Durkheim écrit ce livre avec un but double : d'abord il voulait expliquer ce qui crée une société, ce qui la tient ensemble ; ensuite il voulait éclaircir l'influence qu'a la société sur la pensée logique. Pour Durkheim, la religion est la clé utilisée pour déverrouiller ces deux problématiques.Dans ce livre, Durkheim argumente que les représentations religieuses sont en fait des représentations collectives : l'essence du religieux ne peut être que le sacré. Il est une caractéristique qui se trouve universellement (...) dans toutes les religions. Le sacré, être collectif et impersonnel, représente ainsi la société elle-même. Ensuite il argumente que la société a un impact majeur dans la genèse de la pensée logique. C'est la société qui fournit à l'individu les catégories (le temps, l'espace, le nombre etc.) et les concepts nécessaires pour la pensée logique. (shrink)

The Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life: Translated From The French By Joseph Ward Swain, M.A. This book is a result of an effort made by us towards making a contribution to the preservation and repair of original classic literature. In an attempt to preserve, improve and recreate the original content, we have worked towards: 1. Type-setting & Reformatting: The complete work has been re-designed via professional layout, formatting and type-setting tools to re-create the same edition with rich typography, graphics, (...) high quality images, and table elements, giving our readers the feel of holding a 'fresh and newly' reprinted and/or revised edition, as opposed to other scanned & printed (Optical Character Recognition - OCR) reproductions. 2. Correction of imperfections: As the work was re-created from the scratch, therefore, it was vetted to rectify certain conventional norms with regard to typographical mistakes, hyphenations, punctuations, blurred images, missing content/pages, and/or other related subject matters, upon our consideration. Every attempt was made to rectify the imperfections related to omitted constructs in the original edition via other references. However, a few of such imperfections which could not be rectified due to intentional\unintentional omission of content in the original edition, were inherited and preserved from the original work to maintain the authenticity and construct, relevant to the work. We believe that this work holds historical, cultural and/or intellectual importance in the literary works community, therefore despite the oddities, we accounted the work for print as a part of our continuing effort towards preservation of literary work and our contribution towards the development of the society as a whole, driven by our beliefs. We are grateful to our readers for putting their faith in us and accepting our imperfections with regard to preservation of the historical content. HAPPY READING! (shrink)

This article introduces a form of ‘conversation’ distinct from dialogue or dialectic to the context of educational theory, practice, and research. Through an engagement with the thought of Maurice Blanchot, this paper outlines the conditions he attributes to conversation in the form of plural speech, its relationship to research, how it can be educational, and speculatively concludes by considering how it can operate productively within and around educational institutions. As such, this paper provides an original intervention into educational philosophy and (...) theory, which relies on a close reading of key sections of Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation, and reflections on the distinctiveness of his argument in relation to contemporary theoretical approaches, as well as the significance of his thought and its application here to the broader questions of what non-prescriptive theory might have to offer educational research and practice. (shrink)

This paper does not present an advocacy of a passive education as opposed to an active education nor does it propose that passive education is in any way ‘better’ or more important than active education. Through readings of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and B.S. Johnson, and gentle critiques of Jacques Rancière and John Dewey, passive education is instead described and outlined as an education which occurs whether we attempt it or not. As such, the object of critique for this essay (...) are forms of educational thought which, through fate or design, exclude the passive dimension, either within or outside of formal educational settings. An underlying component of this argument is therefore also that education does occur outside of formal educational settings and that, contra Gert Biesta and his critique of ‘learnification’, we may gain rather than lose something by attending to it as education. (shrink)

Positive ignorance is the putting in to question of, and sometimes moving on from, the knowledge we think we have, and asking where it might be just or helpful to do so. Drawing primarily on the work of Barbara Johnson, this article shows how the notion of positive ignorance might be offered as a tool in the context of education and educational research. Partly a critical development of Richard Smith's argument in ‘The Virtues of Unknowing’, I attempt to understand ‘unknowing’ (...) as an active rather than passive form of ‘not knowing’, in a manner that challenges some aspects of ‘the virtues of unknowing’ and its concomitant epistemological and ethical positions, not least those tied to Smith's advocacy for what he calls the ‘well-stocked mind’. Unknowing, in my reading, is not a dispositional acceptance of the desirability of nonknowledge, instead, unknowing is a means of epistemological resistance, especially against that which, often with very real social and political consequences, is presented as self-evident. (shrink)

