Multicultural Education in the Zionist State – The Mizrahi Challenge

In this paper, we explore a specific variant of multicultural education inIsrael that developed within the dominant Jewish cultural identity, that isthe claim of Jews from Islamic countries (Mizrahi Jews) for educational autonomy. This demand arose against the backdrop of an aggressive nationalist ideology – Zionism – that claimed torepresent all Jews, and yet was too ambivalent toward its non-European Jewish subjects. The Mizrahi Jews' dual identity, as Jews and as products of the Arab culture, conflated with the state's problematic self-conception as both Jewish and democratic. This phenomenon, apparently, is evidenced by the two types of multicultural responses that developed within the Mizrahi sector: a critical multiculturalism with a social-democratic character on the one hand, and an autonomist multiculturalism with fundamentalist featureson the other.     

Philosophy of Education in Spain at the Threshold of the 21st Century – Origins,Political Contexts,and Prospects

This article analyzes the evolution of Philosophy of Educationin Spain and its situation at the dawn of the 21st century. Spain'speculiar socio-historical circumstances have largely conditioned thedirection this discipline has taken over the last several decades. So,although during a period there was some approximation towards themethods of analytic philosophy, Philosophy of Education has never fullyrelinquished its normative vocation. To do so would have meant spurningthe hopes and fears that had filled Spanish society by the mid 1970supon the reinstatement of civil liberties and democracy. Indeed,attention to the circumstances and that normative orientation have foundtheir best fit in a practical Aristotelian-based philosophy meant toendow Philosophy of Education with a normative character that do notshun the educator's need for reflection, practical decision-making, andresponsibility. Since the 1990s, new directions have been marked by thechallenge of postmodernism, inasmuch as it affects not only thetechnological positivist model but also the reflective educator's modelof a practical Philosophy of Education. The new directions spread out invarious ways, yet they all fall into a common denominator of narrativetrends. The problem posed by these new languages lies in the extent towhich they are consistent with pedagogic intent. In turn, the answerstake on different profiles depending on whether the stance leans moretowards the philosophical or the pedagogical point of view withinPhilosophy of Education. The complementary nature of both perspectivescharacterizes the current state of the field in Spain.     

Dewey’s Theory of Experience,Traumatic Memory,and Music Education

Studies in Philosophy and Education - Trauma’s ubiquity in society leads to an acknowledgement that damaging experiences likely affect more students than they leave untouched. Dewey...     

On the nature of language – Heidegger and African Philosophy

abstract

This paper explores links between Heidegger’s notion of language and views in African philosophy. My contention is that Heidegger’s daring phenomenology of language is also found and even radicalised within the framework of African philosophy, particularly the philosophy of myth. I argue that the exploration of the relation between these views of language offers the possibility not only to expand on the conventional conception of language but also to challenge the common notion of philosophical language and philosophy as such.     

Gender Education and the Transformation of Calvinism in the Netherlands, 1870‐1970

Examining from a gender perspective religious education within a prominent branch of Dutch Protestantism, this article investigates the interplay between oppressive and emancipating educational forces. The so‐called Neo‐Calvinists‐‐progressively minded, yet orthodox‐‐sought successfully to update traditional Calvinism and keep it abreast with modern developments from circa 1870 onwards, notably by reforming school, family and youth culture. Notwithstanding Calvinism being traditionally sexist biased, the role of women and girls was becoming more important. Firstly, the article sketches both the influence of Calvinism in the history of the Netherlands and Dutch ‘pillarized’ culture and society between 1880 and 1970, Neo‐Calvinism being one of the main ‘pillars’ within this religiously compartmentalized society. Secondly, it focuses on Neo‐Calvinist gender education and its paradoxical effects.     

Psychosocial Stress and Cardiovascular Risk: What is the Role of Daily Experience?

