Reforms surrounding the teacher’s role in fostering students’ social competences, especially those associated with empathy, have moved to the forefront of global higher education policy discourse. In this context, reform in higher education teaching has been focused on shifting teachers’ practices away from traditional lecture-style teaching—historically associated with higher education teaching—towards student-centred pedagogical approaches, largely because of how the latter facilitate students’ social learning, including the development of students’ abilities connected to empathy, such as intercultural understanding. These developments towards learner-oriented (...) higher education teaching may offer promising opportunities; however, a central problem within these current policy recommendations is that the connection between cultivating empathy and cultivating imagination is not explicitly foregrounded. Against this background, I turn to Dewey’s notion of imagination to show how imagination is indispensable to all learning, and therefore has a role to play in teaching. In this article, I show how imagination is not only deeply connected to empathy, but also critical for gaining intercultural understanding and is a condition for the possibility that, as human beings, we can learn with and from others. On this basis, I argue that Dewey’s notion of imagination provides significant insight on how to rethink what is needed to create inclusive classrooms in higher education, especially under conditions of cultural, linguistic and religious diversity. First, I consider Dewey’s concept of learning and the indispensable role of imagination in learning. Second, drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, I examine how teaching through the narrative arts in higher education cultivates the imagination and helps us engage the lives of others. I use an example from my own teaching to illustrate how the narrative arts can foster dialogue across difference through the development of what I call ‘third voice’—a different or other ‘position’ that productively mediates reflective interaction between participants, including teacher and learners. In closing, I consider the implications of my discussion for present and future higher education policy on the evaluation of ‘quality teaching’. (shrink)

On 7 April 2022 – coinciding with World Health Day – the British Medical Association launched its new report, Health and human rights in the new world order.1 Written during the global upheaval triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and published just weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the report responds to a range of emerging and intensifying threats to health-related human rights globally. As the report establishes, human rights in health and healthcare matter because human suffering, and (...) its relief, are fundamental moral issues. As relief of human suffering is the primary purpose of medicine, it follows that doctors and other health professionals are often active in times of human challenge and extremity. During conflict, humanitarian crises, and, as we have so recently seen, global public health emergencies, health professionals are essential to the response. But these crises – and the response to them – can put fundamental human rights and interests under pressure. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen sustained indiscriminate shelling of civilian infrastructure. Whether health facilities were directly targeted is moot – the indiscriminate nature of the assault means they will inevitably be hit. Not only is this a violation of the Geneva Conventions, it undermines fundamental human rights, not least of which the right to health. Destroying health infrastructure drives further suffering and delays post-conflict recovery. Public heath emergencies can rightly require draconian measures – social distancing, enforced isolation, location tracking, economic shutdown. Although we saw their necessity during the COVID-19 outbreak, concerns were raised about disproportionate restrictions on basic rights, including rights to privacy and liberty. Human Rights Watch drew attention to the way governments unlawfully exploited COVID-19 to crack down on fundamental rights.2 Although conflicts and public health emergencies are not new, the report also tracks a number of …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 126.1 (2005) 127-133 [Access article in PDF] Aristophanes' Frogs: Brek-kek-kek-kek! on Broadway Mary English Montclair State University e-mail: [email protected] Aeschylus: Answer me—why should the dramatic poet be admired? Euripides: For cleverness and sound advice, and because we make the men of the cities better. Aristophanes, Frogs, 1008-1010 Thirty years ago, Robert Brustein, the dean of the Yale School of Drama, commissioned Burt Shevelove to restage (...) a production of Aristophanes' Frogs that Shevelove wrote during his graduate school days at Yale in 1941.1 The performances were to be held in the Olympic-size swimming pool of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Shevelove asked Stephen Sondheim, with whom he had collaborated on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, to compose the lyrics for the musical numbers and Carmen de Lavallade to choreograph the dance pieces. The cast included students at the Yale School of Drama (among the chorus were Christopher Durang, Meryl Streep, and Sigourney Weaver), and, as in 1941, members of the Yale swim team were assembled for the frogs. In addition to stripping the original Greek script of most of its topical allusions, Shevelove updated the comic agōn by replacing Aeschylus with Shakespeare and Euripides with George Bernard Shaw, whose detractors, much like Euripides' opponents, characterized him as "subversive" and "unpatriotic" and believed that his plays favored criticism over commitment. Broadway columnists traveled to New Haven to review the [End Page 127] performances, and, for the most part, the response was positive.2 Despite this acclaim, however, only a few other directors in the intervening years have dared to stage this imaginative adaptation.3The Lincoln Center Theater decided to mark its twentieth anniversary with a revision of this script that poses an answer to Aeschylus' question in Frogs, "Why should the dramatic poet be admired?" The production owes its very existence to the advocacy of Nathan Lane,4 who shrewdly decided to employ the talents of Tony Award-winning Susan Stroman as choreographer and director. Lane updated the original script, and he and Stroman convinced Sondheim to write additional songs for the libretto. In an interview with John Guare, Lane revealed that he saw Aristophanes' Frogs as speaking directly to challenges of our times: "There's something idealistic about the notion of someone believing that the arts can make a difference, that you can effect a change. Dionysos' dream to go down to Hades and bring back this great writer who could actually have an effect on the world, it's noble and touching and crazy—all at the same time. I found it moving, in light of what was going on in the world."5 Stroman, too, believed that Frogs could offer comfort not only to fifth-century Athenians embroiled in a thirty-year civil conflict but also to those trying to rebuild their lives after the recent terrorist attacks: "And when Nathan first brought this [script] to me, it was only a [End Page 128] year after September 11th. We were all still reeling. I think that's another reason I was attracted to the play immediately. Usually, when one grieves, you can go somewhere and have a little relief from it. But when September 11th happened, the entire city of New York was grieving. There was nowhere to go, and there would be nowhere to go for a very long time. No one was stepping forward who could truly speak about what just had happened. No one could find words to comfort us or explain these images we were overwhelmed with daily. There was no one to ease our hearts."6 Although the links that Lane and Stroman draw between fifth-century Athens and New York often work well—the topical jokes about George Bush elicited veritable "hooting and hollering" from the typically reserved Broadway theatergoers—the play's final message, that a dramatic poet, in this case Shakespeare, can save the world from its present woes (or at least help it along), seems unlikely to satisfy an audience whose... (shrink)

Background Increase in global health research undertaken in resource poor settings in the last decade though a positive development has raised ethical concerns relating to potential for exploitation. Some of the suggested strategies to address these concerns include calls for providing universal standards of care, reasonable availability of proven interventions and more recently, promoting the overall social value of research especially in clinical research. Promoting the social value of research has been closely associated with providing fair benefits to various stakeholders (...) involved in research. The debate over what constitutes fair benefits; whether those that addresses micro level issues of justice or those focusing on the key determinants of health at the macro level has continued. This debate has however not benefited from empirical work on what stakeholders consider fair benefits. This study explores practical experiences of stakeholders involved in global health research in Kenya, over what benefits are fair within a developing world context. Methods and results We conducted in-depth interviews with key informants drawn from within the broader health research system in Kenya including researchers from the mainstream health research institutions, networks and universities, teaching hospitals, policy makers, institutional review boards, civil society organisations and community representative groups. The range of benefits articulated by stakeholders addresses both micro and macro level concerns for justice by for instance, seeking to engage with interests of those facilitating research, and the broader systemic issues that make resource poor settings vulnerable to exploitation. We interpret these views to suggest a need for global health research to engage with current crises that face people in these settings as well as the broader systemic issues that produce them. Conclusion Global health research should provide benefits that address both the micro and macro level issues of justice in order to forestall exploitation. Embracing the two is however challenging in terms of how the various competing interests/needs should be balanced ethically, especially in the absence of structures to guide the process. This challenge should point to the need for greater dialogue to facilitate value clarification among stakeholders. (shrink)

