Tag: History
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The Philosophers Behind the Texts
by Bharath Vallabha ____ For sixteen years I studied and taught philosophy. As a professor I taught Plato, Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. I thought I knew Western philosophy. Boy, was I wrong. Though I taught the great texts, in an important sense I didn’t understand them or the thinkers who wrote them. For —…
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Philosophy (of Education): What’s the Point?
by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ The following piece is a reflection I wrote mainly in response to undergraduate questions about philosophy’s purpose and value. I teach philosophy-of-education themed (and other) classes in a College of Education, so most of my students are neither philosophy majors nor in any way fluent with philosophy coming into my course.…
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Why We Do History
by Kevin Curry-Knight ___ Recently, a friend of mine – a Nietzsche scholar – posted on social media that he wished all of those engaged in arguments over antiracism in history education would read Nietzsche’s essay “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.” The friend didn’t elaborate, but I respect his judgment and…
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Three Constraints on the Philosophy of Art
by Daniel A. Kaufman _____ Preliminary Remarks After a brief hiatus in the last century, the search for a definition of ‘art’ has resumed with great vigour. Wittgensteinians may bemoan this as intellectual atavism, an anachronistic longing for “essences,” but I am inclined to think that the revival of the question of ‘art’ ’s definition…
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Love, Memory, and Children’s classics
by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ All history was palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any…
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Remembering Hal Colebatch
by Mark English If you grew up in London or New York or any other city with a strong literary and/or cinematic tradition or even in towns (such as many in Europe) with strong local traditions and customs, the geography of your childhood has an enhanced reality. I grew up in possibly the most isolated…
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Exhaustion of the Dialectic as End of History
by E. John Winner ___ (1) Every field of human endeavor requires communication, and in communication, language generates ideas in the ordinary sense of that term (and sometimes in the technical philosophic senses of the term, as well). Since communication is a process, developing over time and in concrete contexts of social involvement, every idea…
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The Past is [Not] What it is or What it Was
by Daniel A. Kaufman __ My title is derived from a comment made by our own Mark English, in a recent discussion on his excellent essay on history. The thought his comment expresses is mistaken, but in the best sort of way, for explaining where it goes wrong helps us to understand something essential –…