Like the discipline of economics, the philosophy of education and educational studies are offshoots of moral philosophy. They investigate how best to realize the good as part of human existence. In...

This essay is an attempt to demonstrate that Charles Taylor’s “social imaginaries” should not be viewed as sources of identity. For Taylor, making sense of society’s practices allows an individual to develop a conception of the self – an idea Taylor borrows from Hegel. I therefore suggest that Kierkegaard’s critiques against Hegel may similarly be used against Taylor’s conception of identity. Kierkegaard’s critiques of Hegel are applicable to Taylor’s social imaginaries for two reasons. First, Hegel’s system only provides approximations—mediation in (...) the ethical nullifies the individual’s subjective relation to Kierkegaard’s “Absolute” by objectivizing the relation. Thus, despair ensues. Second, if knowledge of the Absolute is mediated through social imaginaries, the individual’s responsibility to perpetually renew faith in her constituting power is diminished. Taylor’s “system” is therefore insufficient for achieving a positive view of existence because selfhood is properly understood through the inward subjectivity of one’s relation to her constituting power. (shrink)

'You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable' – so begins André Gorz's 'open love letter' to the woman he has lived with for 58 years and who lies dying next to him. As one of France's leading post-war philosophers, André Gorz wrote many influential books, but nothing he wrote will be read as widely or remembered as long as this simple, passionate, beautiful letter to his dying wife. (...) In a bittersweet postscript a year after Letter to D was published, a note pinned to the door for the cleaning lady marked the final chapter in an extraordinary love story. André Gorz and his terminally ill wife, Dorine, were found lying peacefully side by side, having taken their lives together. They simply could not live without one another. An international bestseller, _Letter to D_ is the ultimate love story – and all the more poignant because it's true. (shrink)

Thatmox means, or can mean, ‘soon,’ is an assertion which is made often and positively, in works of all sorts, from the ordinary dictionaries, such as Facciolati-Forcellini and Lewis and Short, and valuable writings on lexicography such as Merguet's lexicon to Cicero and Krebs-Schmalz' Antibarbarus, down to the latest little school book at which I have looked. As I had never been able to find a passage in which it clearly and unambiguously had that meaning, in any classical author, I (...) have thought it worth while to examine all the instances in a few good writers, with a view to finding out how they really do use it. (shrink)

There exists the putative assumption that since those values that legitimate social practices and institutions are liberal values, then the most coherent form of justification for their universal applicability must — and can only — be a liberal one. The aim of this article is to unravel the foundations of this assumption and, in doing so, to demonstrate that the transition from comprehensive to political liberalism is an expression of postmodern concerns at the heart of liberalism. The central claim I (...) wish to make is twofold: first, John Rawls's concentration on the problem of legitimacy over and above justice leads to an acceptance of the social thesis, albeit in a minimal form. Two, as a consequence of this, the Kantian form of practical reason that informs his work has to be modified to avoid problems with motivation. In the succeeding section, I reverse the direction of argument and concentrate on an explicitly hermeneutical liberalism, that of Gianni Vattimo, which avowedly embraces the substantive implications of the social thesis and yet attempts to demonstrate that the aims of interpretation and understating entail a commitment to liberal political values. Although the social thesis can offer a plausible account of political motivation congruent with the demands of legitimacy, it must also be committed to a minimal formal account of practical reason much to the chagrin of the critics of postmodern ethics who accuse all contextual thought of exhibiting strong irrational tendencies. The intention of the conclusion is to show that whether one begins from the liberal commitment to formal values, or the postmodern contextual commitment to substantive, situated values, one must be committed to a political form of autonomy that is both non-comprehensive yet necessarily situated. Moreover, the recognition of these concerns necessitates a simultaneous avowal of postmodern themes in order for political liberalism to be fully coherent and persuasive as a political doctrine, as well as an explicit recognition of the formal claims of reason by any postmodern thought. (shrink)

Integrity ought logically to be a particularly important concept within political science. If those acting within the political system do not have integrity, our ability to trust them, to have confidence in their actions, and perhaps even to consider them legitimate can be challenged. Indeed, the very concept of integrity goes some way towards underwriting positive views of political actors. Yet, despite this importance, political science as a discipline has perhaps focused too little on questions of integrity. Where political science (...) has looked at the subject of integrity, it has often done so without using the specific linguistic formulation “integrity”. Most commonly, the focus has instead been on “corruption”—a strand of research which has produced results that cannot always be translated into discussions of integrity, by virtue of its narrower focus upon the “negative pole” of public ethics. Other measures, such as “Quality of Government”, focus on positive attributes, notably impartiality, but this also fails fully to capture the notion of integrity: dishonesty can be impartial. Specific formal “codes” used within public life and among political practitioners can be much more nuanced than the most widely used measures, and can be much closer to what we understand—academically—as “integrity”. This paper argues that the hard conceptual and empirical work of elaborating integrity into a fully operationalizable concept offers the potential reward of an analytical concept that is more closely aligned with political reality. (shrink)

The sumptuous edition of Herodas by Headlam-Knox, while it throws welcome light on many dark places, is perhaps hardly adequate in a few points where ancient religious ideas are involved. I venture, therefore, to offer the following suggestions: I. II and 66, μà τàς Моίρας. IV.30, πρòς Моιρέων. I. 32,μà τήν Αϊδεω Κούρην. I. 69, μà … τήν Φίλην δήμητρα.

