If only implicitly, social anthropology has long incorporated joint attention as a research technique employed in what anthropologists call “the field”. This paper outlines the crucial role joint attention plays in anthropolgical fieldwork—specifically in Participant Observation—and advances the position that joint attention is a goal rather than a starting point of fieldwork practice. Exploring how anthropologists tentatively use attention as a methodological tool to understand other people’s lifeworlds, this paper draws parallels between Participant Observation and ordinary everyday interactions, thus teasing (...) out a view of joint attention as a goal to be reached only by means of knowing what matters to others in the context of the lifeworld they inhabit. (shrink)

On the 65th anniversary of the late Allan Bloom's birth, a distinguished group of his former students honored the memory of this inspiring teacher. Includes a previously unpublished essay on Isocrates by Bloom.

Prompted by the centenary of the founding of Summerhill, in my contribution to this JOPE Suite on Democratic Education, I briefly explore both the admiring reciprocity and the subsidiary but significant differences of praxis between A.S. Neill and Alex Bloom, two remarkable pioneers of education in and for participatory democracy as a way of life. Because A.S. Neill's work is internationally renowned and Alex Bloom's has yet to re-establish the worldwide recognition it had in his own lifetime, my emphasis is (...) on the contribution of Alex Bloom, in large part because he is amongst the most radical pioneers of democratic education the UK state sector has ever known. To a significant degree, the aspirations and actualities of Bloom's work rebutted Neill's insistence that pioneers within the state sector of education could not innovate in ways that would significantly challenge the status quo. Indeed, Alex Bloom extended participatory democratic educational aspirations in ways which Neill did not. Most importantly, these not only entailed a commitment to community engagement, they did so in conditions of abject poverty and profound psychological trauma following the ravages of the Second World War London Blitz with its attendant evacuation and subsequent return to the ruins of their former homes.In the first section, I take as my starting point Alex Bloom's strongly supportive review of A.S. Neill's book The Problem Family and Neill's visit to Bloom's school in the East End of London, some five years later. Foregrounding the dialectic of practice and aspiration, I touch on some of the key issues that emerged for both Neill and Bloom at that time.Challenging Neill's later affirmation that the only significant freedom one can introduce into a state school is ‘a free attitude on the teacher's part, his or her being on the side of the child’ and his reported view that Bloom and others might be able to experiment in methods of teaching or ways of organising the timetable, ‘but not in methods of living’, the second section explores the nature and interrelationship of six key strands woven into the fabric of Alex Bloom's truly remarkable work that exemplified the grounded possibility and vibrant actuality of participatory democracy as a way of living and learning together that prefigures a more just, creative and caring form of human engagement.Locating the foundation of Alex Bloom's praxis within the 20th-century personalist philosophical tradition and its Adlerian psychological counterpart, the brief concluding section draws in particular on the work of John Macmurray who argues, as did Bloom in his own writing and his daily praxis, that ‘The first priority in education—if by education we mean learning to be human—is learning to live in personal relation to other people. Let us call it learning to live in community’. (shrink)

Although Bloom gives more credit to social cognition (mind reading) than do most other theorists of word learning, he does not go far enough. He still relies fundamentally on a learning process of association (or mapping), neglecting the joint attentional and cultural learning skills from which linguistic communication emerges at one year of age.

Eco, Chopin, and the limits of intertextuality -- The appeal to structure -- On codes, topics, and leaps of interpretation -- Bloom, Freud, and Riffaterre : influence and intertext as signs of the uncanny -- Narrative and intertext : the logic of suffering in Lutosawski's Symphony no. 4.

Sheldon Brivic has an immediately idealist and ultimately religious view of language and literature; he is devoted to Berkeley and Hegel, turns phenomenology into what he wittily calls "phonemonology" , and is much preoccupied with the individuality, personality, and god-like authority of the author. For Brivic, history is mainly important insofar as it passes through the mind of the author , and political criticism is readily construed as "narrowly political" , particularly if it seems insufficiently respectful of a favored character. (...) With the partial exception of phenonemology, these are not habits of thought with which I instinctively sympathize, though I do respect them and would certainly expect to learn something from them, especially when it comes to the practical criticism of Joyce, which is what I found most rewarding in the book; Brivic has a sensitive chapter on the consciousness of Stephen in the "Proteus" episode of Ulysses, as well as some noteworthy ideas on the echoing interactions between Stephen and Bloom and the more contentious relationship between Shem and Shaun in Finnegans Wake. Though he doesn't use the term, the homosocial bond would seem to be his long suit; since he does on page 160 use the phrase "between men," I think he could profitably have consulted Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's l985 book of the same name. Requests for reprints should be sent to Michael Walsh, Ph.D., Department of English, University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut 06117. (shrink)

Bloom's book underscores the importance of specifying the role of words and grammar in cognition. We propose that the cognitive power of language lies in the lexicon rather than grammar. We suggest ways in which studies involving children and patients with aphasia can provide insights into the basis of abstract cognition in the domain of number and mathematics.

