Changing pre-service teachers' purposes of education through existential crises

This article considers changing the purposes of education held by pre-service teachers. It argues that purposes of education are inextricably linked to life meanings and purposes. Employing an existential perspective, mainly through Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Morris, the fundamental beliefs that one has regarding the meaning and purpose of life are understood to serve as the basis for formulating purposes of education. An attempt to change these purposes is recommended by drawing upon the existential crisis and Kierkegaard's doctrine of 'how'. Importance is placed not so much on the object or what of purposes and understandings, but on how the individual relates to them.

An existential framework of spirituality

A holistic approach to spirituality indicates a spiritual development that is relevant for all students and not just for those who have a religious background. However, debates in England surrounding spirituality in education often generally locate it within the religious domain (Blake, 1996;Carr, 1995, 1999;Isherwood, 1999). Conceptualizing spirituality in such a way tends to deny access to this development for non-religious students or students in non-religious contexts. Alternatively the other approaches to spirituality have adopted non-religious viewpoints (see Erricker, 2003, p. 7). Such either/or approaches work against the notion that spirituality should be conceived as intrinsic to the enterprise of education. This paper offers a brief view of a more elaborate existential framework of spirituality which has been developed in order to transcend the religious/secular divide. A short account of Existentialist philosophy is provided before an outline of the framework is discussed.

The Janus face of schizotypy: enhanced spiritual connection or existential despair?

It has been asserted that schizotypy has a negative relationship with subjective well-being. By employing a multidimensional measure of spiritual well being with 400 British College students we report a more complex relationship. The Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being and Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief Version were used and analysis made use of Canonical Correlational Analysis. Results suggested that two distinct relationships emerged between schizotypy and spirituality. First, a positive association between cognitive/perceptual features of schizotypy and spiritual connectedness emerged. Second a more global negative relationship between feelings of spiritual isolation and despair was found for all aspects of schizotypy. These findings challenge the previous literature based on one-dimensional subjective well being measures which have found only a negative relationship. However, the positive association between connectedness and cognitive-perceptual aspects of schizotypy raises import questions about the possible benefit of certain types of schizotypal experience.

Existential individual alone within Freire’s sociopolitical solidarity

Freire’s work has been recognized as lacking some careful and systematic attention to details on occasion (Dale and Hyslop-Margison 2011; Gerhardt 1993; Roberts 2010). This is not a serious criticism but is simply accepted as characteristic of his humanizing approach. One example of an event Freire identifies as important but does not provide systematic details about is the personally existential encounter an individual must face alone while being educated and liberated to participate in the sociopolitical solidarity of her context. Existential encounters are often marginalized due to the all-important focus upon dialogue between others. This contribution seeks to draw attention to the existential experiences of educational transformations to which Freire refers, explaining that these are not just juxtaposed ideas (Hufford 2010) but must necessarily be experienced alone because of their existent ..

Judgement, decision, and integrity

Although Aristotle did not mention it, integrity can be understood in an Aristotelian framework. Seeing it in these terms will show that it is an executive virtue which concerns the existential well being of an agent. This analysis is not offered as an exegesis of Aristotle's text, but as an attempt to use an Aristotelian framework to understand a virtue deemed important today. This account will have the benefit of solving some problems relating to motivational internalism and, as such, will contribute to that recent current of thought which has been highlighting the importance of virtue thinking in moral theory. I will distinguish moral judgement from decision and show that moral judgement is dependent upon virtue more strongly than it is upon impartial rationality. I will suggest that integrity is the virtue to which moral judgement gives expression and is the virtue which links judgement to decision so as to overcome akrasia.

Overcoming principles: dialogue in business ethics

Basing itself upon a virtue-ethics approach, this paper questions the value of syllogistic or deductive approaches to teaching business ethics and to the modelling of the kinds of judgments that executives are asked to make in situations of moral complexity. It urges that the teaching of ethical theories, of ethical principles, and of logical methods of moral thinking, and the use of hypothetical or historical scenarios, be augmented by the method of `Real Case Dialogue' which more nearly models the eal and intense existential realities of ethical decision making. A brief description of such a dialogue is offered so aslo provide an example.

