Humaniorastudier i pedagogikk Blogg

Richard Wolin i The Nation:

Delbanco's main objective in College is to redeem the meaning and value of a liberal arts education in the face of superordinate cultural trends--the commodification of knowledge, globalization, the communicative distractions of digital technology and social media--that have compromised the existence of the meditative space necessary for robust character formation and the cultivation of individual autonomy. As Delbanco points out, contemporary students are drowning "in an ocean of digital noise, logged on, online, booted up, as the phrase goes, 24/7, linked to one another through an arsenal of gadgets that are never 'powered down.'" Nearly a century ago, the poet and philosopher Paul Valéry lamented that the denizens of the modern world had lost the ability to be bored. What he meant was that by becoming so enamored of fleeting sensations and cheap amusements, people had forfeited their capacity for solitude and their appreciation of the virtues of sustained contemplation. Delbanco's point is that we with our iThings are at risk of becoming, in the words of Valéry's contemporary, the Austrian writer Robert Musil, men and women "without qualities."

In his effort to reinvigorate the college ideal, Delbanco surveys several traditional accounts of the liberal arts mission. According to one inherited view, the unique value of the college experience is that it affords a hiatus between adolescence and vocational life to pursue the ends of self-exploration and self-discovery--to "become who we are," to employ Nietzsche's adage. In an American context, this noble striving for self-realization corresponded to an indigenous translation of the German philosophical ideal of Bildung, or individual self-cultivation. In the nineteenth century its most prominent exponents were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. As Delbanco shows, by the 1830s Emerson was dissenting from the conventions of American higher education, lamenting its heightened insularity, its linguistic turgidity, its disconnectedness from the purposes and goals of "life." It was, conversely, the visionary Whitman who astutely perceived the interrelationship between individual self-realization and democracy; like no other previous system of government, democracy, by virtue of its endemic aversion to dogmatic authority and gratuitous hierarchy, created a political space for individuals to explore their variegated and rich inner natures. Whitman gave voice to the pivotal idea that democracy is not merely a technique of government or an equitable mechanism of dispute resolution but equally a paradigm of individual self-fulfillment.

(via Lars Løvlie)

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Childism: The Unacknowledged Prejudice Against Kids

Racism and sexism are understood as ideological prejudices. Why don't we have a similar understanding of the root of child abuse?

Childism is the hardest form of prejudice to recognize because children are the one group that, many of us think without thinking, is naturally subordinate. Until they reach a stipulated age, they are the responsibility of their parents or guardians -- those who have custody. But what does custody permit? What distinguishes it from ownership? One of the essential ingredients of childism is a claim by adults to the effect that children are ours to do with exactly as we see fit, or children exist to serve, honor and obey adults. These claims make a subordination doctrine out of natural dependency, out of the fact that children are born relatively helpless and need to be taken care of until they can take care of themselves. It seems normal to insist "honor thy father and thy mother" without any reciprocal "honor thy children."

(Time)

Fra Purlieu: Philosophy in a New Century

 So what is the connection between environmental philosophy and environmental ethics?

Callicott: There is a difference between the two, and I say that I do both. The majority of my work is in environmental ethics, and my current work is very much in the domain of environmental ethics, but it is also metaphysically grounded. I don't think that ethics is hermetically sealed: it has to have foundations and those foundations are not themselves ethical. That is, before we can start talking about ethics we have to talk about what it means to be a moral agent, a person, what our relationship is to others and to the world.

To take a concrete example: the prevailing tradition of ethics (which is Kantian deontology and Utilitarianism) has an underlying assumption of external relations whereby individuals can be defined independently of other individuals, externalizing the relationships. This is in opposition to a sense of internal relationships whereby one's identity and individuality is defined in terms of relationships, so that one cannot cut themselves out of a whole--either a social or natural whole--and be independent of it. The connectivity that we have with each other and the world recalibrates our ethics. To do ethics, you have to start with metaphysics. So the metaphysical is the larger environmental philosophy, and the ethics is more limited to human behavior: its evaluation, making judgments and decisions, etc