We describe an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocol designed to measure daily life experiences along several psychosocial dimensions (Social Conflict, Task Demand, Decisional Control, Negative Affect, and Arousal) hypothesized to be relevant for cardiovascular disease risk. In a large community sample, these assessments have been administered in conjunction with ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) monitoring and measures of subclinical cardiovascular disease. Several results have emerged that support the promise of this approach. First of all, each of these dimensions of experience appears to be a trigger for cardiovascular activation, with movement on each scale being associated with significant within-person changes in heart rate and blood pressure in the natural environment. Second, there appear to be individual differences in physiological responsiveness to these dimensions of daily experience, with such differences being associated in some cases with laboratory-based assessments of cardiovascular reactivity, as might be expected. Third, EMA ratings are associated in several instances with (between-person) stable individual differences in ABP readings. And finally, we have found that some of the characteristics defined by our EMA ratings are related to measures of subclinical atherosclerosis. Such effects appear to be mediated, in part, by ABP. The advantages of using EMA measures for capturing the effects of psychosocial stressors are highlighted by comparing the predictive validity of these daily life assessments to traditional global self-reports. We conclude by describing future plans for use of this type of assessment protocol for helping us to characterize psychosocial characteristics relevant to cardiovascular disease risk. Personality and social processes during daily living may have an important impact not only on psychological functioning but also on physical health and disease. In this article we review our recent work involving the assessment of daily experience as a means of better understanding the role of psychosocial stress in cardiovascular disease risk. First, we outline the rationale for our interest in daily experience sampling for examining these processes, and we describe the methods we have adopted for this purpose. Next, we review findings from a recent study in which we have used these approaches to examine the role of psychosocial stress on ABP and atherosclerosis in a community-dwelling sample. We compare our approach to more traditional (global self-report and laboratory-observation) methods for examining these relationships in humans, and we discuss potential future directions for use of daily experience sampling in studies of health and behavior.     

Lost in Space? Education and the Concept of Nature

Although the idea of nature has allbut disappeared from recent discussion ofeducation, it remains highly relevant to thephilosophy and practice of education, sincetacit notions of human nature and whatconstitutes underlying reality – the `natural'order of things – necessarily orientateseducation in fundamental ways. It is arguedthat underlying our various senses of nature isthe idea of nature as the `self-arising' whoseintrinsic integrity, mystery and valueimplicitly condition our understanding ofourselves and of the reality in which we live.I argue that the acknowledgement of nature soconceived opens up a perspective on educationthat requires us to review currently dominanttechnological notions of truth and knowledge,and also of what should characterize theprocess of education, reasserting the properplace of more intuitive, local and dialogicalknowledge and relationships.     

On Not Giving Up the World – Davidson and the Grounds of Belief

Abstract

What is the relation between our beliefs, or thoughts in general, and the perceptual experience of the world that gives rise to those beliefs? Donald Davidson is usually taken to have a well‐known answer to this question that runs as follows: while our beliefs are, at least in part, caused by our experience, such experience does not thereby count as providing a rational ground for those beliefs; our beliefs are thus evidentially grounded in other beliefs, but not in the experience that gives rise to them. John McDowell, among others, has challenged this Davidsonian picture on the grounds that it actually severs the connection between beliefs and their proper evidential grounds. Against such a view, this paper argues the Davidsonian position grounds belief in the specificity of our own locatedness in the world, and in the more general and prior embeddedness of belief in the world that is a part of the very concept of belief.     

The Manifestation Range of Innately Good Knowledge and Ability,and the Danger of Separation: On Zhuzi’s Question about Understanding Words

Zhuzi (Zhu Xi), Zhang Nanxuan and Lü Donglai continued a discussion begun by Hu Wufeng and his disciples on the subject of “knowing the form of benevolence,” and “seeking for a true mind in an absent one.” One result of their discussion was to make people realize that innately good knowledge and ability are not only manifested in loving one’s parents and respecting one’s elders, but also in the simple acts of drinking when thirsty and eating when hungry. This generated the idea of “manifestation range of innately good knowledge and ability.” However, another conclusion of this discussion claimed that if the desire to drink and eat or the king of Qi’s grudging an ox are included in this range, there would be a danger of viewing innately good knowledge and ability merely as inborn human nature or instinct. This discussion reveals an unsteady relationship between innately good knowledge and ability and the feeling of commiseration, which are sometimes united and sometimes separate.     

On the Subjectivity of the Experience of Victory: Who Are the Election Winners?

