Shifting Baselines explores the real-world implications of a groundbreaking idea: we must understand the oceans of the past to protect the oceans of the future. In 1995, acclaimed marine biologist Daniel Pauly coined the term "shifting baselines" to describe a phenomenon of lowered expectations, in which each generation regards a progressively poorer natural world as normal. This seminal volume expands on Pauly's work, showing how skewed visions of the past have led to disastrous ...

This book initiates fresh pedagogic thinking on the nature of intelligence and human potentiality in the midst of a rising panic over so-called artificial intelligence. At the rate of current advancement, entire social and cultural landscapes including education and work are going to change in unprecedented ways in the near future. In light of these developments, the author sets out to critically assess the role of education in creating the capacity to distinguish between machinic “intelli...

This book provides a new understanding of art education, connecting art, necessity, and pedagogy. Plenty has been written about art education, but its potential contribution to inner autonomy and existential emancipation due to the re-articulation of time and space in art has not been adequately explored in a pedagogic context. This book explores art as an affective continuum--not a plaything of culture, but rather a mode of alignment of the existential Eros with our ontological truth.

This book argues that global crises such as the present Covid-19 pandemic are correlates of the contemporary thought regime that it calls technohumanism. Taking up the pandemic as the central case in point, the book shows how the basic assumptions of technohumanism encourage large-scale dependencies and a consequent loss of endurance in the populace. Next, it shows that a form of recuperation can be pedagogically attempted by means of a “psychoanalysis” of thought which releases it from th...

This book presents authentic educational experience as the actualization of a potential within a phenomenological field whose axes consist of the somatic, the psychic, and the symbolic, thereby rejecting the one-dimensionality of contemporary education that is primarily mind-oriented. The author insists on the nature of experiencing as coming to be in a living tension between the intuition and the intellect, or the inner and the outer, and calls this a pedagogy of the twice-born. Within th...

This book facilitates a missing dialogue between the secular and the transsecular dimensions of human existence. It explores two kinds of limits of the secular: the inadequacies of its assumptions with respect to the total being of the human, and how it curbs the ontological sensibilities of the human. Kaustuv Roy argues that since secular reason of modernity can only represent the empirical dimension of existence, humans are forced to privatize the non-empirical dimension of being. It is ...

This book engages with the dynamic intersection of several domains such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, and pedagogy, in order to critically analyze and reinvent our understanding of curriculum. The chapters raise important questions such as: what are the conditions of possibility for a living curriculum in which Eros and intellect (or reason and intuition) are not separated? How is it possible to escape ideology that keeps us bound to defunct categories? What are the ingredients of ...

This book identifies and expands upon the link between ontology and education, exposing a lack of ontological inquiry as the vital missing element in the study and practice of modern education today. In this book, Roy aims to reintroduce ontological thinking and reasoning that grounds historical and modern educational understandings and practice. Beginning with a historical perspective, he then turns to examine the results of his scholarship into practical concerns of education such as lan...

Against the backdrop of a historical debate between science and philosophy with regard to the nature of time, this book argues that our commonsense understanding of time is inadequate—especially for education. Teachers’ work is heavily imbued with the effects of clock time, and yet there is another time—duration—which remains out of sight precisely because our sights are filled with temporal things and projections of futurality. The book rests primarily on Henri Bergson’s work on ...

This book explores the possibility of philosophical praxis by weaving an ontological thread through four principal thinkers: Heidegger, Schelling, Goethe, and Heraclitus. It argues that a special kind of redemptive power awaits the structural understanding of thought that is beyond semantic formations such as concepts and ideational systems. The author claims that the “power” is negative in nature, trans-personal, and derived directly from the understanding of thought as a structural pulse...

Why is it so many of us lack contentment, despite all the wealth and freedoms we enjoy?The past two centuries delivered individual and political freedoms that promised unprecedented opportunities for personal fulfilment. Yet citizens of affluent countries are encouraged to pursue lives of consumerism, endless choice and the pleasures of the body.Clive Hamilton argues that the paradox of modern consumer life is that we are deprived of our inner freedom by our very pursuit of...

Is it possible to be spiritual and yet not believe in the supernatural? Can a person be spiritual without belonging to a religious group or organization? In this book philosopher Robert Solomon offers challenging answers to these questions as he explodes commonly held myths about what is means to be spiritual in today's pluralistic world. Based on Solomon's own struggles to reconcile philosophy with religion Spirituality for the Skeptic offers a model of a vibrant fulfilling spirituality t...