Philosophical Vision Research Articles

Leaving everything as it is: Political inquiry after Wittgenstein

The assumed difference and continuing estrangement between political philosophy and political science is a relatively recent development. Both fields sprang from closely entwined concerns about democracy and matters of social and political justice, and today both must still confront their practical as well as cognitive relationship to their subject matter. This issue, however, has receded into the background of these discourses. Ludwig Wittgenstein's vision of philosophy is in effect a vision of social inquiry. His work, when viewed from this perspective, prompts us to reconsider the logical status of various modes of political inquiry: how can these practices, descriptively and normatively, do justice to their subject matter? How can they deal with such foundational issues as the nature of social phenomena, the concepts of representation and interpretation, the problem of knowledge of other minds and what is involved in making explanatory and evaluative judgments about the objects of inquiry?

Mining the Past, Acting in the Present, and Enriching the Future

The year 2012, in one sense, marks the 40th Anniversary of our Society, for it was in 1972 that John Lachs suggested to some of his colleagues interested in American Philosophy that they consider starting a new organization. The following year, this “American Philosophy” group held a symposium on “Possibilities for American Philosophy” at the Western Philosophy Association meeting. At that time the group’s name was changed to “Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy,” and in 1974 the first independent annual meeting of the Society was held at Vanderbilt University.1 The Society’s name has stimulated contention for various reasons, but reflecting on forty years of this group, I want to say “we have come a long way.” Philosophy has advanced because of the work of this group and others whose philosophical vision is compatible with our vision. And what is that vision? In my view, it at least involves three types of action and reflection: (1) “respecting, exploring, and ‘mining’ the past” for its own value as well as to ground and stimulate creative thought about both philosophical and contemporary world problems; (2) “acting in the present” by questioning the status quo, clarifying issues of human life so that more effective solutions to personal and social problems would be found and, as philosophers, becoming “public” and “engaged”; and (3) enriching the future of philosophical and human reflection in at least the following four ways. First, we are using and should continue to use the resources of our tradition to enrich the exploration of contemporary philosophical issues whether in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, or philosophy of religion. Second, in contention against the continuing segmentation of philosophy into splinter interest groups, we are and

Does Pragmatism Have A Theory of Power?

Asking if pragmatism, and John Dewey in particular, has a theory of power poses the question about the intellectual resources that pragmatism has to offer the social sciences. Pragmatism stands accused of being naive about power and presenting the specter of an overly soft program for doing social science. Yet, Dewey’s philosophical method provides a distinctive transactional theory of power and untapped resources for advancing social science. Dewey’s melioristic philosophical vision develops a theory of praxis that is a tacit theory of power. Explicating his concerns with experience, inquiry, and social life show how they converge into his theory of praxis and power. Developing this theory, next, enables distinctions to be outlined between Dewey’s transactional view of power and the mainstream interactional view seen in the work of Dahl, Lukes, and Mann. Furthermore, the theory of praxis establishes analytical categories for deconstructing the structure of transactional power, the patterns or modes of conjoint activity. Dewey’s pragmatist theory of power stands in marked contrast to interactional models and provides the analytical tools for the critical assessment of power.

Some reflections on existence and imagination in relation to interreligious dialogue and intercultural philosophy of religion

This article discusses notions of philosophical grammar, existence, imagination and reason in light of religious plurality in modernity and intercultural philosophy of religion. More specifically the first part of the article presents a model that aims to combine a central modern human experience – that there is a plurality of religious and non-religious ‘non-reducible’ ontologies and existential interpretations of them – with an awareness of the possibility of non-reductionist dialogical existential inter-subjectivity, specifically in relation to ontology, philosophy and religion. The second part of the article discusses briefly the definition of modernity as a global condition, and argues that the plurality of worldviews and a Kantian inspired focus on the individual's courage to use his or her own reason should be seen as central aspects of worldviews in modernity, but without the need necessarily to follow Kant's ‘universalistic’ approach to individuality. The third part of the article presents some views on ‘existence’ and ‘essence’ and how these notions are related in various ways to notions of imagination in some parts of the Muslim philosophical tradition. The fourth part of the article returns to the issue of how to conceive of what it means to be individual and the relation between the individual, communal reality and ontology.

Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain (review)

Reviewed by: Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain Chad Rohman Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain. By Lawrence I. Berkove and Joseph Csicsila. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 288 pages, $39.95. There are at least two Holy Grails in current Twain studies: to recover a recording of Twain’s voice, which is known to have existed but is lost or likely destroyed (lacking it, most assume he sounded like an aged Hal Holbrook) and, more important, to discover a unified philosophical vision in his oeuvre. In Heretical Fictions, Lawrence I. Berkove and Joseph Csicsila ably seek the latter boon. Using convincing primary and secondary evidence, they argue Twain’s works are subtle yet sustained and serious reactions to his lifelong Calvinism; in them, close readers find his implicit “countertheology”: “that because of God’s malice life is deceitful and humans are not meant to achieve in it their dearest goals of freedom, happiness, and fulfillment” (2). A valuable addition to recent Twain scholarship, Heretical Fictions shows Mark Twain’s skill and, now, his apparent philosophical steadfastness. Its provocative thesis will spark continued debate about his works’ literary aims, especially their alleged dark and despairing theological dimensions. Taking a both/and approach, the authors argue Twain’s underlying philosophical agenda results in provocative dialogical tensions: heretic and Calvinist; ironist and tragedian; preacher and teacher; artist and philosopher; pessimist and dreamer; rebel and prophet. Because Twain was both a Calvinist and one who despised “those same tragic truths,” his purposeful humor acts as a mask under which he preaches his heretical philosophy and through which he creatively explores lifelong intellectual tensions that seep into his fiction, beginning with some of his earliest works (17). Posing as a hilarious travel book comprised of ostensibly detached set-pieces rendering Twain’s travels west with his older brother, Orion, Roughing It (1872) is neither hilarious for its own sake nor necessarily detached in its form, according to Berkove and Csicsila; in fact, the work is best read as a novel rife with serious undertones. In the chapter “Roughing It: The Dream of the Good Life,” the authors confidently stake their claim: “The entire book leads up to, enlarges, and ends with the idea that it is futile to try to escape God’s doom for humanity” (38). Fans of the Scotty Briggs episode may be perplexed. But patient readers of Heretical Fictions may be ultimately swayed, believing Twain was both a serious writer and a crafty salesman who, “while he was still anxious to ensure that his books sold well, … was more devious and circumspect about hiding his targets and beliefs beneath dark hints and veiled clues” (55). In their analyses of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1969), Berkove and Csicsila thoroughly test their dark thesis that “Twain’s main theme is not an affirmation of freedom but rather its opposite: a tragic denial of any hope for freedom in human life” (82). Especially rewarding are their close readings of Twain’s best works. Dealing with the “somber designs” of Tom Sawyer’s St. Petersburg (62), variations of impersonation, [End Page 441] romance, and hoax in Huckleberry Finn, questions of authority and freedom in Hank’s exploits in Arthurian England, and August Feldner’s “psychic quest” in No. 44 (170), the authors provide well-researched and fully explicated defenses of these works’ most notoriously alleged thematic flaws and formal tensions: Tom’s boyish romantic adventures become only “romantic delusion” (72); the so-called evasion chapters in Huckleberry Finn become an essential continuation of the novel’s main theme (illusory freedom), highlighting the ironically misnamed post-Reconstruction free man of color (f.m.c.); the horrific slaughter at the Battle of the Sand-Belt in Yankee becomes a despairing fulfillment of the work’s indictment of humankind’s idolatry of material progress, just another “step deeper into the hell of humankind’s age-old abuse of knowledge” (114); and the mysterious stranger’s startling command to August to dream better dreams becomes only an ironic nightmare...

Expatriate Coaching, Olympism and the Olympic Games

The practice of hiring foreign coaches to lead national teams has been on the rise and is especially visible at the Olympic Games. It has been criticised in both the receiving and the lending countries as a breach of patriotic duty. In a recent publication I defended expatriate coaching as a morally unobjectionable practice with many beneficial effects. In this article, I extend my defence of expatriate coaching into the realm of the Olympic Games. I argue that when articulated from the perspective of moderate patriotism this practice is not only compatible with Olympism, the philosophical vision that underpins the Olympic movement, but also that it enacts and advances the tenets of this vision. In the process, I provide a coherent explanation for the Olympic authorities' lack of an official stance on expatriate coaching and reflect on their disparate stand on the nationality of coaches and athletes.

