Rethinking East German Education
نویسنده
چکیده
75 despair, as all certainties—even the putative postmodern certainty of exposing all certainties—become steadily bereft of intellectual or existential justification. By contrast, Vico, though a “genealogist of modernity” not unlike Nietzsche, kept one foot resolutely in the Catholic-Augustinian tradition. This tradition supplied him with the normative intellectual resources to offer qualified esteem for both classical and modern thought, while also making him acutely aware of their limitations and overweening pretensions. If the modern or “Enlightenment project” has failed, as a chorus of postmodernist voices tell us, then we are indeed left in a situation where we must choose a different path. However, for Miner that new path immediately forks and we must choose again, not necessarily between Nietzsche and Aristotle, as Alasdair MacIntyre famously claimed in his muchdiscussed After Virtue (1981) but rather between Vico and Nietzsche. For both, unlike Aristotle, have borne witness to modernity’s beneficial and baneful aspects. However, the two unmodern paths posited by Miner lead, finally, in radically different directions: to Rome or at least to the seat of the former Bishop of Hippo (in the case of Miner’s Vico) or to the sanitarium (in the case of Nietzsche). These are of course grand claims for a slender volume, and one might naturally wonder whether Miner’s extensive time with Vico’s texts have led him to magnify their author’s importance beyond the pale of prudence. Is Miner himself guilty, in other words, of what Vico called the “conceit of scholars”? To a degree, perhaps. Still, Miner has given us nourishing food for thought, and this work deserves attention, not least for Miner’s meticulous scholarship. If it does not in the end convince one that Vico is humanity’s last best hope this side of modernity, it should at least rekindle an interest in this engaging, often neglected Neapolitan thinker. In particular, the book helps render intelligible the theological underpinnings of Vico’s thought, the breadth and drama of his intellectual endeavor, and the similarities (and crucial differences) between Vico’s thought and those ubiquitous, corrosive strains of “genealogy” afoot today that we recognize as the offspring of Nietzsche.
منابع مشابه
Teenage Pregnancies and Births in Germany: Patterns and Developments
Teenage Pregnancies and Births in Germany: Patterns and Developments We study the development of teenage fertility in East and West Germany using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) and from the German Mikrozensus. Following the international literature we derive hypotheses on the patterns of teenage fertility and test whether they are relevant in the German case. We find that teena...
متن کاملAre the Farmers Always Right? Rethinking Assumptions Guiding Agricultural and Environmental Research in Southeast Asia
conventional wisdom. The East-West Center is an education and research organization established by the U.S. Congress in 1960 to strengthen relations and understanding among the peoples and nations of Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center contributes to a peaceful, prosperous, and just Asia Pacific community by serving as a vigorous hub for cooperative research, education, and dia...
متن کاملComparison of Medical Education between Germany and Poland Considering Internal Medicine, General Medicine, and Anaesthesia
With the continuing shortage of physicians in Germany, healthcare is increasingly being sustained by foreign physicians. The present paper addresses the comparability of medical education curricula in Germany and Poland and the qualification of physicians having Polish exams and specialist medical training for clinics and practices in Germany. The Medical Licensing Act and the Model Specialty T...
متن کاملRethinking well-child care.
THE COMMONWEALTH FUND ONE EAST 75TH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10021-2692 TEL 212.606.3800 FAX 212.606.3500 E-MAIL [email protected] http://www.cmwf.org The nation’s system of preventive pediatric care requires major revisions if chronic health problems and unmet behavioral and developmental needs among American children are to be addressed, so reports The Commonwealth Fund’s Edward L. Schor, M.D., in “Re...
متن کاملShould I Stay or Should I Go – Cognitive Conflict in Multi-Attribute Signals Probed with East and West German ‘Ampelmännchen’ Traffic Signs
In post-unification Germany, lingering conflicts between East and West Germans have found some unusual outlets, including a debate of the relative superiority of East and West German 'Ampelmännchen' pedestrian traffic signs. In our study, we probed the visual efficacy of East and West German Ampelmännchen signs with a Stroop-like conflict task. We found that the distinctive East German man-with...
متن کامل