Intellectual Inquiry Research Articles

Philosophical education: the turn to the applied philosophy

Focusing on the substantiation of the process of modernization of the model of philosophical education, the study aims to represent the turn to applied philosophy as a new educational and professional program for training the philosopher. The theoretical basis of the study consists of two main points: the economic position of social epistemology, within which the emphasis is on understanding the social process of knowledge production and distribution of cognitive work, which requires a basis of interdisciplinarity. As well as practical application of a competent approach to philosophical education, which requires its modernization in the context of the requests and practices of today. Scienti c novelty is to justify a turn to applied philosophy in the training of professionals, which enables practice in real-world situations and contexts beyond the realm of philosophy. The normative content of the preparation of the Master of Applied Philosophy, which is provided with a complex of competencies, is rst formulated in the main learning outcomes as a methodology, moderation, performance. Practical signi cance. New techniques introduced in the program of applied philosophy, aimed at the organization and presentation of applied philosophical and scienti c project, the purpose of which is to make their own intellectual inquiry in the chosen practical and applied elds. The transition from a rigid academicism to the reinforced practical aspect of teaching philosophy is fully explained in order for a new understanding of the role of university education to be understood. Namely: to ensure that the student's knowledge does not remain misconstrued or misused.

Pre-service Teachers' Perceptions of Lecturers' Teaching and Learning Strategies in Moral Education

Effective lecturers have a repertoire of effective practices to ensure student learning outcomes. This study investigates pre-service teachers’ perceptions on moral lecturers’ teaching and learning strategies at two different higher learning institutions. A descriptive case study design was employed in developing the study. Focus group interview was conducted with seven pre-service teachers on voluntary basis. Only one instrument was used in data collection namely focus group interview protocol. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the interview data. Six categories were analysed from the interview data: intellectual excitement, values, inquiry and reflection, technology integration and resources, constructive alignment and international and cultural diversity. The findings from the study revealed that the teaching and learning strategies incorporate 21st century learning including getting pre-service teachers’ engagement through technology use and multimedia resources.

Orwellian codes of behaviour exploring ideological power in education research policy

Conceptions of education research as independent and serving the interests of truth have come to represent freedoms that emerge from the application of intellectual inquiry. Critiques of education research and its relevance to the enhancement of education, coupled with neoliberal market-led pragmatism, have contributed to the erosion of an enlightenment heritage. In this nexus, empowerment is replaced by control. There is an absence of analysis of the Scottish National Party’s education research policy which means its regime of governance through logics of quantification productive of asymmetries of power has gone unrecognized. It is argued this policy produces a metrification of teaching and research which constructs teaching and research as servile to external discourses. These encroachments into autonomy and professionalism are intellectually clandestine as they operate through assumptive worlds holding that evidence is value-free rather than the outcome of constructivist processes driven by choice. Orwell’s dystopian vision of a subjugated society informs the meaning of the argument in the paper—that technologies of control and surveillance re-shape teacher autonomy and instrumentalize research such that its power to arbitrate is emasculated.

GIS research to address tensions in geography

The rise of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies has been producing powerful tools for spatial data processing, management, analysis, modeling, and visualization. While supporting many tasks, GIS technologies have evoked new thinking and advanced intellectual inquiries in geography. Technological advances in other fields often stimulate new research questions and lead to revolutionary discoveries. The Hubble telescope revolutionizes our understanding of the universe, and 3D digital microscopes transform our knowledge of the coordination among biological, neurological, and physiological systems in living organisms. Can GIS claim similar revolutionary effects on geography? The answer is much up for debate. With GIS technologies, geographic studies can explore a broader extent across multiple scales in space and time and tackle problems through increasingly complex spatial statistics, visual analytics, computation, simulation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Both the Hubble telescope and 3D digital microscope were built based on scientific research that subserves the technological advances for inquiries into space and life systems. Likewise, GIScience research innovates GIS methods that enable novel geographic investigations and therefore contribute to geographic knowledge production. For the sake of simplicity, the term GIS used here represents both GIScience and GIS technologies. This essay attempts to clarify the intellectual contributions of GIS to geography on the following two questions: (1) What novel geographic thinking is driven by GIS? (2) How may GIS provoke new geographic inquiries and knowledge? Building on Nystuen's notion of four tensions that trigger geographic questions, the essay discusses how GIS innovations mediate historical tension, space‐time tension, dimensional tension and scale tensions.