Discursive history of the English language has been vital to analysing ‘the postcolonial condition’ in the Indian subcontinent, with a broadly overarching emphasis on how English is a ‘usurper language’. Simultaneous to this, however, there exists a hitherto understudied history featuring subaltern, ‘organic intellectuals’ from the lower castes. Not only does this ‘subaltern history of English’ exhibit a more positive affect toward the English language – by invoking its emancipatory potential in an economy of deeply casteist vernacular languages – but (...) it also complicates multiple assertions that the postcolonial apparatus has so far held as a priori. Jotirao Phule’s Slavery/Gulamgiri (1873) is one of the foremost examples of such a position; its preface, which lucidly announces this seemingly unique position, is quite possibly the first explicitly political treatise written in the English language in the history of the subcontinent. This paper highlights the enormous shifts that take place in our understanding of the history of English – and (post)colonial modernity – if we were to (aptly) classify Phule’s preface as a key text in the history of ‘Indian writing in English’. Subsequently, it is argued that Phule’s work crystallizes into a radically alternate – and far more egalitarian – conception of ‘world literature’ contra Tagore’s well-known idea of visva sahitya. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 241-261 [Access article in PDF] Should We All Be More English? Liang Qichao, Rudolf von Jhering, and Rights Stephen C. Angle [T]he Celestial Empire, with its bamboo, the rod for its adult children, and its hundreds of millions of inhabitants, will never attain, in the eyes of foreign nations, the respected position of little Switzerland. The natural disposition of the Swiss (...) in the matter of art and poetry is anything but ideal. It is sober and practical, like that of the Romans. But, in the sense in which I have thus far used the expression "ideal," in its relation to rights, it is just as applicable to the Swiss as to the Englishman. 1Rudolf von Jhering (1818-92) published Der Kampf ums Recht (The Struggle for Law) in 1872. He was already regarded as one of Germany's most important legal philosophers, and Der Kampf helped to ensure a world-wide reputation. His argument that people should be less like the "adult children" of China and more like the English found audiences everywhere, including China, where Der Kampf was translated between 1900 and 1901. Jhering's doctrines stimulated Liang Qichao (1873-1929), one of China's leading thinkers, to publish "Lun Quanli Sixiang (On Rights Consciousness)," in 1902 as part of his manifesto On the New People. Liang tells us that the "essential points" of his essay, which is among the earliest and most sustained treatments of the concept of rights to appear in Chinese, are mostly taken from Der Kampf. 2 We will see that there are indeed certain similarities that make Liang's "quanli" 3 (the standard Chinese translation of "rights") resonate with Jhering's notion of "Recht," and these similarities--chief among which is a kind of individual assertiveness--help to explain [End Page 241] Liang's interest in Jhering. My discussion of the two thinkers will offer at least the beginnings of an explanation of why German conceptions of law and rights were so attractive to Chinese intellectuals.As is often the case with cross-cultural comparisons, we will also see that these similarities mask some less obvious but deeply important differences. For Jhering the relation between following the procedures of the law and exercising one's Recht is crucial; for Liang, in contrast, quanli are deeply related to ethical concerns. This difference in turn colors their respective notions of assertiveness, which thus turn out not to resemble one another as closely as first appeared. When we see Recht and quanli as separate concepts emerging from separate discourse contexts, these differences will make sense.In "On Quanli Consciousness" Liang regularly quotes Jhering, often at some length. One important passage reads as follows: In ancient times, Lin Xiangru scolded the King of Qin saying: "Smash both my head and the jade disk!" 4 Now given the size of the state of Zhao, how could such love be expressed for a tiny thing like a jade disk? He was saying that Qin could smash the disk, kill him, invade his territory, endanger his state, and still he would not surrender. Ah! This was nothing other than "quanli"! Jhering has also said: "If an Englishman traveling to the European continent is one day asked to pay an irrational charge by the hotel's carriage driver, in every case he will resolutely scold [the driver]. If the driver won't heed his scolding, the Englishman will struggle for justice without tiring, always preferring to extend his stay; even if his traveling expenses were to increase as much as ten-fold, he would not cease. Unknowing people all laugh at this great fool, but none of them understand that this person's struggle over a few shillings is in fact a vital part of what allows the nation of England to stand tall by itself in the world. This abundance of quanli consciousness and sharpness of feelings of quanli are the great reasons behind the ability of the English to establish their state. Now let... (shrink)

This book contains twelve engaging philosophical lectures given by Alexandru Dragomir, most of them given during Romania’s Communist regime. The lectures deal with a diverse range of topics, such as the function of the question, self-deception, banalities with a metaphysical dimension, and how the world we live in has been shaped by the intellect. Among the thinkers discussed in these lectures are Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Nietzsche. Alexandru Dragomir was a Romanian philosopher born in 1916. After studying (...) law and philosophy at the University of Bucharest, he left Romania to study for a doctorate in philosophy in Freiburg, Germany, under Martin Heidegger. He stayed in Freiburg for two years, but before defending his dissertation he was called back to Romania for military service and sent to the front. After 1948, historical circumstances forced him to become a clandestine philosopher: he was known only within a very limited circle. He died in 2002 without ever publishing anything. It was only after his death that Dragomir's notebooks came to light. His work has been published posthumously in five volumes by Humanitas, Bucharest; the present volume is the first to appear in English translation. In 2009, the Alexandru Dragomir Institute for Philosophy was founded in Bucharest as an independent research institute under the auspices of the Romanian Society for Phenomenology. (shrink)

Biases and misunderstanding stemming from pre-training in Generative Pre-Trained Transformers are more likely for users of underrepresented English varieties, since the training dataset favors dominant Englishes (e.g., American English). We investigate (potential) bias in GPT-4 when it interacts with Trinidadian English Creole (TEC), a non-hegemonic English variety that partially overlaps with standardized English (SE) but still contains distinctive characteristics. (1) Comparable responses: we asked GPT-4 18 questions in TEC and SE and compared the content and detail of the responses. (...) (2) Accurate translation: we assessed how accurate and authentic 29 TEC and 34 SE translations were. (3) Language knowledge and attitudes: we asked what language the prompts were written in and categorized the responses and examined any language attitudes that were exhibited. Content and detail in prompts were comparable. The model was proficient at translating TEC pronouns and many grammatical categories. It was weaker at processing spelling and vocabulary items. In addition, it produced several inauthentic features. Only 39% of TEC-generated sentences were fully grammatical. While GPT-4 was perfect at identifying SE, it was 21% accurate at identifying TEC, which it sometimes classified as English with “errors” and “corrected”. GPT-4’s scope of use is limited for non-hegemonic English users. It is problematic that some of its analyses perpetuate bias against underrepresented Englishes. Increased research on lesser-documented Englishes is necessary and we anticipate that this problem affects dialects of other languages. We intend to partner with Trinidadian stakeholders to train GPT-4 in the future. (shrink)

As the demand for English language skills among non-native speakers globally has grown steadily so too has the number of ‘global textbooks’ for ELT aimed at a world market. Concurrently, critical perspectives of the expansion of English have begun to challenge the view that native speaker contexts ‘own’ English. Based on the aforementioned, and on reflective approaches to culture, our objective is to analyze critically the representations of speakers of English as a second or foreign language offered by two (...) global ELT textbooks, to discuss the issues of essentialization and reproduction of stereotypes about the “non-native” speakers of English and their sociocultural characteristics in the constructed image. To achieve this purpose, we apply a methodology based on a sociocognitive approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Van Dijk, 2013), the concept of sociocultural knowledge as stated by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), and critical perspectives of culture according to Holliday, Kullman, and Hyde (2004). Our findings indicate that, though the books include ‘non-native’ speakers in an attempt to address multiculturalism, their representation is generic, portraying a reified image of their sociocultural traits and presenting diversity mostly through national labels. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Laughing at the Devil is an invitation to see the world with a medieval visionary now known as Julian of Norwich, believed to be the first woman to have written a book in English. (We do not know her given name, because she became known by the name of a church that became her home.) Julian “saw our Lord scorn [the Devil's] wickedness” and noted that “he wants us to do the same.” In this impassioned, analytic, and irreverent book, (...) Amy Laura Hall emphasizes Julian's call to scorn the Devil. Julian of Norwich envisioned courage during a time of fear. Laughing at the Devil describes how a courageous woman transformed a setting of dread into hope, solidarity, and resistance. (shrink)

