Elliot Eisner has spent the last 40 years researching, thinking and writing about some of the key and enduring issues in Arts Education, Curriculum Studies and Qualitative Research. He has contributed over 20 books and 500 articles to the field. In this book, Professor Eisner has compiled a career-long collection of his finest pieces-extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings and major theoretical contributions-so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Starting with a specially written (...) Introduction, which gives an overview of Professor Eisner's career and contextualizes his selection, the chapters cover a wide range of issues, including: · Children and art · The use of educational connoisseurship · Aesthetic modes of knowing · Absolutism and relativism in curriculum theory · Education reform and the ecology of schooling · The future of education research This is a must-have book for anyone wishing to know more about the development of Arts Education, Curriculum Studies and Qualitative Research over the last four decades, and about Elliot Eisner's contribution to these exciting fields. This book is part of the World Library of Educationalists series, which celebrates the contributions made to education by leading figures. Each scholar has selected his or her own key writings from across numerous books and journal articles, and often spread across two or more decades to be presented in a single volume. Through these books, readers can chase up the themes and strands that have been lodged in a lifetime's work, and so follow the development of these scholars' contributions to the field, as well as the development of the fields themselves. Other scholars included in the series: Richard Aldrich, Stephen J. Ball, John Elliott, Howard Gardner, John Gilbert, Ivor F. Goodson, David Hargreaves, David Labaree, E.C. Wragg, John White. (shrink)

Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes in the debate over Martin Heidegger and Nazism from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger's work. He reveals crucial aspects of Heidegger's thinking that betray an affinity with dimensions of Jewish thought.

Elliot R. Wolfson is Professor of Religious Studies and the Marsha and Jay Glazer Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Children are not simply molded by the environment; through constant inference and interpretation, they actively shape their own social world. This book is about that process. Elliot Turiel's work focuses on the development of moral judgment in children and adolescents and, more generally, on their evolving understanding of the conventions of social systems. His research suggests that social judgements are ordered, systematic, subtly discriminative, and related to behavior. His theory of the ways in which children generate social knowledge through (...) their social experiences will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and students in child development and education. (shrink)

In this erudite new work, Elliot R. Wolfson explores philosophical gnosis in the writings of Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod. The juxtaposition of these three extraordinary, albeit relatively neglected, philosophers provides a prism through which Wolfson scrutinizes the interplay of ethics, politics, and theology. The bond that ties together the diverse and multifaceted worldviews promulgated by Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod is the mutual recognition of the need to enunciate a response to the calamities of the twentieth century (...) based on an incontrovertible acknowledgment of the decadence and malevolence of human beings, without, however, succumbing to acrimony and despair. The speculation of each of these philosophers on melancholia and the tragicomedy of being is unquestionably intricate, exhibiting subtle variations and idiosyncrasies, but we can nevertheless identify a common denominator in their attempt to find the midpoint positioned between hope and hopelessness. As Wolfson articulates, Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod exemplify a philosophical sensibility informed by a nocturnal seeing, which is not merely a seeing in the night but rather a seeing of the night. Ultimately, the book reveals the potential for these thinkers' ideas to enhance our moral sensitivity and to encourage participation in the ongoing struggle for meaning and decency in the present. (shrink)

In his book, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues against the inclusion of non-human animals within the scope of the principles of justice developed therein. However, the reasons Rawls, and certain commentators, have advanced in support of this view do not adequately support it. Against Rawls' view that 'we are not required to give strict justice' to creatures lacking the capacity for a sense of justice, it is initially argued that (i) de facto inclusion should be accorded non-human animals (...) since their exclusion strains just institutions, and (ii) Rawls' account of the sense of justice has implicit and undefended human chauvinist elements. Two further counter-arguments are then developed in more detail. First, the suggestion that some non-human animals do have a capacity for a sense of justice is explored. Second, the suggestion that the capacity for a sense of justice is unrealised in so many human beings that Rawls' basis for marking out a special place for them is undermined is explored. Attention is next given to Rawls' characterisation of the participants in the original position. It is claimed that there are no good reasons for disallowing the possibility that these individuals turn out to be non-human animals in the real world. If sound, this claim brings non-human animals directly within the scope of Rawlsian principles of justice. The claim is defended against three objections. (shrink)