Galileo Reading Qohelet: Seeing the World with “Curiosity’s Eye”

Abstract This essay examines Galileo’s reading of Ecclesiastes 3:11, which he cited in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina in 1615 at the beginning of his trial for heresy. Why would Galileo have used this text in support of his intellectual inquiry? Three critical components of his intellectual environment are explored: 1) the development of scientific inquiry within the 17th c system of patronage; 2) the culture of curiosity that sustains his intellectual inquiry; and 3) the telescope and the transformation of human imagination.

Cultural Studies and radical popular education: Resources of hope

This article takes up the theme that a significant but often ignored source for British Cultural Studies began in the interdisciplinary teaching of the Workers’ Educational Association and university extra-mural departments in the immediate post-Second World War years. I deepen this argument by outlining the history of ‘popular education’ in Europe and beyond in the modern period to illustrate how the coming together of subaltern political movements and intellectual inquiry created an independent public sphere of radical self-enlightenment. In this article, by utilising archival and textual sources, I should like to explore whether it may be possible to renew the original project of Cultural Studies through radical programmes of ‘popular’ adult education in the digital age. I see Jim McGuigan’s work as offering ‘resources of hope’, in Raymond Williams’ phrase, for this tradition in the universe of academic Cultural Studies.

Evolutionary theology: a new chapter in the relations between theology and science

Despite many arduous attempts to reconcile the separation between theology and science, the common ground where these two areas of intellectual inquiry could converge has not been fully identified yet. The purpose of this paper is to use evolutionary theology as the new and unique framework in which science and theology are indeed brought into coherent alignment. The major step in this effort is to acknowledge that theology can no longer dialogue with science but must assume science and its method as its conceptual foundation. This approach successfully does away with any tensions that may arise between the two disciplines and establishes a firm ground on which neither of them will turn into ideology. Moreover, it enables the dialogue with contemporary scientific atheism on solid grounds and the restoration of the credibility of theology in the secularist culture of the day.

Covid-19 and the Epigenetics of Learning

Covid-19 is a natural phenomenon that has rapidly upended much of the cultural infrastructure of societies across the globe. Education, which in recent years increasingly tied itself to notions of global culture and markets, is deeply threatened by these changes to the natural environment. This paper makes the case that the relationship between nature and culture in education requires a deep level analysis of the biological and physical substrate of human learning. Only with a sufficiently fundamental level of analysis can society reorganise its systems of learning and scientific inquiry to this rapidly changing environment. Drawing on evolutionary biology, we argue that institutional and individual structures and processes are recapitulations of evolutionary cellular development. Understanding the impact of Covid-19 on cells presents an invitation to consider the larger-scale cultural recapitulations of similar mechanisms and structures, and this has implications for the ways education might most effectively deploy technology. Whilst universities seek to maintain their existing structures, practices and business models, a cellular evolutionary approach points to the necessity for fundamental rethinking of intellectual life and learning. We consider the parameters of effective educational organisation in a post-Covid-19 world. As the richness and variety of the physical campus is removed, viable educational relationships will necessitate deeper intellectual connections and personal inquiries than are currently permitted in the transactional processes of education.

