Capabilities and Education

This paper provides an outline about the basic ideas of the capability approach. It will be argued that the capability approach is able to provide an appropriate approach in order to evaluate educational and social human services. As an egalitarian approach to social justice, the capability approach has particular strengths when issues concerning the actual life-conduct of tangible human beings come to the fore. In particular educational aspects of welfare and well-being might thus be well grounded on the Aristotelian reasoning of the capability approach. The paper focuses on the potentially fruitful relations of the capability approach and the philosophy and practice of ‘just’ education referring to the idea of the autonomy of life-practice.

Identity, Philosophy, and the Problem of Armenian History in the Sixth Century

History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East gathers together the work of distinguished historians and early career scholars with a broad range of expertise to investigate the significance of newly emerged, or recently resurrected, ethnic identities on the borders of the eastern Mediterranean world. It focuses on the "long late antiquity" from the eve of the Arab conquest of the Roman East to the formation of the Abbasid caliphate. The first half of the book offers papers on the Christian Orient on the cusp of the Islamic invasions. These papers discuss how Christians negotiated the end of Roman power, whether in the selective use of the patristic past to create confessional divisions or the emphasis of the shared philosophical legacy of the Greco-Roman world. The second half of the book considers Muslim attempts to negotiate the pasts of the conquered lands of the Near East, where the Christian histories of Hira or Egypt were used to create distinctive regional identities for Arab settlers. Like the first half, this section investigates the redeployment of a shared history, this time the historical imagination of the Qu'ran and the era of the first caliphs. All the papers in the volume bring together studies of the invention of the past across traditional divides between disciplines, placing the re-assessment of the past as a central feature of the long late antiquity. As a whole, History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East represents a distinctive contribution to recent writing on late antiquity, due to its cultural breadth, its interdisciplinary focus, and its novel definition of late antiquity itself.

Vorlanite, (CaU6+)O4, from Jabel Harmun, Palestinian Autonomy, Israel

Vorlanite (CaU6+)O4 Fm3̄m, a = 5.3647(9) Å, V = 154.40(4) Å3, Z = 2 was found in larnite pyrometamorphic rocks of the Hatrurim formation at the Jabel Harmun locality, Judean Desert, Palestinian Autonomy. Vorlanite crystals from these larnite rocks are dark-gray with greenish hue in transmitted light. This color in transmitted light is in contrast to dark-red vorlanite Fm3̄m, a = 5.3813(2) Å, V = 155.834(10)Å3, Z = 2 from the type locality Upper Chegem caldera, Northern Caucasus. Heating above 750 °C of dark-gray vorlanite from the Jabel Harmun, as well as dark-red vorlanite from Caucasus, led to formation of yellow trigonal uranate CaUO4. The unusual color of vorlanite from Jabel Harmun is assumed to be related to small impurities of tetravalent uranium.