This discussion concerns the under-explored influence of Jacques Derrida on Paul B. Preciado and the autotheoretical enterprise that is Testo Junkie. Picking up on the deconstructive logic of contamination at work in Preciado’s early writings, the article reckons with autotheory as both a theoretical mode motored by the first person and an autobiographical mode interested in self-shaping. In so doing, it offers a genealogy of autotheory that finds its origins in Derrida’s disinterest in disciplinary purity and dislike of philosophical detachment, (...) at the same time as positioning Testo Junkie firmly within a French literary and philosophical context where it both intervenes in the activity of queer theorizing and antagonizes the highly popular genre of autofiction through a series of generic contaminations. Autotheory, in this itinerary, is inseparable from the self-writing project that Preciado undertakes and advocates, one that disidentifies from the fiction of a privately sexed and interior ‘self’. (shrink)

Logic-Based Therapy & Consultation (LBTC) is a popular modality of philosophical counseling developed by philosopher Elliot D. Cohen and the first one to have undergone a randomized, controlled efficacy study. Logic-Based Therapy and Consultation: Theory and Applications brings together leading LBTC researchers, trainers, and practitioners to provide the latest account of its theory and apply it to diverse populations including persons with mental health issues, children, athletes, persons with drug and alcohol addictions, persons in a detention center, human services (...) workers, and adolescents. Edited by Elliot D. Cohen, S Zinaich Jr., Himani Chaukar, and Florin Lobont, this collection shows how religious and philosophical traditions from East to West can be used with LBTC to inspire meaningful life change, tackle social issues such as civic conflict, and even attain romantic love. Spanning forty years of research and development, this book should interest instructors of philosophy, religion, psychotherapy, and related areas; social workers and human services/mental health providers; philosophical counselors and consultants; and anyone interested in learning about this versatile approach to coping constructively with problems of living. (shrink)

In S. Psillos and M. Curd (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science, forthcoming.

Alastair S. Gunn has argued that it is in principle possible to restore degraded natural environments and to restore their full value, provided that species distinctive to them are extant. I argue, first, that the proviso is unnecessary. More importantly, I claim that full value cannot be restored because restored environments lack the relational property of being naturally evolved. I delineate and explain the structure and detail of the theoretical bases for this claim and show that Gunn’s reflections do not (...) rule out the view that full value cannot be restored. (shrink)

Are mysticism and morality compatible or at odds with one another? If mystical experience embraces a form of non-dual consciousness, then in such a state of mind, the regulative dichotomy so basic to ethical discretion would seemingly be transcended and the very foundation for ethical decisions undermined. Venturing Beyond - Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism is an investigation of the relationship of the mystical and moral as it is expressed in the particular tradition of Jewish mysticism known as the (...) Kabbalah. The particular themes discussed include the denigration of the non-Jew as the ontic other in kabbalistic anthropology and the eschatological crossing of that boundary anticipated in the instituition of religious conversion; the overcoming of the distinction between good and evil in the mystical experience of the underlying unity of all things; divine suffering and the ideal of spiritual poverty as the foundation for transmoral ethics and hypernomian lawfulness. (shrink)

Incarceration served as a primary apparatus by which abolition democracy was defeated after Reconstruction. Carceral institutions—such as the penitentiary, the convict-lease system, and the chain gang—functioned to demarcate the racial limits of citizenship and to impede equal political power. This article turns to W. E. B. Du Bois to argue that incarceration constrains democratic political equality. Turning to Du Bois’s treatment of crime and imprisonment in works including The Philadelphia Negro (1899), “The Spawn of Slavery” (1901), and The Souls of (...) Black Folk (1903), alongside archival material, I situate incarceration in Du Bois’s democratic thought. According to Du Bois, carceral institutions bounded ideas of full citizenship, fueled panic over Black “criminality,” fomented feelings of inferiority, and hampered the possibility for abolition democracy, a multiracial, multiclass movement committed to worker democracy and a future rid of slavery and subjugation. Du Bois shows us how carceral institutions run into tension with democratic ideals. (shrink)

The philosophical past, once a thing of the past, is with us again. I examine three recent positions about how to understand the philosophical past: the presentism of Richard Rorty, the traditionalism of Alasdair MacIntyre, and the interpretism of Charles Taylor. Rorty, MacIntyre, and Taylor all acknowledge a Hegelian influence upon their views; thus, I also explore Hegel's own view of the history of philosophy. Finally, I offer my own view that our relation to the past ought to be guided (...) by "recognizing" it. Although the concept of recognition is found in Hegel, I argue that Hegel as well as Rorty and MacIntyre end up conceiving of our relation to the past as one of appropriation. Recognition as I define it eschews such appropriation; rather, it consists in a "working through" of the past in a sense the paper specifies. (shrink)

Language evolution has long been researched. I will review a number of broad, emerging research directions which arguably have the potential to contribute to our understanding of language evolution. Emerging topics in genomics and neurolinguistics are explored, and human-specific levels of braincase globularity – and the broader process of self-domestication within which globularity seems capable of being encapsulated – will be argued to be the central pillars of any satisfactory and interdisciplinary model of language evolution.

