Attainment Of Truth Research Articles

Development of the pedagogue's spiritual abilities as an "understanding subject" when organising mediation of school conflicts

The article discusses the problem of the high conflict nature of the educational environment, changes in the attitude in society towards the pedagogue, who is becoming increasingly limited in the implementation of educational functions and the use of legitimate disciplinary methods in school conflicts. The pedagogue's ability to act constructively in conflict situations allows it to successfully solve functional problems and ensure productive interaction with pupils. Mediation as a new tool for resolving conflicts at school requires the pedagogue-mediator to be in the position of an “understanding subject”. The article analyses the possibilities and limitations of two positions of mediation – “expert” and “understanding” – the author points out that the successful implementation of the fundamental principles of mediation is possible only in the paradigm of the “understanding” approach. The article notes that the basic competences of the pedagogue, developed by Vladimir Shadrikov in accordance with the educational standard, include interest in the inner world of the person, openness to accepting other’s positions, emotional stability, and reflection are closely related to the spiritual abilities of the person, aimed at knowing the other person, attainment of truth, penetration, understanding. The development of spiritual abilities and personal competences of the pedagogue will become the basis for the successful implementation of the possibilities of mediation when resolving interpersonal conflicts in the educational environment.

Mapping the epistemic arguments for religious toleration

AbstractIn the literature on toleration, epistemic arguments are commonly equated with John Stuart Mill's fallibilism according to which toleration of opinions is a necessary means to the attainment of truth. This conflation does not capture the variety of those arguments and it results from the fact that a proper analysis of epistemic arguments for religious toleration and a systematic account of their different types are still lacking. The purpose of this article is to provide such an analysis and to argue that those arguments come in four different types, which I name fallibilism, religious belief-forming process, epistemic parity, and differentiated access to religious truth or divine message. I also offer a mapping of those different types of arguments using the standard epistemic notions of justification, truth, and belief coupled with a distinction of focus in the epistemological approach – whether individually or socially focused.

Comparative standard in institutional epistemology

Which epistemic value is the standard according to which we ought to compare, assess and design institutional arrangements in terms of their epistemic properties? Two main options are agent development (in terms of individual epistemic virtues or capabilities) and attainment of truth. The options are presented through two authoritative contemporary accounts-agent development by Robert Talisse?s understanding in Democracy and Moral Conflict (2009) and attainment of truth by David Estlund?s treatment, most prominently in Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (2008). Both options are shown to be unsatisfactory because they are subject to problematic risk of suboptimal epistemic state lock-in. The ability of the social epistemic system to revise suboptimal epistemic states is argued to be the best option for a comparative standard in institutional epistemology.

Text Interpretation as a Scientific Activity

One way to show that text interpretation can be treated as a scientific problem is to show that the standards that are currently used in the natural sciences when dealing with problems not involving meaningful material can also be successfully employed in the case of text interpretation. These standards involve (but are not confined to) intersubjective intelligibility, testability with the use of evidence, rational argumentation, and making methodological decisions aiming at the attainment of truth, accuracy, simplicity and other epistemic values. In the case of text interpretation—despite the fact that we deal with meaningful material—hypotheses can be formulated, consequences can be drawn by deduction, and these can be tested against empirical data. This claim is substantiated by the provision of an example of a scientific text.

The Baby and the Bathwater: Hans Jonas's Recovery of Aristotelian Biological Concepts

The idiom referred to in the title, “don't throw out the baby with the bath water,” instructs us to keep what is essential and to only throw away what is inessential. Bathing babies has the well-being of the child in mind, the end result of which is cleanliness. Efficiency in the task of cleaning is secondary. No one would throw away a baby when draining the baby's bathwater. Somewhat analogously, science and philosophy each have the goal of the attainment of truth in mind. Part and parcel of this search for truth has been the attachment of being parsimonious, especially since William of Ockham. If the goal is truth, then one cannot get lost in the pursuit of parsimony, therefore losing the truth. The goal of finding the truth must remain intact; the method of parsimony at best remains subservient to the attainment of truth. Hans Jonas believed this regarding truth and pursued the criticism of reductive materialism as part and parcel of his research program in philosophy of biology and philosophical anthropology beginning in 1950. In his mind, reductive materialism, as it was practiced, involved the pursuit of parsimony at the cost of the truth through neglect of the purpose-driven conscious life of the subject. In this article, I expose and defend the recovery of certain elements of Aristotelian biology by Professor Hans Jonas. In the process, I show how Jonas was among the early authors writing on the philosophy of biology and defending ontological essentialism and purposefulness in organisms against reductive materialism and the relentless pursuit of the unity of the sciences. Along this line, I position Jonas among the arguments made regarding teleological explanations current in the philosophy of biology. First, I explain and defend Jonas's thesis that a full understanding of organisms requires recognizing an ontological essentialism regarding organisms. Secondly, I explain and defend Jonas's forward looking and backward looking teleological conceptions of activity insofar as it concurs directly with the conscious experience of life for humans, while situating it within the mainstream of philosophy of biology. Last, the importance of this recovery of Aristotelian concepts highlights Jonas's position as an early proponent of non-reductive materialism. More importantly, his thought forces us to recognize that in the pursuit of truth we must use parsimony well. We should take extreme care to preserve the truth; we should not throw out the baby with the bath water.