The Qing dynasty scholar Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927) has received little recognition in the English-speaking world, and even less in the philosophical community. Raised to be a Ruist (or Confucian) scholar official, he gave up this path to pursue the study of the “new learning” (xīnxué 新學) from the West and became enamored with German aesthetic philosophy, especially the works of Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. However, by the start of the modern Republic period in China, Wang had denounced (...) all his previous research interests and dedicated himself to “old learning” (jiùxué 舊學), fearing for the future of China’s traditions and cultures. Taking Wang Guowei as a case study, my dissertation functions as an exercise in decolonial philosophy, highlighting the impacts of coloniality on his thinking while attempting to revitalize his theories from the perspective of decoloniality. -/- The Introduction sets up this case study by clarifying the points laid out in the title: Who is Wang Guowei, what is coloniality, and why is this case study “philosophical?” To begin, it details the specifics of Wang’s life and explaining his approach to comparative thinking, which became a target of criticism for later Chinese thinkers, including Qian Zhongshu. Next, it offers an overview of the concept of coloniality, referring to thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano, Maria Lugones, Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres. From this point, this chapter moves into the literature on colonialism in China, emphasizing Anne Reinhart’s understanding of China’s situation as one of “semi-colonialism.” To end, it briefly outlines the earliest and latest periods of Wang’s life, in order to bookend my own discussion, which focuses on the period after he became invested in new learning and before he abandoned it for old learning. -/- Part I centers on Wang’s philosophical essays, all of which were published in the journal Education World between 1903 and 1908. Chapter 1 focuses on Wang’s earliest writings on “philosophy” (zhéxué 哲學), wherein he aims to properly introduce this imported discipline to his peers and make them aware of its value. Chapter 2 concentrates on the earliest of Wang’s major philosophical influences: Kant and Schopenhauer. Although Wang was attracted to Kant’s demarcation of the limits of reason, he could not accept his reimagining of the demands of reason as regulative principles. And while he sympathized with Schopenhauer’s criticisms of Kantian philosophy, he eventually came to regard metaphysical pessimism and the will to life as flawed theories. Chapter 3 deals with the two thinkers who shaped Wang’s views the most in his later philosophical essays: Nietzsche and Schiller. After rejecting Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, Wang came under the influence of Nietzsche and adopted a psychophysiological worldview. However, even though he accepted Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power, he could not accept Nietzsche’s view of overcoming. For Wang, consolation is all we can hope for in this life, and the best means to attain it is through the creation and appreciation of art, which prompts him to look to Schiller and his doctrine of aesthetic education. -/- Part II revolves around Wang’s mature aesthetic writings, specifically his Remarks on Lyrics in the Human World (1908–1909), a work in the “remarks on lyrics” (cíhuà 詞話) genre of literary criticism, which he published just before the Qing dynasty fell in 1911. Under the influence of decoloniality, Chapter 4 examines this work through the lens of praxis, highlighting the specifics of the traditional “remarks on lyrics” genre. After discussing the unique praxical features of this work, Chapter 5 analyzes it through the lens of theory, discussing its most significant ideas, such as its reimagining of the beautiful and the sublime, and the concept of “poetic worlds” (jìngjiè 境界). -/- The Conclusion examines everything discussed in Chapters 1 through 5 from the perspective of coloniality. It begins by determining how, and to what extent, colonial modernity impacted Wang’s thinking, in terms of both theory and praxis. It then provides some ways in which Wang’s theories and practices can contribute to the development of intellectual “worlds otherwise.” Beyond this, it aims to demonstrate how investigating the scholarly endeavors of non-Western thinkers caught in confluence of tradition and modernity can give us glimpses of alternatives to our modern intellectual and ontological modalities, thereby furthering the movement of decoloniality. (shrink)

This is a translation of the second revised edition of Geist in Welt. It was J. B. Metz, a Rahner pupil, who carried out the revision with Rahner's full approval. Metz has added a brief foreword to this translation. Also included is an excellent and jam-packed Introduction by Francis P. Fiorenza which attempts to set the background for Spirit in the World, in terms of its being an attempt to ground a metaphysics by going through Kant back to an (...) Aquinas who is now viewed through the spectacles of transcendental method. Rahner was influenced in this attempt by Maréchal, of course, but also by Heidegger. The work itself is built around an exegesis of a key text from the Summa Theologiae I, Q. 84, a. 7. The title of the article in question is "Whether the intellect can actually know anything through the intelligible species which it possesses without turning to the phantasm." Since Thomas answers no to this question, it becomes clear that metaphysics for him is possible only on the foundation of imagination. It also becomes clear, through Rahner, that the feature of Thomas' epistemology which requires the most clarification is his doctrine of sensibility. Rahner's handling of this question is not altogether satisfactory. At crucial points he switches from an intentional analysis to a metaphysical analysis. But it is not entirely clear how phenomenological otherness can be reduced to the metaphysical otherness supposedly guaranteed by differing potentialities within the formal identity between knower and known in both sensibility and intellection. The work is overpowering in the execution of its intent, however, despite what seemed to this reviewer a crucial unclarity. It is interesting to note that the contents of this book were originally Rahner's doctoral thesis finished in 1936, turned down by Rahner's director M. Honecker, but first published anyway in 1939. It is surprising that these historical facts are not presented by the translator in at least a brief introduction to this important work. It must be lamented also that no attempt was made to compile any sort of index. Finally, while the translator cannot be envied the task of having to come to grips with Rahner's German, the English we are provided with leaves a great deal to be desired.--E. A. R. (shrink)

The evolution of Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is the result of the amount of research in the field of education and artificial intelligence in recent years. English is the third most common languages in the world and also is the internationally dominant in the telecommunications, science and trade, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomatic language as most of the areas of work now taught in English. Therefore, the demand for learning English has increased. In this paper, we describe the design (...) of an Intelligent Tutoring System for teaching English language grammar to help students learn English grammar easily and smoothly. The system provides all topics of English grammar and generates a series of questions automatically for each topic for the students to solve. The system adapts with all the individual differences of students and begins gradually with students from easier to harder level. The intelligent tutoring system was given to a group of students of all age groups to try it and to see the impact of the system on students. The results showed a good satisfaction of the students toward the system. (shrink)