Some considerations are urgent and others are not. Sometimes we invite criticism if we neglect the urgency of our situation, even if our action seems adequate to respond to it. Despite this significance, the literature does not offer a satisfactory analysis of the normative structure of urgency. I examine three views of urgency, drawn from philosophical and adjacent literature, which fail to explain the distinctive criticism we face when we neglect the urgency of our reasons. Instead I argue that urgent (...) considerations pre-empt our deliberation about less urgent considerations. Urgency, then, is a meta-normative phenomenon, setting standards for how we handle and respond to first-order considerations, requiring that we close deliberation. In the face of urgency, appropriate action is not enough: commitment is called for. This is how we enact appreciation of our practical reasons, independently of our carrying out the action they call for. (shrink)

This highly original, provocative, and poetic work explores the nexus of time, truth, and death in the symbolic world of medieval kabbalah. Demonstrating that the historical and theoretical relationship between kabbalah and western philosophy is far more intimate and extensive than any previous scholar has ever suggested, Elliot R. Wolfson draws an extraordinary range of thinkers such as Frederic Jameson, Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, William Blake, Julia Kristeva, Friedrich Schelling, and a host of kabbalistic figures into deep conversation with (...) one another. _Alef, Mem, Tau _also discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time. The framework for Wolfson’s examination is the rabbinic teaching that the word _emet, _“truth,” comprises the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, _alef, mem,_ and _tau,_ which serve, in turn, as semiotic signposts for the three tenses of time—past, present, and future. By heeding the letters of _emet _we discern the truth of time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning that cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that re/marks the place of origin and destiny, and the end that is the figuration of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of rebirth. The time of death does not mark the death of time, but time immortal, the moment of truth that bestows on the truth of the moment an endless beginning of a beginningless end, the truth of death encountered incessantly in retracing steps of time yet to be taken—between, before, beyond. (shrink)

Demonstrating the practical relevance and import of many historically significant philosophers , Critical Thinking Unleashed presents a practical, non-technical, and comprehensive approach to critical thinking. In contrast to other treatments of practical reasoning, Elliot D. Cohen not only teaches students how to identify and refute irrational premises_he also teaches them how to construct rational antidotes to combat the personal, social, and political obstacles they confront in everyday life.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Elliot Rubinstein BUÑUEL'S WORLD, OR THE WORLD AND BUNUEL* THE line OF descent from Surrealist cinema to chosiste fiction—the line which all the remarks that follow are meant at least to trace—is, if not direct, surely collateral. But the genealogy is so complex as to resist detailing in a brief paper. What I offer may be taken for preliminaries, observations on the cinema of Bunuel prompted in large (...) part by a rereading of Robbe-Grillet's For a New Novel. ' The world of any Bunuel film is first of all, in William S. Pechter's phrase, the worst of all possible.2 But the phrase misleads, implying that better worlds are imaginable, let alone photographable, let alone otherwise available. Neithersexual fascination {L'Aged' or, El [ This Strange Passion], Ensayo de un crimen [The Criminal Life ofArchibaldo de la Cruz], Abismos de pasión [Wuthering Heights], Diary ofa Chambermaid, Belle de Jour) nor faith (Nazartn, Robinson Crusoe, Vindiana, The Milky Way), nor any other agency of spiritual transcendence delivers us to a world fit for human habitation. Trailing clouds, but not of glory, do we come, and beneath these clouds we proceed to make fools and martyrs and killers of one another, of ourselves. Unhappily, such views, seized upon as novelties, leave Buñuel at the mercy of some of the most sophomoric adulators ever to hound a major artist. Happily, Buñuel's vision justifies his views; happily, his career transcends his vision. His particular achievement is the sheer variety of worlds he has discovered or reanimated, none quite like *This article, and the one by Stanley Cavell which follows it, grew out of remarks presented at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, December 30, 1977. The title of the symposium was "Chosisme and the Cinema: the Perception of Physical Reality in Cinema and Literature." 237 238Philosophy and Literature another except in the way it is seen—and each the worst of all possible. The world of Nazartn appears, on the relentlessly gray surface of its film stock, the most conventional in any of Buñuel's works. (I am not thinking of, for one must try to think as little as possible of, some of the potboilers Buñuel had to produce during his Mexican captivity of the late 1940s and 1950s.) Its story of a persecuted priest is left to progress without worrisome spatial or temporal discontinuities. The myth on which its story feeds, explicit in the title, is the most familiar of all, and the inescapable implications of the Quixote and of Dostoyevsky 's tale of the Grand Inquisitor further cater to our certainty of the correctness of our responses. The sole plainly Surreal moment occurs when the picture of Jesus on the priest's wall explodes into a wicked Bosch-like grin, but the image is subjective, "psychological," reflecting the delirium of a wounded prostitute whom the priest is sequestering, and seen only by her. Emotional valences are respected: there is nothing perplexing about the characters' reactions and interplayings. And things are in their place. Such an account of Nazartn recalls Robbe-Grillet's account of Balzacian fiction: All the technical elements of narrative—systematic use of the past tense and the third person, unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, regular trajectory of the passions, impulses of each episode toward a conclusion, etc.—everything tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, decipherable universe. Since the intelligibility of the world was not even questioned, to tell a story did not raise a problem. The style of the novel could be innocent, (p. 32) I trust there is no reason to belabor the frailness (I mean with respect to any reading of Balzac) of an argument that pushes to that last sentence. Still, the point is plain enough, and, in its way, and, in its limits, true enough. Because Nazarin (based, by the way, on a novel of Galdós) tells a story in an age when "To tell a story has become strictly impossible" (p. 33) it cannot lay claim to a place in the realm of New Narrative. But there is more to Nazarin than... (shrink)