"Souls Without Longing" was Allan Bloom's own title for his Closing of the American Mind. "Souls Without Eros," eros of any kind, he might have titled it, for in it Bloom described vividly the unerotic students typical of the elite schools to which his teaching was limited, their equally unerotic mentors whose specialized activity and general indifference set American Academe adrift, and the more spirited than erotic Nietzsche, whose thoughts, first inevitably degraded by lesser men and now abused by celebrity (...) nihilists, have contributed to both unerotic students and unerotic teachers. The current book is the positive to that negative. It could have been entitled Souls With Longing. And it could have been subtitled: Me Too. (shrink)

Replies are given to comments, questions, and objections to The Appearance of Ignorance. The reply to Robin McKenna focuses mainly on his questions of whether, with the skeptical argument I’m focused on, a strong enough appearance of ignorance is generated to require an account of that appearance, and whether, to the extent that we do need to account for that appearance, we might do so without contextualism by adopting a solution proposed by Ernest Sosa. The reply to Michael Blome- (...) class='Hi'>Tillman focuses mainly on a counterexample he offers to my account of the operation of the “Rule of Sensitivity.” The reply to Elke Brendel focuses mainly on objections to contextualism from the phenomena of disagreement and retraction. The reply to Peter Baumann concerns several of his comments about my treatment of the Harman lottery puzzle. (shrink)

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, in this volume Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design - disengaged ethical thinking, first from distinctly Christian ideas and then from (...) theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors' most deeply held philosophical goals. (shrink)

In _The Immorality of Punishment_ Michael Zimmerman argues forcefully that not only our current practice but indeed any practice of legal punishment is deeply morally repugnant, no matter how vile the behaviour that is its target. Despite the fact that it may be difficult to imagine a state functioning at all, let alone well, without having recourse to punishing those who break its laws, Zimmerman makes a timely and compelling case for the view that we must seek and put (...) into practice alternative means of preventing crime and promoting social stability. (shrink)

Because of the difficulty posed by the contrast between the search for truth and truth itself, Michael Polanyi believes that we must alter the foundation of epistemology to include as essential to the very nature of mind, the kind of groping that constitutes the recognition of a problem. This collection of essays, assembled by Marjorie Grene, exemplifies the development of Polanyi's theory of knowledge which was first presented in Science, Faith, and Society and later systematized in Personal Knowledge. Polanyi (...) believes that the dilemma of the modern mind arises from the peculiar relation between the positivist claim for total objectivity in scientific knowledge and the unprecedented moral dynamism characterizing the social and political aspirations of the last century. The first part of Knowing and Being deals with this theme. Part two develops Polanyi's idea that centralization is incompatible with the life of science as well as his views on the role of tradition and authority in science. The essays on tacit knowing in Part Three proceed directly from his preoccupation with the nature of scientific discovery and reveal a pervasive substructure of all intelligent behavior. Polanyi believes that all knowing involves movement from internal clues to external evidence. Therefore, to explain the process of knowing, we must develop a theory of the nature of living things in general, including an account of that aspect of living things we call "mind." Part Four elaborates upon this theme. (shrink)

This book challenges the dominant approach to problems of justice in global normative theory and offers a radical alternative designed to transform our thinking about what kind of problem injustice is and how political theorists might do better in understanding and addressing it. It argues that the dominant approach, ideal moral theory (IMT), takes a fundamentally wrong-headed approach to the problem of justice. IMT seeks to work out what an ideally just society would look like, and only then outlines our (...) moral obligations in realizing that ideal. In other words, it ignores the realities of everyday politics. As Michael Goodhart asserts, IMT postpones engagement with actually existing injustices and distorts our understanding of them, and it normalizes many problematic features of our world. On the other hand, the leading alternatives to IMT struggle to make sense of the role values play in politics. This book sees justice as an ideology and develops an innovative bifocal theoretical framework for making sense of it. This framework provides two complementary perspectives on justice: a theoretical perspective that situates competing ideological claims about justice in a broader political context and a partisan perspective that evaluates the structure and coherence of particular conceptions of justice. As opposed to IMT, it focuses on barriers to justice and advocates an activist political theory that takes sides in political struggles against injustice. Goodhart argues that theorists can help to generate the countervailing power necessary for social transformation through the work of articulation, translation, and mapping, work which contributes to a more comprehensive social science of injustice. (shrink)

