How can spiritual transcendence safeguard peace in any community, let alone our planetary universe?

Fifty-one years ago, leaders of different religious institutions from around the world, representing all Christian denominations and their Islamic/Muslim counterparts together with representatives from diverse faith communities, including Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Zoroastrian, and Baha’i, came together with two purposes in mind. The first was to assemble to advocate, as one spiritual and religious voice, for a holistic peace— not just the absence of war: rather, seeking to prevent the very causes that lead to conflicts in the first place, including the escalating nuclear arms race and proxy wars, poverty, rampant human rights violations, and the decline of the primacy of the rule of law around the world.

The second purpose, what would become Religions for Peace, aimed to put words into actions, by practically working together at the national, regional, and global levels. From the latter inclination Inter-Religious Councils (IRCs) were born. This would be a structure that basically would convene the religious leaders from all faith institutions in any one country and serve as a space for these leaders to meet as equals, regardless of numerical, historical, or demographic religious dynamics. In other words, in the majority or minority, old or new, monotheistic/Abrahamic, or not, these faith leaders would meet as equals. For what purpose? To speak as one about the rights of all; to struggle as one for the rights— and dignity— of all; to ensure that no one is left behind. To hold accountable government and governance and to be the partner of all other secular civil society actors. These were the faith-based and faith-inspired civic actors working for the rights of all: yet with a special focus on the most vulnerable. In short, theirs is a human rights mission and a human-rightsbased approach. Far from attempting to equalize or generalize the commonalities between each religion, this form of “interfaith dialogue” is more an attempt to translate deeply shared faith inspiration into common action destined for the most vulnerable anywhere.

This interfaith movement was mobilized owing to incendiary rhetoric and the near catastrophic increase in nuclear arsenals.

Introduction

Treating socialism as a thing— such is the programmatic intention displayed by Emile Durkheim in the opening lecture of the course held at the University of Bordeaux in 1895– 96 as the first part of a never completed history (Durkheim 1928). Applying that fundamental sociological rule has been the inaugural epistemological strategy to dispel a widespread misunderstanding, while clarifying from the outset the peculiar viewpoint that would preside over the entire analysis. Against historical studies and public opinion, Durkheim wanted to emphasize from the start that socialism had not to be confused with an already developed empirical science, interested in exploring the nature and explaining the evolution of human societies, despite its regular incursions in what was now sociology's own domain of inquiry. Although based on a worried observation of modern societies, socialism was not a science, but an object of science. It had to be studied as a given fact about which sociology alone could and should show in which sense it was indeed social, by demonstrating to what extent its main doctrines belonged, in fact and in principle, to the underlying collective reality that its partisans claimed to be able to grasp in its structure and to transform in its organization.

By taking up the basic principle formulated in The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim seemed then firmly determined to bring the difference between sociology and socialism back to the apparently insurmountable gap separating science and politics. As he pointed out in the opening lecture, if social science had to limit its pretentions to describing and explaining actual practices and institutions, past and present, belonging to an already constituted reality, socialism had in turn to focus its expectations on the sole development of projects and programs attempting to give a definite shape to a not yet realized future. In this complementary perspective, socialism offered then to sociology the unique opportunity to reach the only politics accessible from its characteristic scientific position. Once grasped and explored in its social rooting, socialism was destined to appear as the future already at work in the present of European societies, grappling with the convulsive process inaugurated by the French Revolution.

The Durkheimian obsession with religion is altogether well known, if not entirely well understood. It has been the custom of social scientists, especially, to assume proprietary rights over the entire Durkheimian effort as a flagship launch of a scientific study of society. But the picture of the Durkheimian relation to religion, I suggest, implies a far more interesting and curious Durkheimian ambitions than what the conventional social science creation story would relate. What does one make of what can only be called an amazing poetic outburst about religion from one of Durkheim's closest confederates, Henri Hubert? Appealing to the imagery of something like a great sprawling Banyan tree, Hubert says,

What I shall try to do is pierce some of that ‘sultry shade’ surrounding Durkheim's concept of religion. I shall be arguing that Durkheim's concept of religion emerged from attractions to and struggles with major ideological and, indeed, religious communities making up the discursive landscape of the study of religion in Paris's École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fifth Section – ‘Sciences Religieuses’. Even in what was, at least officially, an open laic academic environment of the Fifth Section, Durkheim and his confederates would discover that studying religion sociologically would inevitably pit them against the covert and overt religious agendas of some of their most powerful colleagues.

Introduction

Academic subjects are generally assumed to be composed of propositional rather than practical knowledge. One of the insights of Paul Hirst was, however, that they are also practices with procedures for validating and establishing truths which are themselves constituted by a closely connected conceptual structure (cf. Hamm, 1989: 68– 69). Mastering this structure involves inferential ability, itself a form of practical knowledge, just as the ability to validate and establish truths demands a variety of forms of practical ability. This article examines the relationship between subject knowledge, inferential ability and ability to validate and establish truths in the perspective of an ascent from novice to expert within a subject. It is argued that a key feature of good curriculum design is the ability to manage the different types of knowledge in a sequence that matches not just the needs of the subject, but also that of the student, so that the different kinds of disciplinary knowledge are introduced in such a way that the development of expertise is not compromised. Examples of problems with curriculum design are discussed.

Three Kinds of Knowledge in the Curriculum

Epistemology has traditionally distinguished three distinct if related kinds of knowledge: knowledge by acquaintance, propositional knowledge and knowledge how. Each of these is important for curriculum design. Their relationships with each other are, however, just as important.