The Neurosciences in Averroes’ “Principles of Medicine”

One of the fundamental advances of the transition of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was the rediscovery of the Greek philosophers. Among the greatest representatives of this epoch we find the Cordovan doctor and philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) who, with his commentaries on the works of Aristotle, brought a new philosophical vision to Western Europe. His contribution to medicine has been overshadowed to some extent by this great work of philosophy. Our intention is to evaluate, in the context of the neurosciences, the vision of health and sickness that he left us in his book “The Book of the Principles of Medicine. The organisation of the Kulliyat is based on Aristotelian concepts. Averroes regarded the nervous system not as single entity but rather as a complex of various elements. The anatomy of the nervous system is studied in two parts: the encephalus and the periphery. Both the encephalic nervous system and the sensory organs are regarded as heterogeneous organs. Averroes structures the anatomical order without taking into account the local movements of the living body. The mission of the senses is to maintain contact between external reality and the structure of the organism. This requires an external process, a point of union and an internal process. The ultimate goal is the preservation of health in a balanced disposition and the cure of disease in the organism in disequilibrium.

Metaphysics and the philosophical imagination

Methods and goals in philosophy are discussed by first describing an ideal, and then looking at how the ideal might be approached. David Lewis’s work in metaphysics is critically examined and compared to analogous work by Mackie and Carnap. Some large-scale philosophical systematic work, especially in metaphysics, is best treated as model-building, in a sense of that term that draws on the philosophy of science. Models are constructed in a way that involves deliberate simplification, or other imaginative modification of reality, in order to make relationships visible or problems tractable.

Feminist Transformations

Feminist Transformations

The Philosophical Vision of Józef Życiński

The Philosophical Vision of Józef Życiński Michael Heller (bio) I. Introductory Remarks1 The time will yet come for a more systematic treatment of the literary and academic work of Józef Życiński. Indeed, I have purposely included both “academic” and “literary,” since Życiński’s legacy deserves recognition in these two fields. In Życiński’s case, it is hard to differentiate between the two. Attempting a synthetic approach to his works, it would behoove one to study the entirety of his work once more, taking an unbiased view of his complete works, allowing for a friendly, though by no means lax, critique. I doubt, however, if I would be capable of this. Likely, I would be able to effect some critique, yet I would be unable to detach myself from the many personal memories I have of Życiński. Even in this brief outline of Życiński’s views, my memories of him have made their way into the text. Naturally, I knew Życiński’s work: in the years prior to his ordination as bishop, we worked together frequently, but it is only now, looking over his publications for the purposes of this overview, that I realize that a unified philosophical vision is present in Życiński’s writing. Previously, this fact had escaped me, though the fault for [End Page 115] this is not mine alone. The contours of a definitive, cohesive philosophy were blurred by the sheer volume of essays and short works produced by Życiński. Hence, a continuation of the reconstruction of Życiński’s philosophical vision is a worthwhile undertaking. This reconstruction was effected rather hastily, because of the necessity of honoring the deceased in a timely manner. I had in front of me his books and other earlier publications, but time was insufficient to reread these works with due diligence. Instead, select quotes served as reminders of once familiar theses; the accuracy of these theses was consequently verified, in particular to ensure that I am not ascribing my own views to Życiński. One such thesis precipitated the next, and in this manner Życiński’s philosophical vision became clear. One should remember, however, that this is only an introductory overview. Perhaps it can blaze the trail for future systematic treatments of Życiński’s thought. II. Fascination with Science At the beginning of our cooperative work, our philosophical views developed mutually, or at least progressed parallel to one another, though with considerable interaction. To a large extent, we worked individually, but both of us were eager writers and published a good number of popular press articles on philosophical and scientific topics. The demand for these works was enormous: we received a continuous stream of letters from our readers. We published article after article in Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak, and in any publication that would accept our work. In those days it wasn’t easy to find amicable editors or to pass through the censorship process unmolested. Because of Życiński’s directness, the censors gave him more trouble than they gave me. Our first opportunity to coauthor a book occurred when Dr. Rev. Stanisław Grzybek, president of the Polish Theological Society, a registered, fully legal organization, realized that the society’s bylaws include a clause that permits publication by the society. After passing through copious amounts of red tape, [End Page 116] Rev. Grzybek arranged for the society to publish its first book, and suggested that Życiński and I write something together. Hence, we collected several of our articles, synthesized them into a fairly consistent whole, and after a while, Wszechświat i filozofia [The Universe and Philosophy] saw the light of day.2 Perhaps it was beginners luck, or maybe the nostalgia of our former readers, but even today I hear voices calling for a new edition of the book. Of course, this is not possible since time flows more rapidly in academic work than in other areas of culture and books age quickly. In those days there were few books that represented a different viewpoint from the official Marxist one, and consequently the several thousand copies of our work permitted by the authorities...

