (...) Italy, Dewey went through his most fruitful philosophical period in the United States, including his writings on politics and democracy. They both found targets of critique by diagnosing the pathologies of public life resulting from the power of private capital interests in collusion with a co-opted representative body, the authoritarian crimes and attendant culture of fascism, and the theoretical rigidity of the Soviet Marxists. In addition, true to their Hegelian roots, they marshaled their critiques of the abstractions of liberalism and its attendant moral and economic theory by insisting on the embedded, cultural, and historically deep contexts in which emancipatory practice need take place. (shrink)

Manila is one of the world’s most fragmented, privatized and un-public of cities. Why is this so? This paper contemplates the seemingly immutable privacy of the city of Manila, and the paradoxical character of its publicity. Manila is our prime exemplar of the 21st-century mega-city whose apparent disorder discloses a coherent order which we here call ‘neo-patrimonial urbanism’. Manila is a city where poor and rich alike have their own government, infrastructure, and armies, the shopping malls are the simulacra of (...) public congregations once found in cathedrals and plazas, and where household order is matched by streetside chaos, and personal cleanliness wars with public dirt. We nominate the key characteristics of this uncanny approximation of chaotic and discordant order – a polyphonous and polyrhythmic social order but one lacking harmony – and offer a historical sociology, a genealogy that traces an emblematic pattern across the colonizing periods of its emergent urban forms into the contemporary impositions of gated zones and territories. The enduring legacy of patrimonial power to Manila is to be found in the households and on the streets that undermine and devalue public forms of social power in favour of the patriarch and his householders (now relabelled as ‘shareholders’ in ‘public companies’) at the cost of harmonious, peaceable and just public order. Such a state of affairs is not only destructive of the historic built environment of the city, especially its public parks and plazas and heritage districts, its streets, footpaths, public transport and utilities, but is directly injurious of its citizens. To address the question of Manila’s private order and public chaos is to reopen the quest for the good city as the just polis. It is also to take us beyond arguments of indigenous versus colonial forms of urbanism that are mired in nationalist and modernization ideologies respectively, and it is to reject the reductive logics of globalization arguments that Asian mega-cities are but variations of American logics of urbanism. (shrink)

In the transcendental aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims that space and time are neither things in themselves nor properties of things in themselves but mere subjective forms of our sensible experience. Call this the Subjectivity Thesis. The striking conclusion follows an analysis of the representations of space and time. Kant argues that the two representations function as a priori conditions of experience, and are singular "intuitions" rather than general concepts. He also contends that the representations underwrite (...) some non-trivial a priori cognition of the objects of sensible experience. The Subjectivity Thesis is then presented as an immediate consequence: Space represents no property at all of any things in themselves nor any relation of them to each other. . . . For neither absolute nor relative determinations can be intuited prior to the existence of the things to which they pertain, thus [neither] can be intuited a priori. Time is not something which exists of itself, or which inheres in things as an objective determination. . . . [Were it] a determination or order inhering in things themselves, it could not precede the objects as their condition, and be known and intuited a priori by means of synthetic propositions. Kant's argument for the Subjectivity Thesis seems to have the following structure: * No absolute or relational features of things in themselves can be cognized a priori. (shrink)

At anaphase chromosomes move to the spindle poles (anaphase A) and the spindle poles move apart (anaphase B). In vitro studies using isolated diatom spindles demonstrate that the primary mechano‐chemical event responsible for spindle elongation is the sliding apart of half‐spindle microtubules. Further, these forces are generated within the zone of microtubule overlap in the spindle midzone.

IN THIS ESSAY WE ASK WHETHER CHRISTIANS HAVE THE RESOURCES AND the commitment to make the theological-ethical case for ending war as an instrument of international and national policy in an authentically Christian, intellectually coherent, and practically feasible way. Historical precedent for such shifts in mindsets and practices, as occurred with the abolition of slavery, give grounds for hope, as do witness pacifists. In this essay, we argue for a shift in the center of gravity of theological debate by reorienting (...) our vision of the future to the continuing in-breaking of the Reign of God. (shrink)

This article rehearses the critical theory of Craig Calhoun’s book on nationalism and applies his threefold typology of ‘project, discourse, evaluation’ to the peculiar case of modern Philippine nationalism. The Republic of the Philippines is a marine archipelago of over 7100 islands and 85 million people of various ethnic, linguistic and cultural identities. Because of its history of colonizations (Spanish, American, Japanese), the predominance of Christianity, and the lack of a unified or prestigious pre-modern religious, political or economic order, the (...) Philippines is frequently positioned as ‘in but not of Asia’. Because Filipinos are made acutely aware of their peculiar trajectory as a modern nation-state and precarious position within the region, the dominant discourses of ‘the Philippines’ have been too anxious to construct a genealogy of the modern nation-state as telos and to assert some form of ‘Filipino’ identity and spirit. Now that the nationalist moment of contemporary nation-states has passed with the fading of the post-Second World War ‘developmentalist state’ project and its usurpation since the 1980s by ‘the globalization’ project, an opportunity is afforded for a changing of our critical lens from searches for revolutionary projects of founding myths and ends, of romantic nationalisms, or of nostalgic returns to pre-modern idylls (whether ethnic or colonial). Accordingly, this article has three parts. Part One provides a brief synopsis of Calhoun’s arguments about nationalism. Part Two applies these critical insights to the case of Philippine nationalism, especially as it is expressed in the historical and social sciences. Part Three then introduces alternative ways of thinking about the Philippines as sites of cultural hybridity and traffic. (shrink)

Over the past quarter of a century the work of few philosophers has exerted such powerful influence, or been the centre of such vigorous debate, as that of Alasdair MacIntyre. And although MacIntyre has not often formally addressed educational issues, the thrust of his writing has seemed to bear more clearly on education than that of most philosophers. His assault on central tenets of the Enlightenment in After Virtue already contained an implicit critique of public education in the modern era. (...) That critique was extended and made more explicit in later writings such as his Richard Peters Lecture ‘The Idea of an Educated Public’ (1987), the concluding chapters of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), the final chapter of Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), and the essay ‘Aquinas’s Critique of Education: Against his Age, Against Ours’ (1998). With less polemical intensity he furnished some further arguments on education and upbringing in his book Dependent Rational Animals (1999a). And his most recent comments on the subject are presented in the dialogue published in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (MacIntyre and Dunne, 2002). Moreover, even in his most critical writing MacIntyre has also developed an affirmative vision that has seemed to offer resources for a fruitful reconceptualisation of education: his steady concern with human flourishing, strongly linked to his own distinctive conceptions of virtue and of practice, as well as to his ideas of the biographical unity of a life and the encompassing power of traditions, flows easily into discourse about the aims of education and the kind of undertaking engaged in by teachers. (shrink)