Over a career spanning American history from the 1880s to the 1950s, John Dewey sought not only to forge a persuasive argument for his conviction that "democracy is freedom" but also to realize his democratic ideals through political activism. Widely considered modern America's most important philosopher, Dewey made his views known both through his writings and through such controversial episodes as his leadership of educational reform at the turn of the century; his support of American intervention in World War I (...) and his leading role in the Outlawry of War movement after the war; and his participation in both radical and anti-communist politics in the 1930s and 40s. Robert B. Westbrook reconstructs the evolution of Dewey's thought and practice in this masterful intellectual biography, combining readings of his major works with an engaging account of key chapters in his activism. Westbrook pays particular attention to the impact upon Dewey of conversations and debates with contemporaries from William James and Reinhold Niebuhr to Jane Addams and Leon Trotsky. Countering prevailing interpretations of Dewey's contribution to the ideology of American liberalism, he discovers a more unorthodox Dewey—a deviant within the liberal community who was steadily radicalized by his profound faith in participatory democracy. Anyone concerned with the nature of democracy and the future of liberalism in America—including educators, moral and social philosophers, social scientists, political theorists, and intellectual and cultural historians—will find John Dewey and American Democracy indispensable reading. (shrink)

This essay looks to Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey, as well as a contemporary political theorist, Kevin O'Leary, for some guidance in confronting the present crisis in American democratic norms and practices—including that swirling around issues of public health.

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...

While the notion of risk remains under-theorised in moral philosophy, risk aversion and moralist self-protection appear as dominant cultural tendencies saturating educational orientation and practice. Philosophy of education has responded to the educational emphasis on risk management by exposing the unavoidable and positive presence of risk in any endeavour to learn and teach. Taking such responses into account, I discuss how the theoretical connection of risk and education could be radicalised through an ethical approach combined with epistemological and existential concerns. (...) My aim is to propose an ethics that is sensitive to the difference between risks taken and risks imposed and to the cultural variations of what counts as danger. Finally, I explain how the educational relevance of such an ethics requires a prior questioning of the western understanding of self and world that has functioned as a subtext of the dominant view of risk. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 303-325.

In the article the key terms including “coach”, “coaching”, “coaching technology” used in the area of educational leadership are investigated. The purpose, tasks and types of coaching in the educational management are determined. The coaching algorithm as a technology targeted at unlocking the potential of university faculty and staff is explained. The emphasis is placed on the use of coaching principles that ensure effective leadership. The immense potential that coaching technology provides for the educational leadership is considered. The role of (...) master programs that offer specialized training for future leaders in different educational environments is outlined. In order to stimulate professional education, leader’s ability to make ethical managerial decisions, develop responsibility, confidence in their own capabilities, the ways of implementing coaching technology in higher education are substantiated. The key competencies and masteries that educational leaders have to acquire are outlined. Today’s schools lack experienced leader that can ensure stability and growth. To understand the problems and challenges that schools in Ukraine are facing, principals in two regions of Ukraine have been served regarding their awareness of the term “coaching” and its practical importance for the effective educational management. It is argued that coaching as a strategy to ensure effective leadership is considered to be a powerful resource for any educational setting. The framework of coaching treats each and every employee as a unique, creative personality, able to independently solve a number of tasks, take initiative, make choices, and realize goals. (shrink)

Though concerned with knowledge, this article begins with unknown political events that are ignored by the culture and educational practices of the societies in whose name the events took place. The questions that these events raise indicate a relation of epistemology with ethics and education that complicates some theoretical and managerial attitudes to knowledge. This relation, along with Richard Smith’s notion of knowingness, will frame an exploration of virtue-epistemologies that contests epistemic exaggerations of the knower as accomplished virtuous character. The (...) article emphasizes the need for a normative epistemology that critically invigorates the educational aim of transmitting knowledge and submits it to ethico-political considerations. (shrink)

Traditional medical practices and relationships are changing given the widespread adoption of AI-driven technologies across the various domains of health and healthcare. In many cases, these new technologies are not specific to the field of healthcare. Still, they are existent, ubiquitous, and commercially available systems upskilled to integrate these novel care practices. Given the widespread adoption, coupled with the dramatic changes in practices, new ethical and social issues emerge due to how these systems nudge users into making decisions and changing (...) behaviours. This article discusses how these AI-driven systems pose particular ethical challenges with regards to nudging. To confront these issues, the value sensitive design approach is adopted as a principled methodology that designers can adopt to design these systems to avoid harming and contribute to the social good. The AI for Social Good factors are adopted as the norms constraining maleficence. In contrast, higher-order values specific to AI, such as those from the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, are adopted as the values to be promoted as much as possible in design. The use case of Amazon Alexa's Healthcare Skills is used to illustrate this design approach. It provides an exemplar of how designers and engineers can begin to orientate their design programs of these technologies towards the social good. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the way in which proximity and distance have been made relevant to cosmopolitanism and I discuss the significance contemporary theory attributes to border crossing. By employing colonial border crossing and its rationalization as an example, and by drawing from Alain Badiou's critique of political philosophy, I expose some of the problems of facile and faddish approaches to planetary movement. I argue that the real borders to be crossed by true cosmopolitans are internal and, regrettably, traversible, (...) raised at an early age, preserved through education and carried along wherever one goes. Then, I show how this thesis relativizes the drastic choice between cosmopolitanism and patriotism that is imposed by many current theories. By elaborating on Heraclitus's dictum that ‘the citizens must defend the law, as they would defend the wall of the city’, I sketch an account of patriotism that is (a) compatible with, and conducive to, cosmopolitanism as well as (b) mindful of the duplicity of the interplay of proximity and distance. (shrink)