This essay concerns two forms of moral non-naturalism according to which general moral principles or laws enter into the grounding explanations of particular moral facts. According to bridge-law non-naturalism, the laws are themselves partial grounds of the moral facts; whereas according to grounding-law non-naturalism, the laws explain the grounding connections that obtain between particular natural facts and particular moral facts. I pose and develop an objection to BLNN concerning moral worth: as compared to GLNN, BLNN has trouble accommodating the common (...) intuition that actions performed out of motivation for rightness de dicto are, at least in paradigm cases, deficient in their moral worth as compared to those performed out of motivation for rightness de re. After presenting the moral worth objection to BLNN, I respond to a possible defense of the view and explain why GLNN is not itself imperiled by an analogous objection. I finally argue that in light of the moral worth objection, a purported analogy between the law and morality fails to give us any reason to prefer BLNN to GLNN. I conclude that non-naturalists who accept the existence of general and explanatory moral principles should adopt GLNN rather than BLNN. (shrink)

Clear and distinct perception is the centrepiece of Descartes’s philosophy — it is the source of all certainty — but what does he mean by ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’? According to the prevailing approach, what it means for a perception to be clear is that its content has a certain objective property, like truth. I argue instead that clarity is at least partly a subjective, phenomenal quality whereby a content is presented as true to the perceiving subject. Clarity comes in degrees. (...) Any weak degree of clarity, available to the senses, can be merely subjective, since what it presents as true may not actually be true. But complete clarity, available to intellectual perception, has an objective dimension, since what it presents as true is always some truth, some bit of reality. Further, I argue that the other perceptual qualities that Descartes identifies — obscurity, confusion, and distinctness — are all defined in terms of clarity. Of particular note is the fact that distinctness is not a positive feature to be added to clarity: a distinct perception is just a completely clear perception. (shrink)

according to some interpreters of John Locke’s moral philosophy, there is an inconsistency between Locke’s adoption of hedonism and his commitment to a natural law view of ethics. Indeed, Locke is not fully explicit about the relationship between pleasure and pain and the natural law in the Essay concerning Human Understanding. But the thesis I defend in this paper is that the idea of convenientia, according to which God harmonizes the natural law with human nature, can be used to understand (...) how Locke synthesizes the hedonism he adopts in the 1670s, and ultimately expresses in Book II, chapter 20 of the Essay, with the natural law doctrine he maintains over the course of his lifetime. As I argue, God’s providential.. (shrink)

Contents: Ethical principals for environmental protection / Robert Goodin -- Political representation for future generations / Gregory S. Kavka and Virginia L. Warren -- On the survival of humanity / Jan Narveson -- On deep versus shallow theories of environmental pollution / C.A. Hooker -- Preservation of wilderness and the good life / Janna L. Thompson -- The rights of the nonhuman world / Mary Anne Warren -- Are values in nature subjective or objective? / Holmes Rolston III - Duties (...) concerning islands / Mary Midgley -- Gaia and the forms of life / Stephen R.L. Clark -- Western traditions and environmental ethics / Robin Attfield -- Traditional American Indian and traditional western European attitudes toward nature / J. Baird Callicott -- Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action / Richard Routley. [Book Synopsis]. (shrink)