Intuition in professional activity of modern proficient teachers

The article is devoted to pedagogical intuition as one of the unique capacities of a modern professional pedagogue, providing attainment of truth in its intellectual and emotional sense. Intonation belongs to a category of individual professional qualities, which discloses the core meaning of teachers' personality-related centration and makes it a corner stone of teachers' creative initiatives.

Phenomenology of the Human Person, by Robert Sokolowski.

As the author announces on page one, ‘[t]he theme of this book is the human person’; he immediately introduces the term ‘agent of truth’ as a ‘synonym’ for ‘human person’ and as a ‘paraphrase’ of ‘rational animal’ (where ‘rationality’ is ‘not simply the power to have ideas, to calculate, and to draw inferences’ but is ‘essentially a disclosure of things’ (p. 7); thus the ‘human person’ may also be called a ‘dative of disclosure’ or of ‘manifestation’). Sokolowski’s two ‘major inspirations’ are Husserl and Aristotle, and his overall aim is ‘to describe the human person philosophically by clarifying what it means to be involved with truth’ (p. 4). (Lest one hope that the phrase ‘human person’ was constructed to allow space for the possibility of ‘non-human persons’: it was not. Animals, we are told, are at best capable of a ‘proto-language’ (p. 35), and proto-language is ‘entirely different from’ language because it lacks syntax (p. 36). Nor can animals even ‘wish’, as opposed to ‘needing’ or ‘wanting’ (pp. 238–9).) The book consists of four parts. Part one, ‘The Form of Thinking’, focuses largely on ‘syntax’ (a ‘plain term’ for what Husserl calls ‘categoriality’), on the grounds that ‘human voicing’ only becomes ‘able to serve as a vehicle of thinking and the attainment of truth … when syntax is introduced into it’ (p. 1); indeed human persons may also be called ‘agents of syntax’ (p. 3). The principal activity of this agent is predication or judgement; thus part two, ‘The Content of Thinking’, looks at predicables, namely ‘accidentals’ and ‘essentials’. We ‘allow’ the distinctions between these predicables to ‘come to light’ through articulating things syntactically (p. 124). Part three, ‘The Body and Human Action’, is not, as one might expect, about the phenomenology of the body; the focus of this part is (ostensibly at least) the involvement of the brain and nervous system in human experience and thinking. Part four, ‘Ancients and Moderns’, defends the view that phenomenology allows us ‘to transcend the difference between ancients and moderns’ (p. 273).

Compatible worlds

We discuss a bridge way of inference between Agnostic Learning and Prior Knowledge based on an inference goal represented not by the attainment of truth but simply by a suitable organization of the knowledge we have accumulated on the observed data. In a framework where this knowledge is not definite, we smear it across a series of possible models that we characterize through a probability measure of effectively explaining the observed data which denotes their compatibility with them. We point out the main features and benefits of our approach w.r.t. the two direct competitors: namely, the frequentist and Bayesian approaches, representative respectively of agnostic and a priori knowledge paradigms. Then we explore in greater depth its implementation for learning Boolean functions, showing an unprecedented relation between complexity of the concept class to be learnt and some peculiarities of the features through which the inference problem is represented. Exploiting this relation allows us to compute concretely suitable upper bounds to the classification errors of these functions when they are learnt through a soft-margin kernel-based Support Vector Machine.