Iain Thomson: Thinking the Pedagogical Truth Event After Heidegger

As I have shown elsewhere, Heidegger's philosophy of education is a philosophy of transformation, one profoundly concerned with both personal and historical transformation. In this necessarily condensed presentation, I want to work up to the moment in which these two dimensions intersect, such that personal and historical transformation come together to illuminate, motivate, and facilitate one another. I call this doubly transformative moment the pedagogical truth event. In such events, we achieve a revolutionary return to the self that shows us how to step beyond our nihilistic late-modernity into a genuinely meaningful postmodern understanding of being. To begin to explain this doubly-transformative event (which is all I can hope to do here), I shall briefly sketch its personal and historical dimensions and their intersection.

(Purlieu)

Salongen har snakket med Per Bjørn Foros:

- Vi er opptatt av dannelsens retning, det er vel der vi skiller oss ut. Vårt bidrag handler om innholdet i oppdragelsen og dannelsen, det må være mulig å si noe om hvilke tema dannelse skal være opptatt av i våre dager, sier tidligere pedagog ved Høgskolen i Sør-Trøndelag, Per Bjørn Foros.

Sammen med professor i filosofi ved Universitetet i Oslo, Arne Johan Vetlesen, forsøker Foros i boken Angsten for oppdragelse. Et samfunnsetisk perspektiv på dannelse å peke ut en ny kurs for oppdragelse og dannelse. De mener dagens utfordringer og historiens lærdommer gjør de klassiske dannelsesidealene ufruktbare. Store klimaproblemer og andre bekymringsfulle utviklingstrekk øker samtidig behovet for en dannelse med et klart innhold.

Forfatterne setter opp et skille mellom det materiale og det formale for å påpeke problemer med det rådende dannelsessynet. I dag fremheves det formale foran det materiale innholdet hevder de, ferdigheter og teknikker vektlegges heller enn kunnskap og refleksjon.

- Dette er en slags resignasjon overfor de raske endringene i samfunnet, alle skal lære noen grunnleggende ferdigheter som de skal kunne brukes i alle sammenhenger. Vi legger jo også sterk vekt på kommunikative ferdigheter og evnen til kritisk tekning i vår bok, men vi mener det må være knyttet til innhold og retning, sier Foros.

Fra New York Magazine:

Cornel West is a self-proclaimed prophet who believes in the virtues of love and justice. But in his own life, he can't seem to find either.

We want to establish a counter model to the Europe of elites and technocrats, and re-establish its political creativity and legitimacy.

A European Year of Volunteering for Everyone - for taxi drivers and theologians, for workers and the workless, for managers and musicians, for teachers and trainees, for sculptors and sous-chefs, for supreme court judges and senior citizens, for men and women - as a response to the euro crisis!

Ulrich Beck, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Zygmunt Bauman, Jürgen Habermas m.fl i The Guardian

Fra UIBs forskningsmagasin Hubro:

 Den nye dannelsen er ikkje som den gamle dannelsen. Det handlar ikkje lengre om å lese klassikarar, spele piano, spise fint eller kunne konversere. Det handlar om noko anna, men kva? Eg bestemte meg for å finne det ut. Forelesningane i dannelse er opne, så eg oppsøkte forelesningssalen «Egget» på Studentsenteret på jakt etter svaret. Emnet eg skulle følgje var Mennesket: Natur og kultur.

Kan penge efterhånden købe alting? Næsten, beklager den populære Harvard-filosof Michael Sandel i sin nye debatbog om markedsøkonomiens stort set ubemærkede overtagelse af funktioner i det 'gode' og det offentlige liv, som indtil for 30 år siden var styret af etiske værdier fremfor af prismekanismer.

Er det en god idé, at nogle forældre og skoler betaler deres børn for at læse bøger, spørger Sandel. Kan det være rigtigt, at forsikringsselskaber tilbyder overvægtige amerikanere økonomiske incitamenter mod at gå på en slankekur? Eller at indsatte i fængsler kan betale sig til mere bekvemme faciliteter og bedre mad?

Sandel peger på det absurde i, at de eneste tilbageblivende tabuer er handel med slaver og børn samt køb af stemmer i demokratiske systemer. Ellers synes alt andet at være blevet sat til salg i vores senkapitalistiske samfund.