Vermicompost, the story of organic gold: A review

Earthworm has caught imagination of philosophers like Pascal and Thoreau. Yet its role in the nutrition of agricultural fields has attracted attention of researchers worldwide only in recent decades. Waste management is considered as an integral part of a sustainable society, thereby necessitating diversion of biodegradable fractions of the societal waste from landfill into alternative management processes such as vermicomposting. Earthworms excreta (vermicast) is a nutritive organic fertilizer rich in humus, NPK, micronutrients, beneficial soil microbes; nitrogen-fixing, phosphate solubilizing bacteria, actinomycets and growth hormones auxins, gibberlins & cytokinins. Both vermicompost & its body liquid (vermiwash) are proven as both growth promoters & protectors for crop plants. We discuss about the worms composting technology, its importance, use and some salient results obtained in the globe so far in this review update of vermicompost research.

Pedagogies of experience: a case of the African American male teacher

Numerous scholars have illustrated how African American teachers’ past experiences provide them a philosophical vision committed to teaching for social and educational change for African American students. This article draws from this body of work by looking at the diverse ways five African American male teachers used their past experiences to shape their vision for working with African American male students. However, this article also extends this body of work by illustrating that while the teachers in this study had similar commitments to working with African American males, their varied life experiences and social locations provided them different sources of practical and philosophical knowledge. These findings illustrate the diversity of experiences these teachers drew from, thus troubling the common sense discourses that essentialize African American male teachers as one-dimensional monolithic role models.

Beyond the “Pragmatic Acquiescence” Controversy: Reconciling the Educational Thought of Lewis Mumford and John Dewey

This article provides a reconsideration of the intellectual altercation between John Dewey and Lewis Mumford in the 1920s, and a sketch of some educational implications that follow this reconsideration. Although past scholarship has tended to focus on ways in which the altercation obscured similarities in their thought, we consider whether important differences were also obscured, particularly regarding their outlook on science and technology, their potential place in society, and their ideas about the best means to positive social change. We also consider how these differences might play out in philosophy of education/educational practice, concluding that Mumford's commitment to regionalism can augment Dewey's philosophical vision while also helping deal with pressing contemporary social and educational needs.

Innocents and Oracles: The Child as a Figure of Knowledge and Critique in the Middle-Class Philosophical Imagination

This paper argues that the figure of the child performs a critical function for the middle-class social imaginary, representing both an essential "innocence" of the liberal individual, and an excluded, unconscious remainder of its project of control through the management of knowledge. While childhood is invested with affect and value, children's agency and opportunities for social participation are restricted insofar as they are seen both to represent an elementary humanity and to fall short of full rationality, citizenship and identity. The diverse permutations of this figure, as it develops in the middle-class imagination, are traced from the writings of John Locke to the films of Michael Haneke (via Charles Dickens and Henry James), to interrogate what this ambivalence regarding childhood reflects about middle-class, adult identity.

Affective Aporetics: Complementary Contradictions in the Interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche

In 1971, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter introduced his study of Nietzsche as an investigation into the history of modern nihilism in which “contradiction” forms the central thread of the argument. For Müller-Lauter, the interpretive task is not to demonstrate the overall coherence or incoherence of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but to examine Nietzsche’s “philosophy of contradiction.” Against those such as Karl Jaspers, Karl Löwith and Martin Heidegger, Müller-Lauter argued that contradiction is the foundation of Nietzsche’s thought, and not a problem to be corrected or cast aside for exegetical or political purposes. For Müller-Lauter, contradiction qua incompatibility (not just mere opposition) holds a key to Nietzsche’s affective vision of philosophy. Beginning with the relationship between will to power and eternal recurrence, in this paper I examine aspects of Müller-Lauter’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction specifically in relation to the counter-interpretations offered by two other German commentators of Nietzsche, Leo Strauss and Karl Löwith, in order to confirm Müller-Lauter’s suggestion that contradiction is indeed an operative engine of Nietzsche’s thought. Indeed contradiction is a key Nietzschean theme and an important dynamic of becoming which enables the subject to be revealed as a “multiplicity” (BGE §12) and as a “fiction” (KSA 12:9[91]). Following Müller-Lauter’s assertion that for Nietzsche the problem of nihilism is fundamentally synonymous with the struggle of contradiction experienced by will to power, this paper interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction in terms of subjective, bodily life (rather than in terms of logical incoherences or ontological inconsistencies). Against the backdrop of nihilism, the “self” (and its related place holder the “subject”), I will argue, becomes the psycho-physiological battlespace for the struggle and articulation of “contradiction” in Nietzsche’s thought.

