Tag Archives: philosophy/religion

Term of Art: Polysemy

“polysemy: The property of a single word which has two or more distinct but related senses. Thus the noun screen is polysemous, since it is used variously of a fire screen, a cinema screen, a television screen, and so on.

Compare homonymy. The difference, in principle, is that in cases of homonymy the senses are quite unconnected; therefore they are not treated as belonging to the same word. But in many cases, it is hard to decide, and in theories of meaning the distinction is not always seen as valid.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Konrad Adenauer on History

“History is the sum total of all the things that could have been avoided.”

Konrad Adenauer

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Rotten Reviews: The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser

“The tediousness of continued allegory, and that too seldom striking or ingenious, has also contributed to render the Faerie Queen peculiarly tiresome…Spenser maintains his place upon the shelves, among our English classics; but he is seldom seen on the table.”

David Hume, in The History of Great Britain 1759

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998. 

Rene Descartes

Here is a reading on Rene Descartes along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I’ve had exactly one request for this material in 17 years of teaching, which is why it exists. If, like me, you’ve had students in special education classes who were there on account of acting-out behavior, and not because they were learning disabled. I prepared this for just such a student, who was exceptionally intelligent, but suffered from an inordinate love of fisticuffs.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Ted Sizer on Understanding

“Understanding…[is] the development of powers of discrimination and judgment…. Understanding is more stimulated than learned. It grows from questioning oneself and being questioned by others.”

Theodore Sizer

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

Kurt Godel

Here is a reading on Kurt Godel along with its attendant vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet. There is room in the document–and the latitude, as, like most other things on Mark’s Text Terminal, these are Word documents that can be edited for your students’ needs–to deal with some of the abstractions Godel’s work deals with.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Term of Art: Heuristic

heu*ris*tic adj

  1. serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.
  2. encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or by trial and error: a heuristic teaching method.
  3. of, pertaining to, or based on experimentation, evaluation, or trial and error methods.
  4. Computers, Math. Pertaining to a trial-and-error method of problem solving method used when an algorithmic method is impractical. –
  5. a heuristic method of argument.
  6. the study of heuristic procedure….

Flexner, Stuart Berg, and Lenore Crary Hauck, eds. Random House Unabridged Dictionary. New York: Random House, 1993.

Nietzsche on Protestantism

“Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity—and of reason.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Plato

Finally this morning, here is a reading on Plato and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet if you teach him in the context of global studies, English language arts, or even a philosophy class. This is a short but solid general introduction to ancient Greek thought in general and Plato in particular.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Term of Art: Historical Materialism

“Historical Materialism: A term applied by Karl Marx himself to his theory of society and history. ‘History entailed the analysis of how particular forms of society had come into existence, and the specific historical concepts within which apparently universal or eternal social forms—state, religion, market, and so forth—were located. Materialism denoted the rejection of Hegelian idealism and the primacy of socio-economic processes and relations. A sustained attempt to defend Marx’s account of the determining role in history played by the productive forces is made by William H. Shaw (Marx’s Theory of History, 1978).”

Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.