The Main Enterprise of the World

Author(s):  
Philip Kitcher

Education ought to be central to our lives—it should be, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase, “the main enterprise of the world.” In its broadest sense, education aims at three goals: to enable people to support themselves, to enable them to function as citizens, and to find fulfillment. In our times, changing features of the workplace environment provide opportunities to focus on the latter two goals, and to liberate education from supposed economic constraints. By doing so, we can improve the lives of individuals, and build more solid foundations for democracy. Philip Kitcher’s humanistic vision of educational reform is not, however, divorced from the realities of contemporary life nor doomed by any conflict with sound economics. After an accessible discussion of central philosophical questions, he examines the content of the curriculum, identifies the social changes required if a fully adequate education is to be provided to all, and considers how the proposals can be reconciled with financial stability. The Main Enterprise of the World renews classical pragmatism: with one eye on the ideal, and the other on the world, it presents a picture of education appropriate for our century.

Author(s):  
Hallie M. Franks

In the Greek Classical period, the symposium—the social gathering at which male citizens gathered to drink wine and engage in conversation—was held in a room called the andron. From couches set up around the perimeter of the andron, symposiasts looked inward to the room’s center, which often was decorated with a pebble mosaic floor. These mosaics provided visual treats for the guests, presenting them with images of mythological scenes, exotic flora, dangerous beasts, hunting parties, or the specter of Dionysos, the god of wine, riding in his chariot or on the back of a panther. This book takes as its subject these mosaics and the context of their viewing. Relying on discourses in the sociology and anthropology of space, it argues that the andron’s mosaic imagery actively contributed to a complex, metaphorical experience of the symposium. In combination with the ritualized circling of the wine cup from couch to couch around the room and the physiological reaction to wine, the images of mosaic floors called to mind other images, spaces, or experiences, and, in doing so, prompted drinkers to reimagine the symposium as another kind of event—a nautical voyage, a journey to a foreign land, the circling heavens or a choral dance, or the luxury of an abundant past. Such spatial metaphors helped to forge the intimate bonds of friendship that are the ideal result of the symposium and that make up the political and social fabric of the Greek polis.


Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 408-431
Author(s):  
Irena Petrović ◽  
Marija Radoman

AbstractThe authors analyze the changes in value patterns—patriarchy, authoritarianism and nationalism—in Serbia in the context of the social changes that have marked the postsocialist transformation period. They focus on the extent and intensity of two sub-patterns within each of these three basic value patterns: private and public patriarchy, general and specific authoritarianism, organic (natural) and ethnic nationalism. The conclusions about changes in these value patterns are drawn on the basis of three empirical studies conducted in 2003, 2012, and 2018. They show the prevalence of private patriarchy, general authoritarianism, and organic (natural) nationalism over their counterparts. Private patriarchy has weakened, which is largely to be explained by the significant structural changes in Serbia. On the other hand, support of general authoritarianism and organic (natural) nationalism has been on the rise, which clearly mirrors the unfavorable economic and political situation in the country.


1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Paul Ingram

Abstract Theodor Adorno’s philistine functions as the other of art, or as the ideal embodiment of everything that the bourgeois aesthetic subject is not. He insists on the truth-content of the derogation, while recognising its unjust social foundation, and seeking to reflect that tension in a self-critical turn. His model of advanced art is negatively delimited by the philistinism of art with a cause and the philistinism of art for enjoyment, which represent the poles of the aesthetic and the social. The philistine is also the counterpart to the connoisseur, with the interplay between them pointing to his preferred approach to aesthetics, in which an affinity for art and alienness to it are combined without compromise. However, Adorno fails to realise fully the critical potential of the philistine as the immanent negation of art and aesthetics.


Author(s):  
Alimaa A. ◽  
◽  
Tseveendorj D. ◽  

The social priorities of literature are the tribune of environmental idiology. Today, in the Mongolian literature, the direction of ecocriticism has been established. This article makes an analysis in traditional Mongolian poetry and modern poetry on the topic of nature conservation and ecology. In Mongolian folklore praise the purity of nature and the motherland. His idol of pure nature is praise and praise. But each species has its own color. The topic of nature protection in Mongolian folklore (Orthodoxy, Magtaal-praise, Tuul-epic, du-folk songs and myth) is that a person should not control and control nature but understand and convert to nature as a living creature; means that people will have a natural relationship, a balanced and safe life. Probably, there is not a single poet of Mongolia who does not address the topic of “man and nature”. Each in its own way perceives nature, and each in its own way revealing to the reader the world of nature and himself in this world. The space of the “Mongolian spirit” created by the poet is filled with natural landscapes, people, and historical memory. His ancestors and descendants, the dead and living, are called upon to preserve this space and believing that nature and civilization can exist in equal harmony, he would like to reconcile them among themselves. Therefore, the poems of Mongolian poets writing about nature sound like a distress signal, like a cry for help to nature. This is a feature. That is why Mongolian writers have initiated environmental protection measures. They stopped the construction of a chemical plant on Lake Hubsgul. The lake is the main freshwater reservoir in the world. Mongolian writers also warned that the pine forest “Tuzin Nars” was destroyed in nature every year billions of tons of waste. With such an attitude of man to nature on Earth there will soon be nothing left. There are examples of the writer C. Galsan, who planted 360 thousand trees. In this article we propose that we do not limit the observation and conclusions about the mastery of writers to the nature of the writings, but take into account personal, mental and social changes in the environment.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Milan Orlić

