I argue in defense of Aristotle's position that contemplation is the proper use of at least some of one's leisure and that, consequently, leisure education must consist in teaching the inclination and capacity for contemplation. However, my position is somewhat more flexible than Aristotle's, in that I allow that there are other activities worthy of some leisure. My argument examines Aristotle's own comments on the importance of theoria as well as commentaries by Ackrill, Nagel, Broadie, Green and Telfer. In the (...) conclusion I argue that there are good reasons to think that studying Philosophy is one of the best strategies for leisure education. (shrink)

This article reflects on the struggle for recognition, in particular on the question of how to avoid people becoming battle-weary. Where do people find the strength to continue this struggle without lapsing into violence? These are questions which we derive from one of Paul Ricoeur's latest publications Course of Recognition. Ricoeur claims that the only way to avoid the struggle for recognition degenerating into violent conflicts, is to place it in a horizon of hope – the hope that the struggle (...) does not have the final word on interpersonal relations. In this article we take up Ricoeurs suggestion and elaborate it successively from a broad religious perspective and a Christian-Biblical perspective. This also allows us to develop new anthropological insights concerning the Struggle for Recognition. (shrink)

Research on meaningful work has not embraced a shared definition of what it is, in part because many researchers and laypersons agree that it means different things to different people. However, subjective and social accounts of meaningful work have limited practical value to help people pursue it and to help scholars study it. The account of meaningful work advanced in this paper is inherently normative. It recognizes the relevance of subjective experience and social agreement to appraisals of meaningfulness but considers (...) them conceptually incomplete and practically limited. According to this normative account, meaningful work should be meaningful to oneself and to others and is also meaningful independent of them. It sets forth grounds for evaluating some work to be more meaningful than other work, asserting the possibility that one could be mistaken about the meaningfulness of one’s work. While it thus proscribes some claims to meaningful work, it also opens up potential new avenues of inquiry into, among other things, self-aggrandizing and harmful work that is experienced as meaningful, morally valuable work that is not experienced as meaningful, and the distinction between experienced and normative meaningfulness. (shrink)

This paper argues that the accelerating pace of life is reducing the time for thoughtful reflection, and in particular for contemplative scholarship, within the academy. It notes that the loss of time to think is occurring at exactly the moment when scholars, educators, and students have gained access to digital tools of great value to scholarship. It goes on to explore how and why both of these facts might be true, what it says about the nature of scholarship, and what (...) might be done to address this state of affairs. (shrink)

This paper explores what it means to fail in an ultramarathon—be marked DNF, or Did Not Finish—through hermeneutic phenomenology. In today’s popular culture, failure holds a paradoxical position: P...

This essay seeks to contribute to the critical reception of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by tracing the Taxonomy’s underlying philosophical assumptions. Identifying Bloom’s work as consistent with the legacy of Cartesian thought, I argue that its hierarchy of behavioral objectives provides a framework for certainty and communicability in ascertaining student learning. However, its implicit rejection of intuitive knowledge as well as its antagonism between the human subject and the known object promote the Enlightenment ideal of education as “intellectual work.” (...) When embodied in the Taxonomy, Cartesian assumptions foster a fundamental disposition in front of reality that is ultimately alienating. The paper begins with an explication of the Taxonomy’s affordances and philosophical assumptions. I then identify the Cartesian elements of these assumptions, particularly the Taxonomy’s inherent mind–body dualism and primacy of method. Finally, the paper employs these elements as an explanatory factor for the predominant critiques of the Taxonomy in educational theory literature. An addendum questions the possibility or plausibility of distance from objectives frameworks in the contemporary classroom. (shrink)