Horizontal pedagogy is an approach to learning with roots in the work of
many activists, scholars, and educators through their various encounters
within teaching and learning (Freire, 1972/2000, Guattari 2005).1 This
chapter presents horizontal pedagogy as a prefigurative educational experiment
that emerged from the Occupy University in New…[Read more]

Japan Times guest editorials and selected letters from 1985-1990 on the Japanese as unique individuals, proposed school year reforms, an elegy for the Showa Emperor, biculturalism, and cultural liberation. Two photos from that period are included at the end: holding a friend’s scroll stamped with seals from each of the 88 temples of the Pilgrimage…[Read more]

Repair has visibly come to the fore in recent academic and policy debates, to the point that ‘repair studies’ is now emerging as a novel focus of research. Through the lens of repair, scholars with diverse backgrounds are coming together to rethink our relationships with the human-made matters, tools and objects that are the material mesh in whi…[Read more]

Handout for a presentation at the Tech Day Plus regional conference of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) at Otemae University in Osaka Prefecture on September 28, 2013. Conservative and cautious institutional cultures can add to language barriers to limit the international recognition of a university’s accomplishments.…[Read more]

Western and Japanese educators face some of the same issues, even while their common-sense social organization and practices could hardly stand in greater contrast. Contentious issues in North America–such as core liberal arts requirements vs. vocationalization of higher education, the student as customer, or faculty treatment in terms of…[Read more]

Outline of a frank presentation on the role of education in Japan to American college observers in 2006.

The foreword (here in pre-print version) introduces the scope of this special issue, that is, a re-interpretation of the development of 18th-century German philosophy. We aim in particular at identifying naturalistic and ‘scientific’ tendencies, which evolved alongside the well-studied mainstream currents. In our view, this long-overshadowed man…[Read more]

A multilingual podcast, recorded in August 2005 by native speakers of English, Japanese, and Chinese, found proverbs with a similar meaning in each culture. The author arranged this podcast during a Translation class between Japanese and English with fourth year students at Shinonome University in Matsuyama, on Shikoku island in Western Japan.

This essay argues, through various personal anecdotes, for a university in which our work and lives would turn away from impersonal professionalism and more towards a praxis where we would recognize better, as Brantley Bryant has written, that our “very strength, our very expertise, comes from darkness, indeterminacy, unmarketably disastrous…[Read more]

A plea for more generous modes of reading each other’s scholarship in order to arrive at a University that values productive dissensus within a framework of shared endeavor and solidarity. The essay also argues for new relational modes in which personal, professional and other identities would be rejected in favor of cruising each other’s thought and work.

An overview of the “state of the field” of critical post/humanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary post/humanist studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to “Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio State…[Read more]

André de la Vigne (1470?-1526?) in the manuscript of his “Mystère de Saint Martin,” performed in the town of Seurre in October 1496, also included a “moralité” and a “farce.” Although they are positioned at the conclusion of the “mystère,” these short plays were undoubtedly integral to the larger performance. At the same time they are via…[Read more]

Did it all begin with Tschirnhaus? This paper (here in pre-print version) discusses the exemplary role that Tschirnhaus could play in the reconstruction of an empirically oriented, scientific, somewhat radical and variously unorthodox current in 18th-century German philosophy, starting from 18th-century characterizations of his intellectual image.

A syllabus for an undergraduate course, taught in English, on the visual culture (primarily film, photography, and aesthetic theory) of the Weimar Republic. The course is housed in German Studies and crosslisted with Art History, Cinema, and other departments.

From Spanish and Portuguese travelers to Maupertuis, the problem of albinos, or ‘white Negroes’, as they would be called, has been an epitome of strangeness, a disturbing and/or marvelous appendix to human essence, and has often been instrumental to various definitions of identity. Some major historical and cultural episodes concerning the int…[Read more]

Descartes’ Regulae are the first text in which the idea of ​​a universal mathematics is put in connection with algebra. Young Descartes thinks of geometrical figures as a representation of algebraic procedures so as to guarantee its feasibility: i.e., an epistemological foundation of analysis. The young Leibniz starts from a similar problem. He…[Read more]

The role of insensible appetitions (similar to insensible perceptions, or petites perceptions) in Leibniz’s theory of appetite and will is sketched. Since such insensible appetitions are the medium of interaction, through the body, between the individual and the physical world, and the form in which, at a microscopic level, environmental…[Read more]

IL REALE E L’IMMAGINARIO. Critica dell’infinito e dell’infinitesimo. Continuo reale e ideale. La metafisica del calcolo. Immaginario e immaginazione. Bibliografia

The paper addresses the first phase in the reception of Leibniz’s Monadology, starting with Johann Christoph Gottsched’s dissertation of 1721, until the publication of the essays presented for the prize question on monads proposed by the Berlin Academy of Sciences 25 years later. A critical edition of Gottsched’s “Dubia circa monades L…[Read more]

METAFISICA E MATEMATICA. Continuo e discreto. L’ambiguità dell’attimo. Il principio di continuità. Forza viva e forza morta. Tra Platone e Democrito