“Scalar implicatures” is a phrase used to refer to some inferences arising from the competition between alternatives: typically, “Mary read some of the books” ends up conveying that Mary did not read all books, because one could have said “Mary read all books”. The so-called grammatical theory argues that these inferences obtain from the application of a covert operator \, which not only has the capability to negate alternative sentences, but also the capability to be embedded within sentences under other (...) linguistic operators, i.e. \ has the potential to add to the meaning of expressions, the negation of their alternatives. This view typically seeks support from the existence of readings that could not be explained without the extra-capability of \ to occur in embedded positions. However, if some embedded positions seem to be accessible to \, not all conceivable positions that \ could occupy yield sensible results. In short: the \ approach is powerful, maybe too powerful. Various approaches based on logical strength and monotonicity have been proposed to justify on principled grounds the limited distribution of \; these approaches are mostly based on a comparison between possible parses, and considerations of monotonicity. We propose a new constraint based instead on “connectedness”, ruling out parses because of inherent problems their outcome may raise. Connectedness is a sister notion of monotonicity, which has been recruited to explain certain lexical restrictions on nouns, adjectives and more recently quantifiers; we propose here that connectedness could play a similar role at the level of propositional meanings. (shrink)

This article proceeds from a consideration of what John Baldacchino calls ‘viable ignorance’, attempting to take leave from the critical and pedagogical obligations of certain elements of Barbara Johnson's ‘positive ignorance’. It considers Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard and the composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen's reflections on modes of experience, and the cultivation of complementary dispositions, where the knowing, egocentric subject is transformed into, or undermined as, what Nietzsche calls ‘a medium of overpowering forces’. The disposition itself is outlined through close readings of (...) key elements of Nietzsche's notebooks, Lyotard's final chapter of Libidinal Economy (1993), and Stockhausen's lecture, ‘Intuitive Music’ (1971) and developed through supplemental practice-as-research activity in sound. The intention of this paper is to explore the space of aesthetic ignorance as committedly as possible, without reverting constantly to positive ignorance. (shrink)

In this influential work, first published in English in 1963, Durkheim and Mauss claim that the individual mind is capable of classification and they seek the origin of the ‘classificatory function’ in society. On the basis of an intensive examination of forms and principles of symbolic classification reported from the Australian aborigines, the Zuñi and traditional China, they try to establish a formal correspondence between social and symbolic classification. From this they argue that the mode of classification is determined by (...) the form of society and that the notions of space, time, hierarchy, number, class and other such cognitive categories are products of society. Dr Needham’s introduction assesses the validity of Durkhiem and Mauss’s argument, traces its continued influence in various disciplines, and indicates its analytical value for future researches in social anthropology. (shrink)

Cet article présente les paradigmes de la cécité au changement. J'y identifie et évalue les interprétations perceptives et cognitives des déficits induits par des manipulations de l'attention, et critique le critère épistémique proposé par Dretske en faveur de la conception cognitive. Mon argument souligne l'influence de l'attention sur le contenu de l'expérience perceptive.

The primary purpose of this paper is to outline the conceptual means by which it is possible to be optimistic about education. To provide this outline I turn to Ian Hunter and David Blacker, after a brief introduction to Nietzsche’s conceptions of optimism and pessimism, to show why certain forms of optimism in education are either intellectually unhelpful or dispositionally helpless in the face of current educational issues. The alternative form of optimism—which I argue is both intellectually and practically helpful—is (...) drawn from a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche. This reading of Nietzsche is not a simple exercise representing his views. As Nietzsche never explicitly advocated for any form of optimism—and frequently advocated against many of its manifestations—drawing what I call ‘a new version of optimism’ from his writings is no straightforward task, and certainly not without risk. As such, I have extended my readings of Nietzsche across his entire oeuvre, including his writings unintended for publication from his Nachlass. At the core of my argument is the claim that when Nietzsche was sketching out what he called ‘a new version of pessimism’, it was actually quite close to what we might now call ‘a new version of optimism.’ This first claim precipitates a second, which is that this new version of optimism is not only especially suited to contemporary educational thought and practice but is itself a description of an educational experience and disposition. (shrink)

In this influential work, first published in English in 1963, Durkheim and Mauss claim that the individual mind is capable of classification and they seek the origin of the ‘classificatory function’ in society. On the basis of an intensive examination of forms and principles of symbolic classification reported from the Australian aborigines, the Zuñi and traditional China, they try to establish a formal correspondence between social and symbolic classification. From this they argue that the mode of classification is determined by (...) the form of society and that the notions of space, time, hierarchy, number, class and other such cognitive categories are products of society. Dr Needham’s introduction assesses the validity of Durkhiem and Mauss’s argument, traces its continued influence in various disciplines, and indicates its analytical value for future researches in social anthropology. (shrink)

Through readings of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology and 'The Age of Hegel', attention is given to two of the problematic types of relationships that philosophy can have with education. These engagements, alongside a reading of 'The Antinomies of the Philosophical Discipline: Letter Preface', show how Derrida’s thought can prescribe no educational programme and instead troubles educational proclamations and certainties. Throughout his life, Derrida negotiated his relationships to the educational systems and institutions to which he was responsible, these negotiations, though, were (...) not indicative of a belief in any ontologically grounded educational truth. Quite to the contrary, as I will claim, Derrida’s thought is remarkable for its deflation of the myth, stretching at least as far back to Plato’s Republic, that philosophy can discover and prescribe the practical means for its own educational good. The argument presented in this article is that Derrida’s thought is particularly fertile when it comes to educational reflection precisely because it does not close down, presuppose, or prescribe, and that these characteristics also allow for generative contradictions in Derrida's educational and philosophical thought and practice. (shrink)