Post-Yugoslav literature and culture came out of the stylistic formations of Yugoslav modernism and postmodernism, in the context of European cultural discourse. Yugoslav literature, which spans the existence of “two” Yugoslavias, the “first” Yugoslavia (1928–1941) and the “second” socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1990), is the foundation of various national literary and cultural paradigms, which shared the same or similar historical, philosophical and aesthetic roots. These were fed, on the one hand, by a phenomenological understanding of the world, language, style and culture, and on the other, by an acceptance of or resistance to the socialist realist aesthetics and ideological values of socialist Yugoslav society. In selected examples of contemporary Serbian prose, the author explores the social context, which has shaped contemporary Serbian literature, focusing on its roots in Serbian and Yugoslav 20th century (post)modernism.


2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory W. Dawes

A recurring debate within discussions of religion, science, and magic has to do with the existence of distinct modes of thought or “orientations” to the world. The thinker who initiated this debate, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, distinguished two such orientations, one characterized as “participatory” and the other as “causal.” The present essay attempts to clarify what a participatory orientation might involve, making use of the social-psychological category of a “schema.” It argues that while the attitude to which Lévy-Bruhl refers is to be distinguished from an explicit body of doctrine, it does have a cognitive dimension and can embody causal claims. It follows that if such a distinction is to be made, it is not helpfully characterized as a contrast between participation and causality. A better distinction might be that between a mythical and an experimental attitude to the world.


Author(s):  
Noah Benezra Strote

This concluding chapter argues that Germans themselves imagined the framework for a more stable political structure before the arrival of American troops. The reconstruction of post-Nazi Germany relied so much on the reconciliation of previously conflicting groups that “partnership” became its foundational ideology. The Germans who rebuilt the educational system in the Federal Republic, West Germany's intelligentsia, were the lions and lambs of the Weimar Republic in their youth. They lived through and participated in the social, economic, political, and cultural conflicts that tore apart German society before Hitler's rise. They also witnessed the Nazi attempt to overcome those conflicts, and some supported Hitler publicly before opposing him as he led Europe and the world into a catastrophic war. When this generation of Germans designed courses of education for the rising post-Nazi generations, they celebrated the ideal of partnership precisely to avoid the earlier conflicts.


2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Schillmeier

To assume that all things we want to describe – humans and non-humans alike – can be done so properly only in terms of 'societies', requires a contrast – a momentum of cosmopolitics – to the very abstract distinctions upon which our classical understanding of sociology and its key terms rests: 'The social' as defined in opposition to 'the non-social', 'society' in opposition to 'nature'. The concept of cosmopolitics tries to avoid such modernist strategy that A. N. Whitehead called 'bifurcation of nature' (cf. Whitehead 1978, 2000). The inventive production of contrasts names a cosmopolitical tool which does not attempt to denounce, debunk, replace or overcome abstract, exclusivist oppositions that suggest divisions as 'either…or'-relations. Rather, as the Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers stresses, 'the contrast will have to be celebrated in the manner of a new existent, adding a new dimension to the cosmos' (Stengers 2011: 513). Cosmopolitics, then, engages with 'habits we experiment with in order to become capable of new experiences' (Stengers 2001: 241) and opens up the possibility of agency of the non-expected Other, the non-normal, the non-human, the non-social, the un-common. 'The Other is the existence of a possible world', as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1994: 17-18) have put it. It is 'the condition for our passing from one world to another. The Other (...) makes the world go by.'


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Kasmuri Selamat ◽  
Irma Handayani ◽  
Akhyar Hanif

The ideal leader is an expectation for every society in the world. Leadership is a relationship between the influence of the leader and the one being led. Leadership also functions to execute power to invite, influence, guide, mobilize and build other people to do something to achieve certain goals. To implement, Islam provides normative and philosophical bases on the principles of leadership. These principles include deliberation, fairness, gentleness, freedom of thought, synergy in building togetherness. The principles taught by Islam are in line with the thoughts of one of the Islamic philosophers, Ibn Khaldun. Furthermore, he emphasized that the social solidarity factor is crucial to become an ideal leader.


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