Elections represent key moments in democratic countries, and an established finding from the existing literature is that winners of elections display higher levels of satisfaction with democracy. Yet we know almost nothing about the times when voters feel like winners of an election. Using panel data in four countries, this article finds that while the objective performance of the supported party—measured using vote share and changes in vote share from the previous election—has a very important effect on feeling like an election winner, prior expectations regarding the election’s outcome as well as preferences for the supported party significantly moderate the effect of party performance on voter feelings. It seems also that the identification of the winners and losers of elections are clearer in majoritarian‐style democracies than in proportional systems with coalition governments. Ultimately, the findings indicate that measuring who are the winners of an election using exclusively objective measures of party performance may provide a distorted view of public opinion following the elections.     

On “Bettering Humanity” in Science and Engineering Education

Authors such as Krishnasamy Selvan argue that "all human endeavors including engineering and science" have a single primary objective: "bettering humanity." They favor discussing "the history of science and measurement uncertainty." This paper respectfully disagrees and argues that "human endeavors including engineering and science" should not pursue "bettering humanity" as their primary objective. Instead these efforts should first pursue individual betterment. One cannot better humanity without knowing what that means. However, there is no one unified theory of what is to the betterment of humanity. Simultaneously, there is no one field (neither science, nor engineering, nor philosophy) entitled to rule univocally. Perhaps if theorists tended their own gardens, the common weal would be tended thereby.     

Safe on the road – Does Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems Use affect Road Risk Perception?

A major goal of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) deployment is higher road safety. However, these systems are only as safe as users handle them. This article presents a study evaluating the links between the use of ADAS and road risk perception. 101 drivers were invited to evaluate accident probability and risk controllability and to indicate whether they were using ADAS or not. Results show that the use of ADAS decreases perceived accident probability and increases perceived controllability for risky driving situations. Since the degree of automation in ADAS is still low nowadays, it is important to discuss the importance of human factors for the purpose of a safer implementation.     

Reasons and Value – in Defence of the Buck-Passing Account

In this article, I will defend the so-called buck-passing theory of value. According to this theory, claims about the value of an object refer to the reason-providing properties of the object. The concept of value can thus be analyzed in terms of reasons and the properties of objects that provide them for us. Reasons in this context are considerations that count in favour of certain attitudes. There are four other possibilities of how the connection between reasons and value might be formulated. For example, we can claim that value is a property that provides us with reasons to choose an option that has this property. I argue that none of these four other options can ultimately be defended, and therefore the buck-passing account is the one we ought to accept as the correct one. The case for the buck-passing account becomes even stronger, when we examine the weak points of the most pressing criticism against this account thus far.     

The More the Better? Effects of Training,Experience and Information Amount in Legal Judgments

In an experimental study involving German lay judges, law students and controls, effects of legal training and experience as well as information amount on legal judgments was investigated. In a three (legal knowledge: legal training versus legal experience versus controls) x two (information amount: high versus low) between‐subjects design, 137 participants judged the premeditation of a perpetrator in eight real‐world cases decided by the German Federal Court of Justice. Judgment congruency with the Court's ruling increased with legal training, but official lay judges showed lower congruency compared with student controls. Additionally, legal training and experience corresponded with higher confidence. Emotional reactions to the legal cases were stronger when more information was given for individuals without legal training but decreased for individuals with training. An information‐processing perspective to explain the observed differences in legal judgments is advanced, and the issue of using untrained individuals in the legal decision making process is discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does the Subject of Experience Exist in the World?

In this paper I attempt to show, by considering a number of sources, including Wittgenstein, Sartre, Thomas Nagel and Spinoza, but also adding something crucial of my own, that it is impossible to construe the subject of experience as an object among other objects in the world. My own added argument is the following. the subject of experience cannot move in time along with material events and processes or it could not be aware of the passage of time, hence neither of change nor of motion. the subject cannot therefore be identified with any neural process, function, or location since whatever goes on in the CNS is necessarily objective and part of the temporal flux. However this does not imply any form of dualism for experiences exist only for the subject whose experiences they are and hence they have no objective reality.     

