Group items tagged

The questions addressed included: can a world of 9-10 billion people vote its way to a sustainable future - or are new forms of leadership (even forms of authoritarian rule) going to be necessary? Are the rising global powers (China, India and Brazil among them) best placed to move towards more sustainable forms of development?

What of the link between democracy and sustainable development? Most respondents held that voter pressure meant that democracy was of benefit to sustainable development. Yet consultation with a more specialised group of experts found that only 28% believed that capitalism (often paired with democracy in its liberal variant) aided sustainable development, against 36% who said that capitalism inhibited it. Overall, Doug Miller saw in the figures an activation of people's survival instinct: as the planet "speaks" through extreme weather events, citizens are starting to listen.

Many of the issues the roundtable addressed had been highlighted in a keynote paper commissioned ahead of the meeting from Ian Christie. This made four basic propositions about democracy, ecologically sustainable development, and environmental/sustainability campaign organisations (SD-NGOs). He argued that together, these phenomena offer a paradox about the relationship between democracy, civil society and sustainability; and that resolving it is now an urgent and complex task - for the west, for newly industrialised democracies, and for emergent democratic civil society in the global south.

As the cultural historian Markman Ellis writes, in Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, the British coffee house, a “heady combination of news, literature, debate and writing”, was “the central locus of newly egalitarian practices of discussion and conversation, including forms of structured discourse, such as lectures and debates, as well as unregulated discourse, such as gossip and chatter”.

The freedom of speech led to time-wasting and “gabbling” (“Here men carried by instinct sipp muddy water, and like Frogs confusedly murmur Insignificant Notes, which tickle their own ears, and, to their inharmonious sense, make Music of jarring strings”). The education on offer was “a school . . . without a master”.

The eighteenth-century coffee house was undoubtedly a great vehicle for the reading of newspapers. A Continental observer in the late eighteenth century noted that, whereas the French coffee house was a place where games were played, in Britain “you neither see billiards nor backgammon tables” because people frequent coffee houses principally to read “the PAPERS”. There was a close and sometimes volatile relationship between the coffee-men and the newspaper-men, which came to a head in 1728, when the coffee-men launched an abortive scheme for setting up their own newspapers. Coffee shops had long been used as places for reading papers without having to pay for them. The coffee-men resented the high price of newspapers and the fact that there were so many of them. The newspaper-men objected that coffee houses relied on newspapers to attract custom. There is a comparable symbiosis now between cafés and information, whether in the form of newspapers (Starbucks has an exclusive deal with The Times, Costa with the Daily Telegraph) or internet connection. It is hard to see which party owes most to whom. As a pamphleteer of 1729 wrote, “Papers mutually beget company, and Company papers”.

Danto has argued that what all works of art have in common is that they all relate in some way to an `artworld', to an accepted artistic theory, or to the history of art as a whole. So if someone puts a toilet in the middle of an art gallery and calls it art, then it is art if (and only if) it makes sense in the history of the development of art over the centuries. Maybe the history of art was just ready for a toilet in an art gallery then, and what distinguishes it from ordinary toilets are the interpretations which those educated in art history put upon it. Danto has a view of the development of the history of art inspired by Hegel. He claims that eventually, through its growing consciousness of itself, art becomes philosophy and thus comes to an end.

To be sure, the desire to live in a modern society and to be free of tyranny is universal, or nearly so. This is demonstrated by the efforts of millions of people each year to move from the developing to the developed world, where they hope to find the political stability, job opportunities, health care, and education that they lack at home. But this is different from saying that there is a universal desire to live in a liberal society – that is, a political order characterized by a sphere of individual rights and the rule of law. The desire to live in a liberal democracy is, indeed, something acquired over time, often as a byproduct of successful modernization.

The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a “post-historical” world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Outside powers like the US can often help in this process by the example they set as politically and economically successful societies. They can also provide funding, advice, technical assistance, and yes, occasionally military force to help the process along.

In The Public and its Problems (p. 365), he admitted that "it is not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry on the needed investigations; what is required is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns."

What is true in the Netherlands and Europe is true all over the world: reducing the inequalities that exist between men and women is not only a matter of justice; it also makes economic sense.

According to the Dutch historians Tine de Moor and Jan Luyten van Zanden, the early break with patriarchy in Europe in the late Middle-Ages (1200-1500) accounts for the rise of capitalism and growing prosperity in the Western World. Girls were no longer married off, but selected their own spouses. As a result, it became worthwhile for parents to invest in girls’ education and wellbeing.

Laura Kyrke-Smith

“Strauss’s interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end,” Burnyeat argued. “There is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of ‘the philosopher’ but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.”

Strauss said, political philosophy is good for something: “If for no other purpose, at least in order to defend a reasonable policy against overgenerous or utopian thought, we would need a genuine political philosophy reminding us of the limits set to all human hopes and wishes.”

“I was certainly struck by how very skeptical he was for the prospects of establishing democracy in Germany,” Tarcov says. In “Re-education,” Strauss doubted that a just government in Germany could be constructed after the war, at least not if the effort were left to the Allies. “A form of government which is merely imposed by a victorious enemy will not last,” Strauss predicted. “Only Germans, only Germans who remained in Germany and shared all the misery of Nazi rule and of defeat, can do it. Only they will be able to speak a language understandable to post-Hitlerian Germany.”

And let me say that commitment to international action on justice means today to prevent genocide, the world must through the U.N, urgently act in Darfur.

Most of all my parents taught me that each of us should live by a moral compass.It was a simple faith with a fundamental optimism.That each and every one of us has a talent.Each of us a duty to use that talent.And each of us should have the chance to develop that talent. And my parents thought we should use whatever talent we had to help people least able to help themselves. And as I grew up surrounded by books, sports, music and encouragement, I saw at school and beyond how some flourished and others, denied these opportunities, fell behind. They had talent, they had ability. But they did not have the chance to fulfil their promise. They needed someone to champion them. They needed the support of people on their side. And is not our history the story of yes, progress through the fulfilled talents, even genius, of some but, yes, also of the wasted potential of millions for too many, their talents lost and forever unfulfilled?

Strip away the rhetoric about globalisation and it comes down to one essential truth: You can buy raw materials from anywhere,You can borrow capital form anywhere,You can engage with technology half way across the world,But you cannot buy from elsewhere what in the global economy you need most; the skills and the creativity of all our people – and that means that in education we must aim to be number one.