Robert Kirkman
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 6
And now, at last, the conclusion to “Practices and Practicing in Human Moral Development.” VI. Postscript on the Practice of Mimetic Pedagogy So much for the formal conclusions of this brief investigation of human moral development through the lens provided by Merlin Donald. Questions remain, of course, especially concerning how a “mimetic pedagogy” might actually… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 5
The heading of this installment declares it to be the conclusion of the paper, but this isn’t the last installment of “Practices and Practicing in Human Moral Development.” A postscript – or maybe a coda? – is yet to come, with some initial thoughts on what a “mimetic pedagogy” for ethics might look like. V.… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 4
IV. Practicing Throughout his account of moral virtues, Aristotle (2002) often falls back on analogies with more immediately familiar kinds of human endeavor. On the way to his first definition of the highest good, for example, he considers what might be the work – the fundamental, species-defining task or function – of being human by… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), part 3
The third installment of “Practices and Practices in Human Moral Development” is the most direct extension of the “Tuning-In Relationship” paper, building on the connection between music and ethics. III. Practices Part of human sense-making arises from participation in shared ways of doing things. We more readily “tune in” with others who are participating in… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 2
The framework for the paper derives from the work of Merlin Donald, who identified three broad stages in the development of human cognition, characterized mimetic, mythic, and theoretic modes of memory and representation, respectively. Philosophers tend to preoccupy themselves with the theoretic mode, sometimes with a dash of the mythic or narrative mode, but how… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 1
Following hard on the heels of “The ‘Tuning-In’ Relationship” was a second paper on the intertwining of human music-making, human social life, and moral development, this time with an evolutionary twist. In particular, I pick up from and/or expand upon the last section of the previous paper, on practices. There were some loose threads I… Continue reading
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The Tuning-In Relationship (2023), Part 5
And now, at last, the conclusion to my 2023 paper, “The ‘Tuning-In’ Relationship in Music and in Ethics.” I’ll let it speak for itself. Practices An appeal to embodiment may be necessary to account for the tuning-in relationship, but it is not sufficient. Gestures and other bodily cues that mean one thing in one context… Continue reading
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The Tuning-In Relationship (2023), Part 4
Digging deeper into the phenomenology of making music together and thence to the phenomenology of social life, the next section of my 2023 paper concerns embodiment. Making music together is something we do as living beings of a species with a peculiar history, a species with a distinctive way of experiencing our own embodiment. Does… Continue reading