" In Democratic Hope, Robert B. Westbrook examines the varieties of classical pragmatist thought in the work of John Dewey, William James, and Charles Peirce, ...

Adjectives such as “environmental”, “social”, “cosmopolitan”, “relational”, “distributive”, etc. reflect how scholars discern the many faces of justice and put several claims to, and claimants of, justice in perspective. They have also helped related research to focus on some surfaces of justice, that is, on spaces that invite justice, localities and formations, such as the state, social policies, social institutions, etc. within which ethical-political challenges unravel. Diverse philosophical perspectives enable context-specific explorations of (sur)faces of justice. However, I argue, there is (...) more to the concept of justice than what perspectives (considered alone or in their sum total) allow us to view. To theorize how this surplus may be more discernible through stereoscopic rather than perspectival optics I first describe how educational-philosophical perspectives, old and new, discuss just education or education for justice; and then I critique the very notion of perspective on which scholarly work relies. Despite their merits, perspectival framings of justice fail to address the interconnectivity of various (sur)faces of justice. (shrink)

This article brings together two case studies that examine how nontransgender people, “gender normals,” interact with transgender people to highlight the connections between doing gender and heteronormativity. By contrasting public and private interactions that range from nonsexual to sexualized to sexual, the authors show how gender and sexuality are inextricably tied together. The authors demonstrate that the criteria for membership in a gender category are significantly different in social versus sexual circumstances. While gender is presumed to reflect biological sex in (...) all social interactions, the importance of doing gender in a way that represents the shape of one's genitals is heightened in sexual and sexualized situations. Responses to perceived failures to fulfill gender criteria in sexual and sexualized relationships are themselves gendered; men and women select different targets for and utilize gendered tactics to accomplish the policing of supposedly natural gender boundaries and to repair breaches to heteronormativity. (shrink)

Local seed systems remain the fundamental source of seeds for many crops in developing countries. Climate resilience for small holder farmers continues to depend largely on locally available seeds of traditional crop varieties. High rainfall events can have as significant an impact on crop production as increased temperatures and drought. This article analyzes the dynamics of maize diversity over 3 years in a farming community of Yucatán state, Mexico, where elevated levels of precipitation forced farmers in 2012 to reduce maize (...) diversity in their plots. We study how farmers maintained their agroecosystem resilience through seed networks, examining the drivers influencing maize diversity and seed provisioning in the year preceding and following the 2012 climatic disturbance. We found that, under these challenging circumstances, farmers focused their efforts on their most reliable landraces, disregarding hybrids. We show that farmers were able to recover and restore the diversity usually cultivated in the community in the year following the critical climate event. The maize dynamic assessed in this study demonstrates the importance of community level conservation of crop diversity. Understanding farmer management strategies of agrobiodiversity, especially during a challenging climatic period, is necessary to promote a more tailored response to climate change in traditional farming systems. (shrink)