The paper focuses on ›Sammelrezensionen‹ (reviews) in the DVjs in their founding period and enquires into their function on establishing the concept of ›Geistesgeschichte‹ as a research paradigm. First, I will have a closer look on the text-type itself in the context of the journal and will analyze its strategic potential to (re-)organize research fields. Second, I will investigate the polemic function of such reviews and the relevance for the founding years of the DVjs. Finally, the results of this analysis (...) are discussed in relation to the research on Baroque literature. (shrink)

Professor Housman states that stella never is used to mean sidus, and for authors of the best age I believe he is right; at least I know of no examples except those which he convincingly explains away in the article quoted. There seem, however, to be instances of this usage perhaps as early as the age of the Antonines. Hyginus, fab. cxcv, says of Orion, ab Ioue in stellarum numenim est relatus, quam stellam Orionem uocant. Again, fab. ccxxiv, Crotos…in stellam (...) Sagittarium. Hyginus, it is true, was a fool, and his book is crammed with mistakes, including astronomical blunders; thus, just after the last-quoted passage, and also in fab. cxxx, he names the star Arcturus when he means the constellation Arctophylax, or Bootes. But I cannot think him quite so grossly ignorant, since he was interested in star-myths, as not to know that Orion and Sagittarius are constellations. It may be, however, that the use of stella in these passages is due, not to Hyginus himself, but to the epitomators whose extracts from the original work are all that has come down to us. Of these gentry I can believe almost anything that implies false Latin or general ignorance. (shrink)

In the final years of his life, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote _True Christianity_, an opus that served both to contextualize his theology within contemporary Christianity and to serve as a road map for the new spiritual age that would follow. This second volume covers topics such as freedom of choice, repentance, the transformation of a person’s inner being during spiritual awakening, the rites of baptism and the Holy Supper, and the second coming of the Lord. This new translation is part of (...) the New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg, an ongoing project to render Swedenborg’s theological works in clear, contemporary language that reflects the simple and engaging style of the original Latin. The portable edition contains the text of the New Century Edition translation, but not the annotations or other supplementary materials found in the deluxe edition. (shrink)

There is no such thing as the future of Man. Or, rather, there is only one circumstance in which that phrase has any real meaning, that circumstance being the complete eradication of all humans at more or less the same time or as a result of one event—such as a large enough asteroid strike, a widespread major volcanic episode, or a massive nuclear exchange. Barring such an event, however, different groups of humans, even different groups within individual societies, have different (...) futures. Even if we try to think about the future of the human species in the abstract, there are many different futures that can be conceived, and even these different conceptions do not exhaust the topic, for our thinking about our future and our knowledge are linked—our knowledge shapes our thinking about our futures, and the ideas we have about our futures help direct the knowledge that we set out to gain—which then shapes the new thoughts we have about our futures, which are always unfolding before us. (shrink)

I. It has long been a standing puzzle why the women at the festival of Mater Matuta prayed, not for their own children, but for their sisters' offspring. The attempts to connect it with any sociological phenomenon are purely absurd, and would not have been noticed but for their association with one or two famous names and the complete ignorance of non-European systems of relationship prevailing among the scholars of an older generation. There is no system under which a woman (...) is closer akin to her sister's children than to her own; for under father-right a nephew or niece is further off than an own child, and if the system be pushed to the most logical and most absurd extremity, so as to make a child kin to his father only, not his mother, then he is also no kin to his mother's sister; under mother-right, which Rome never had in any form whatsoever, the mother is still nearer kin than the maternal aunt; while if ever there was, anywhere in the world, a classificatory system so pure and rigorous as to make no distinction between the actual mother and any other woman of the same age-class, then mother and aunt were in the same degree of kinship to every member of the younger generation. No ritual explanation I know will bear investigating. Yet the fact is handed down to us on good authority, probably that of Verrius Flaccus, the most likely common source for Ovid and Plutarch. (shrink)

The poetic … would be that which you desire to learn, but from and of the other, thanks to the other and under dictation, by heart. Derrida, “Che cos’è la Poesia?” 227 I dare not pretend to be any...