Viral modernity is a concept based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture, and the basic application to understanding the role of information and forms of bioinformation in the social world. The concept draws a close association between viral biology on the one hand, and information science on the other – it is an illustration and prime example of bioinformationalism that brings together two of the most powerful forces that now drive (...) cultural evolution. The concept of viral modernity applies to viral technologies, codes and ecosystems in information, publishing, education and emerging knowledge systems. This paper traces the relationship between epidemics, quarantine, and public health management and outlines elements of viral-digital philosophy based on the fusion of living and technological systems. We discuss Covid-19 as a ‘bioinformationalist’ response that represents historically unprecedented level of sharing information from the sequencing of the genome to testing for a vaccination. Finally, we look at the US response to Covid-19 through the lens of infodemics and post-truth. The paper is followed by three open reviews, which further refine its conclusions as they relate to philosophy and the notion of the virus as Pharmakon. (shrink)

This paper raises a problem for the pair of views that universals are immanent in their instantiations and that these instantiations, or states of affairs, are somehow constructed from the instantiated universals. It is argued that the pair is inconsistent. The first view implies that universals are prior to states of affairs, whereas the second view implies that states of affairs are prior to universals. This paper does not attempt to solve this problem, but rather to formulate it precisely. That (...) promises to illuminate how to solve the problem if it can be solved, or why it cannot be solved if it is unsolvable. (shrink)

This text gives voice to the idea that the study of the philosophy of thought and language is more than a specialism, but rather lies at the very heart of the ...

Does human life have meaning? Ever since Darwin, there has been great skepticism about whether a "meaning of life" was possible outside of religious belief. Is it possible to find meaning in human life? Philosopher of science Michael Ruse examines the question of meaning in life within Darwinian views of human nature. He argues that meaning in the Darwinian age can be found if we turn to a kind of Darwinian existentialism, seeing our evolved human nature as the source (...) of all meaning, both in the intellectual and social worlds. (shrink)

This paper is an experiment in collective writing conducted in Autumn 2019 at the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. The experiment involves 12 international masters' students readi...

So Lentricchia has fulfilled one of his purposes in this essay. He has subverted the patriarchy from within: that is, he has subverted Bloom’s literary history as well as the essentialist feminism associated with it. But he has not fulfilled his affiliated purpose of establishing a dialogue between feminists and feminized males. The “feminization” of literary studies by patriarchal figures like Bloom does not account for the feminization of Stoddard, Gilder, Van Dyke, Woodberry, or Stedman. Their feminization, like that of (...) the Stevens who felt positively lady-like, was not the result of patriarchal oppression. And it will not disappear as the result of the subversion of the patriarchy by a feminized male. Mistaking the work of feminization with the work of the patriarch eradicates the feminine. By identifying the difference between a feminization produced by the patriarchy and a feminine cultural sphere, Lentricchia has made room for the different cultural conversation he wants to develop. But this conversation can take place only after the backdrop of an oppressive patriarch can drop away.This conversation might begin with an account of that cultural sphere in which women are the agency to which Lentricchia alludes. It might begin when we recall that the model for the culture’s “Emmeline Grangerfords” was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva. The social change Little Eva helped effect was the emancipation of both slaves and slaveholders. Donald E. Pease is professor of English and American literature at Dartmouth College. His articles on nineteenth-century authors and literature have appeared in a number of journals. He is the coeditor, with Walter Benn Michaels, of American Renaissance Reconsidered, and is the author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Contexts, which won the Mark H. Ingraham Prize in 1987. (shrink)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The literature on Kierkegaard is often content to paraphrase. By contrast, Michael Theunissen articulates one of Kierkegaard's central ideas, his theory of despair, in a detailed and comprehensible manner and confronts it with alternatives. Understanding what Kierkegaard wrote on despair is vital not only because it illuminates his thought as a whole, but because his account of despair in The Sickness unto Death is the cornerstone of existentialism. Theunissen's book, published in German in 1993, is widely regarded as the (...) best treatment of the subject in any language. Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair is also one of the few works on Kierkegaard that bridge the gap between the Continental and analytic traditions in philosophy. Theunissen argues that for Kierkegaard, the fundamental characteristic of despair is the desire of the self "not to be what it is." He sorts through the apparently chaotic text of The Sickness unto Death to explain what Kierkegaard meant by the "self," how and why individuals want to flee their selves, and how he believed they could reconnect with their selves. According to Theunissen, Kierkegaard thought that individuals in despair seek to deny their authentic selves to flee particular aspects of their character, their past, or the world, or in order to deny their "mission." In addition to articulating and evaluating Kierkegaard's concept of despair, Theunissen relates Kierkegaard's ideas to those of Heidegger, Sartre, and other twentieth-century philosophers. (shrink)