Agonistic Recognition in Education: On Arendt’s Qualification of Political and Moral Meaning

Agonistic recognition in education has three interlinked modes of aesthetic experience and self-presentation where one is related to actions in the public realm; one is related to plurality in the way in which it comes into existence in confrontation with others; and one is related to the subject-self, disclosed by ‘thinking. Arendt’s conception of ‘thinking’ is a way of getting to grips with aesthetic self-presentation in education. By action, i.e., by disclosing oneself and by taking initiatives, students and teachers constitute their being. The way Arendt theorizes action (vita activa) makes it essentially unpredictable and destabilizing, which does not seem to fit into what should be expected from education. In the article I will argue that it should have a place by virtue of the debate, challenge and contest it offers. But education should also be defined from a specific kind of contemplation called ‘thinking’ to become the cultivation of a faculty of judgment in education—thinking (vita contemplativa) as a common virtue in education. Arendt’s demarcation between truth and meaning does from the point of view of agonistic recognition in education call for ‘thinking’ as a qualification of political and moral meaning–the ‘taste’ to be established in the individual, by individual judgements but always judged in relation to members of a community.     

The infant and the infinite: On psychoanalytic faith – Bion,Meltzer and Kierkegaard

This paper discusses the meaning of psychoanalytic faith as a useful developmental concept, which applies to the therapeutic process in the consulting room as to other intimate educational experiences. Faith is a concept which has been little considered in relation to psychoanalysis, partly owing to semantic confusion with ‘the Faith’ as in religious or psychoanalytic dogma, and partly owing to the difficulty of defining or describing what it is, outside accepted jargon. Yet, faith is traditionally the gateway to experiencing the unknown – a psychoanalytic goal-demanding negative capability. It is suggested that philosophy and poetry, where the concept is more familiar, can provide psychoanalytic parallels for this particular type of learning from experience. The viewpoints of Bion, Meltzer and Kierkegaard are taken as contributing to a picture of how, in the psychoanalytic session, there may be a developmental encounter between the infant (patient) and the infinite (the transference process, rather than the analyst as a person).     

On the notions of indiscernibility and indeterminacy in the light of the Galois–Grothendieck theory

We analyze the notions of indiscernibility and indeterminacy in the light of the Galois theory of field extensions and the generalization to \(K\) -algebras proposed by Grothendieck. Grothendieck’s reformulation of Galois theory permits to recast the Galois correspondence between symmetry groups and invariants as a Galois–Grothendieck duality between \(G\) -spaces and the minimal observable algebras that discern (or separate) their points. According to the natural epistemic interpretation of the original Galois theory, the possible \(K\) -indiscernibilities between the roots of a polynomial \(p(x)\in K[x]\) result from the limitations of the field \(K\) . We discuss the relation between this epistemic interpretation of the Galois–Grothendieck duality and Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles. We then use the conceptual framework provided by Klein’s Erlangen program to propose an alternative ontologic interpretation of this duality. The Galoisian symmetries are now interpreted in terms of the automorphisms of the symmetric geometric figures that can be placed in a background Klein geometry. According to this interpretation, the Galois–Grothendieck duality encodes the compatibility condition between geometric figures endowed with groups of automorphisms and the ‘observables’ that can be consistently evaluated at such figures. In this conceptual framework, the Galoisian symmetries do not encode the epistemic indiscernibility between individuals, but rather the intrinsic indeterminacy in the pointwise localization of the figures with respect to the background Klein geometry.     

On the origin and development of the idea of “de” in Pre-Qin times

In ancient Chinese thoughts, de is a comparatively complicated idea. Most of the researchers translated it directly into “virtue”, but this translation is not accurate for our understanding of the idea of “de” in pre-Qin times. Generally speaking, in Pre-Qin times, the idea of “de” underwent three developmental periods. The first is the de of Heaven, the de of ancestors; the second the de of system; and the third the de of spirit and moral conducts. In a long period of history, the idea of “de” never cast off the influence of tian Dao (the way of Heaven). It was in Western Zhou Dynasty that the idea of “de” shook off the dense fog of the mandate of Heaven. However, it was the thinkers in Spring and Autumn Period and Warring States who made contributions to bring it deep into people’s mind. The ancient Chinese thoughts were mainly concerned with people’s recognition and development of their own abilities, with people’s seeking harmony and balance between human-beings and nature, and with people’s seeking harmonious and balanced human relations. The development of the idea of “de” played a very important role in this context. __________ Translated from Zhongguo Shehui Kexue 中国社会科学 (China Social Sciences), 2005(4) by Lei Yongqiang