Marsilio Ficino’s Critique of the Lucretian Alternative

INTRODUCTIONMarsilio Ficino is perhaps most widely remembered by historians of philosophy today as a fifteenth-century Platonist and Hermeticist who advocated the soul's flight from the sordid world of matter and body. Ficino's major contributions to philosophy include his Latin translations of Plato and Plotinus, as well as his voluminous and encyclopedic Platonic Theology, where he argues that the immortal soul occupies a privileged midpoint between God and inchoate prime matter. It therefore comes as a surprise to learn that Ficino, for a time in his early twenties, was drawn to the Roman poet Lucretius, who believed that most people are plagued by the superstitions of religiously-minded fable mongers. During this time Ficino composed a short commentary on Lucretius' didactic Epicurean poem, On the Nature of Things. In 1417 one of the last surviving manuscript copies of this poem was found in a German monastery by the humanist Poggio Bracciolini after several centuries of dormancy.1 Also, in an early treatise on pleasure, Ficino argues that the Epicurean emphasis on pleasure as the removal of pain is superior to the crass and hedonism of Aristippus.2 In time, however, Ficino developed into the Platonist that historians of philosophy are more familiar with today. He turned his back on Lucretius, destroyed his commentary on him, and he became a rigid opponent of those philosophers who, as Plato describes them in his Sophist, insist that only what offers tangible contact is, since they define being as the same as body.3Despite the fact that Ficino ultimately rejected Lucretius, and in a letter to the poet Angelo Poliziano claimed to have followed the divine Plato from my youth, it appears that he was never able to successfully put the Epicurean poet completely out of his mind.4 The specter of Lucretius - that is, the specter of a potent and fully-articulated materialism and what it entails - casts a long shadow across the eighteen books of Ficino's Platonic Theology. This work, which was printed in 1482 and remains his most extensive philosophical treatise, gives the impression that Ficino considered Lucretius a relevant and un-eliminated alternative to his own mature philosophical vision. The Lucretian alternative, as it will here be called, aspires to show that anything that exists is a composite of matter and void alone, and that there is no need to countenance the existence of some ghostly third constituent, such as soul, in order to explain adequately the phenomena of nature or consciousness.5 Ficino's Platonic Theology argues for a profoundly different metaphysical picture of the nature of things. There Ficino wanted to demonstrate the essential immortality of the soul, and to further clarify the best way that it can, as he puts it, cast off the bonds of our terrestrial chains so that it may fly unhindered to the ethereal abode.6 However, in order for Ficino to accomplish this, he first had to show that the Lucretian alternative is not a living hypothesis, but a dead one. Refuting Lucretius, therefore, is central to the polemical aims and aspirations of this work, and it is to this end that Ficino addresses several chapters to refuting the materialism of the vulgar and impious Epicurean poet and philosopher. The Lucretian alternative also explains in part why Ficino discusses, sometimes at great length, the nature of matter and body, especially in the early books of his Platonic Theology. The core argument that Ficino brings against the Lucretian alternative is that its materialist ontology is at best incomplete, and that something else - some ghostly incorporeal principle - is in fact necessary in order to adequately explain the nature of things.Both the Renaissance recovery of On the Nature of Things, and the subsequent role that it played in the advancement of early modern philosophy and science, are familiar to historians of philosophy today.7 Ficino's fifteenth-century critique of Lucretius, however, is not. …

Cultivating the Philosophical Imagination: Experiencing the Limits of Language with Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Habermas