Feminist economic geography and the future of work

Scholars have recently begun to account for the absence of feminist analyses in the popular and academic discourse surrounding ‘the future of work’. In this article we offer a critical synthesis of emerging research from feminist economic geography to propose a series of questions about the future of work, conceptualized as both an object of intellectual inquiry and an emerging empirical reality. Feminist economic geography emphasizes difference, embodiment, and conceives of workplaces as dynamic, uneven, and untidy spaces, an emphasis which can help recenter discussions about the future of work on workers and their experience of work. Our discussion features a series of analytically rigorous, theoretically informed, and empirically rich conference papers, organized around three critical questions: Who are the subjects of the future of work? What counts as work? And where should we look? We highlight a broad concept of work developed through debates among feminist scholars across disciplinary fields as a key frame for understanding the global economy, including difference, social reproduction, and the spatial division of labor. Feminist economic geographers are pluralizing the subjects, forms, and geographies of work, which may help enhance our understanding of the future of work in economic geography.

A Comparative Exploration of John Dewey’s and Julius Nyerere’s Concepts of Education and African Development

Owing to the nearly tangible result in the quest toward inclusive development in Africa, there has been the clamour that perhaps the Social Sciences, charged with the responsibility of providing solace for the menace are no longer adequate. This is the axiomatic basis upon which this essay builds its argument as it aims to blaze a trail that is usually taken for granted in the discourse on development – pedagogy. Hence, via the methods of comparison and analysis, this essay discloses the nexus between John Dewey’s reconstructionism and Julius Nyerere’s educational model of self-reliance as a basis to structure development from the arena of education. For Dewey, through education, society can develop and reform its purposes and can move in different directions. For Nyerere, education for self-reliance has to foster communal goals of living together and working together for the common good. Both Dewey and Nyerere stated that education should make the individual realize that he is a member of the society and learn to participate in social learning. A critical examination of the ideas of these minds reveals that in the face of the discrepancies or differences motivations between their educational philosophies, the aggregate factor is suggestive of a worthy platform upon which a self-reliant education that will usher in the era of social development may be erected. This study admits the undeniable Western presence and the indigenous approach which makes it to initiate a blend of them. The parenthood can serve as a platform that will nurture minds that will consequently inform national development, also ideology plays a very crucial role. The present educational system of contemporary Africa has waned consequent to the circumvention of proper assessment of knowledge. The educational framework is therefore the onus and recommendation of this intellectual inquiry.

Intellectual Freedom, the Right to Free Inquiry, and Digital Privacy

The extensive use of the internet and digital technology in the workplace, including universities, has transformed the work style of employees, faculty members, and students. On the one hand, it has helped employees communicate, coordinate, and collaborate on a 24/7 basis around the world, which in turn has improved productivity and work performance. However, on the other hand, it has made employees vulnerable to monitoring and invasion of privacy. Many faculty members and students feel that surveillance and computer monitoring are compromising their intellectual freedom, the right to free inquiry, and digital privacy. This study addresses how the use of computer monitoring affects the morale and performance of faculty members and students for their intellectual and free inquiry. The study uses the survey method to interview professors and students to analyze their responses with regards to monitoring their online activities.

The paradox of Haiti in African Diaspora Studies

ABSTRACT This article is grounded on the premise that any critical discussion of the formation and intellectualization of the African Diaspora as discourse and field of study must confront the place and displacement of Haiti as a constitutive element of global black diasporic identity and consciousness. Since one of the tenets of African Diaspora Studies is the examination of the impact of displaced peoples of African descent, hence the significant tropes of displacement in African Diasporic literature, I argue that further research on Haiti in the field that attempts to tackle the paradox of Haiti would do well to consider the notion of Haiti as both displaced subject and object of intellectual inquiry. Such perspective not only contributes to critical investigation into global discourses of racialization and the erasure of global black histories, but also, more broadly, articulations of displacement in Diaspora Studies.

For geographical imagination systems

For many, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related libraries for programming languages define the terrain of geographical computing today. But what if GIS were locales within wider realms of geographical imagination systems (gis), realms more adequate to diverse theoretical commitments of geographical thought? Examining how various thinkers in spatial theory have conceived of phenomena, space, knowledge, and their entanglements, this article advocates for geographical imagination systems that change the infrastructures of geographical computation and broaden its associated objects of intellectual inquiry. In doing so, it centers questions such as: What if knowledge were understood as interpreted experience? What if phenomena were represented as individuated out of process and internal relations? What if spaces and coordinates were coproduced with phenomena? Interludes juxtapose such considerations with concrete possibilities realized by an experimental prototype geographical imagination system under development. As the article also argues, though, crucial to the future of geographic computation adequate to geographical inquiry will be diverse creative conversations in code (valued alongside and) intellectually interwoven with scholarly interventions made through mediums such as the written word.