Phenomenologies of Violence explores phenomenology’s capacities to deepen our understanding of various violences. The volume presents phenomenology as an interdisciplinary, relevant method to investigate violence, its many faces, meanings, and far reaching consequences for human existence and self-understanding.

Early expressivists, such as A.J. Ayer, argued that normative utterances are not truth-apt, and many found this striking claim implausible. After all, ordinary speakers are perfectly happy to ascribe truth and falsity to normative assertions. It is hard to believe that competent speakers could be so wrong about the meanings of their own language, particularly as these meanings are fixed by the conventions implicit in their own linguistic behavior. Later expressivists therefore tried to arrange a marriage between expressivism and the (...) truth-aptness of normative discourse. Like many arranged marriages, this has not been an entirely happy one. In particular, the marriage has seemed to depend on so-called deflationist theories of truth, and these may well turn out to provide at best a shaky foundation for any marriage. Before advising the parties to file for divorce, though, we should first see whether expressivism itself has not been misunderstood. I argue that the marriage of expressivism to the truth-aptness of normative discourse can indeed be saved, though only in the context of a version of expressivism I call “Ecumenical Expressivism.”. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION The doctrines and values of the 'new' archaeology are in the process of being broken down; for many they were never acceptable. ...

Michael Kelly is the author of 68 entries altogether. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French is far more than a simple revision of the original Oxford Companion to French Literature, published in 1959, and described by The Listener as the `standard work of reference for English-speaking enquirers into French literature'. As the change in title implies, this completely new work presents an authoritative guide not only to ten centuries of literature produced in the territory now called France, (...) but also to the rich literary output of other French-speaking countries around the world. The scope of the Companion is deliberately open and inclusive, challenging and extending the traditional canon. Literature is understood in a broad sense, ranging from strip cartoon and pamphlet to tragedy and epic, and particular attention is devoted to francophone writing from outside France. Written by an international team of specialists, entries cover individual authors and works - over 3,000 of them - from the troubadours to Césaire, and from La Princesse de Clèves to La Vie mode d'emploi. Each is discussed in detail within their historical, cultural, and intellectual context. Among the new features of the Companion are the substantial essay-entries, reflecting up-to-date scholarship and theoretical debates on topics such as: - literary movements and genres - historical subjects such as chivalry, or Occupation and Resistance in wartime France - movements of thought from Scholasticism to feminism - linguistic topics - the sciences - the arts and media, including opera, cinema, and press. (shrink)

Grounded in the canonical gospels and other New Testament passages, especially Philippians 2:1-11, this study offers an account of humility from a Christian perspective.

Michael Luntley provides a lively introduction to the debate over postmodernism. Sympathisers of the postmodernist critique of absolute knowledge have jetisoned concepts of reason,t ruth and self; this abandonment has fuelled their opponents' case against postmodernism. This has led them to ignore the very real problems raised by the postmodernists. Luntley offers a clear and careful exposition of how rational debate survives despite the Enlightenment's failings. _Reason, Truth and Self_ covers many of the key questions of our age: * (...) How rational is science? * Can we really know the truth about ourselves and the world? * What is the nature of the mind? * Can we know the difference between right and wrong? _Reason, Truth and Self_ is ideal for courses in philosophy and the social sciences. (shrink)

From the concrete experience of war, Michael S. Yandell constructs a phenomenology of “negative revelation” in which false or distorted claims of goodness and justice disintegrate and become meaningless, adding depth to the term moral injury.