In this essay we present three arts-based and game-like participatory simulations that are designed to promote inquiry, curiosity, and play as students embody and enact otherwise opaque philosophical concepts. These three simulations invite students to experientially participate in the philosophical insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas regarding a deep but essential philosophical issue: the limits of language in expressing meaning, truth, and experience. Each thinker offers a unique perspective on the limitations of understanding through language, and thus each participatory simulation yields a unique experiential encounter of these perspectives for students. These experiences are supplemented by a curriculum of philosophical imagination in which students also deliberatively discuss their experiences and pragmatically design their own participatory simulations to convey relevant perspectives on the limits of language from other philosophers or from their own perspective. These participatory simulations are based on the premise that philosophical imagination works best with encounters that link concepts and experience. In other words, the cultivation of philosophical imagination is connecting the enactment of the concept while simultaneously learning it. To describe the concept of philosophical imagination, first we define participatory simulations and philosophically ground the concept in an experiential aesthetic attitude. This provides the groundwork to then briefly describe previous attempts to shift philosophy away from pure textual analysis to a more experience based style of production. Finally we reveal three participatory simulations that are designed to evoke and demonstrate the cultivation of philosophical imagination within the milieu of an aesthetically minded, experience-based performance of philosophy.

Constitutional Artisanship and Institutional Diversity: Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, and the Workshop

Constitutional Artisanship and Institutional Diversity:Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, and the Workshop Filippo Sabetti (bio) A story is told around the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University that when Elinor Ostrom received a call from Nobel representatives in the very early morning of October 10, 2009, her words to Vincent, her spouse and colleague, went something like this: "Wake up, honey. We have won a prize." 1 The emphasis on "we" is not surprising as Elinor Ostrom—Lin for many of us—has always acknowledged that "none of us [at the Workshop] could have achieved what we have done without [Vincent's] inspiration, criticism, encouragement, and help." 2 Thus, Lin's selection as a recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences also helped to spotlight the pioneering quest of Vincent to understand public affairs. As the good news spread, the Workshop was inundated with congratulatory messages from Workshoppers around the world, sharing in the "we have won a prize" celebration. I and other first-generation Workshoppers joined the present sixth-generation in a chorus of congratulations. 3 For me, it all started, in the spring of 1968, when I had the good fortune of receiving a telephone call from Lin, then the graduate advisor in the Department of Government (as it was called at that time), urging me to choose Indiana University for graduate studies in political science. She challenged me to learn more about a new and exciting interdisciplinary field of public choice that also drew on the Italian school of public finance and fiscal theory. For the first time I heard someone stressing the importance of the works of James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, whose papers I had distractedly noticed in earlier issues of Il Politico, a University of [End Page 73] Pavia journal edited by Bruno Leoni. He had welcomed their contributions when most Anglo-American non-economic journals were not so readily disposed to their innovative thinking. After accepting a position in the 1968 class of graduate students, who formed the first generation of Workshoppers, I found that indeed Buchanan and Tullock were among the pillars of the Workshop curriculum. In the fall of 1968, I took my first graduate course with Vincent Ostrom. The course was based on readings derived largely from classical texts on America and the first generation of public choice scholars. It was not an easy course for me not just because that was my first introduction to readings like The Federalist, Democracy in America, Leviathan, The Calculus of Consent and The Logic of Collective Action but also because I was confronted with a novel approach to these texts. It was the approach to pursue the logic of the propositions as testable hypotheses (at least by experience, if not by rigorous field research) that set Vincent's teaching apart. No one read these books as he did. I was attracted by his challenge and philosophical vision and thus became one of Vincent's Ph.D. students. I served as his Teaching Assistant in two of his undergraduate courses—a most enriching experience for me as well as for the undergraduates. By now, I have read all of Vincent's scholarship since 1968 and much of his earlier work. In the earlier years of the Ostroms' tenure at Indiana University, Vincent had the heavier teaching schedule. By the early 1970s, Lin's courses applying the Workshop's theoretical conceptions in rigorous fieldwork of police studies as well as in other modes of quantitative analysis and modeling, including game theory, had became part of the core curriculum, complementing Vincent's "macro theoretic" approach with empirical studies and "micro theory." Although I somehow missed taking a course from Lin, I experienced what anyone who has read Lin's work, beginning soon after she completed her Ph.D. in 1965 through her most recent award winning works, cannot help but see: the amazing creativity and innovative thinking that were a mainstay at the Workshop. She combined these qualities with a human touch that was genuine, generous and disarming. Her positivity and humility about life were sources of encouragement and strength for all of us and for me in particular...