In this paper, we build on recent work on the role of the ‘utopian pedagogue’ to explore how utopian thinking can be developed within contemporary higher education institutions. In defending a utopian orientation on the part of HE lecturers, we develop the notion of ‘minimal utopianism’; a notion which, we suggest, expresses the difficult position of critical educators concerned to offer their students the tools with which to imagine and explore alternatives to current social and political reality, while acknowledging the (...) contingent ethical constraints of the system within which they and their students are working. While agreeing with utopian theorists such as Darren Webb who have defended the need for ‘blueprint utopias’ in education in the face of the reduction of the idea of utopia to a purely process-oriented pedagogy, our focus here is on the prior educational task of providing the conceptual and communicative tools for utopian thinking to emerge. The collaborative nature of this paper is ref... (shrink)

[688/2197] In many economic matters there arises a paradox that may be related to what in logic courses is called the “sophism of the heap of wheat”. Among the sophisms bequeathed to us by the Greeks, none is worthier to have come down through the centuries than this “sophism of the heap of wheat”; indeed this no mere puzzle, but a topical example of a frequent difficulty, as much in practical life as in pure speculation.One grain of wheat does not (...) make a heap; neither do two grains; nor do three grains; \(\ldots \) on the other hand, if a million grains are gathered, we can agree that they constitute a heap. What is the exact limit? Should we say that 2,342 grains, for instance, do not make a heap, whereas 2,343 grains do? This is obviously ridiculous. There appears no logical way out of this dead-end; it is therefore not possible to know what a heap of wheat is.The expression of the sophism can be varied in many ways; a classification of these expressions will not be unhelpful. (shrink)

Paru pour la premiere fois en 1908, l'essai d'Emile Meyerson Identite et realite demeure aujourd'hui un classique de la philosophie des sciences, dont A. Koyre a salue l'importance. Un premier aspect important de cet ouvrage concerne la conception et le statut meme de la science (physique, biologie, etc.). Meyerson developpe une critique profonde de la conception positiviste de la science formulee par Auguste Comte, en montrant l'impossibilite de penser des rapports phenomenaux sans leur presupposer des supports: la legalite ne peut (...) pas se resoudre dans la causalite. C'est la raison pour laquelle l'auteur s'efforce de definir un substantialisme renouvele, apte a echapper aux critiques positivistes. L'autre these essentielle de cet essai se rapporte bien entendu au celebre concept de causalite scientifique : le concept de legalite mis en jeu dans la conception positiviste de la science ne suffit pas, car la science cherche egalement a expliquer les phenomenes; et c'est precisement cette explication, qui consiste dans l'identification de l'antecedent au conequent, que l'auteur appelle la causalite scientifique, et qu'il distingue et oppose a la causalite theologique aussi bien qu'a la causalite efficiente. (shrink)

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century is a wide-ranging collection of essays that explores philosophy, biography, and texts about and by disabled people living in the eighteenth century. The book, which introduces and affirms the notion that disability studies predates most United States and United Kingdom findings by more than a hundred years, will be of interest to philosophers, historians, sociologists, and literary scholars.

In this paper, we introduce a new fragment of the first-order temporal language, called the monodic fragment, in which all formulas beginning with a temporal operator have at most one free variable. We show that the satisfiability problem for monodic formulas in various linear time structures can be reduced to the satisfiability problem for a certain fragment of classical first-order logic. This reduction is then used to single out a number of decidable fragments of first-order temporal logics and of two-sorted (...) first-order logics in which one sort is intended for temporal reasoning. Besides standard first-order time structures, we consider also those that have only finite first-order domains, and extend the results mentioned above to temporal logics of finite domains. We prove decidability in three different ways: using decidability of monadic second-order logic over the intended flows of time, by an explicit analysis of structures with natural numbers time, and by a composition method that builds a model from pieces in finitely many steps. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to sketch out the conceptual possibility of what is given the name remuant existence. That is to say, a changeable, restless and fickle existence. The word remuant, no longer in common use in the English language, is an adjective. Its meaning offered here is used to designate what will be considered the qualifying attribute of existence, which is to make the point that existence is remuant existence. Existence is a common noun and thereby grammatically a (...) universal but if it cannot exist without being remuant its nominal universality is of no significance. The universality of existence does not mean anything; only remuant existence has meaning. The articulation of this concept, and those which are concomitant with it, is primarily an untangling of the remuant from the critique of presence and of the subject offered by Jacques Derrida, whose influence remains visitant throughout. (shrink)