Descartes holds that when you perceive something with perfect clarity, you are compelled to assent and cannot doubt. (This is a psychological claim.) Many commentators read him as endorsing Psychologism, according to which this compulsion is a matter of brute psychological force. I show that, in Descartes’s view, perfect clarity provides a reason for assent—indeed a perfect reason, which precludes any reason for doubt. (This is a normative claim.) Furthermore, advancing a view I call Rational Force, he holds that the (...) normative claim explains the psychological one: since your will is naturally responsive to reasons, you are compelled to assent because you have a perfect reason to assent. This coheres with his view that will is essentially active, self-determined, and free. The force that clarity exerts on the will is not the brute push of an efficient cause, but the rational pull of a final cause. (shrink)

The American Society for Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy (ASPCP) was founded on the premise that philosophical and psychological practices are interdependent and mutually supportive. While psychological practice can benefit from becoming more philosophical, the converse is also true. In contrast, the American Philosophical Practitioner’s Association, under the direction of Louis Marinoff, has driven a wedge between these two practices. In this paper, I show how philosophical therapies such as my own Log­ic-Based modality, and psychological therapies, especially Rational-Emotional Behavior Therapy (REBT) (...) work together synergistically. I hold that the APPA bifurcation of psycho­logical from philosophical practice is artificial, impractical, and self-defeating. Further, I maintain that Marinoff’s position that there is a distinct class of “sane” clients appropriate for the latter form of therapy serves to propagate a dangerous popular stereotype, that clients who “need” conventional psychological therapy must therefore be “insane.”. (shrink)

This paper provides a new solution to the problem of moral permissions for the moral error theory. The problem is that the error theorist seems committed to the claim that all actions are morally permitted, as well as to the contradictory claim that no action is morally permitted. My solution understands the moral error theory as the view that folk moral discourse is systematically in error by virtue of suffering from semantic presupposition failure, which I show is consistent with a (...) Kratzerian semantics for deontic modals in natural language. Formally, the solution is to treat the ordering source parameter within Kratzer’s semantics as undefined in the case of folk moral discourse. The paper concludes with thoughts about the import of the solution proffered for the alleged independence of the moral error theory from normative ethics. (shrink)

Environmentalists express concern at the destruction/exploitation of areas of the natural environment because they believe that those areas are of intrinsic value. An emerging response is to argue that natural areas may have their value restored by means of the techniques of environmental engineering. It is then claimed that the concern of environmentalists is irrational, merely emotional or even straightforwardly selfish. This essay argues that there is a dimension of value attaching to the natural environment which cannot be restored no (...) matter how technologically proficient environmental engineers become. The argument involves highlighting and discussing analogies between faking art and faking nature. The pivot of the argument is the claim that genesis is a significant determinant of an area's value. (shrink)

This chapter explores the ways in which the project of the early Royal Society supported the transformation of religion into a practical and reasonable activity that essentially consists in a kind of natural religion wherein we focus on what can be known about God and our duties through the natural light, understood in terms of an experimental approach to nature. More precisely, Rossiter argues that the natural religion supported by figures in and around the Royal Society subverts the traditional hierarchy (...) between contemplation and action found in the medieval period by subsuming contemplation into action—the fruit of which is a concept of religion that is above all practical. After the Introduction, the second section considers the way in which the ideal of religious contemplation is viewed differently between the Royal Society and earlier medieval perspectives that value speculative theology. He argues that figures in the Royal Society invert the traditional hierarchy found in the medieval period between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. Instead of seeing action as dispositive and subservient to contemplation, experimental philosophers understand contemplation as an ultimately practical activity oriented toward bettering our condition on this Earth. In the third section, Rossiter shows that the proper contemplation of nature on this view yields evidence of teleological design. Contemplation of nature, then, ultimately has a practical orientation insofar as recognition of divine design in nature is intended to strengthen the conviction that God too has designed human nature for practical ends. In the fourth section, he argues that this serves to yield a ‘de-confessionalised’ conception of religion in which religious knowledge primarily consists in a minimal set of propositions about the world and the divine nature, all of which were verified by experience and oriented toward promoting ethical behaviour. Religion, in this sense, is essentially practical and has no place for contemplation as an end in itself. (shrink)