Pain, Knowledge, and the Female Body in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Pain, Knowledge, and the Female Body in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz stephanie kirk washington university in st. louis O wrangling school, that search what fire Shall burne this world, had none the wit Unto this knowledge to aspire, That this her feaver might be it? —John Donne, ‘‘A Feaver’’ In late-seventeenth-century Mexico, pain and suffering and, by extension, death, occupied a privileged place in the cultural imagination and were closely associated with the attainment of truth and knowledge.1 However, both suffering and knowledge were deeply embedded in power structures that excluded women. In this study, I will show how Sor Juana responds to such exclusion by promoting physical torment as women’s way to cross the enemy lines of the patriarchy and gain access to knowledge.2 Through poetic depictions of Katharine of Alexandria and Lucretia, Sor Juana forges a bond between female suffering and the attainment of knowledge and, in so doing, rewrites the meaning inscribed on a female body so often cast as a site of weakness and lust. Stephanie Merrim has identified the existence of a metaphorical space, what she has called ‘‘the city of knowledge,’’ whose doors seemed forever closed to women of the early modern period (194). Throughout history, society has attempted to gender knowledge as male, conferring what Sneja Gunew terms ‘‘le1 I will be using the concepts of ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘knowledge’’ as connected concepts in this paper, basing this on Foucault’s analysis of truth as interpreted knowledge and the way both are intimately implicated in power structures. Further, I am using ‘‘truth’’ here in the sense of what Gupta calls ‘‘truth effects,’’ for, as she says, ‘‘[absolute truth] is difficult to discover and might be said to belong to the domain of rhetoric (persuasive truth) rather than to any kind of objective reality. Who or what decides how or when knowledge in the sense of ‘‘truth’’ has been reached. Does gender come into this?’’ (13). 2 It is impossible to discuss physical pain without referring to Elaine Scarry’s groundbreaking study The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. However, Scarry herself makes a distinction between sacred or religious pain and the contemporary practices of torture she addresses. She shows how pain in a religious context is not an act of denying physicality but rather ‘‘a way of so emphasizing the body that the contents of the world are cancelled and the path is clear for the entry of an unworldly and contentless force’’ (32). Mitchell B. Merback has highlighted this distinction in Scarry’s book, showing how pain in a religious context is ‘‘not ‘world-destroying’ in the sense theorized in Elaine Scarry’s brilliant essay on the structure of torture, but rather ‘world-making’’’ (20). It is this conception of pain that I am using in my discussion of Sor Juana’s use of it as a path to knowledge. 38 Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.1 (2008) gitimation’’ on certain types of knowledge through such mechanisms as ‘‘the specific machinery of formal education,’’ while excluding others (13). This authoritative legitimation, she argues, effectively ‘‘territorialized’’ knowledge, creating forbidden zones—the city of knowledge, for example—to which women were, historically, denied access. Ironically, while this legitimated knowledge was indeed conceived of as restricted and proprietary, it was nonetheless promoted as being objective and universal (Gunew 17).3 The paradox of this exclusionary universality both prevented women from participating in mainstream knowledge and undermined their attempts to work outside this system. Sor Juana’s relentless search for knowledge emerges as a constant and unifying thread in her multi-faceted work, which encompasses many genres and themes. She does not characterize the search for knowledge as easy, certainly. The intellectual explorations she undertook were particularly hindered by society ’s resistance to women’s desire to learn, and Sor Juana makes it clear that she is aware and resentful of her exclusion from the city of knowledge. Her enforced auto-didacticism is a topic she revisits constantly in her work, characterizing her education as a solitary pursuit full of obstacles and difficulties.4 To emphasize the struggle she underwent to educate herself, Sor Juana...

Reflections on Truth, Tradition, and the Psychoanalytic Tradition of Truth

This paper describes psychoanalysis as a theory and practice aimed at the attainment of truth. In this sense, it resembles other fields of science, and its traditions are paradigms that have been formed through the accumulation of clinical evidence, and which in turn shape what we can see. But psychoanalysis is specifically concerned with the truth of psychic reality and with change that occurs through coming to know this truth and withstand it, and thus tradition in psychoanalysis also refers to the boundaries of the field defined by this concern. By tracing some of the developments of psychoanalytic thinking from Freud through Klein and Bion, the paper stresses how these analysts have introduced significant changes in psychoanalysis both in terms of content and method, while still adhering to its essential tradition of a search for truth.

Postmodern Storytelling versus Pragmatic Truth-Seeking: The Discursive Bases of Social Theory

The task of speaking the truth is an infinite labor: to respect it in its complexity is an obligation that no power can afford to shortchange, unless it would impose the silence of slavery (Foucault 1989, p. 308). . . . the attainment of truth is the outcome of the development of complex and elaborate methods of searching, methods that . . in many respects go against the human grain, so they are adopted only after long discipline in a school of hard knocks (Dewey [1925] 1988, pp. 234-35).

