Ludic Love

This chapter discusses the single movie made at Lenfilm by one of the USSR’s most important avant-garde directors, Kira Muratova. As she worked on the script, Muratova transformed a mild and sweet story about a pretty young factory worker, Lyuba, who was in love with two men at once, into a philosophical meditation on love. Yet any aspirations to deep thinking were constantly called into question by the playful nature of the representation. Music-hall effects, comedy repetition, and parodic echoes of Stalin-era official films jostle film noir and citations from new wave. Reactions at Lenfilm were wary, and the collaboration with Muratova ended at one film. But Getting to Know the Wide World remained Muratova’s favorite film even at the end of her life; though she resented the criticism that she got at Lenfilm, the frustration that it generated turned out to be creative.

Jaspersa nowa formuła starożytnego ujęcia filozofii jako praktycznego filozofowania

Jaspers defines his philosophy as philosophizing, in order to emphasize the practical function of thisthinking. His approach to philosophy evokes many similarities with the ancient concept of philosophy as wisdom related to life, the art of living. And yet, although the similarities are suggestive, it is the dif- ferences that come to the fore. This is because Jaspers’ formula of philosophy is a thoroughly modern and original proposition, differing from ancient con- cepts in its basic tenets, as I shall demonstrate. I highlightthe differences by identifying two assumptions underlying this concept: the “source of thought” (der denkende Ursprung) and the “thing” (Sache), that the man has made his. The concept of the practical function of philosophy belongs to one of the many paradoxes found in Jaspers’ thought. I follow the mystery of this para- dox by juxtaposing Jaspers’ concept of practical philosophy against its ancient predecessor, based on several selected categories, such as freedom, reason, fear, real life, and philosophical meditation that the two seem to share. Along the way, I argue that the contemporary formula of Jaspers’ practical philosophy gives the original and modern shape to the eternal idea of philosophy as the guide to life.

Megjegyzések a nemiség drámáját illetően (1.)

This philosophical meditation on the drama of bodily existence and sexual identity intends to explain and complement the reflection of Ricardo Aldana, who considered these issues from the Communio-theology point of view represented by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr. The main claim to be exposed and phenomenologically corroborated is that the horizon of correctly interpreting the phenomenon of bodily existence is an existential and dramatic encounter with the Trinitarian reality. The context of an adequate response to one’s unique and sexual bodily existence is predetermined by Mary’s “Fiat!” and Christ’s redemptive sacrifice; these two yeses to divine love created the possibility for a radical freedom to embrace creation when it comes to the gift of bodily existence. The dramatic nature of our fundamental relationship with the body is characterized in two steps: first, by analyzing the paradoxes of how the body is given to us; and second, by argu- ing that the drama of being exposed to bodily existence can lead us through bodily self-gift (sacrification) and care for the (bodily existing) other to the discovery and contemplative appreciation of the body.

Inquiring into Notions of Educational Improvement by Teaching Where We Think: Philosophical Meditations as a Practice of Teacher Education

Background This paper is part of the special issue “Reimagining Research and Practice at the Crossroads of Philosophy, Teaching, and Teacher Education.” Early childhood initiatives have joined a nexus of educational reforms characterized by increased accountability and a focus on measurement as a marker of student and teacher learning, with early education being framed as an economic good necessary for competing in the global marketplace. Underlying the recent push for early childhood education is what we see as a “discourse of improvement”—depictions of school change that prioritize achievement as reflected in assessment scores, data collection on teacher effectiveness, and high-stakes evaluation. These characteristics, we argue, foster increasingly inequitable educational contexts and obscure the particularities of what it means to be a child in the world. Purpose We use the practice of philosophical meditation, as articulated in Pierre Hadot's examination of philosophy as a way of life, to inquire into the logics of educational improvement as instantiated in particular contexts, and for cultivating cross-disciplinary partnerships committed to fostering children's flourishing. We link this meditational focus with feminist and de-colonial theoretical perspectives to make visible the role of power in the characterization of children's learning as related to norms of development, minoritized identities, and hierarchies of knowledge. Research Design: In this collaborative inquiry, we compose a series of meditations on our experiences with the logics of improvement inspired by 12 months of systematic conversation. Our data sources include correspondence between the two authors, written reflections on specific practices in teacher education each author engages with, and a set of literary, philosophical, and teacher education texts. Conclusions/Recommendations Our meditations illuminate the value of collective inquiry about what constitutes improvement in schools. We raise questions about how the measurement of learning is entwined in historical and present-day relations of power and idealized formulations of the universal “child” or “teacher” and argue that we must work together to reimagine the framings that inform our work. Ultimately and most directly, these meditations can support dynamic attempts to cultivate meaningful and more equitable educational experiences for teachers and students. Philosophical meditations at the crossroads of philosophy, teaching, and teacher education thus extend beyond critique toward imagining and enacting a better world in our classrooms, even though (and especially when) this path is not clear.