In this article I examine Jean–François Lyotard’s conception of history, its philosophical presuppositions, and its implications. As his conception’s most crucial implicit assumptions I consider Lyotard’s account of language and his notion of agonistics and dissent. Concerning its implications, I consider the nominalist and relativist conclusions Lyotard’s theory may engender if thought through to its end, as well as the possibilities it opens up for ethics and justice for alterity, or otherness, via a new notion of human history. My aim (...) is to show how Lyotard advances philosophical thought about history and to examine whether he succeeds in delivering the goods he promises. I conclude with suggestions for an alternative approach. The main thesis of the article is that Lyotard’s metacritique of past accounts of human history is pertinent and apposite but, because of some negative implications of certain implicit assumptions on which he relies to articulate this critique, it appears inadequate in some respects. I argue that it is possible to promote a critique of older notions of human history along Lyotardian lines and to preserve the merits of Lyotard’s critique for a sensitive and nonlogocentric approach to otherness via another route, one that is not committed to Lyotard’s agonistics and incommensurability of language games. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetics, Education, the Critical Autonomous Self, and the Culture IndustryMarianna Papastephanou (bio)IntroductionE Lucevan le Stelle disconnected both from Tosca and Puccini becomes incidental music and brings strong recollections of the detergent advertisement it once coated. Last Year in Marienbad has caused some of the deepest yawn relief to many hopefuls for the title of the sophisticated who wished to cash out the film's cultural and social capital. A painting (...) by a well-known artist in the living room of a middle-upper-class residence often matches the colors of the carpet, and a piece of African art in the corner testifies to the hosts' cosmopolitan respect for otherness and the proper dose of hybridity in their selfhood. The young of the family are said to search for freedom from the puritan lifestyle in Ecstasis. Or, they rebel against the oppressive order of the system through idolizing music bands of an unconventional style and, as a matter of fact, of "unconventional" wealth accumulated precisely through the systemic exploitation of their idolization. The whole family, including the discontented young, will unite in the enjoyment of a new movie in which, just as in hundreds before it, police detectives can solve cases only after their suspension from duty and foreigners prefer to converse in perfect English when they are alone. What all members of the family are sure of by the end of the day, some of them through the prism of heavy drinking and others in the sober appreciation of the latest reality show, is that they exercised once again their free will in all instances. For they oriented their desires, treated as natural and self-posited, to objects they initially lacked but "autonomously" and "critically" found and selected from a rich and all-encompassing marketplace of culture. [End Page 75]How are art, its education, and its educational ideals of autonomy and critique related to this particular cultural reality that I have highlighted? Pseudo-individualism, escapism, Ersatzbefriedigung, fetishization, reification, and educationalization are some of the terms Adorno employed to approach the reality of artistic production and reception in capitalist times while preserving the distance that art offers for critiquing reality.1 In contrast with the above-sketched reality, in Adorno's ultimate aesthetic vision through art the self is not supposed to "forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image."2 Adorno attacks the drive toward a "totally administered" society—that of late capitalism—which "reduces every aspect of present-day life to the dead level of conformist popular 'taste' as dictated by a wholesale culture industry given over to the purposes of mass indoctrination."3 Fundamentally, the culture industry hinders the formation of autonomous, critical, and independent individuals.4I shall argue that such a theoretical framework gives us additional insight through which to combat what has already been perceived in pedagogical discourse as educational inability to cultivate reflective and critical subjectivities. Instead of autonomy, education nurtures narcissism. and instead of critique, it promotes appeasement5 —all the more so when education succumbs to the culture industry or fails to encourage students' critical stance to its imperatives.My position here is that by reclaiming their own valuable connection to reflective artistic experience and reception, aesthetic theory and art education can contribute to a reconceptualization of autonomy and critique and, perhaps more importantly, to a reorientation of educational practice.6 Adorno's aesthetics is exceptionally relevant to this aim because his work exemplifies in a unique way the necessary awareness of the antinomic qualities of autonomy and critique, their ineluctable dependence on society and culture, and their secret culpability in domination. Moreover, Adorno's cultural criticism comprises an unsurpassable diagnosis of those social pathologies that leads away from critical and reflective subjectivity and offers conceptual means for setting a critical eye on some current impoverished practices of teaching art. Above all, Adorno's aesthetic theory displays a remarkable topicality regarding contemporary positions on purely artistic concerns and contentions. Thus, the current neglect of his work in aesthetic educational theory7 must be dealt with since accommodation of such aesthetics within art educational discourse will serve significantly the latter's... (shrink)

This paper employs an eclectic mix of paradigms in order to discuss constituting characteristics of young children's learning experiences. Drawing upon a phenomenological perspective it examines learning as a form of 'Being' and as the result of learners' engagement with the world in their own, unique, intentional manners. The learners' intentions towards their world are expressed in everyday activity and participation. A social constructivist perspective is thus employed to present learning as situated in meaningful socio-cultural contexts of the everyday, lived (...) world and as a form of participation in those settings. These characteristics of learning are brought together into a holistic, synthesised model, a Gestalt of learning. The proposed synthesis has relevance for and is applicable to educational contexts as a means of making sense of children's learning experiences and of promoting and facilitating them. (shrink)