Where science has often been used to explore the questions raised by art, this book does the reverse, suggesting that art can address a problem raised by science: the deep challenge to ethics posed by Darwin’s discovery that we are intentional beings living in an unintentional world. Using Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, among others, Angus Fletcher shows how the physical experience of art can transform Darwin’s discouraging theory into a practice-based ethics that establishes pluralism, curiosity, and cooperation as the (...) basis of progressive life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 24.1 (2004) 135-157 [Access article in PDF] "That We May Know Each Other": The Pluralist Hypothesis as a Research Program Paul O. Ingram Pacific Lutheran University When an African American Muslim named Siraj Wahaj served as the first Muslim "Chaplain of the Day" in the Unites States House of Representatives on 25 June 1991 he offered the following prayer, the first Muslim prayer in the in the (...) history of the House of Representatives: In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most merciful. Praise belongs to thee alone; O God, Lord and Creator of all the worlds. Praise belongs to Thee Who shaped us as and colored us in the wombs of our mothers; colored us black and white, brown, red, and yellow. Praise belongs to Thee who created us from males and females and made us into nations and tribes that we may know each other.1Siraj Wahaj's prayer is a direct reference to one of the most cited verses of the Qur'an: "Do you not know, O people, that I have made you into tribes and nations that you may know each other." Of course, "knowing each other" is an important goal in the practice of interreligious dialogue, but Muslims often move on to cite further Qur'anic advice about religious pluralism: "If God had so willed, He would have made you a single people," the verse reads, "But His plan is to test you in what He hath given you; so strive as in a race in all virtues."2 According to Siraj Wahaj and many like-minded American Muslims, Islam and pluralism go hand in hand and respect for the dignity for each person, no matter what religious or secular label he or she wears, rests on Islamic foundations. Of course, this interpretation of the Qur'an is rejected by radical communities within the House of Islam as well as by fundamentalist communities within Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish traditions. Nor are the foundations of pluralism only found in the Qur'an; Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Christian, and aboriginal traditions support religious pluralism as well.This essay's thesis, what John Hick first posited as the "pluralist hypothesis," offers us the most coherent theoretical framework—minus Hick's Kantian epistemology—from which to interpret contemporary postmodern experiences of religious [End Page 135] diversity. Furthermore, I shall argue that the pluralist hypothesis constitutes a coherent history-of-religions research program from which to investigate and interpret the facts of religious diversity.3 In order to demonstrate the adequacy of my thesis and argument, I shall appropriate the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos's account of the methodology and structure of scientific research programs, guided by Nancy Murphy's application of Lakatos's work in the construction of theological research programs. But first, some preliminary clarifications about what I mean by "religious pluralism" and "religious diversity."4 The Structure of the Experience of Religious Pluralism In a recent book on the lives of four Catholic writers—Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy—Paul Elie provides one of the most accurate descriptions of the structure of postmodern experience of religious diversity in English print: We are all skeptics now, believer and unbeliever alike. There is no one faith, evident at all times and places. Every religion is one among many. The clear lines of orthodoxy are made crooked by our experience, and are complicated by our lives. Believer and unbeliever are in the same predicament, thrown back onto ourselves in complex circumstances, looking for a sign. As ever, religious belief makes its claim somewhere between revelation and projection, between holiness and human frailty, but the problem of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it should be.5Assuming that Elie's description is an accurate one, certain implications follow that will serve as working assumptions of this essay."Pluralism" is not just another name for "diversity." Diversity names the fact of the existence of differing... (shrink)

The English word digital (from the Latin, digitus) etymologically connects both fingers and technologies. In this special issue, we honor this dual meaning of the digital by foregrounding how living in a digital era both challenges and actualizes our senses, particularly our sense of touch. Ethnographically, the articles gathered offer intimate accounts of tactile experiences that intertwine with the digital in both direct and indirect ways. Despite ongoing—and often legitimate—anxieties about the disappearance of touch from our increasingly digitized world, (...) our special issue shows that human engagements with digital technologies are more complex. We theorize touch through a phenomenological and relational lens and as a sensory experience that is deeply shaped and reconfigured by local, sociotechnical and political-economic concerns. This special issue illuminates how attention to hands, fingers, or touch can help us understand the relationship between bodies, ethical life, social relations, selves, and subjectivities through a new lens. (shrink)

Sri Lanka, once a colony of Britain, gained independence in 1948. However, especially the health sector continues to use English as its main medium of communication. Such language bias leads to marginalization of those less fluent in English, and hinders achieving a higher level of health literacy. Discrimination of people or social groups based on their language is termed linguicism. Tackling linguicism requires an understanding of its historic roots and an exploration of potential links to colonial racial prejudices. Published literature (...) presents evidence that traces linguicism to language policies of the British colonial government. Though an exhaustive survey of historical records is not presented, there is reasonable evidence to suggest a close link. British colonial rule derived its justification from supremacist and racist ideology. As a result, English became the medium in all forms of official communications, a situation that persisted after independence. A similar situation exists in many parts of the worlds. We should recognize language-based discrimination and linguicism as public health issues. They are detrimental to health of vulnerable groups and have the potential to worsen health disparities. (shrink)

In "Formations of World Literature and Shaw's The Man of Destiny in Chinese and Japanese Translation" Shunqing Cao and Xin Chen expand Franco Moretti's dictum that "world literature is not an object, it's a problem" to elaborate that the concept of world literature is in some sense a problematic one, which is itself under a process of problematization. Cao and Chen discuss how variation and heterogeneity contribute to a more in-depth understanding of formations of world literature. (...) Taking the Bernar Shaw's The Man of Destiny they discuss the writer's presence in world literature from a bi-lateral perspective: Shaw's work in the English-speaking West and Shaw in Asia. For the former, Shaw stands in a specific place in recent postcolonial Irish Studies and thus raise problems for their research paradigm. For the latter, Cao and Chen present an analytical comparison between a Chinese and a Japanese translation of The Man of Destiny. Cao and Chen argue that by such a bilateral approach we may recognize the importance of heterogeneity so as to obtain further reflections on present discussions of world literature. (shrink)

Previous empirical studies have suggested that language is primarily used to exchange social information, but our evidence on this derives mainly from English speakers. We present data from a study of natural conversations among Farsi speakers in Iran and show that not only are conversation groups the same size as those observed in Europe and North America, but people also talk predominantly about social topics. We argue that these results reinforce the suggestion that language most likely evolved for the transmission (...) of information about the social world. We also explore sex differences in conversational behavior: while the pattern is broadly similar between the sexes, men may be more sensitive than women are to discussing some topics in the presence of many other people. (shrink)

The present “visual world” eye-tracking study examined the time-course of how native and non-native speakers keep track of implied object-state representations during real-time language processing. Fifty-two native speakers of English and 46 non-native speakers with advanced English proficiency joined this study. They heard short stories describing a target object either having undergone a substantial change-of-state or a minimal change-of-state while their eye movements toward competing object-states and two unrelated distractors were tracked. We found that both groups successfully directed their (...) visual attention toward the end-state of the target object that was implied in the linguistic context. However, neither group showed anticipatory eye movements toward the implied object-state when hearing the critical verb. Only native English speakers but not non-native speakers showed a bias in visual attention during the determiner before the noun. Our results suggested that although native and non-native speakers of English largely overlapped in their time-courses of keeping track of object-state representations during real-time language comprehension, non-native speakers showed a short delay in updating the implied object-state representations. (shrink)

A colleague of Roland Barthes at the CNRS in the 1950s and cowriter and friend of Cornelius Castoriadis until the latter's death, Edgar Morin has until recently been too little known in the English-speaking world. In an oeuvre that spans half a century, attempting to combine in ongoing dialogue the `humanities' and `sciences', Morin has written on scientific method, fundamental anthropology, politics, contemporary life and popular culture. He is an advocate of `complex' thought, thought which does not reduce, rationalize (...) and mutilate phenomena under examination, which emphasizes the interaction between researcher and researched, and participation as a way of being in the world. This article particularly focuses on his work on death and cinema, suggesting a strong continuity between his early studies and his more recent writing on complexity and ecology. The radically democratic complexion of Morin's writings, his emphasis on a human empathy that can incorporate notions of unity and difference, make him a thinker of great relevance for today. (shrink)