Knowledge by acquaintance

I see a person, hear a symphony, smell a flower and taste a fruit. When a person does these things they are said to be acquainted with them. The primary mode of knowledge by acquaintance is through the senses and these need not be just one sense. One may be acquainted with objects, events, processes, states and persons in this way. Knowledge by acquaintance is important because it encompasses qualities and characteristics of what is known that could not be understood in any other way. It is possible to describe the beauty of a landscape, for example, without capturing what the observer takes to be its most significant qualities: the colours, the vista, the atmospheric conditions and, perhaps also, the accompanying sounds and smells that are also significant elements of the experience. In this sense, knowledge by acquaintance cannot be fully supplanted by a full and accurate, or even a sensitive, description.

Introduction

Debates about the nature of practical knowledge and its relationship with declarative knowledge have, over the last ten years, been lively. Relatively little has, however, been written about the educational implications of these debates, particularly about the educational implications of the two broad families of positions known respectively as ‘Intellectualism’ and ‘Anti-intellectualism’. The aim of this paper is, first, to offer a qualified defence of anti-intellectualism about practical knowledge and, second, to argue that the adoption of anti-intellectualism offers the best opportunity for constructing a rationale for vocational and professional education that gives broad forms of agency, autonomous action and the pursuit of excellence their due place in such programmes.

A recent paper by Jason Stanley extends the defence of the view that knowing how is best seen a species of knowing that presented earlier in Stanley and Williamson (SW) (Stanley, 2010; Stanley and Williamson, 2001). SW's claim was explicitly made as a response to the knowing how/knowing that distinction made by Ryle (1945, 1949). SW (2001) and Stanley (2010) attempt to show that the underlying grammatical similarities between attributions of knowledge that and knowledge how strongly suggest that the analysis of the latter should be in terms of the former. This is a direct consequence of the intellectualist thesis that all knowledge is a form of propositional knowledge. This paper examines that claim in relation to a central feature of Ryle's analysis, that talk about knowing how is intimately bound up with the use of what Ryle calls ‘intelligence epithets’ (e.g. 1949: 25). Neither SW nor Stanley (2010) pay much, if any, attention to this aspect of Ryle's analysis, yet it is central to his account of the distinctiveness of knowing how. Without examining this claim it is hard to see how Ryle's account of knowing how can be so easily dismissed, particularly if one wishes, as Stanley does, to point to the underlying similarities between propositional knowledge and knowing how.

Intelligence Epithets

Ryle's (1949) discussion opens with the claim that when intelligence epithets are applied to someone, we attribute ability to do something to them, not knowledge or ignorance (1949: 27).

Introduction

In this chapter, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent state responses are analyzed through multiple perspectives. Iran is one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic. The number of positive cases in the country has risen to staggering proportions compared to the number of cases in other Middle Eastern nations. Prior to the onset of the pandemic, the socioeconomic conditions in Iran were already dire owing to the ongoing US campaign of sanctions and international pressure. These issues have been further exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, resulting in a lack of access to the most basic necessities and severe humanitarian concerns. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran, and around the world, and the subsequent failures of governments to adequately contain the virus demonstrate faults in the existing global order. In particular, the past year has shown how the disjointed and fragmented system of geopolitics and human relationships, established after the Second World War, is limited when it comes to addressing complex issues that are truly global in nature. As American foreign policy analyst and lawyer Anne- Marie Slaughter noted, we are often taught to see the world as a chessboard, where actors craft and implement strategies that are designed to promote their nation's interests. By focusing on the military and diplomatic prowess of our individual, sovereign nations, however, we fail to recognize how citizens around the world are individually impacted by policy decisions (Slaughter, 2017, pp. 5– 7).We also fail to establish meaningful connections and global processes for addressing crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. Authors Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall similarly argue that the current global framework we operate within is inadequate. According to Zohar and Marshall, the original theories and laws of physical reality, made popular by figures such as Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, and Thomas Hobbes, stressed mechanistic physics. Mechanistic physics emphasized the existence of a vast gap between human beings and the physical world. These figures also pushed for frameworks that emphasized isolated and interchangeable parts. During the Enlightenment and for centuries afterward, these framings helped promote economic growth and technological innovation, including through the Industrial Revolution.

Introduction

One of the dominant views about how people learn is derived from a complex of theories known collectively as cognitivism. It is particularly influential because it combines within it elements of the romantic view of learning associated with Rousseau's Emile (1762) and more explicitly scientific accounts of learning associated with Noam Chomsky (1988) and others. One of the main consequences of the influence of cognitivist theories is an emphasis on autonomous learning and a consequent devaluing of overt teaching as an aid to learning. If, however, cognitivism rests on a mistake, then the devaluing of teaching is no longer tenable on cognitivist grounds and the modern tendency in education of exalting the role of the learner at the expense of that of the teacher will need to be re-evaluated. That it does rest on a mistake and that the role of the teacher does need to be re-evaluated is the contention of this paper. In this context I mean by ‘teaching’ the active transmission of knowledge and technique by an authoritative figure rather than the setting up of situations in which autonomous pupil learning can take place (the ‘facilitator of learning’ model).

Cognitivism can be seen both as an alternative, and as a response to behaviourist accounts of learning. It is a set of theories not only about how people learn, but also about how they think. Indeed, it is arguable that cognitivism claims that people learn through being able to think. The ability to think rationally, both consciously and subconsciously, amounts to an ability to internally manipulate symbolic representations of that which we think about, it is maintained. Some versions of cognitivism emphasise the importance of the computer as a way of conceptualising such a system of internal representations, while others use neural networks. Cognitivist theories in both their ‘classical’ and their connectionist forms take the notion of representation to be the fundamental building block of their accounts, however, so there is a great deal in common between them. If we are to look at cognitivist accounts of learning then, we will need to first look at cognitivist accounts of thinking since if the account of thinking is inadequate, then so will be the account of learning in the absence of any alternative support.