Is it Eurocentric on the part of western philosophers (Habermas, Derrida) or of researchers in human sciences to set out from a specific locality (Europe) to formulate ethico-political ideals with universal aspirations? In this article, I critique the ‘universalism vs. particularism’ framework within which the charge of Eurocentrism is deployed and I redefine the notion of Eurocentrism outside the drastic choice between universalism and particularism and in light of an ‘ec-centric’ reflection on the entanglement of the ‘We’ and the ‘others’. (...) I illustrate my position by discussing the Habermasian–Derridean plea for the determination of new European political responsibilities beyond any Eurocentrism. I grant that the two philosophers go indeed beyond Eurocentrism as the latter is usually understood, i.e. along the axis ‘universal–particular’. Yet, without minimizing their political contribution, I detect subtler Eurocentrisms that pervade several assumptions of Habermas’s and Derrida’s collaborative efforts. I argue that a hasty enlisting of possibilities for a politically and morally pertinent European intervention in world affairs fails to account for other, more necessary steps in the direction of reforming the western consciousness and of going beyond less easily discernible Eurocentrisms such as those theorized within the proposed, reformulated notion. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine ways in which localized research runs the risk of becoming a boundary discourse in a negative sense. The exaggerated emphasis on immanent critique, contextualization and incommensurability may lead discourse and disciplines to an isolationist self-understanding that leaves unchallenged or even entrenches existing discursive hegemonies. Or, it may side with the kind of facile and hasty fusion of discourses and disciplines that ignores epistemic demands and concerns for validity and semantic accuracy. That is, (...) it may overlook the necessity for positively understood discursive boundaries. Clearly demarcated, a-porous boundaries block osmosis and fruitful exchange and facilitate what is called here ?stronghold fortification?. And they make common cause with a disregard for all boundaries, i.e. with what is called here ?frame demolition?. Discourses of educational research, and particularly of ?special? versus ?inclusive? education, supply examples that are all the more telling since the very possibility of pedagogy reminds us that relativism is not an option here. To discuss interdisciplinarity and discursivity with an eye to such risks, I refer to Habermas? outlook on the position of philosophy after Kant alongside Derrida's rethinking of the right to philosophy ? a rethinking that is grounded in a reading of Kant's cosmopolitical point of view. (shrink)

Artistic practices of postmodern art do not only express the principles of the conceptions of the world of modern culture but on the whole they prepare the anthropological "project" of a cosmopolit. But the danger of leveling and even ruining the system of the Ukrainian world outlook traditions exists in the framework of this project. In this article the author investigates the peculiarities of Yu. Andrukhovych' creative work in the context of the Ukrainian postmodern art. Thanks to the ironic form (...) and extreme spontaneity in the choice of dedication and epigraph, postulates the model in which the contextual neo-mythological features are traced and the features reveal the essential peculiarities of the anthropological project of a "post-totalitarian" person. The author's tragic world-outlook and apocalyptical mood are hidden behind the humor and eclectic glare. It doesn't look like "banquet during the plague", but like the comprehension of the problem of one's existence under the totally new historic-cultural conditions. The neo-mythological axis is grounded on the Christian-mythological model-antithesis. The neo-mythological peculiarities analyzed by the author interact with each other in the dialectical unity and make the organic entirety of the artistic work, they are actual for a contemporary person finding himself under the conditions of a transitional period when culture is looking for stable landmarks in its development. It is proved that the neomyth by Yu. Andrukhovych was being built on the synthesis of Christianity and folk culture, ascertaining the European character of the Ukrainian culture and surge for its legitimacy, uniting together the Dianetical and Apologian features. It gave the author the chance to model the modern culture in the coordinates "Bu - bo - bu" and build the anthropological project in the direction of a Cosmopolitan pole. (shrink)

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

ExcerptIn “Tired of Science?! Notes on the Relationship between University and Society,” Michael Hüther insightfully updates a preoccupation of German intellectuals running back at least to Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, the relationship between science and society, and so between “truth” and “politics,” and the extent to which an enlightened politics is even possible—but let us not get too far ahead of ourselves.

This chapter contains sections titled: Epistemology and Politics Peirce James Dewey Neo‐pragmatism.

In this paper, I will focus on a type of confabulation that emerges in relation to questions about mental attitudes whose causes we cannot introspectively access. I argue against two popular views that see confabulations as mainly offering a psychological story about ourselves. On these views, confabulations are the result of either a cause-tracking mechanism or a self-directed mindreading mechanism. In contrast, I propose the view that confabulations are mostly telling a normative story: they are arguments primarily offered to justify (...) one’s attitudes, and they are produced by our argumentative reasoning mechanism driven by the biological goal of presenting ourselves as good reasoners and as reliable sources of information. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide an original account of the distinction between the spheres of Sitten that goes beyond the traditional one based on the nature of incentives, since this underestimates some of their characteristics. First, the paper identifies in obligatio a common source between Ethics and Right. Then, it explores how in the Metaphysics of Morals the connection between law and incentive constitutes a more relevant criterion to distinguish ethical lawgiving from juridical lawgiving. Specifically, it demonstrates (...) that such connection: to be ethical should be linear, understood as a necessary self-determined process of connecting law to incentive; to be juridical should be mediated, namely it comprises an inclusive disjunction between two modalities of connecting law to incentive: a non-necessary linear and a divergent one. It concludes by exploring the implications of such perspective on the notions of internalisation and externalisation associated to each lawgiving. (shrink)