The work of the lay Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain continues to provoke and inspire readers to engage in a Thomistic approach to many of the questions facing the world today. Maritain’s wide-ranging thought touched on many fields, including aesthetics, anthropology, educational theory, moral philosophy, and ethics, as well as Thomism and its relationship to other philosophical stances._ In _Being in the World: A Quotable Maritain Reader_, Mario O. D’Souza, C.S.B., has selected seven hundred and fifty of the most (...) salient quotations found in the English translations of fifty-four works by Jacques Maritain. Organized into forty thematic chapters, ordered alphabetically, the book serves as an overview of the areas that Maritain's writings addressed. By referring to entries in _Being in the World_, readers can quickly locate key passages in Maritain’s writing on a given topic and then turn elsewhere to the full texts for more in-depth study. Complete with a detailed index of key terms, the _Reader _will be an essential reference tool for the study of Maritain in English. "Fr. Mario O. D'Souza's careful selection from the works of Jacques Maritain provides the reader with an invaluable sampling of Maritain's extensive philosophical work. In it, we find examples of Maritain's almost lyrical gift of expression as well as of his trenchant wit. More than a scholarly contribution, the volume also ably serves as an introduction and entrance into Maritain's corpus." — William Sweet, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada_. (shrink)

Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new word (...) for the increasingly grandiose spaces they were designing, so they added an augmentative suffix, producing salone. In the seventeenth century, French translations of Italian works on architecture reproduced the new term, only dropping the final e so as to keep the masculine gender of the Italian. French salon came into English in the early eighteenth century, initially as a word for a large and lofty room; but as French speakers applied it more and more to social functions occurring in such spaces, English speakers did so too. Then came a fork: a phonological adaptation produced saloon, which drifted off as a fully naturalized word of English toward hotels, carriages, bars, and cars; but salon persisted nonetheless. By retaining the stress pattern and marginally nasal final vowel of its source language, the doublet has remained in use as a xenism—a word of English understood to be not English, but understood in English all the same.How many such words are there? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Coupé, du jour, fuselage, pizza, paparazzi, sauerkraut, Zeitgeist—all signal their foreignness either by nonstandard pronunciation of written consonants (s, g, j, z), the presence of foreign diacritics, or irregular tonic stress. These are the kinds of loanwords that Scholar calls “émigrés,” but he gives us not thousands or hundreds or even a dozen of them: his chapters deal only with four: à la mode, ennui, naïveté, and caprice. The histories of these words do not really teach us any more about the cultural, social, and political relations between England and France than do saloon and salon, which is not much at all, or any other set of loanwords that retain phonetic or orthographic signs of foreignness. Scholar nonetheless does his level best to put his favored four at the heart of early modern English culture. Lengthy accounts of a play by Dryden, a famous work of Schiller's, an essay by Raymond Williams, Caribbean notions of creolization, and a John le Carré novel, learned though they all may be, do not really make the argument more persuasive, or even clear. By the end of this beautifully produced and floridly written book, the reader (or at least this reader) is not quite sure what it was really about. The very title of Émigrés repurposes a xenism which in regular usage is associated with high social status (we never talk of émigré workers, for example), thus exhibiting what I suppose the whole field ought to demonstrate: the ways in which new, hard, or nonnative words are always used to establish pecking orders between speakers, between their interlocutors and between their worlds. In Bourdieusian terms: not to make distinctions, but to create distinction. (shrink)

The right of Australian Indigenous groups to own traditional lands has been a contentious issue in the recent history of Australia. Indeed, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders did not consider themselves as full citizens in the country they had inhabited for millennia until the late 1960s, and then only after a long campaign and a national referendum (1967) in favour of changes to the Australian Constitution to remove restrictions on the services available to Indigenous Australians. The concept of terra nullius, (...) misapplied to Australia, was strong in the popular imagination among the descendants of settlers or recent migrants and was not definitively put to rest until the Mabo decision (1992), which also established a firm precedent for the recognition of native title.This path to equality was fraught and made lengthy by the fact that the worldviews of the Indigenous Australians (i.e. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) and the European (mainly British and Irish) settlers were so different, at least at a superficial level, this being the level at which prejudice is typically manifested. One area where this fact is particularly evident is in the area of the conceptualisation of property and especially the notion of land “ownership” and “use”.In this paper, we will focus on these terms, examining the linguistic evidence of some of the Australian languages spoken traditionally by Indigenous Australians as one means (the only one in many cases) of gaining an insight into their worldview, comparing it with that underlying the English language.We will show that the conceptualisations manifested in the two languages are contrasting but not irreconcilable, and indeed the ability of both groups of speakers (or their descendants in the case of many endangered Australian languages) to reach agreement and come to develop an understanding of the other’s perspective is reason for celebration for all Australians. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public (...) domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public (...) domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 397-413 [Access article in PDF] Betwixt Two Ages Cast: Milton, Johnson, and the English Renaissance Jack Lynch To judge by the most visible institutional mechanisms of literary periodization --the anthology, the history of literature, and the survey course--John Milton has come unstuck in time. The Norton Anthology of English Literature prints its excerpts from Paradise Lost under the rubric "The Early (...) Seventeenth Century (1603-1660)" along with Jonson and Bacon, not under "The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1785)" alongside Dryden and Bunyan. 1 Milton gets a chapter to himself in volume five of the Oxford History of English Literature, English Literature in the Early Seventeenth Century 1600-1660, not in volume six, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century. 2 And Stanford Uni-versity's two-part survey of English masterpieces puts Milton in English 10 ("Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and their Contemporaries") rather than English 11 ("From the Enlightenment to the Modern Period"). But his most important work appeared in 1667, the same year as Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Sprat's History of the Royal Society, works now invariably consigned to the latter of the two periods. Milton is almost univerally accorded the title of the last great writer of the English Renaissance, while his contemporaries stand at the beginning of what we clumsily call the "long eighteenth century." 3The situation is not new; it began neither with the Norton Anthology nor the Oxford History. As long ago as 1853 Hippolyte Taine placed Milton in book II [End Page 397] of his History of English Literature, "The Renaissance," rather than in book III, "The Classic Age." 4 But Taine was not the originator of this habit; he was only an inheritor of older paradigms. In fact a search for the causes of this treatment of the seventeenth century would take us back to the seventeenth century itself, only a few years after the publication of Paradise Lost, and into the eighteenth, when Milton's epic took its central place in the English canon.To remark upon this peculiar violation of strict chronology in English literary history is not necessarily to quarrel with it; it may well be that specialists in the English Renaissance have more interesting things to say about it than do those in the eighteenth century. But Milton's treatment at the hands of literary historians deserves attention, for it takes us straight to the heart of questions of literary periodization. Because eras make sense only in relation to one another, periodization is never entirely disinterested. Periods are imposed in retrospect in an attempt to extract the most useful or satisfying narrative out of the events of the past, and it is therefore inevitable that they should serve the cultural needs of the present.Some of the most enduring acts of periodization come out of cultural movements which divide themselves from their immediate predecessors, dividing us from them, now from then. Thomas Vogler observes that "the perennial goal of historical thought can be seen to be a mode of self-definition in the form of a narrative in which a 'modernity' defines itself over against a past perceived as essentially different." 5 As Peter Bürger points out, periodization inevitably, if sometimes indirectly, results in "the construction of the present." 6 This invocation or creation of an ever-new sense of now (along with its resulting creation of a series of thens) amounts to a declaration of modernity.Perhaps the most important such declaration of modernity came when the Florentine humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries traded the classical and Christian models of six ages or four monarchies for a new three-term model, one with three great ages: ancient, middle, and modern. 7 Francesco Petrarca is a central figure in this transformation: for him, defining modernity meant first discovering or inventing a post-classical Dark Age against which to measure the brightness of modern enlightenment.Petrarch never gave a definitive account of a modern world, though by allying himself... (shrink)

