Education, Signs, and the History of Ideas

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-288
Author(s):  
Alin Olteanu ◽  
Cary Campbell

Abstract This interview/dialogue addresses an important issue of how educational semiotics is grounded in the history of ideas. The discussions concern the shared history of semiotics and liberal education; the modern university and its medieval antecedents; semiotic consciousness, the traces of which are found in both Christianity and Islam (and the hermeneutics of Abrahamic and mystical religions, in general); intercultural translation; the relationship between learning (conceptualized edusemiotically) and biosemiotics, and how our social understandings of learning determine and shape our basic relationship to the world. Touching on the concepts of scaffolding and evolution, the chapter discusses adaptation in relation to learning, social semiotics and contemporary social reality, while imploring us to consider education in terms of its service to learning (and not the other way around).Campbell: This interview was originally published as a recorded podcast-interview in 2017, on philosophasters.org as part of the interview series Signs of Life. Thank you to Thomas Hoeller for recording and editing the sound and music, and Marion Benkaiouche for transcribing the interview. Thank you, Inna Semetsky, for summarizing the dialogue, included in part in the above abstract description. Please bear in mind that as this interview was conducted two years ago, the author´s current ideas on some of these topics may have changed.

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 13-28
Author(s):  
Adam Świeżyński

The article is devoted to the presentation of the position of Judah Loew (Maharal) on the relationship between the scientific and religious view of the world. In his opinion, scientific and theological explanations are disproportionate and are located at various epistemic levels. Consequently, there can be no conflict between them. Each of them refers to a different history of their course, describing them as historia divina and historia naturalis. Although Loew clearly did not reject the path of scientific cognition, he expressed doubts about the effectiveness of contemporary scientific research due to the variety of scientific views and the multiplicity of the proposed solutions. The knowledge of religious revelation, which is, in his opinion, always reliable and accurate, is completely different. The consequence of the described position is his recognition that scientific knowledge remains potentially available to all people equally, regardless of their religion. However, there is a fundamental difference between Jews and other nations in terms of their internal, spiritual “equipment,” resulting from the experience, status and religious tradition of the Jews. Maharal’s position on the relationship between the natural science and Jewish theology seems to be an expression of religious exclusivity on the one hand and thus becomes close to the contemporary trends of religious fundamentalism, and on the other, expresses a strict separation of scientific and religious explanation of reality.


Author(s):  
Oksana S. Rudova

The author of the article tried to trace the formation of the idea about the connection of the works of Vladimir Nabokov with Nikolai Gogol's tradition based on the material of the Russian émigréecritics’ works of and literary critics of the 20th—21st centuries. This process is considered as a progressive one, largely specified by the development of researching idea. The émigréecriticism saw the reason for the similarity these writers’ works in their similar aesthetics based on the relationship of the perception of the world and the human. In turn, literary studies of the late 20th century presented a new way of comparison, where Nabokov's prose is considered to be a complicated fiction on the whole, in which there is not only Nikolai Gogol's subtext, but also allusions to the other writers’ works, called "polygenetics". The author of the article offers a generalisation of methodological nature, indicating different types of literary links.


Author(s):  
Lyman Tower Sargent

In popular usage both ideology and utopia have negative, and somewhat similar, connotations. Utopia is thought to imply something naively idealistic and, as a result, impossible to achieve due to the constraints of the ‘real world’ or because ‘human nature’ will get in the way. Ideology is also thought to imply being out of touch with the ‘real world’ by being blinkered by a set of beliefs that distorts one’s understanding of that ‘real world’.This chapter examines the recent history of the relationship between the two concepts by examining the way they are treated by their best known theorists, Ernst Bloch, Michael Freeden, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Karl Mannheim, and Paul Ricoeur. The chapter argues that while they are closely related and one can become the other, they can also be separated because they reflect different ways of understanding the world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kas Saghafi

In several late texts, Derrida meditated on Paul Celan's poem ‘Grosse, Glühende Wölbung’, in which the departure of the world is announced. Delving into the ‘origin’ and ‘history’ of the ‘conception’ of the world, this paper suggests that, for Derrida, the end of the world is determined by and from death—the death of the other. The death of the other marks, each and every time, the absolute end of the world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Carlos Alvaréz Teijeiro

