"Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose." The European Legacy, 23(6), pp. 710–711
Ethics seems to be of increasing concern for researchers in Higher Education Institutes and funding bodies demand ever more transparent and robust ethics procedures. While we agree that an ethical approach to fieldwork in religion is critical, we take issue with the approach that ethics committees and reviews adopt in assessing the ethicality of proposed research projects. We identify that the approach to research ethics is informed by consequentialism – the consequences of actions, and Kantianism – the idea of duty. These two ethical paradigms are amenable to the prevailing audit culture of HE. We argue that these ethical paradigms, while might be apposite for bio-medical research, are not appropriate for fieldwork in religion. However, because ethics should be a crucial consideration for all research, it is necessary to identify a different approach to ethical issues arising in ethnographic research. We suggest that a virtue ethics approach – concerned with character – is much more consistent with the situated, relational and ongoing nature of ethnographic research.
We live in an age the chief characteristic of which, as is often said, is the speed of change. Under the banner of “continuing professional development”—or whatever the latest fad or fashion is—we ...
Several authors have identified a 'therapeutic turn' in education in the UK, at all levels of the system. In this paper I focus on and develop this claim, specifically in relation to the Higher Education sector. I seek to do two things: First, I argue that the 'self' which is identified by commentators on the therapeutic turn needs to be reworked in the direction of McGee's idea of the 'belabored' self. This is because the therapeutic turn serves, I argue, a set of wider economic goals arising from the restructuring of capitalism which followed in the wake of the oil crisis of 1973 and the subsequent breakdown of the post-war (1939-1945) consensus around the purpose of public policy, of which education is an important part. Second, I revisit an important document in the history of the UK Higher Education sector: the National Committee of Inquiry Into Higher Education's 1997 report Higher Education In The Learning Society (known popularly as the Dearing Report, after its chair, Sir Ron Dearing). I argue that that the committee's ambition to bring about a learning society characterised by lifelong learning played an important and neglected part in bringing about the therapeutic turn in higher education in the UK. The project of creating a learning society characterised by lifelong learning, advocated by the Dearing Report, should properly be recognised as an exhortation to embark upon a lifetime of labouring upon the self.
Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are widely acknowledged as the great pop poets of the 1960s, transforming the popular song into a medium for questionng the personal, social, and political norms of their times. They emerged at a time when the music industry was transforming the revolutionary sound of black music into something bland, homogenous, and fit for mass consumption. For many members of their generation, Dylan and Cohen were able to articulate what they were feeling and could not express: anti-establishement anger, angst, and despondency. Dylan and Cohen is a fascinating political, psychological and artistic profile of these two iconic writers and performers. With reference to both biographical details and lyrics. David Boucher explores their similarities and differences, tracing the development of religious political, and social themes in their work and the ways in which those ideas engaged a new audience. A must-read for all serious fans of either Dylan or Cohen, this book will also engage anyone interested in the North America of the 1960s, or more generally in the relationship between music, identity and politics.
Since Athens put Socrates to death for the crime of publicly challenging the complacency of his fellow citizens, to Heidegger’s pragmatic complicity with Nazism, and on even to such contemporary events as Negri’s long incarceration at the hands of the Italian authorities, the relationship between the philosopher and the state has been a problematic one. For some, Socrates for example, philosophy is by its very nature a critical activity, the task of which is to alert us to injustice and immorality. But for others, certain modes of philosophizing potentially mask rather than reveal injustice and immorality, legitimating tyranny rather than undermining it. In the context of the alleged failure of the Enlightenment project of securing emancipation through the discovery and dissemination of universal standards of truth and justice, the universalist mode of philosophizing has increasingly become the focus of criticism. Postmodernists such as Lyotard dismiss universalist philosophies as “terroristic” and emphasize particularism as a means of undercutting tyranny (Lyotard 1984). There is much at stake in this debate. Documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which embody the Enlightenment emancipatory aspiration to make tyranny impossible, are now, fty years on, viewed by some as little more than vehicles for a form of cultural imperialism. Yet it remains an open question as to whether or not particularist modes of philosophizing are likely to be any more successful in undercutting tyranny than their universalist counterparts. This paper explores these issues through an analysis of the work of Michael Walzer. In a series of books and articles spanning more than two decades Walzer has consistently made the case for particularism over universalism. In his seminal work Spheres of Justice (1983a) Walzer described his own preferred position as “radically particularist,” and this is presented as a mode of philosophizing that avoids the fate of giving comfort to tyrants. Theories of justice, he claims, ought to be both “immanent and phenomenological,” which is to say they should be tied intrinsically to a culture’s own shared understanding and not to abstract, universalistic principles. Walzer’s importance in terms of political philosophy lies precisely in the consistency with which he has defended and developed the emancipatory ideals of the Enlightenment, retaining a belief in freedom and equality, for example, but couched in particularist terms. He
Supporters of liberal neutrality distinguish between 'weak' conceptions of autonomy which operate as background features of liberal democratic regimes, and 'strong' conceptions, which amount to conceptions of the good. These latter are to be excluded from the political realm on the grounds that in order to protect and promote a conception of the good, in the context of a pluralistic society, the state would have to resort to illiberal methods. The result of this will be the destablization and fragmentation of the regime. In this article I argue two things: first, that autonomy ought to be understood, not as a neutral background assumption of liberal theory, but as a partially comprehensive conception of the good in its own right; secondly, that protecting and promoting autonomy need not lead either to illiberalism or to the destabilization and fragmentation of liberal democratic society.