During the COVID-19, online teaching has become a popular way of teaching in the world. Previous research on English language teachers’ emotional labor has not focused on the changes brought about by online teaching. Unlike the traditional physical teaching space, the emotional labor of English teachers teaching online changes with the daily use of online technological conditions. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the factors influencing teachers’ emotional labor in online teaching and the emotional labor dilemmas. We took interviews (...) with a group of English teachers in China (T1, T2, … T20) and found that their online teaching emotions were influenced by three main factors: the degree of adaptation to online teaching technology, the invisibility of the online teaching space, and the peripheral environment of the space in which the teachers were located. In addition, this study observed the online classrooms of the interviewees and found that the first two influences are at a priority level for Chinese English teachers, while whether the third factor can bring positive or negative emotions is often influenced by the nature of the emotions brought by the first two factors. In order to find a balance between norms and emotions, English teachers are often accompanied by emotional labor in their work. However, they face many dilemmas of choice and behavior during the emotional labor of teaching online: emotional rule dilemma, emotional expression dilemma and professional identity dilemma. The emergence of these dilemmas is directly related to the influencing factors. In conclusion, this article uses normative and emotional labor theories to explore how norms affect Chinese English teachers’ emotions when teaching online as a response to the question of why emotions need to be labored. Ultimately, this study offers some useful suggestions for language teachers’ emotional labor dilemmas. (shrink)

Lars Porsena Or the Future of Swearing Robert Graves Originally published in 1927 "Not for squeamish readers." Spectator "A deliciously ironical affair." Bystander "Humour and style are beyond criticism." Irish Statesman As relevant now as when it was first published, this volume and its ironic look at the political correctness of society has become a classic of the Today & Tomorrow series. 90pp Breaking Priscian’s Head Or English As She Will Be Spoke and Wrote J Y T Greig Originally published (...) in 1928 "The most vehement attack we have ever read." Morning Post "A rollicking book" Spectator This volume discusses the nature of language, grammar, the influence of America, of slang dialect and many other subjects. 90p **************** Delphos The Future of International Language E Sylvia Pankhurst Originally published in 1927 In this volume, Sylvia Pankhurst argues that an international language would be one of the greatest assets to modern civilization. She surveys past attempts from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries and predicts the arrival of the inter-language, its form, its social and cultural utility and its influence for world peace. 90pp Pomona or the Future of English Basil de Sélincourt Originally published in 1926 "Equal to anything yet produced in this brilliant series." Spectator An analysis of the present condition of the English language and the paths along which it is progressing. 88pp. (shrink)

The term ‘phenomenology’ has become almost as over-used and emptied of meaning as that other word from Continental Philosophy, namely ‘existentialism’. Yet Husserl, who first put forward the phenomenological method, considered it a rigorous alternative to positivism, and in the hands of Merleau-Ponty, a disciple of Husserl in France, phenomenology became a way of gaining a disciplined and coherent perspective on the world in which we live. When this study originally published in 1977 there were only a few books (...) in English on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. It introduced the reader and suggested how his thought might throw light on some of the assumptions and presuppositions of certain contemporary forms of Anglo-Saxon philosophy and social science. It also demonstrates how phenomenology seeks to unite philosophy and social science, rather than define them as mutually exclusive domains of knowledge. (shrink)

Perniola takes his inspiration from ancient Roman religion and its demystification of myth as ritual without myth. This demystification of ritual does not entail a process of secularization nor does it compromise the sacred character of myth. Instead, it is an attempt to establish a link or a transit between the sacred and the profane. The repetitive nature of ritual thinking is an attempt to relate the individual to the hard nuts of experience-sexuality, death, and the vast complexity of the (...) world.These realities are opaque and impenetrable, indifferent and extraneous to subjective purpose and good intentions. They appear to be 'things' that are irreducible to the life of the spirit and to its ideal aspirations. Where philosophy breaks down in coping with these actualities, ritual thinking provides a symbolic means. Today we witness the global dissemination of behaviors that have lost their original meaning. These behaviors and patterns of thought have become the modern rituals through which we cope with reality.This composite of two works-Transits and The Society of Simulcra-by one of Italy's most innovative thinkers, here translated into English for the first time, will be invaluable to philosophers with an interest in continental philosophy.Mario Perniola is professor of aesthetics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and is the author of many books on aesthetics including Disgusti: New Trends in Aesthetics and Nineteenth Century Aesthetics. (shrink)

Two studies investigated the interaction between utterance and scene processing by monitoring eye movements in agent–action–patient events, while participants listened to related utterances. The aim of Experiment 1 was to determine if and when depicted events are used for thematic role assignment and structural disambiguation of temporarily ambiguous English sentences. Shortly after the verb identified relevant depicted actions, eye movements in the event scenes revealed disambiguation. Experiment 2 investigated the relative importance of linguistic/world knowledge and scene information. When the (...) verb identified either only the stereotypical agent of a (nondepicted) action, or the (nonstereotypical) agent of a depicted action as relevant, verb‐based thematic knowledge and depicted action each rapidly influenced comprehension. In contrast, when the verb identified both of these agents as relevant, the gaze pattern suggested a preferred reliance of comprehension on depicted events over stereotypical thematic knowledge for thematic interpretation. We relate our findings to language comprehension and acquisition theories. (shrink)

This study investigated grammatical gender processing in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children using a visual world paradigm with a 4-picture display where the target noun was heard with a gendered article that was either in a context where all distractor images were the same gender as the target noun or in a context where all distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun. We investigated 32 bilingual children who were exposed to Spanish since infancy and began learning English (...) by school entry. Along with the eye-tracking experiment, all children participated in a standardized language assessment and told narratives in English and Spanish, and parents reported on their child's current Spanish language use. The differential proportion fixations to target were analyzed in two time regions with linear mixed-effects models. Results show that prior to the target word being spoken, these bilingual children did not use the gendered articles to actively anticipate upcoming nouns. In the subsequent time region, it was shown that there are differences in the way they use feminine and masculine articles, with a lack of use of the masculine article and a potential facilitatory use of the feminine article for children who currently use more Spanish than English. This asymmetry in the use of gendered articles in processing is modulated by current Spanish language use and trends with results found for bilingual and second-language learning adults. (shrink)

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of contents -- Contributors -- Introduction -- 1 From place to planet: The role of the language arts in reading environmental identities from the UK to New Zealand -- From here to there -- Cockney translation -- Environmental identities -- Environmental knowledge -- Conclusion: moving from place to planet -- Notes -- References -- 2 Connecting community through film in ITE English -- Introduction -- The place of English (...) in the contemporary policy context -- Place in English: doing things differently -- The film project -- The films -- 'Our Place': the Kingsville School -- 'This is Our Place': High Bridge -- 'This is My Place': Silver Hill -- Discussion -- The place of school -- The place of the subject -- The place of pupils -- Connecting community through film: the possibilities of place -- Note -- References -- 3 Muslim youth identities through devotional songs and poetry in South Yorkshire communities -- Introduction 1: creative language study as etiolation -- Introduction 2: faith-based complementary schooling and language heritage -- Introduction 3: Islamophobia and youth identity -- Poetry and 'song' in the Islamic world and among Muslim youth in the UK -- This study -- Conclusion -- Notes -- References -- 4 Creative spaces for developing independent writing with English teachers -- Why do we need to develop teachers as creative writers? -- The role and influence of the National Writing Project -- The writing identities of trainee teachers -- Writing in creative spaces -- Some conclusions: writing teachers in creative spaces -- Writing from the Georgian House -- Writing from Brandon Hill -- Notes -- References -- 5 Durham city as an educational resource in initial teacher education for English: Seeing the city with new eyes -- Context -- The activity -- Implications. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is man's attempt to use software to emulate the intelligence of human beings. But the complexity of the human neurological system formed in the course of evolution is impossible to replicate: "Human languages and societies are complex systems, indeed complex systems of many complex systems," so much so that their mathematical modeling is impossible. Barry Smith, philosopher and professor at the University at Buffalo. shows no uncertainty about this. His latest book written with Jobst Landgrebe, a mathematician and (...) entrepreneur in the AI field, leaves no doubt – starting with the title: Why machines will never rule the world (Routledge 2023). The book was presented in Turin during an evening organized by the Fondazione CRT and the Bruno Leoni Institute, in which Smith was interviewed based on questions developed by generative Ai. We have accepted the challenge to conduct an interview parallel to the one done with GPT4. (shrink)

