Books
The Necessity of Aesthetic Education: the place of the arts on the curriculum
7 May 2024 — Laura D’Olimpio
The Necessity of Aesthetic Education is a manifesto. That which is experienced through engagement with art, through the many various and diverse art forms and media, is uniquely and essentially valuable to the lives of human beings. In order to fully appreciate and gain the most out of the arts, which offer a variety of aesthetic experience, there are concepts, skills and techniques integral to such understanding. In this book, Laura D'Olimpio argues that aesthetic education ought to be a compulsory part of education for all school-aged students, from pre-primary to high school, on the basis of its distinctive value. Such an argument is timely, given the so-called crisis in the arts and humanities, with declining student numbers in subjects that do not have a direct vocational correlative, and increased focus on science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM) subjects. As funding cuts increasingly slash the support for the arts, there is a need to argue for why the arts and arts education is valuable, for their own sake, as well as for the positive contributions they can and do make to society. Through critical engagement with a range of thinkers including Maxine Greene, John Dewey and Elliot Eisner, D'Olimpio offers a unique and important contribution to aesthetic education, and to research within philosophy of education. Table of Contents Series Editor's Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Arts Education in Policy and Practice 2. Why Value The Arts and Arts Education? 3. Defending Arts Education 4. On the Centrality of Aesthetic Experience 5. Objections and Replies 6. Instrumental Defences of Arts Education 7. Aesthetics and Ethics Conclusion: The Necessity of Arts Education References Index
Agora Archive — Columns
Trust and Initial Teacher Education
3 May 2024
Teachers as trusted professionals Popular writer Adam Grant has looked at what has made the Finnish school system among the most successful in the world: In the early 1990s, a new leader came in and called for another set of dramatic changes to create ‘a new culture of education.’ Policymakers start…
CFPs
EPAT Special Issue: Naturalness and Artificiality in Education: Lessons From Fictional Texts
30 Apr 2024
10 July 2024
The special issue will thus contribute to the vivid discussion of AI and, more broadly to efforts on thinking how education should respond to ongoing global crises, focusing on changes in long-standing educational tensions and contradictions considering the emergence of new information technologies.…
Agora Archive — Columns
Nuclear Daze
30 Apr 2024
J. Andrés Gannon has formulated a nuanced geopolitical model of the war in Ukraine regarding the spectre of nuclear conflagration. Within the tempestuous realm of Russo-Ukrainian relations, Gannon warns that the lurching discourse surrounding the potential deployment of nuclear armaments by Russia h…
CFPs
EPAT Special Issue on Canonical Pluralism: New Approaches to Teaching the History of Philosophy
22 Apr 2024
20 November 2024
In contrast to academic philosophy, teaching philosophy consists largely of reading philosophers from the past. This approach presupposes selecting works and authors that culminate in a ‘canon’: a set of works or authors from a specific period deemed outstanding by individuals at a later period. The…
General
PESA Pub Band Seeking Members!
22 Apr 2024
ASAP
The PESA Pub band needs you (to Shake Your Dewey)! Keen to be a member of the world famous PESA Pub band? Keen to play a selection of conference theme adjacent pub band numbers at a PESA Pub event in Christchurch, 2024? Then get in touch with the PESA Pub manager Andrew (agibbons@aut.ac.nz) soon as.
Agora Archive — Columns
Trump’s Torching of America
9 Apr 2024
In the looming spectre of a Trump triumph in November 2024, democracy finds itself ensnared in a dark and foreboding web. Much like Grendel, the malevolent creature of ancient myth whose lineage traces back to the Biblical figure Cain, Trump prowls the political landscape tormented by a relentless h…
Agora Archive — Columns
Thomas Mann and Niko’s Cassirer
8 Apr 2024
Stanley Corngold tells us a story about Thomas Mann’s dog named Niko. Not allowed to step foot into Mann’s library, Niko finally gains entry. Well, Niko ate a book by Ernst Cassirer. If it was the book on symbolic forms, well, then – as Captain Ryder might say in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited…
Events
PG/ECR Group Meeting
26 Mar 2024
March 26 @ 5-7pm AEST or 7-9pm NZT — Zoom
PESA has a special focus on supporting post-graduate students and early career researchers engaging with philosophy of education. The PG/ECR group welcomes members to participate in activities as decided by the members of the group, including philosophical discussions, reading groups, writing and ed…
Agora Archive — Columns
Heraclitus and Trust
21 Mar 2024
Heraclitus, or Herakleitos (c. 500BC), famously addressed the classic Greek philosophical problem of reality (in part), saying, ‘You cannot step twice into the same river.’ It is not only the river that is constantly changing, but you also. Heraclitus’s resolution of the problem of identity (same/di…
Agora Archive — Columns
Metaphoric Philosophy between Cultures
17 Mar 2024
Samuel Marsden [meets Ruatara outside his pā (village) at] Rangihoua, 1814 (Te Ara)* The translation of meanings between languages and cultures is an ancient point of contention. A defining feature of Aotearoa-New Zealand is the language binary of English and te reo Māori (the Māori language), which…
CFPs
South Korea as Method: Korean Education as Postcolonial/Post-Oriental Discourse
11 Mar 2024