Truth is God harm minimization through the practice of ecologically sustainable design and buddhism

The emergence of the global ecological crisis is presenting unique opportunities for the coordination of ethical thinking across cultural boundaries. Harm minimization as an ethical imperative operates as the ‘modus operandi’ behind both Ecologically Sustainable Design (ESD) and Buddhist practice. The architectural response to ESD is founded upon the ‘Declaration of Interdependence for a Sustainable Future’ adopted in 1993 by the International Union of Architects, of which the RAIA is a member.

Buddhism is a response to existential concerns universal to humanity. It developed as a set of principles for personal transformation known as the Four Noble Truths elucidated two and a half thousand years ago. Buddhist meditation practise ‘interrupts automatic patterns of conditioned behaviour’ recognised as the major obstacle to be overcome in any programme for change. Unsustainable egocentric behaviour is considered fundamental to our global ecological crisis and calls for radical behavioural change are increasingly being heard at the professional as well as the personal level. Emerging synergies between the Western cognitive sciences and Buddhist study of the mind increasingly validate the Tibetan Buddhist mind development phenomenon. Buddhists argue that their programme for enhancing ethical behaviour through mind development is a step-by step process of observation and analysis built upon empirical observation – a fundamental pre-requisite of any ‘scientific’ enquiry. Collaborative research programmes currently underway are an attempt to re-interpret Buddhist meditation techniques within a framework acceptable to Western scientific understanding. A truly holistic approach to harm minimization requires its consideration.

Place, progress and memory : McGlashan and Everist at Geelong College

Building in an historical setting engages the problem of progress and authentic dialogue between tradition, contemporaneity and visions of a future. Since 1960, McGlashan and Everist have been the sole architects for Geelong College's Talbot Street campus, established in 1871. They have designed its master plans and all new buildings and alterations to the existing eclectic stock. As modernists with a task providing no opportunity for stylistic coherence in an age of universality, the architects were caught between protecting the College's perceived authenticity by continuing its historicist links with English collegiate architecture on the one hand, and their own modernist ethic on the other. Adopting what Frampton has called in his essay, 'Critical Regionalism', an 'arriere-garde' position (an 'identity-giving culture' rather than reversion to the past or to the 'Enlightenment myth of progress'), the architects avoid overt display of nostalgic historicism, modernist tectonics and populism. This paper asks whether and to what extent they have been capable of an authentic dialogue. Have they created an existential place in an 'architecture of resistance' as Frampton would have it, attending sufficiently to 'identity-giving culture' and the future? What is the role of implacement in the problematic of 'progress' in this context and how might it have affected a particular approach and the outcome?

Integrity and shame

In a recent study, Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze and Michael P. Levine argue for a complex conception of integrity. But they leave two questions unanswered. The first is whether integrity is of greater importance to the agent's own sense of themselves or whether it is a virtue that is of social significance. The bulk of the literature on this virtue stresses its existential import. However, considerable weight should be given to its social significance. It should be linked to the essentially social reaction of shame, as opposed to the existential and personal reaction of guilt. The second question is whether the virtue of integrity has been analysed in such general terms that no specific meaning can be given to the virtue. Being a person of integrity might just collapse into being a virtuous person. This essay offers a distinctive account of integrity by asking what it is to act from the virtue in particular contexts that require public trust.

Rogue en vogue : North Korea and the war on terror

North Korea occupies a unique place in the thinking of US policymakers insofar as it represents both a direct, physical threat and also a reminder of the limits to American power. In numerous ways, North Korea is anathema to the US: it has fulsomely rejected America’s systems of political–economic organisation, its gradual rapproachment with South Korea threatens to undermine the rationale for America’s military presence in Northeast Asia, and its possession of nuclear weapons threatens the safety of the US and its allies. For these reasons, and despite its lowly standing in the international political system, North Korea continues to severely frustrate the superpower’s interests and thus represents an existential threat to the US.