Decolonization and Diaspora

Decolonization and Diaspora

The Concept of Symmetry and Asymmetry in Federalism with a brief sketch of Economic Federalism

Asymmetrical federalism is an important concept in the constitutions of Belgium, Canada, Germany and India. This concept has recently given way to a much more sustained intellectual inquiry of philosophical, theoretical, and empirical foundations. It incorporates two different connotations; to some it signifies a positive instrument designed to strengthen the federal values while to others, it carries the meaning of threat and danger to the stability of the state. In symmetry each state is a miniature reflection of the whole political system, the question of differences on any major issue does not arise. Since there is always an equal representation of the states in the spheres of the government, it does not allow any room for special social, economic, or political privileges. The paper also dilates on economic federalism under centralized and decentralized forms within the parameters of three constitutional indicators.

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Jonathan Farina

Reviewed by: Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jonathan Farina Daniel Tyler (bio) Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Jonathan Farina; pp. xxii + 286. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, £75.00, £19.99 paper, $99.99, $23.99 paper. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), Dorothea’s uncle Mr. Brooke is an unruly, bumbling, bungling speaker and thinker. But what specifically are the implications of his habit of allowing his sentences to trail off with the tag “that sort of thing” ([Norton, 2000], 84)? In Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Jonathan Farina considers Mr Brooke’s phraseology and neatly develops its surprising connections with the novel’s interest in taxonomies of different kinds. This account is exemplary of this book’s fascination with innocuous words and phrases and their connection with nineteenth-century epistemology and ways of thinking about knowledge itself. The book views literature as participating in economies of knowledge production; for, as Farina sees it, novels are “exemplary repositories of an epistemology of character that extended well beyond fiction into other domains and genres” (xv). Brooke’s other tic, [End Page 129] “you know,” might therefore be taken to register a concern with epistemology that other voices address with more competence. The book argues that characterization in Victorian novels takes place by way of unassuming, inconspicuous, “everyday words,” like “thing,” or like “turn,” “general,” “particular,” “attention,” “as if,” “something,” and “but.” The model of characterization that is proposed is one where character is performed or expressed, rather than being innate. Character involves “a grammar of relations” (xiii); it is “generated by the articulation of certain locutions rather than by any fixed set of qualities belonging to a specific object” (213). In other words, the idea of character is displaced from inner virtues to outward performances, or, as Farina expresses it, “characterization diverts moral value from content to form” (27). That puts it sharply, and occasionally the book risks making Victorian novelists seem to have more in common with more recent theorists than with the stereotypical but nevertheless prominent Victorian defenders of character as the sum of the qualities and virtues that comprise an individual’s inward life. But of course there is much to be said for the prevalence of the performance of manners and character in the period, and the book puts that counteremphasis well. The first three chapters read the period’s fiction alongside writing from other fields of intellectual enquiry. The first chapter develops parallels between Charles Dickens’s use of the word “turn” (for example, “a gentleman of a literary turn”) and Charles Darwin’s, for Darwin regularly observes a propensity to turn in the behavior of animals, while his own prose turns readers from one subject to the next (3). Farina claims that the word turn, whether noun or verb, indicates modern character, because it describes an outward act or performance rather than something intrinsic or essential. The chapter discusses the way that characters move between individuality and typicality, between the instance and the species, showing that in Victorian characterization idiosyncrasy does not necessarily trump commonality (Dickens’s Sketches of Young Gentlemen [1838] and Sketches of Young Couples [1840] would have provided exemplary corroboration here). The second chapter outlines the way that inductive method in natural philosophy offered a context for characterization in Jane Austen, as signalled in her prose through the balance of the words general and particular. The chapter reveals how frequently nineteenth-century reviewers and critics assessed a novel’s performance and its characterization in terms of its movement back and forth between general truths and observed particulars, a quality that was exemplified in Shakespearean characterization. The third chapter considers the use of the phrase “as if” in creating “conditional analogies” in science writing by Charles Lyell and John Tyndall (95). The locution establishes a form of knowledge that is not factually or empirically or evidentially grounded, but nevertheless true (even revelatory), and it is then taken into the fiction of the period, preeminently the novels of Dickens. In the hands of Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others, the phrase...