This book presents the foundations of classical Chinese aesthetic discourse--roughly from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages--with the following animating questions: What is art? Why do we produce it? How do we judge it? The arts that garnered the most theoretical attention during this time period were music, poetry, calligraphy, and painting, and the book considers the reasons why these four were privileged. Whereas modern artists most likely consider themselves musicians or poets or calligraphers or painters or sculptors (...) or architects, the pre-modern authors who produced the literature that established Chinese aesthetics prided themselves on being wenren, "cultured people," conversant with all forms of art and learning. Other comparisons with Western theories and works of art are presented at due junctures. Key Features Addresses Chinese aesthetic discourse on its own terms Provides comparisons of key concepts and theories with examples from Western sources Includes more coverage of primary sources than any other English-language book on the subject Each chapter opens with a helpful summary, highlighting the chapter's key themes. (shrink)

Reason and World, a collection of lectures and essays, ranges in terms of the date of authorship from a lecture on Heidegger published while Marx was at the New School for Social Research to his Inaugural Lecture upon succession to Heidegger’s chair in Freiburg/br. to the Woodward Lecture at Yale in 1970. Although some of the papers were delivered in English, others are appearing here in English translation for the first time. The papers are reflections on German Idealism, Husserl, (...) and Heidegger. They are not arranged chronologically but rather in terms of the history of philosophy, yet their order is not meant merely to reflect this history. What is at issue is rather what Marx, playing on Hegel’s phrase, believes to be the contemporary Bedürfnis der Philosophie. The subject of the initial paper is what constitutes this requirement or need for Hegel and how the Differenzschrift is crucial for an understanding of German Idealism. In a similar fashion, Marx holds that contemporary philosophy must come to terms with the requirement of its time. Through reflection of philosophy since Hegel, the contemporary period is depicted as one of transition. The need is to secure "the older thought in its domain" and to legitimize that thought in terms of the questions it asked while still remaining open for a new and different type of philosophy. The fact that the contemporary period is to be understood as one of transition finds expression in the sub-title of the book itself: Between Tradition and Another Beginning. Those two philosophical issues which Marx believes respectively to be the basis for the tradition and the other beginning are reflected by the title: Reason and World. This new beginning and the emergence of the world as a focal philosophical concern represent none other than the overcoming of tradition with its presuppositions of telos and logos. In his analyses of Heidegger, Marx discloses the world to be, in the last instance, the crucial problem of contemporary philosophy in its turn towards ateleological and pre-logical experience. Implicitly, the tradition was for him already called into question by Husserl insofar as the lifeworld together with its possible salutary effect on Western man became the subject of Husserl’s later philosophy. In this book Marx pursues the theme he first enunciated in Heidegger and the Tradition. In my opinion, however, the title of the present work might have been more accurately Reason, Language, and World. For, as Marx seeks to establish, the transition from traditional philosophy is characterized simultaneously by a change in our understanding of language. According to his interpretation of Hegel, Hegel thought of language as a "servant of logos"; on the other hand, contemporary philosophy "attributes power to language in the same measure as it denies it to logos." The question is, then, about the role of language in the emergence of world. In place of reason is the problem of the world and of the possibility of a poetic dwelling in it. The purpose of historical studies is to show via negativa the difference between the tradition and the other beginning proclaimed by Heidegger. In the latter regard, Marx contents himself with an immanent critique and asks simply whether Heidegger’s thought "has been conceived consistently and whether it has been thought through to the end." To be sure, this work is a significant contribution to the literature on Heidegger and its importance in this respect cannot be overlooked. On the other hand, the difficulty of the book lies precisely in its method. Heidegger’s claim for another beginning is itself never evaluated. Marx underscores the point that, if Heidegger is correct, traditional criteria are not applicable to the thought required by another beginning. We are left in the dilemma of simply being or not being Heideggerians. For those who are not, the only insight we gain is through a via negativa. Even if Heidegger’s thought should prove to be consistent and consequential, this fact would not suffice to establish its validity. And what are these if not traditional criteria?—A. G. (shrink)

Debate concerning virtual reality is often drawn in terms of sharply defined dichotomies--for example, between "real" (or "actual") and "virtual," "authentic" and "inauthentic," and "natural" and "artificial." In this paper we offer an alternative approach by suggesting a conception of a virtual world that highlights a continuity and commonality with our sense of everyday reality. We accomplish this in part by an examination of the English picturesque garden as if it were a virtual world partially constructed out of (...) ideas and objects collected during travels to foreign lands on the Grand Tour. Such foreign travel transformed not only the English person's sense of self, but also altered the English landscape. We conclude that in one sense the "real" England is also a "virtual" reality. (shrink)

Different writing systems in the world select different units of spoken language for mapping. Do these writing system differences influence how first language (L1) literacy experiences affect cognitive processes in learning to read a second language (L2)? Two groups of college students who were learning to read English as a second language (ESL) were examined for their relative reliance on phonological and orthographic processing in English word identification: Korean students with an alphabetic L1 literacy background, and Chinese students with (...) a nonalphabetic L1 literacy background. In a semantic category judgment task, Korean ESL learners made more false positive errors in judging stimuli that were homophones to category exemplars than they did in judging spelling controls. However, there were no significant differences in responses to stimuli in these two conditions for Chinese ESL learners. Chinese ESL learners, on the other hand, made more accurate responses to stimuli that were less similar in spelling to category exemplars than those that were more similar. Chinese ESL learners may rely less on phonological information and more on orthographic information in identifying English words than their Korean counterparts. Further evidence supporting this argument came from a phoneme deletion task in which Chinese subjects performed more poorly overall than their Korean counterparts and made more errors that were phonologically incorrect but orthographically acceptable. We suggest that cross-writing system differences in L1s and L1 reading skills transfer could be responsible for these ESL performance differences. (shrink)

Within the New Zealand curriculum, hauora has been co-opted as an underlying and interdependent concept at the heart of the learning area of health and physical education. Hauora is identified as a Māori philosophy of well-being, advocating a Māori world view of hauora. Contemporary understandings of hauora as a Māori philosophy of health are constructed within dominant English-medium curriculum discourses. At first glance the juxtaposition of ‘hauora’ with ‘well-being’, and hauora being defined as ‘a Māori philosophy of health’ seems (...) like an opportunity to promote an indigenous perspective of health into English-medium curriculum, but the philosophical questions of what knowledge is valued, why we should teach it, and its worth of what is taught for human well-being, remain fraught. The notion of hauora is much richer than the word ‘health’ allows. I explore some issues associated with the equivalence between hauora and health, and some of the potential nuances of hauora in light of a counter-colonial Māori philosophy of holism. I invite the reader to consider the terms ‘whakapapa’ and ‘wairua’ in light of a proposed metaphysics. I show that the terms—and the objects they point to—share a relationship with each other and that recognition of that interdependence are necessary to their well-being. (shrink)

The dominant image of courts as agencies of trial and judgment has a long history in the common law world. Yet across that region sponsorship of settlement is now widely identified as the courts’ primary responsibility, transforming them into sites where the profoundly different rationalities that ground negotiated agreement increasingly supersede those of rule-based adjudication. This study examines the work of one English court—the Mayor's and City of London Court—in sponsoring settlement and considers how that role is legitimated on (...) both propositional and symbolic levels. This evolving role raises questions about the Victorian court premises themselves. How are we to regard the now frequently empty courtrooms, designed for trial and judgment and decorated with Gothic elevations linking them symbolically with processes of medieval kingship? Should we simply see this Victorian site of contemporary settlement processes as no more than the quaint residue of a vanished era? Or can these historic features retain potency and relevance at a symbolic level, providing legitimacy for bilateral negotiation rather than the open processes of trial and judgment for which they were originally constructed? (shrink)