 --- Information

Fra New Statesman:

So, for you, secularism today has to do with how we manage cultural and religious diversity?
The original model of secularism was one in which a very dominant religious group had to fight with other kinds of tendencies. That was the situation in France in the 19th century but it doesn't at all describe modern-day Canada or the UK. The kind of secularism [advanced in the book] answers the question, "How do we live together?"

And your claim is that living together requires our agreeing on certain basic or "foundational" principles"?
Right. Though anything like an overlapping consensus is always something you have to go on working for. Some people may deny it but it's something that must exist for all kinds of societies to succeed. I think that we can get, today, very wide agreement on issues [of equality and freedom of conscience].

Anmeldelse av Kant & Education: Interpretations and Commentary (ed: Roth & Suprenant)

Kant and Education brings together sixteen essays by an international group of scholars. The range of topics covered in the anthology is impressive. Kant's contribution to contemporary theories of education is central, as well as Kant's intellectual debt to Rousseau, the role of education in Kant's normative theories, and the impact of Kant's ideas on subsequent generations. Add to this the relative shortness of each essay (ten to fifteen pages), and one is left with an accessible introduction to a fascinating, but often neglected, topic of Kant's ethical theory. The editors, Klas Roth and Chris W. Surprenant, have done an admirable job.

(NDPR)

Pierre Rosanvallon: A Reflection on Populism

As a counterbalance to the simplistic temptations of the populism that is currently spreading within European democracies, Pierre Rosanvallon invites us to complicate our notion of democracy and make it polyphonic, because the people do not all speak with one voice.

(books and ideas)

Philip Kitcher: Religion, Reason and the source of ethical authority

Many people believe, with Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, that if ethical precepts were not grounded in God's commands, then anything would be permitted. From Plato on, however, the philosophical tradition has frequently questioned the idea of a religious foundation for ethics.

Despite this, philosophers have yearned for a different source of absolute ethical authority, substituting the dictates of reason for any divine imperative, seeking, with Kant, the "moral law within."

Over a century ago, Darwin outlined a different way of thinking about ethics, and we are now able to articulate more fully the hints he offered. Ethics emerges as a human phenomenon, permanently unfinished. To adopt this perspective provides a different perspective on many questions that now confront us.

(ABC)

Lars Løvlie: Politisk danning etter 22. juli

Helgard Mahrdt: Nasjon og mangfold

Multiculturalism Bites // The Open University

Multiculturalism is one of the most vexing political issues of our day. How can people with very different values and customs live alongside each other? What is the history of multiculturalism? What are the arguments for and against its various forms? Has it failed? Does it have a future? The Open University's Nigel Warburton interviews ten leading thinkers about the meaning and implications of multiculturalism. David Edmonds introduces each episode.
Med: Tariq Modood, Martha Nussbaum, John Horton, Susan Mendus, Nancy Fraser og andre.

Ian Hacking on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

ONE THING IS NOT SAID often enough: Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, like all great books, is a work of passion, and a passionate desire to get things right. This is plain even from its modest first sentence: "History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed." Thomas Kuhn was out to change our understanding of the sciences -- that is, of the activities that have enabled our species, for better or worse, to dominate the planet. He succeeded.

(Los Angeles Review of Books)

Intervju med Thomas Hurka om Bernard Suits' bok The Grasshopper:

Shall I elaborate a bit? The bulk of The Grasshopper defends an analysis of the concept of playing a game - the very concept that was Wittgenstein's prime example of one that can't be analyzed. Yet Suits's definition is both persuasive and tremendously illuminating. It's the best piece of conceptual analysis I know. The book then argues for the central place of game-playing in a good human life, arguing that in a utopia where all instrumental goods are supplied, people's prime activity would be playing games. This is philosophically very deep. As I've argued in my 'Games and the Good' paper, it gives the clearest expression of what I call modern as against classical values. It's when you have Suits's definition of a game in hand that you understand most clearly what, say, Marx and Nietzsche had in mind when they proposed their visions of the good life, and how those differ from a classical view like Aristotle's.

(virtual philosopher)