A Sense of Place

Merleau-Ponty spent the summer of 1960 in the small French village of Le Tholonet writing Eye and Mind. His choice of location was no accident. Le Tholonet was the physical and emotional epicenter of Paul Cezanne’s late painting, the ultimate proving ground of his relentless quest to reveal the truth of landscape in art.It makes perfect sense that Merleau-Ponty wrote Eye and Mind in Le Tholonet. The essay is a philosophical meditation on vision and painting. But it also is a meditation on place, in the deeply saturated sense that encompasses the landscape, its natural and human history, and the history of the painter who brought this part of Provence to universal visibility in his art. Le Tholonet is the terroir of Eye and Mind, the site and soil of this final, extraordinary expression of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Merleau-Ponty passa l’été 1960 dans le petit village français de Le Tholonet en écrivant L’OEil et l’Esprit. Le choix de ce lieu n’est pas accidentel. Le Tholonet était l’épicentre physique et émotionnel de la dernière peinture de Paul Cézanne, le terrain d’essai final de sa quête incessante pour arriver à révéler la vérité du paysage dans l’art. C’est tout à fait sensé que Merleau-Ponty ait écrit L’OEil et l’Esprit à Le Tholonet. L’essai est une méditation philosophique sur la vision et sur la peinture. Mais c’est aussi une méditation sur le lieu, sur le sens profondément saturé qui entoure le paysage, sur son histoire naturelle et humaine, et sur l’histoire du peintre qui porta, par son art, ce coin de la Provence à la visibilité universelle. On pourrait alors dire que Le Tholonet est le terroir de L’OEil et l’Esprit, le site et le sol de cette expression finale et extraordinaire de la réflexion de Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty trascorse l’estate del 1960 nel piccolo villaggio francese di Le Tholonet, dedicandosi alla scrittura de L’occhio e lo spirito. La scelta di questo luogo non fu casuale. Le Tholonet fu infatti l’epicentro fisico ed emotivo della pittura dell’ultimo Cézanne, il campo di prova finale del suo tentativo instancabile di rivelare la verità del paesaggio nell’arte. È del tutto coerente che Merleau-Ponty abbia scritto L’occhio e lo spirito a Le Tholonet. Il saggio costituisce una riflessione filosofica sulla visione e sulla pittura, ma rappresenta anche una meditazione sul senso di un luogo, secondo un’accezione densa che comprende il paesaggio, la sua storia naturale e umana, e la storia del pittore che attraverso la sua arte ha portato questa parte della Provenza a una visibilità universale. Le Tholonet è il terroir de L’occhio e lo spirito, il sito che ospita e il terreno che nutre quest’ultima straordinaria espressione del pensiero di Merleau-Ponty.

Mamardashvili, Merab Konstantinovich (1930–90)

Merab Mamardashvili was one of the Soviet Union’s most influential thinkers in the fields of phenomenology and philosophy of consciousness. Although he preferred the Socratic genres of the dialogue, interview and philosophical meditation to the abstract rigours of more systematic philosophy, he left substantial published work on Descartes, Hegel, Kant and French literature (especially Proust). Mamardashvili began his career as a historian of philosophy, with a series of close readings of Karl Marx. By the 1970s he had evolved his own distinctive style of ‘philosophizing out loud’, addressing the foundations of European philosophy based on Descartes and Kant, at the core of which was the search for the ‘free phenomenon’ (svobodnyi fenomen) or the ‘event of a thought’ (sobytie mysli). In Kantian fashion, Mamardashvili attended to those a priori conditions of lived experience which govern that moment when reality enters the transcendental realm – but he switched the emphasis: rather than the mental problems presented by the a priori moment, Mamardashvili concentrated on what he called a ‘metaphysics of the a posteriori’, that is, on the actual event, or advent, of a thought. Perhaps the single motivating question of his life was: ‘How is a new thought possible?’ Among his many answers, developed in public lectures and interviews during the last twenty years of his life, was the notion that the very processes of thought provoke ‘hearing a thought’ in another. From this follows his concern with dialogic forms and his interest in the Cartesian dualism of soul and body – not as a necessary truth but as a ‘productive tautology’ that makes internal reason and a ‘grammatical’ analysis of thinking possible on a palpable basis.

Shame

Rather than focusing exclusively on Aristotle’s own account of shame and its possible shortcomings, this chapter offers a philosophical meditation on contrasting interpretations of the emotion of shame within four academic discourses: social psychology, psychological anthropology, educational psychology, and Aristotelian scholarship. It turns out that within each of these discourses there is a mainstream interpretation which emphasizes shame’s expendability or moral ugliness, but also a heterodox interpretation which seeks to retrieve and defend shame. The provenance of the mainstream interpretation merits scrutiny as the heterodox interpretation seems to offer a more realistic picture of shame’s role in moral development. The chapter suggests ways forward for more balanced analyses of the nature, moral justification, and educative role of shame, by reconstructing Aristotle’s own account of shame.

Lovecidal

This book offers a lyrical, philosophical meditation on the global state of endless war and the violence inflicted by the imperial need to claim victory. It discusses the rise of the police state as linked, for example, to U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to China's occupation of Tibet, examining legacies of earlier campaigns and the residual effects of the war on terror. The book also takes up the shifting dynamics of peoples' resistance to acts of militarism and surveillance as well as social media and its capacity to inform and mobilize citizens around the world. At once an engaging treatise and a creative gesture, the book probes the physical and psychic conditions of the world and shows us a society that is profoundly heartsick. Taking up with those who march both as and for the oppressed—who walk with the disappeared to help carry them forward—the text engages the spiritual and affective dimensions of a civilization organized around the rubrics of nonstop governmental subjugation, economic austerity, and highly technologized military conflict. In doing so, it clears a path for us to walk upon. Along with our every step, the world of the disappeared lives on.

Selfie with my Wife

Evgeniy Pavlov's project "дом быта" (Home Life Book) is a record of everyday life in Ukraine during the 70s and 80s as well as in 90s. But it is also a philosophical meditation on memory, photography, time, and history. Examined in the context of Life Span of the Object in Frame (A Film About the Film not yet Shot), a film by Aleksander Balagura, creates an intriguing form - a collective "auto(photo)(cinema)biography".