When the only advice on offer is unhelpful, a potential missionary might need to be advised to seek an alternative. Jesus, we take it, was not building a worldly empire. Christian mission has become associated with colonialism. Dominant advice often pushes Western missionaries to positions of strength. In order to be vulnerable, one needs an alternative to such advice. Economic domination of Africa by the West makes it hard to know when Africa’s people, long engrossed in patron/client relationships, are not (...) talking for power. Use of English to describe Africa leads to massive false imputing of Western histories onto African societies. A little linguistic wisdom exposes the naivety of many contemporary understandings of the acumen of translation. (shrink)

BackgroundIn its 2015 decision in Montgomery v. Lanarkshire Health Board, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom overruled the long-standing, paternalistic prudent doctor standard of care in favour of a new reasonable patient standard which obligates doctors to make their patients aware of all material risks of the recommended treatment and of any reasonable alternative treatment. This landmark judgment has been of interest to the rest of the common law world. A judicial trend of invoking Montgomery to impose more (...) stringent requirements on doctors is discernible in subsequent decisions since then.Main bodyIn this narrative review, without questioning the idea that properly informed patients should play a more active role in procedures affecting their own health in furtherance of their autonomy, safety, and consumer rights, we identify and analyse, with the aid of realistic clinical thought experiments, three practical conundrums that the Montgomery standard may inflict on the daily work of doctors, unfairly exposing them to arbitrary legal risks.ConclusionsThese conundrums pertain to the ascertainment of the risks that must be disclosed to the patient under the test of ‘materiality’; the legal uncertainty as to the scope of the exceptions; and the actual ability of doctors to cope with the pressures of time. These conundrums offer ripe opportunities to rethink the proper role of judicially developed medical law in modern health care practice. (shrink)

Considering the overwhelming amount of media products that we are subjected to in the 21stcentury and the way in which those inevitably influence our perception of reality, this research pays specific attention to the role of the media in the construction and enhancement of stereotypes in everyday life, via the language or, more specifically, specialized languages. In particular, this paper aims to investigate an American legal TV series in order to analyze the way in which legal English is used in (...) dialogues. The major research questions are: to what extent such a kind of specialized discourse may be really understood by the greater audience? How does legal drama participate in the shaping of stereotypes relating to the legal environment in the country where it is produced, and cross-culturally, bearing in mind the prominence of “made in the USA” products in the television programming across the world? Ultimately, in the light of the previous questions, should the growing field of research in audiovisual translation extend its investigation into the area of legal English? Taking into consideration the seminal work of Pedersen and Diaz Cintas in the field of Audiovisual Translation, the study will examine the subtitling techniques employed for this atypical genre. Through the analysis of a corpus comprising several dialogues from a collection of episodes of the legal show Reckless, the paper will mostly focus on gender representations and their most common linguistically enhanced stereotypes. (shrink)

Everyday our vision travels across time and space. We see images in the media about atrocities, disruptions, crises, famine, and wars. And in each case our sense of injustice is awakened. We feel outrage and indignation based upon our ideals and value systems which were formed through our traditions and religions. But in this age where the power of media and information is so powerful, what we see is often manufactured to appeal to our values. While these values circulate among (...) the images we see in cyberspace, these manipulations are rooted in certain realities: geography, natural resources, and power relationships. Our values are managed to serve the control of resources and territory. They serve the deeper reality of geography and geopolitics. How then are these ideals and values created, manipulated, and opposed across various pivots or boundaries, between East and West, between the individual and the collective? Through English geographer Sir Halford Mackinder’s concepts of “pivot” and “heartland”; German philosopher Carl Schmitt’s importance of “nomos”; and French writer Victor Segalen’s reflections on the loss of cultural diversity, we outline this priority of geography. By examining these writers, we can begin to ask if our ideals and values have any real moral or theological significance, or if they are merely effects of the competition between powers. Can ideals and values lead to real change and development, or are they merely leashes to guide us based on the aims of power? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Between Two Worlds: East and West: An AutobiographyWilliam EdelglassBetween Two Worlds: East and West: An Autobiography. By J. N. Mohanty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 134.The British philosopher Anthony Quinton once described J. N. Mohanty as "The one and only x who is a specialist in Navya-Nyāya, Husserl, and Frege." Between Two Worlds: East and West is the extraordinary story of Mohanty's career as a (...) student, teacher, and scholar of Indian and German philosophy. Told against the backdrop of the struggle for Indian Independence, the trauma of partition, the intellectual and cultural glory of Calcutta, postwar Germany, and the United States of the last generation, Mohanty's story is a page-turner filled with fascinating anecdotes from his own life as well as the lives of the many remarkable thinkers and public figures he has encountered. It is also a story of the concrete historical situations that enabled Mohanty's singular contribution to philosophy: the decades of study with some of India's most learned paṇḍits, the opportunities offered during his years as a student in Göttingen, and his close collegial relationships with Aron Gurwitsch, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt. Though he set out to write an autobiography that was explicitly not a philosophical text, Mohanty observes that "since my life has been primarily dedicated to the pursuit of philosophical ideas, the connection of the story of my life to my philosophical interests was almost unavoidable" (p. ix). In addition to brief discussions of some of the philosophical questions he has pursued in his previous writings, Mohanty here reflects on cultural identity, the life of the mind, and religion and spirituality, as well as social and political questions.Born in 1928, Mohanty enjoyed a pleasant and comfortable childhood supported by the loving attention of an extended family. (In this story families are adaptable, ever incorporating others into the love and care of a network grounded in mutual support, shared food, and conversation.) The family home was in the small village of Nilakaṇṭhapur (the seat of the blue-necked god, i.e., Śiva), where Mohanty's [End Page 139] father had been raised. His father had left the village for a successful career as a judge under the British Raj, bringing both social prominence and moderate wealth. But his father's career required periodic moves, and it was the village to which they regularly returned that Mohanty considered home. It is a pleasure to read Mohanty's descriptions of the cycle of the seasons, village life, local customs, family characters, and the rambling house with its temple and many rooms. Mohanty still thinks of himself as a "village boy," and these pages are written with much tenderness and enough historical background to contextualize his descriptions.Unlike his father, Mohanty was not educated in the village school. He himself was born in the regional capital of Cuttack and educated at the English government school in town. Mohanty has fond recollections of his teachers and the special school holidays, including the sports festivals, the single religious holiday observed by the school—the worship of the goddess of learning, Saraswati—and the distribution of prizes for academic distinction. Mohanty would inevitably receive numerous prizes. Later, at his matriculation from high school, Mohanty achieved the highest scores in all of Orissa, and stood first in the university following his studies of mathematics, logic, and Sanskrit in Cuttack. Upon completion of his study of philosophy and law at Presidency College (Calcutta), Mohanty again stood first in the First Class, and then again for his graduate work at Calcutta University. Mohanty's schooling was augmented with lessons from private tutors at home that preceded or followed the regular school hours. "Every morning," Mohanty writes, he and his siblingswould recite conjugations and declensions of Sanskrit verbs and nouns loud enough to be heard outside the house; we would compete to do it first. The pandit [Nilakantha Misra, Mohanty's first Sanskrit teacher] taught me all the grammar that I learnt later. He also taught this ten-year-old boy the primer of logic Tarkasaṃgraha, and Kalidāsa's Raghuvaṃśaṃ. (p. 6)Mohanty... (shrink)

In "The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, " Lubica Ucnik examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl s final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patocka. For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing irrationalism that threatened (...) to undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary life-world: the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl s concerns in today s context, Ucnik first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Patocka. Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocka. Ucnik provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.". (shrink)

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