Emmanuel Lévinas, the philosopher of ethics par excellence in the twentieth century, and by own merit one of the most important ethical philosophers in the history of western philosophy, is also the philosopher of the Other. Thereby, it can be said that no thought has deepened like his in the ups and downs of the ethical relationship between subject and otherness. The general objective of this work is to expose in a simple and understandable way some ideas that tend to be quite dark in the philosophical work of the author, since his profuse religious production will not be analyzed here. It is expected to show that his ideas about the being and the Other are relevant to better understand interpersonal relationships in times of 4.0 (re)evolution. As specific objectives, this work aims to expose in chronological order the main works of the thinker, with special emphasis on his ethical implications: Of the evasion (1935), The time and the Other (1947), From the existence to the existent (1947), Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (1961) and, last, Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (1974). In the judgment of Lévinas, history of western philosophy starting with Greece, has shown an unusual concern for the Being, this is, it has basically been an ontology and, accordingly, it has relegated ethics to a second or third plane. On the other hand and in a clear going against the tide movement, our author supports that ethics should be considered the first philosophy and more, even previous to the proper philosophize. This novel approach implies, as it is supposed, that the essential question of the philosophy slows down its origin around the Being in order to inquire about the Other: it is a philosophy in first person. Such a radical change of perspective generates an underlying change in how we conceive interpersonal relationships, the complex framework of meanings around the relationship Me and You, which also philosopher Martin Buber had already spoken of. As Lévinas postulates that ethics is the first philosophy, this involves that the Other claims all our attention, intellectual and emotional, to the point of considering that the relationship with the Other is one of the measures of our identity. Thus, “natural” attitude –husserlian word not used by Lévinas- would be to be in permanent disposition regarding to the meeting with the Other, to be in permanent opening state to let ourselves be questioned by him. Ontology, as the author says, being worried about the Being, has been likewise concerned about the Existence, when the matter is to concern about the particular Existent that every otherness supposes for us. In conclusion it can be affirmed that levinasian ethics of the meeting with the Other, particular Face, irreducible to the assumption, can contribute with an innovative looking to (re)evolving the interpersonal relationships in a 4.0 context.


Author(s):  
Paul J. Bolt ◽  
Sharyl N. Cross

Chapter 1 explores perspectives on world order, including power relationships and the rules that shape state behavior and perceptions of legitimacy. After outlining a brief history of the relationship between Russia and China that ranged from cooperation to military clashes, the chapter details Chinese and Russian perspectives on the contemporary international order as shaped by their histories and current political situation. Chinese and Russian views largely coincide on security issues, the desirability of a more multipolar order, and institutions that would enhance their standing in the world. While the Chinese–Russian partnership has accelerated considerably, particularly since the crisis in Ukraine in 2014, there are still some areas of competition that limit the extent of the relationship.


Author(s):  
Marjorie Levinson

Chapter 2 studies the relationship between historicism and Romanticism. It locates the two between Enlightenment materialism, on one side, and Marxian historical and dialectical materialism, on the other. In so doing, it isolates a paradox of materialism—namely, its production of the very concepts that undo it. These include the ideas of knowing as dissociated conceptual activity, and consciousness as absolute negativity. Romanticism and historicism, it is argued, represent solutions to a common problem—a claim defended through a reading of Wordsworth’s sonnet “The world is too much with us.” In considering how we position ourselves in relation to past literature, the chapter evaluates the choices between contemplation and empathy, knowledge and power, blame and defense. As such, it represents the first move in a self-critical turn on the new historicist method that had shaped the author’s—and part of the field’s—work in the previous decade.


Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.


Traditio ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas O'Loughlin

In the late third century Eusebius of Caesarea, better remembered now for his work as a historian of the church, produced an apparatus for the reconciliation of the disagreements found in the four Christian gospels. It was a remarkable work in its own right for it preserved, as the tradition demanded, the plurality of the gospels, while allowing them to be presented and studied as a single entity, “the gospel,” and so succeeding in Tatian's aim in hisDiatessaron— as exegesis and apologetics demanded. Moreover, though now largely forgotten, it remained an important element within theology for centuries. This paper's aim is to locate the significance of Eusebius's work in its original setting in the world of late antiquity and the Christian defense of pagan challenges to the gospels' integrity, and then to follow the influence of his work within just one strand of the tradition: that which forms the background of western, Latin theology. So it will note how that work was adopted and adapted by Jerome, how it then passed on to the late-patristic Latin schoolmasters who sought to transform all learning into convenient modules of defined value, and then was taken up by others in just one region of the Latin West, the insular world, such as the anonymous scribes of the Book of Kells, the Stowe Missal, and the Book of Deer, for whom Eusebius's work was a mystery that they could not simply abandon, even when they could not understand it. Throughout this period, the Eusebian Apparatus roused the intellect of scholars, teachers, and scribes, but in each milieu the significance and perceived utility of the Apparatus was different. The history of ideas is about changes within intellectual and textual continuities, and with the Apparatus we have a clearly identifiable scholarly tool that does not in itself change over the period, but whose reception and exploitation vary greatly.


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”


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