3 A Pedagogy of Emergent Self-Cultivation; Why Students Should Have a “Sameness” and Why They Should Not1

This article looks at the nature of individuality and potentiality through the lens of the transcendentals. To do this, it develops an interpretation of how the medieval philosophers discussed the transcendentals in the light of their causal powers. Utilizing a notion of emergent causal powers, I tentatively suggest a concept of higher education where the commonality of the transcendentals’ properties and powers so related offer a hermeneutic account of how we might create a pedagogy from the transcendentals nexus which has explanatory powers for our being.

Philosophical Dualism and the Service Ethic: A Response to Megan Bailey’s “Ritualized Relief and the Misapplication of Dewey in Service-Learning”

Firstly, I want to thank Megan Bailey for maintaining an important critical perspective on an approach to living and learning that I believe can be transformative—but only if we keep a constant critical lens on it: service-learning.1 Service-learning, like many social practices enacted over increasing timespans, has periodically lost its proverbial way; some would argue (and I’m one) that service learning has never been understood well enough theoretically for it to succeed completely in practice—at least not within the institution generally known as “education.” My initial examination of the service-learning pedagogy some twenty-five years ago was precisely the result of a theory/practice disconnect that turned into a Deweyan felt problem connected to several service-learning projects I led at a high school in North Central Florida. Those projects succeeded, but only kind of. And the only reason they succeeded “kind of” was due to a lack of sound theoretical understanding which might reasonably drive its practice. The present manuscript certainly furthers this critical examination in important ways.

4 Being Seized by an Idea: Socrates’s Daydreams, Theory of the Event, and the Experience of Study

In this article, the author describes studying as an experience of being seized by an idea, of withdrawing from the world only to emerge as a speaking being, and of getting lost in thought. These features of studying are discussed against the backdrop of Socrates’s daydreaming episodes. The author claims that Socrates’s habit of daydreaming is an instance of how the experience of study can manifest itself to the outside world. Along with the three features of study, there is another dimension of study that needs to be acknowledged. While the logic of learning only pivots around the constant accumulation of knowledge, studying is also about loss and undoing. We can forget, ignore, or repress what we have learned, and this castrating effect of studying needs to be acknowledged. The author concludes that even though the knowledge we acquire through studying might be lost, we still accept the experience as educationally valuable.

11 Students Re-Discovering the University: Presence of Mind and Body

The article starts from the observation of a rediscovery and reoccupation of the university that continues the history of smaller or bigger revolutionary movements establishing a universitas studii. The thesis is, first, that today’s de-identification with screen work and the affirmation of the importance of places to study is about the willingness to realize a public and collective presence of mind. Second, we elaborate on the thesis that students today perhaps are not rediscovering on campus education in order to fulfill their need for social life or social contact, but to answer the call of the university and its promise of a meaningful, contestable, experimental encounter with “something” that makes them study. Students as well as professors seem to prefer to be where something happens and as it happens, despite the streaming or recordings being available. Today’s mediation by the screen transforms the lecture, seminar, or discussion into an image, which makes the student an outsider or spectator. Studying seems to not only involve a presence of mind but a simultaneous presence of body.

9 The Point of Study Practices Is to Discover the Kind of Questions That We “Also” Should Ask

To develop an idea of study, a lead is taken on the work of the artist Mark Dion. Dion’s work, and more in particular his “Tate Thames Dig,” brings together many of the elements that fosters the coming into being of matters of study. By re-enacting the 14th century cabinets of curiosity, Dion questions how modern science shape our current understanding of knowledge production. With his work, he causes an amazement for the ecology of things. At the same time he evokes a request for an entanglement between science and the world that signals an exposure to the plurality of our present. By doing so, he calls into being a way of thinking about scientific practices as study practices. Not as isolated practices that aim at discovering new knowledge, but as collective practices that give something the power to affect and make a public thinking.