Reflection and Learning: Characteristics, obstacles, and implications

Reflection represents an important form of human thought; from ancient to modern times, the human capacity for reflective thinking has held the imagination of various philosophers and educational theorists. Despite this interest, researchers define reflection in different ways. One of the purposes of this article is to explore the activity of reflection by examining characteristics and contextual factors associated with it. For this purpose, various philosophical and theoretical sources are considered including Socrates, Rousseau, and Bruner, among others. Following this, empirical research is examined to determine whether elements associated with reflection are consistently integrated within regular classroom instruction. Next, practical and theoretical obstacles to reflection are proposed. One of these obstacles is an over‐emphasis on the technical interest, a concept described by Jürgen Habermas. Last, some implications are suggested with regard to the use of reflection as a construct for infusing new points of discussion in teacher education and practice.

“Allow Intelligence to Survive”: Life’s Language in Williams and Tzara

“Allow Intelligence to Survive”: Life’s Language in Williams and Tzara Paul Jaussen In Mexico, since we are talking about Mexico, there is no art: things are made for use. And the world is in perpetual exaltation. —ANTONIN ARTAUD (11) There is a famous passage in William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography in which he recollects his visit to the Armory Show of 1913. Encountering Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” Williams says, “I laughed out loud when I first saw it, happily, with relief” (A 134). Writing several decades after the fact, he claims that the piece “is too hackneyed for [him] to remember anything clearly about it now,” a slight on Duchamp, perhaps (who himself had sufficiently slighted Williams at a party for the latter to bear a grudge), but the statement is also a revelation that the need for an effectively lasting or “timeless” piece of art was absent during the period of Williams’s early work (A 134). The time was now, a now of experiment, of change, of warfare and industrialization, a time accelerating into the future yet unable to completely negotiate the past. And yet a time of laughter and forgetting, when breaking into the world involved breaking from its orders and languages. Williams’s laughter can be read as not simply pleasure, but, as he says, “relief,” what Henry Sayre describes as “release,” the sense of unleashed opportunity that America inherited from the fractured and alienated Europe, the chance to make a new aesthetic practice all its own (16). New York in the years following the Armory Show was the place for that art of release and mirth, and Williams, despite the constraints of a medical practice and a young family, could not keep himself away. This was an era of the small magazines and the French immigrants (most famously Francis Picabia and Duchamp), of salons and parties, all fueled by the compelling need to create something new, not for the museums, but for the world in which they lived, the conflicted everyday [End Page 17] places and spaces that were dominated by the technology of the modern and the logic of warfare.1 Williams, in the thick of it, attended the gatherings and met the artists, aided Alfred Kreymborg in the publication of the journal Others, founded the magazine Contact in 1920, and, through it all, never stopped writing (Dijkstra 22, 109). As Sayre argues, this context of avant-garde energy is crucial for our understanding of the books Williams produced at this time, particularly Spring and All and Kora in Hell: Improvisations (Sayre 17). These works are far from formally autonomous high modernism, nor are they the expansive historical and philosophical vision of what would become Paterson; instead, they are texts that reveal American avant-garde at its conflicted nascent stages, coming from an author who resisted “both Europe and America” in an effort to create newness in his time and place (Tashijan 91). It is the radical commitment to the value of that new, its work as a source of energy in the world, that comes to the forefront of Spring and All and Kora in Hell. This energy went by many names in Williams’s texts, but consistently he refers to it as “life”—an eruptive force which outlasts the constraints of language and culture that always attempt to channel or block it. Life is the energy put into play by its correlative faculty, the imagination, without which, Williams is very clear, thinking disappears. In other words, the newness of life is a fundamental and essential ingredient for all human activities, such as language and science, even as those edifices tend to cover over it and deny its significance. Williams’s poetic goal at the time of these early writings is to make life happen, to restore it to sensibility and allow the imagination to move. Life’s importance is not unique to Williams, however; it springs forth as well in the manifestos of Tristan Tzara. A number of critics have read Dada as the avantgarde movement closest to the early Williams, and, as Peter Schmidt writes, although it is unknown whether or not Williams ever read Tzara’s...