The Problematic Self in Kierkegaard and Freud (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 117 tuality. This and related failures are involved in the proposed measure by comparison of Hegel's concept of Truth: "If that which [on Heidegger's account] shows itself to knowledge or concepts is only a side of being which is dominated by hiddenness or even evades genuine truth, then this is a radical opposition to the possibility [in Hegel] that the selfgrasping concept, the self which unfolds itself to true knowledge, can find itself again in the completed movement of thought determinations as the truth of the system" (p. 123). Here again the process aspect of Hegel's thought in the form in which it here pertains is omitted from consideration. The attainment of Truth on Hegel's account is construed in a simplistic uni-dimensional way, as though it involved the transcendence of dialectic as such, which would place it beyond history. The result of this is that Marx sees a more marked contrast between Hegel and Heidegger on the point at issue than in fact exists. Marx may well be intuitively correct in taking the measure of Hegel by comparing his thought with that of later philosophers who would seem to have spoken effectively to their time, rather than by the more standard approach of direct and piecemeal critique. It is only to be regretted that he has based this effort upon a work (the first six chapters) which, while it is a fresh and in some ways quite adequate introduction to Hegel's Phiinomenologie and hence to Hegel, falls short of providing a basis for such a comparison. The comparison of two important thinkers should force the philosophically fruitful exercise of rethinking them both. In the case of the present effort, such a rethinking should reflect a sensitivity to discriminations in Hegel to match the sensitivity of the author to discriminations in Heidegger. If superficial in ways which can be misleading, so that it detracts somewhat from the work as a whole, this brief attempt at least serves to indicate something of the nature of a task which might well be undertaken. DARRELE. CHRISTENSEN Salzburg, Austria The Problematic Sell in Kierkegaard and Freud. By J. Preston Cole. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971. Pp. 244. $7.50) One of the major claims of Cole's book is that many of the difficulties that pervade Freud's description of the human personality arise from his "attempt to express the historical reality of human existence within a naturalistic framework" (p. 3). Likewise, Cole contends, "Kierkegaard, no less than Freud, was saddled with an inappropriate conceptual framework for his task" (p. 4). Although Kierkegaard understood man historically rather than naturalistically, his reaction against Hegelianism was never so total as to liberate him from Hegelian influence. All of this is correct, of course, but all of it needs qualification . To some degree Cole does provide refinements of these generalizations about both Freud and Kierkegaard in the body of his book. However, one senses a certain lack of precision in all of this. If we must pose the question as a strict disjunction between the naturalistic view and the historical view of man, then I suppose Freud would have to be classified as a naturalist despite what appears to be a movement toward a richer view of man especially in the later Freud. Kierkegaard was certainly anti-naturalistic, but pervading his view of man is the tension between freedom and necessity, mind and body, eternity and time. Not only was the Incarnation--the eternal becoming present in time--a paradox for Kierkegaard, but there was also the great problem of how a nineteenth-century individual might become contemporaneous with Christ. The point is that it is a gross oversimplification to present Kierkegaard as embracing the historical view of man. Cole's approach is "to penetrate the conceptual structures in which both Freud and Kierkegaard seek to communicate their understanding of the character of human existence and to demonstrate the similarity of their insight which is otherwise disguised in the conceptual forms of vitalistic naturalism and the remnants of philosophical idealism" (p. 6). 118 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY One can hardly disagree with Cole's contention that neither extreme...

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE RELATIONS OF OVULATION AND MENSTRUATION.

Read in the Section on Obstetrics and Diseases of Women, May, 1884. Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen. —The aim of all investigation should be the attainment of truth. And, in order that the discussion of any scientific question should be profitable, it is essential that the arguments advanced be based upon known facts. Any process of reasoning without such foundation is presumptuous, if not impertinent. In deference to this plain and just principle I shall abstain from making any assertion, or educing any inference not fairly warranted by the observations of trustworthy investigators. In the year 1673, De Graaf, a Dutch anatomist, described, in connection with the anatomy of the ovaries the bodies which have since borne his name. They were thought to be the ova of mammalia, and this belief obtained for many years. Sir Edward Home noticed the ruptured follicle during menstruation, but attached no importance to the coincidence.