Submit a Manuscript to the Journal Educational Philosophy and Theory For a Special Issue on South Korea as Method: Korean Education as Postcolonial/Post-Oriental Discourse Abstract deadline 15 April 2024 Manuscript deadline 01 November 2024 Special Issue Editor(s) Young Chun Kim, Chinju National Uni…
Agora Archive — Columns
Romancing the Apocalypse
24 Feb 2024
Rejecting a world of communal solidarity and love that values affirmation, respect and reciprocal relations among diverse groups of human beings is irredeemably antagonistic to the purported values we associate with American citizenship. Yet such a rejection seems today to be in lockstep with the pr…
Agora Archive — Columns
Decolonisation isn’t pretty or complicated
25 Jan 2024
Protest to free Palestine! (Answer Indiana, Oct 8 2023) The first pro-Palestine demonstration called after the latest counterattack by a host of Palestinian forces on October 7, endorsed by Students for Justice in Palestine, the ANSWER Coalition and others, put matters very plainly: Today, we witnes…
Agora Archive — Columns
A Problem of the Personal
25 Jan 2024
The Great Chain of Being (Didacus Valade, 1579) Here Lanney Mayer responds to Peter McLaren's columns engaging with Christopher Rufo. Lanney is currently writing a book on the Enlightenment and education called Recovering a Human(e) Education: A Trans-Modern Perspective. Addressing Rufo, I see two r…
Agora Archive — Columns
Finding Fictionalism, or Fictionalism Finding Me
25 Jan 2024
Dahlbeck, J. (2023). Fictionalism: The art of teaching truth disguised as lies. Brill. Fictionalism: The Art of Teaching Truth Disguised as Lies is undoubtedly my most personal book to date. Having almost lost myself in the task of systematically working through different aspects of Spinoza’s philos…
Agora Archive — Ideas
Back to the University’s Future: The Second Coming of Humboldt
22 Jan 2024
Back to the University’s Future: The Second Coming of Humboldt, by Steve Fuller, Springer Cham, 2023, 171pp., USD43.50 (e-book), ISBN 978-3-031-36327-6 Some years ago, when I was doing my postdoctoral fellowship at the Milton and Ethel Harris Research Initiative in Toronto, I decided to sit in on th…
Events
Thinking From Everywhen: Philosophy, Indigenous Knowledge & Perspectives
12 Jan 2024
13-14th February 2024 — School of Philosophy, RSSS Building ANU
This workshop asks how Western Philosophy should proceed if it takes seriously the challenge of decolonisation and of opening a respectful dialogue with Indigenous philosophies and knowledge systems. It explores ways to improve the plurality of the Philosophy discipline by recognising First Nations …
Agora Archive — Columns
A Message to Vladimir Putin
19 Dec 2023
Behind the Campist Curtain I wish to begin with a series of questions, the answers to which will be obvious to any red-blooded leftist. Does the United States harbour an insatiable appetite for perpetual warfare? Does it suffer from a fatal attraction to conflicts that history has etched in agonisin…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Eschaton is Now: José Porfirio Miranda Against the Catholic Right’s Anti-Woke Christianity
16 Dec 2023
Introduction The work of Jesuit theologian José Porfirio Miranda poses a provocative question: What if, in the dominant Western narrative, it was Christianity that ignited the oxidising flame of communism? Picture a timeline from the first century to the nineteenth, where resilient groups of Christ…
Agora Archive — Columns
Killing Children, the Burdens of Conscience and the Israel-Hamas War
10 Dec 2023
Reprinted with the permission of the author and Counterpunch: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/08/killing-children-the-burdens-of-conscience-and-the-israel-hamas-war/ (image by Banksy) The massacre of innocent people is a serious matter. It is not a thing to be easily forgotten. It is our duty t…
Agora Archive — Columns
Spiritual and Material Antisemitism, Julius Evola and the Threat of Contemporary Fascism
1 Dec 2023
Kaushik Jayaram has written a cautionary essay on why fascism is on the rise the world over that should provoke angry remonstrances from the public but will likely be met with a withering indifference if not insipient and callous antipathy. Much has been written about fascism and the proliferation o…
Agora Archive — Columns
‘Being-Together’ Here Now at the End of the World: A Philosophical Imperative
11 Nov 2023
For 戴南洲 Dai Nanzhou (Robbie) in friendship: ‘Mountains in the mist’ The concept of ‘being-together’ explores the idea that humans are inherently social beings, with their survival historically dependent on social interactions that foster interconnectedness, interdependence and a sense of community.…
Books
Eco-rational education: An educational response to environmental crisis
10 Nov 2023 — Thornton, Simone
Eco-Rational Education proposes an educational response to climate change, environmental degradation, and destructive human relations to ecology through the delivery of critical land-responsive environmental education. The book argues that education is a powerful vehicle for both social change and cultural reproduction. It proposes that the prioritisation and integration of environmental education across the curriculum is essential to the development of ecologically rational citizens capable of responding to the environmental crisis and an increasingly changing world. Using philosophical analysis, particularly environmental philosophy, pragmatism, and ecofeminism, the book develops an understanding of contemporary issues in education, especially inquiry-based learning as pedagogy, diversifying knowledge, environmental and epistemic justice, climate change education, and citizenship education. Eco-Rational Education will be of interest to researchers and post-graduate students of social and political philosophy, educational philosophy, as well as environmental philosophy, ethics, and teacher education.