Gordon Keith Chalmers and the Politics of Advanced Placement

This article investigates the role of mid-century conservatism in shaping the College Board's Advanced Placement program. Kenyon president Gordon Keith Chalmers and superintendent of New Trier public schools William Cornog, who led the committee that directly gave rise to the AP Program, understood themselves as classically liberal but socially conservative, and their proposed program was rooted in principles associated with that movement. In keeping with other mid-century conservative thinkers, they promoted humanistic inquiry that introduced all American students, regardless of backgrounds, to the notion of individual freedom, in spaces set apart from economic activity. This article explains that Chalmers and Cornog agreed that schools should focus on reinforcing and transmitting a distinctly American heritage of constitutionalism, individualism, and universal morality by way of the liberal arts. The article ends by establishing how this ideological framing contradicts the Advanced Placement program's current shape.

From Habermas to Derrida: A Weak Form of Secular Universalism

In this article, I argue that a universalistic thrust of secularism should not be located in a Habermasian deontological liberal principle of the priority of universal morality over particularistic ethical doctrines. I show that Habermas cannot plausibly demonstrate that this principle can be invariably applied across different cases. However, in order not to succumb to parochialism, the failure of the deontological model should not prompt us to give up on the search for a universalistic drive behind secularism. To this end, I advocate a Derridean critique of religion and secularism as an alternative solution. By deconstructing the Kantian dichotomy of faith vs. knowledge, Jacques Derrida shows that secularism is, paradoxically, both a concrete socio-political regime and a possibility for a radical change.

Kantian Categories of Ethics and Morality: A Reading of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of the most romantic stories set against a volatile political backdrop wherein the author deals with multiple issues on ideology, ethics and morality. Kant is a foundational thinker in terms of theorizing the notion of morality leading to almost universal categories of moral and ethical imperatives. Kundera’s novel quite significantly appears incommensurable to, what we can call as, universal “categories of imperatives.” Not only the question of morality but even the categories of ideological imperatives have also been emphatically interrogated by Kundera in the novel. The paper is an attempt to understand the Kantian categories as propounded in his The Critique of Practical Reason and revisit Kundera’s novel for a critical engagement to relook at the questions of universal categories of morality as well as ideology. Quite significantly, Kundera uses the term “kitsch” in the novel almost as a discursive tool to counter and denounce the proclamations of the superiority of essentialist political ideology. The novel essentially problematises the Kantian notion of universal morality showing how the universal categories of both morality and reason are inadequate propositions to address the limitless terrains of heterogeneous imperatives.

Global Or Universal Morality? The Importance Of Hermeneutics In The Era Of Transformations

Global Or Universal Morality?The Importance Of Hermeneutics In The Era Of Transformations

Merumuskan Ulang Konsep Moralitas: Sumbangan Pemikir Feminis

The aim of this article is to re-conceptualize the meaning of morality according to the perspective of feminists. This article employed the method of literature review within the qualitative approach. Morality, in the history of western thought, is often related with the concept offered by Immanuel Kant. Human being is perceived to have a sufficient ratio to access the universal morality. Therefore, there is no reason for not following the principles of morality. Nevertheless, feminists argued that the concept offered by Kant does not give a flexible space for the dynamics of contingent things, such as feeling, sensitivity, and inclination. Whereas, these contingent things have given such an influential meaning for the concept of morality. Marilyn Friedman (2000) specifically proposes and explains this point of view in her article entitled “Feminism in Ethics: Conception of Autonomy”. Her approach is thus later shown clearly in the concept of care ethics. Even though, I argue that care ethics would not substitute Kantian ethics, but rather complement it, so that the paradigm of the morality can be seen broader from several perspectives. This entwined paradigm, between Kantian and care ethics, is then can be employed to analyze various social phenomena that occur in our society. Tujuan artikel ini adalah untuk merumuskan ulang konsep mengenai moralitas, terutama ketika mendapatkan sumbangsih pemikiran dari para pemikir feminis. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah kajian literatur dalam pendekatan kualitatif. Moral, dalam perjalanan panjang sejarah pemikiran barat, identik dengan pemikiran Immanuel Kant dalam sifatnya yang berlaku universal. Untuk mengakses universalitas moral, manusia diandaikan memiliki nalar atau rasionalitas yang cukup. Dengan demikian, sebagai manusia yang otonom secara moral, tidak ada alasan baginya untuk tidak mengikuti prinsip-prinsip moral. Penggunaan nalar tidak memberikan ruang bagi hal-hal yang sifatnya kontingen, seperti perasaan, sensitivitas, dan kecenderungan. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa apa yang disingkirkan oleh etika Kantian tadi diangkat oleh para pemikir feminis. Mereka memberikan sumbangsih pemikirannya tersendiri dalam membangun konsep moralitas. Selain itu, penelitian ini juga menunjukkan bahwa etika kepedulian adalah muara dari pemikiran mengenai moralitas dari para pemikir feminis. Meski demikian, etika kepedulian tidak hadir sebagai substitusi atau pengganti dari etika Kantian, melainkan sebagai komplementer yang menjadikan cakrawala moralitas semakin utuh. Bak dua sisi sepayang sayap, kedua pendekatan moralitas tadi saling menyeimbangkan pemaknaan mengenai apa itu moralitas, terutama untuk menelaah fenomena-fenomena secara sosiologis dalam masyarakat.

