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This book makes a strong case for free schooling, comparing the mind of Albert Einstein - who said much - to Zen conscious practice, which says little but encompasses everything. Examining the work of brain researchers, neuroscientists, physicists, and other scholars to illuminate the commonalities between Einstein's thought and the Zen practice of paying attention to one's present experience, the book reveals their many similarities, showing the development of self-direction as a key to fostering compassionate consideration of others and to harmonious, semi-effortless learning and living. Examples demonstrate that students who choose to study what is interesting, remarkable, and important for them tend to become more like Einstein than students with the rigid school curricula; students who are free to learn often demonstrate empathy, and less rigid rule-following, while involved in the process of imaginatively becoming their own oracles and self-educators.
For far too many people for far too many years, schooling has been a debilitating, demoralizing, and ultimately dehumanizing experience. Make-shift, half-hearted, and watered-down reform measures have proved ineffective. Reform throws out the bath water, but keeps the baby. Radicalism recognizes not a baby but a beast lurks in the bath water and throws both out. This dramatic redefinition of schooling examines four models of dynamism as provided by Nietzsche, Whitehead, Dewey, and Freire. Nietzsche's af-firmation of dynamism is marred by his elitism. Whitehead understands that inert cripple schooling. Without dialogue, ideas remain inert. Dewey misunderstands thinking and does not grasp its ...
Groups of people are commonly said to be collectively responsible for what has happened. Sometimes the groups claimed to be responsible are vast in size, as when collective responsibility is ascribed to the class of all Americans or the class of all white males. In this book the concept of collective responsibility is analyzed. It is examined not only in the light of what philosophical proponents (such as Cooper, Held, Bates, French, Swinburne, and May) have said about it, but a genuine attempt is made to make sense of what ordinary people say about responsibility when it is ascribed to groups of people. Accordingly, it is distinguished from related concepts such as shared responsibility and...
Addresses of the Mississippi Philosophical Association is a collection of presidential and invited addresses from the members of the Mississippi Philosophical Association (MPA). Papers date from the inception of the association in the mid-1940s and continue through 1999. The common thread in these addresses is the authors' service to or leadership in the MPA. The content and methods in the chapters are diverse, including addresses on ethics, political philosophy, history of philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and philosophical theology. Some unique features of this book are a history of the MPA, biographical sketches an...
Many debates in biomedical ethics today involve inconsistencies in defining the key term, person. Both sides of the abortion debate, for instance, beg the question about what constitutes personhood. This book explores the arguments concerning definitions of personhood in the history of modern philosophy, and then constructs a superior model, defined in terms of distinctive features (a theoretical concept borrowed from linguistics). This model is shown to have distinct advantages over the necessary and sufficient condition models of personhood launched by essentialists. Philosophers historically have been correct about what some of the pivotal distinctive features of personhood are, e.q., rat...
Phenomenologists or Continental thinkers argue for the subject-object continuum. For phenomenology, subjectivity is of the object, and object is for the subject. This book applies that continuum to the holistic foundations of work or specialization. The author devotes a chapter to each of eight cultural applications of the subject-object continuum. Chapter One examines the specialist-generalist continuum meaning specialization for general education. That continuum comprises the framework for the remaining seven chapters. Those seven include production for community, design for user, automation for user, computing for society, taxation for society, information for manufacturing, and procedure...
This is a valuable book, jam-packed with learning and insight, cosmopolitan in scope, timely yet classically anchored. An achievement of intellectual beauty. This is how I like to see philosophy conducted. Robert Ginsberg Director, The International Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Value Inquiry. This book contains fifteen essays all seeking to regain the original meaning of philosophy as the love of wisdom. Mythos and Logos are two essential aspects of a quest that began with the ancient Greeks. As concepts fundamental to human experience, Mythos and Logos continue to guide the search for truth in the twenty-first century.
This book engages in critical discussion of the role of reason and rationality in philosophy, the human mind, ethics, science, and the social sciences. Philosophers from Poland, Germany, and the United States examine reason in the light of emotion, doubt, absolutes, implementation, and interpretation. They throw new light on old values.
The essays in this volume are from the First Conference of the Central European Pragmatist Forum, held in Slovakia in 2000. Written by prominent specialists in pragmatism and American philosophy from the United States and Europe, they survey contemporary thinking on classical and contemporary pragmatism, social and political theory, aesthetics, and the application of pragmatist thought in contemporary Europe.
The modern era was dominated by conflicts between claims to certainty about justice and denials that certainty is warranted. The purpose of this book is to develop a postmodern alternative to both philosophies, one which is universal without being absolutist. The approach is dialectical in Plato's sense of that term. Dialectic is both necessary and sufficient for the theoretical and the practical aspects of living. The primary symbol in this book is the Athenian Socrates who spent his days in the Agora and his evenings in the houses of his friends, the active professionals of the world's first democracy. His questions were unabashedly philosophical, concerned with the most urgent matters. What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? Who is best suited to rule in the state? How should young people be educated? The nature of justice is closely connected with other questions of value, so the discussion freely moves from that central focus to related matters with the primary goal of developing a dialectical philosophy that is both applicable to life and open to all. Universal Justice is concerned with how to think about justice rather than what to think about justice.