Practical Wisdom Reasoning through Deliberative Pedagogy

Deliberative pedagogy holds promise for improving democratic society by cultivating practical wisdom in students as a means to tackle the problems of democracy, such as polarization. This study embraced an opportunity to consider civic education in the 21st century through deliberative pedagogy by considering practical wisdom in a synchronous, virtual deliberation among university stakeholders and local political candidates concerning our role in 21st-century politics. This civic site enabled an analysis of practical wisdom across three student roles: facilitators enrolled in a deliberation course; students from the wider university; and student alumni of the university’s deliberation center, who had been exposed to deliberation in curricular and cocurricular practice. Using a constructive rhetorical analysis to understand practical wisdom within deliberative pedagogy discourse, we contend that students in these three different roles demonstrated three key aspects of practical wisdom through their discursive responses to rhetorical exigences that arose during deliberative engagement. This analysis offers insights beyond outcomes and informs deeper thinking about curricula and better pedagogical practices. Additionally, such studies, focused on the discourse itself, contribute to understandings concerning the connection between rhetoric and deliberative pedagogy.

From Theory of Rhetoric to the Practice of Language Use: The Case of Appeals to Ethos Elements

In their book Commitment in Dialogue, Walton and Krabbe claim that formal dialogue systems for conversational argumentation are “not very realistic and not easy to apply”. This difficulty may make argumentation theory less well adapted to be employed to describe or analyse actual argumentation practice. On the other hand, the empirical study of real-life arguments may miss or ignore insights of more than the two millennia of the development of philosophy of language, rhetoric, and argumentation theory. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for adapting such theories to serve as applicable tools in the study of argumentation phenomena. Our approach is both theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded in large-scale corpus analysis. The area of interest are appeals to ethos, the character of the speaker, building upon Aristotle’s rhetoric. Ethotic techniques are used to influence the hearers through the communication, where speakers might establish, but also emphasise, weaken or undermine their own or others’ credibility and trustworthiness. Specifically, we apply our method to Aristotelian theory of ethos elements which identifies practical wisdom, moral virtue and goodwill as components of speakers’ character, which can be supported or attacked. The challenges we identified in this case and the solutions we proposed allow us to formulate general guidelines of how to exploit rich theoretical frameworks to the analysis of the practice of language use.

Bimal K. Matilal's Philosophy: Language, Realism, Dharma, and Ineffability

The article considers the theoretical and practical consequences of the so-called "soft" version of epistemological realism in Bimal K. Matilal's philosophical project. The author offers an analytical view on Matilal's philosophy, which helps to understand it in a broader prospective, comparing his arguments on perception and objectivity with contemporary arguments in Western analytical philosophy; in fact, it is possible to view Matilal not only as the proponent of revised Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika approach, but also as the follower of realistic view on language, following L. Wittgenstein, W. Quine, H. Putnam and M. Dummett. Despite the fact that such interpretation may sound diverse or multivocal, it nevertheless helps to better understand both lineages of argumentation: the critical review of the impossibility of private language can be compared in both Western and Indian philosophical discourses, which leads into the domain of social epistemology. The second part of the article discusses the ethical arguments on the vulnerability of moral virtues, and the place of Dharma as a term in moral philosophy. Poetical and metaphorical language appears to be a fruitful strategy to discover the ineffable - and also via negativa and catuṣkoṭi - which is shown by Matilal on the example of the unacceptability of lying. The ethical ineffability and its interconnection with Matilal's commentaries on practical wisdom play the crucial part in the interpretations of Dharmaśāstra texts.

Self-Defence and a Phronetic Use of Violence: A Christian Response to Muslim-mob Attacks in Northern Nigeria

The sermon on the mount has often been used to support a nonviolent response to any form of injustice and violent attacks against Christians. This article argues that the sermon, understood in its original Old and New Testament contexts, does not necessarily support a wholesale prohibition of the use of violence. It also argues that the implicit ethical theory of the sermon – and the New Testament in general – is a combination of a virtue ethics and a divine command theory. On this premise, one is able to show that a measured use of violence for self-defence is a theologically tenable Christian response to unauthorized attacks. This measured use of violence for self-defence is qualified by a Christian phronesis or practical wisdom, which takes into full account both the teaching of Jesus on love of the enemy and the contextual or existential realities of Christians facing violent attacks in northern Nigeria.