8. Critical Theory

This chapter examines the various assumptions of critical theory espoused by the Frankfurt school, with particular emphasis on how the Frankfurt school’s critiques of authoritarianism and repression influenced the critical interventions by International Relations (IR) theorists. The chapter focuses on two major strands of critical International Relations theory: normative theory and the Marxist-based critique of the political economy. After providing an overview of the Frankfurt school and critical IR theory, the chapter explores critical theorists’ views on universal morality and political economy. It then discusses Jürgen Habermas’s ideas in international relations and presents a case study of the Arab Spring. It concludes by analysing the concept of critical reflexivity and how it can show knowledge and social reality are co-produced through social interaction, and how this interaction can, in turn, produce practical or empirical knowledge of the changing moral and legal dynamics of prominent global institutions.

Decolonizing Trauma with Frantz Fanon

Recent scholarship across a range of disciplines has critically engaged with the concept of trauma, interrogating its role in political processes such as commemoration, post-conflict reconciliation, and identity formation. Together this scholarship has called for a rethinking of trauma in order to more accurately represent the social and political dynamics of the concept. However, while offering insights into the politics of trauma, this literature remains distant from the concept's original discipline—psychiatry. This article contends that Frantz Fanon, as a psychiatrist and political revolutionary, presents a unique viewpoint from which to problematize the relationship between psychiatry and politics as it continues to structure trauma (and trauma scholarship) in the present day. Drawing on Fanon's sociogenic psychiatry, it argues that both Fanon and contemporary approaches to trauma are constrained by an exclusive, Eurocentric psychiatry. Subsequently, it contends that a rethinking of trauma is insufficient. Rather, a decolonization of psychiatry is required. Three themes in Fanon's practice—the universal, morality, and gender—demonstrate the necessity of engaging with psychiatry's positionality within the contemporary sociogenic principle. Here, international political sociology provides for an analysis of trauma attentive to the relationship between society, health, and power.

The conservative uses of law: The Catholic mobilization against gender ideology

The term ‘gender ideology’ has become a conceptual and political tool used by various religious and secular actors who defend a legal system embedded in a sexual universal morality. Although the use of the term began within the Catholic sphere, it currently characterizes the politics of different countries that are facing a wave of neoconservative activism. The article analyzes the expansion and uses of this term by considering two main aspects: first, an analysis of its emergence as a strategy by the Vatican to combat the impact of Sexual and Reproductive Rights (SRR) on Universal Human Rights; second, a presentation of the appropriations and uses of the fight against gender ideology as part of a neoconservative movement in Latin America.

Moral Law and the Structure of Personal Reality

Completing Lewis’s famous triad of arguments for theism (along with the argument from joy and the argument from reason) is the “argument from morality,” which begins Mere Christianity and appears elsewhere in Lewis’s writings. Lewis takes the important evidence of moral consciousness and moral judgments that pervade the human race as evidence for a moral theistic being, God. That is, theism philosophically explains the existence of morality better than competing worldviews explain it. Furthermore, Lewis (in implicit Aristotelian fashion) links being moral to the meaning and telos of our humanity. He also shows that the fundamental principles of morality—the “Tao,” as he calls it for his purposes—are universal and objective, while their expression varies across cultures and traditions. This entails that there is essential agreement on values across cultures—say, on the value of life, truth-telling and lying, and so forth. These moral values are not created subjectively or culturally; instead they are reflections of a perfect universal morality to which we simply feel ourselves to be related.