Plato and Socrates: From an Educator of Childhood to a Childlike Educator?

This paper deals with two forms of education—Platonic and Socratic. The former educates childhood to transform it into what it ought to be. The latter does not form childhood, but makes education childlike. To unfold the philosophical and pedagogical dimensions of this opposition, the first part of the paper highlights the way in which philosophy is presented indirectly in some of Plato’s dialogues, beginning with a characterisation that Socrates makes of himself in the dialogue Phaedrus. The second part details Plato’s condemnation of writing in the Phaedrus, and draws on the critique by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze to establish what is at stake in this condemnation. In the third part, the pedagogical and political implications of this condemnation are reviewed, and Plato is placed in a surprising position in relation to his own teacher, Socrates. Finally, through a comparison between childhood and philosophy, the educational value of putting childhood and philosophy together is questioned. Through a number of questions, the paper ends problematising the pedagogical, political and philosophical value of placing the practice of philosophy in the realm of childhood citizenship education. It also recovers the value of philosophy—as a form of questioning and unlearning what we know and affirming the value of not knowing—in a childlike education.     

Behavioral Inhibition and Risk for Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in Latino Children Exposed to Violence

Latino children in urban contexts marked by poverty are at high risk of being exposed to violence and developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Nonetheless, there is great variability in individual responses to violence exposure. This study examines risk for developing re-experiencing, avoidance, and arousal symptoms of PTSD as a function of individual differences in behavioral inhibition and exposure to community violence. Participants were 148 Latino students (M age =11.43 years, SD?=?0.69; 55 % girls) living in an area marked by poverty and crime. Children completed self-report measures of behavioral inhibition and posttraumatic stress symptoms during a baseline assessment. During a follow-up interview 6 months later, children completed self-report measures of exposure to community violence since the baseline assessment and posttraumatic stress symptoms. Structural equation models revealed that behavioral inhibition at baseline was positively associated with PTSD avoidance and arousal symptoms at follow-up, after controlling for symptoms at baseline. Furthermore, behavioral inhibition moderated the association between violence exposure and symptoms such that violence was more strongly associated with the development of PTSD avoidance symptoms as behavioral inhibition increased. Results suggest that individual differences in behavioral inhibition contribute to risk for specific PTSD symptoms and are important for understanding variation in responses to trauma exposure. By examining diathesis-­stress models within a disorder, we may be better able to elucidate the etiology of a disorder and translate this improved understanding into personalized intervention approaches that maximize effectiveness.     

Perceptions of Challenges Affecting Research Ethics Committees’ Members at Medical and Health Science Colleges in Omani and Jordanian Universities

Journal of Academic Ethics - In recent years there has been an increase in research conducted in the Middle East, with a corresponding increase in the challenges faced by members of the Research...     

Quality of Life among Caregivers of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders,Intellectual Disability,and Typical Development

Applied Research in Quality of Life - The quality of life (QoL) of the caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disabilities has received limited attention in emerging...     

MEDICAL MANAGEMENT OF INFANT INTERSEX: THE JURIDICO‐ETHICAL DILEMMA OF CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC LEGAL RESPONSE

Technological advances in the field of medicine and health sciences not only manipulate the normal human body and sex but also provide for surgical and hormonal management of hermaphroditism (intersexuality). Consequently, sex assignment surgery has not only become a standard care for babies born with genital abnormalities in the West but even in some Muslim states. On the positive side, it goes a long way in saving children born with abnormal genitalia from numerous legal interdictions of the pre‐sex corrective surgery. Nevertheless, the larger ethical and legal questions that medical management of genital abnormality raises to some extent have not been adequately appreciated by contemporary Muslim responses. This article, therefore, in principle argues against surgical management of intersexuality during early infancy from the Islamic legal perspective.     

The Effect of Non-sentential Context Prosody on Homographs’ Lexical Activation in Persian

This study examines the effect of non-sentential context prosody pattern on lexical activation in Persian. For this purpose a questionnaire including target and non-target words is used. The target words are homographs with two possible stress patterns belonging to different syntactic categories. Participants are asked to read out the words aloud and note the first word that comes to their mind. The results show that by reading the target words, both meanings of the target words are activated in mind and the prosodic pattern of the non-sentential preceding context does not affect the activation of the other stress pattern meaning. This result suggests that the metrical prosodic pattern of non-sentential context is not a strong constraint to determine which meaning of the target word must be activated. The experiment also illustrates that the stress pattern used to read the target words does not necessarily matches the stress pattern of the target word which relates to the written word. These findings confirm Swinney (Verb Learn Verb Behav 18:645–665, 1979) and Elston-Güttler and Friederici’s (J Mem Lang 52(2):256–283, 2005) finding that both meanings of an ambiguous word are accessed at the first stage. This study shows that in lack of semantic context, Persian natives behave homographs as ambiguous words and there is no bias towards preferring one meaning over another.     

A Cross-Sectional Survey of Pakistani Muslims Coping with Health Anxiety through Religiosity during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Journal of Religion and Health - Investigating the role of religiosity in coping with health anxiety during the outbreak of COVID-19 assumes significance given the continued onslaught of the...     

The Spaces of Knowledge: Bertrand Russell,Logical Construction,and the Classification of the Sciences

What Russell regarded to be the ‘chief outcome’ of his 1914 Lowell Lectures at Harvard can only be fully appreciated, I argue, if one embeds the outcome back into the ‘classificatory problem’ that many at the time were heavily engaged in. The problem focused on the place and relationships between the newly formed or recently professionalized disciplines such as psychology, Erkenntnistheorie, physics, logic and philosophy. The prime metaphor used in discussions about the classificatory problem by British philosophers was a spatial one, with such motifs as ‘standpoints’, ‘place’ and ‘perspectives’ in the space of knowledge. In fact, Russell’s construction of a perspectival space of six-dimensions was meant precisely to be a timely solution to the widely discussed classificatory problem.