To see or be seen? The grounds of a place-based university

In “The Tyranny of Transparency,” Marilyn Strathern argues that, in the neoliberal university, “visibility as a conduit for knowledge is elided with visibility as an instrument for control.” It is, but we would go further. After Deleuze, we would describe the apparatus of the university as an “optical machine”: it is “made of lines of light … distributing the visible and the invisible.” The drive to transparency, or panoptics, dominates the university today – from audit to architecture – and serves what Levien de Cauter calls “transcendental capitalism.” But it obscures a shadow discourse, or scotoptics, which hides invisible “lines of flight” and “fracture” that are transversal to transparency and transcendental capitalism. What this shadow discourse discloses about our university is that it is a transcendental-colonial-Maori place, a place that is palimpsestic and contested, a whenua tautohetohe (contested territory). We need to know that our university is more than it seems to be able to conceive of it as a “pluriversity,” a place of possibilities, upbuilding and practical wisdom: a wānanga (place of learning).

Hermeneutics, Practical Wisdom, and Cognitive Poetics

It may seem trivial to stress that our background knowledge is essential for literary interpretation, but what about practical wisdom, the inarticulable background knowledge? Can we articulate all the things that we know and are able to do in literary interpretation? Are we fully aware of all the assumptions behind our literary arguments? Instead of generally reflecting the status of hermeneutics at a macro-level, this essay argues that one way for hermeneutics to remain meaningful today is not to be tried as a theoretical whole, but as a source of sporadic inspiring arguments. To show that, at a micro-level, we can evaluate the strength of these arguments case by case without generalizing, we analyze from a cognitive perspective Gadamer’s argument that practical wisdom is crucial for literary interpretation. Using cognitive science to provide insights for literary study does not make the latter subservient to the former. Rather, cognitive poetics is a two-way street where each field complements the other by providing hypotheses and functioning as a testing ground. By demonstrating that we know more than we can tell in literary interpretation and that the three features Aristotle and Gadamer attribute to practical wisdom (contingent, inarticulable, and only learnable through experience) are at least tentatively empirically justified, this essay argues that hermeneutics has offered a noteworthy example for the two-way street of cognitive poetics.

Public art as research in the open

In 1979, the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar staged his first public intervention in the context of military dictatorship. His inquiry on states of happiness anticipated a working method that Jaar has been following since. In taking Studies on Happiness as an early example of social aesthetics, this article will show that the work itself is not only seen as the product of making (poïesis), but that the process itself is seen as the embodiment of knowledge, the dwelling and outcome of an intended action. However, this action is not simply an act in the everyday (praxis), but as an intended action it is intelligent in itself and calls for the practical wisdom of acting (phronesis). As soon as the project includes a relational process and forms of participation, both in nature of unforeseeable outcome, the aim is no longer the production of a (common) object; rather, it is the social relation itself, established through the aesthetic or “boundary” object that puts into action the relation as well as the reflection on the conditions of its becoming. We will assess how play and phronesis can mediate between research and art by creating a situational knowledge, that is both critique and contributory: a research in the open.

Toward Marketing as a Discursive Practice: Rethinking the Discipline's Philosophical Foundations

<p>It has been claimed that marketing needs to create a new 'paradigm'. Following a critical analysis of marketing' s philosophical foundations the thesis argues that the discipline should instead seek to build upon the 'linguistic' or 'postmodern' turns in the philosophy of science: a turn that has already been embraced by seemingly related disciplines like sociology, history and anthropology, for example. By connecting to this development, and the approaches that it has engendered such as narrative theory, neo-pragmatism and the notion of a discursive practice, marketing will be better able to develop more useful knowledge or practical wisdom ('phronesis'). A new approach to the generation of marketing knowledge based on praxis will enable three problems that have become apparent in the field over the past decade to be overcome. First, the debate whether marketing is an art or a science can be resolved. Second, the gap between the marketing discipline and practitioners can be closed. Third, the stagnant state of marketing theory can be invigorated. An exemplary case study, which explores the launch of Air New Zealand's 'Domestic Express' service, demonstrates how such an approach to marketing might be operationalised and the added value that it could provide, both to marketing theorists and marketing practitioners.</p>

Toward Marketing as a Discursive Practice: Rethinking the Discipline's Philosophical Foundations

<p>It has been claimed that marketing needs to create a new 'paradigm'. Following a critical analysis of marketing' s philosophical foundations the thesis argues that the discipline should instead seek to build upon the 'linguistic' or 'postmodern' turns in the philosophy of science: a turn that has already been embraced by seemingly related disciplines like sociology, history and anthropology, for example. By connecting to this development, and the approaches that it has engendered such as narrative theory, neo-pragmatism and the notion of a discursive practice, marketing will be better able to develop more useful knowledge or practical wisdom ('phronesis'). A new approach to the generation of marketing knowledge based on praxis will enable three problems that have become apparent in the field over the past decade to be overcome. First, the debate whether marketing is an art or a science can be resolved. Second, the gap between the marketing discipline and practitioners can be closed. Third, the stagnant state of marketing theory can be invigorated. An exemplary case study, which explores the launch of Air New Zealand's 'Domestic Express' service, demonstrates how such an approach to marketing might be operationalised and the added value that it could provide, both to marketing theorists and marketing practitioners.</p>