Understanding the medium of exchange1

In the wake of scandals at Cambridge Analytica/Facebook and Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the ethical implications of a digital economy for thought, word and deed come to the fore in political economy. Such questions require media ecological consideration for grounding ethics in the communicative domain between self, other and world. This theoretical exploration parses the historical intersections of studies in media ecology and political economy in an effort to understand both the medium of exchange and the ethical principle or techno-economic paradigm inherent to that medium. Media ecology is necessary for cultivating the ethical ground of political economy and reflectively engaging the implications of a hypermodern techno-economic paradigm for everyday communicative life. Further, media ecological constraints will be understood as perpetuating particular political and economic conditions in terms of the sensorial equilibrium of a noetic economy and the psychodynamics of human culture. After analysing the ethical demands of changing media ecologies, implications for the fields of political economy and media ecology in this hypermodern moment are presented. This exploration is offered as an initial foray into understanding the productive tensions of these two particular fields of intellectual inquiry and providing an adequate response to the questions of digital economics in this current historical moment.

An Architecture for Criticism or a Critical Discussion of David Olson’s Theory of the Origin of Criticism

This paper involves an experiment in how to engage in an informal and open-ended discussion, in a normally expository context, that is customarily guided by the norms for scholarly exposition. In attempting this experiment, I avoid using the scholarly apparatus of footnotes, endnotes, and references. I leave it open to those interested to use quick internet searches for what usually occurs in the fine print of journal articles, similar to the disclaimer and advisory statements of drug and food advertisements. I request you to engage in this experiment as part of my attempt to simulate the process of Socratic criticism and dialogue without actually using the format of Plato’s dialogues. As proof of concept of a Socratic architecture for intellectual enquiry and criticism, I am attempting to deploy a Socratic architecture in an expository format. Socratic architecture for intellectual enquiry and criticism requires ordinary, non-technical, and jargon free-language as well as open-ended discussion.

Before isis: What Early America Thought of Islam

Early America engaged with Islam through multiple channels. As American missionaries traveled abroad in search of converts, and lived among Muslims, they often viewed the religion and its adherents through the lens of Christianity. For some, Islam’s prophet was a false hero, “an impostor,” and the message of the religion was an unfortunate pastiche of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Simultaneously, American scholars of religion and the ancient Near East in the nineteenth century approached the Islamic world out of an academic desire to understand Middle Eastern antiquity. Through this process of intellectual inquiry, the American academy eventually developed an interest in the study of Islam itself. Thus, two dominant strands of thought emerged that led to divergent discourses about Islam in the United States. These two discourses—an academic one versus a popular one rooted in missionary experiences—have endured and shaped the contemporary understanding of Islam in America.

THE HUMANITIES THROUGH ARCHITECTURE

Architecture has taken various impression and expression of what it is and its intent through the perspective of man, by the reflection of the place and its existence through time. The architecture being viewed as humanities was one progressive perspective by man, spanning from the period when buildings were erected in the past to the present. Architecture is a peculiar public art with buildings having a social function, and many buildings have public interface. The paper discusses architecture as discipline, which personifies man as the important entity and is define through primary humanistic disciplines philosophy, history, language, literature and theology .The appropriate conclusive contention is to view architecture through the atmosphere of humanities which affirms meaning and purpose to modern science, rather than merely comprising a series of supplementary fields of intellectual enquiry, alongside with scientific counterparts.