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Stung by Edward Dowden’s reluctance to endorse the Irish Literary Revival, W. B. Yeats distanced himself publicly from the TCD Professor. This act of distancing has largely been accepted by subsequent scholarship as a reflection of Dowden’s lack of influence on Yeats. Despite obvious disagreements on some key points, this essay will argue that Yeats is close to Dowden on a number of issues, by tracing their intimate dialogue about the writings of George Eliot, Shakespeare and Goethe. The concept of formation of character—an English translation of the German Bildung—will prove central to their related responses to the question of what sort of life is best suited to further the development of literary gifts. These findings are framed by a discussion of Yeats’s profound, and often underestimated, indebtedness to Victorian culture and ideas, and the essay also traces the biographical background to these two writers’ changing relationship.

The aim of this master's thesis is to describe information literacy from an outlook of critical pedagogy. The starting points in the thesis are the meaning of information literacy in the context of information society, the debate about the definition of the concept and the definition of literacy in the tradition of Paulo Freire's pedagogy. The main focus of the first part of the thesis is to explicate, in relation to the functionalist interpretation, the alternative understandings of information literacy (the phenomenographical, sociocultural and the perspective of discourse analysis) as current theoretical perspectives of the concept. In the second part the author describes the state of the information literacy debate on the basis of general philosophical frameworks which shape its main conceptualizations. This entails the conflict of poststructuralist and the outlook of information literacy based on critical theory. The position of critical pedagogy is presented as reconstructivist i.e. the position which arises from its refusal to abandon the positive naratives of the modern age, different from the poststructuralist critique of metanaratives. To explain the pedagogical relevance of information literacy author looks to the German notion of Bildung as conceived by critical theorists of the Frankfurt school. The idea of education is presented as the key orientation in the reconstructivist agenda of critical theory. In the last part of the thesis author explores the thoughts of authors that have in so far tried to think about information literacy based on critical pedagogy. This is done through the perspectives of three authors: Cees Hamelink, James Elmborg and Andrew Whitworth. Whitworth's view is further explicated in relation to the theory of transformative learning while information literacy is also being connected to transformative approaches to education in general. Conclusively, because of different theoretical perspectives of information literacy the author attempts to find reasons why future developments of the concept should consider the perspective of philosophy of science as well as the potential of information literacy to be thought of as a scientific paradigm.

Este ensayo explora la relación entre el fenómeno de la estupidez y la construcción de la subjetividad. A partir de la lectura de dos ensayos clásicos sobre la estupidez, el de Robert Musil y el de Eduard Erdmann, se establece el carácter paradójco de la estupidez. Por un lado equivale a la incapacidad para adoptar puntos de vista distintos del propio, y,
en esa medida, puede ser corregida por el proceso de la Bildung, de la adquisición de la facultad de juzgar y, con ello, de la formación de una subjetividad propia. El Juicio, sobre todo, que requiere precisamente
de esos puntos de vista ajenos, tal como se muestra, con notables implicaciones políticas y críticas, en la obra de Hannah Arendt y en la tercera crítica de Kant. Por otro lado, la estupidez es un concepto práctico de las relaciones intersubjetivas que responde a la opacidad de las conductas ajenas; pero, también, y sobre todo, la estupidez da cuenta del núcleo más íntimo e irreductible de cada subjetividad: aquel que no puede ser recogido por ningún juicio. La estupidez tiene así una
relación paradójica en la constitución de los sujetos.

The paper explores the notion of ‘the subject’ in the context of education as an alternative to more limited concepts such as the student or learner. Drawing on the thought of Cornelius Castoriadis, the subject under consideration is a conscious, self-reflective subject that organizes and modifies itself in relation to a world of significations. Through the capacity for conscious self-modification, the subject becomes a self-reflective agent in a socially instituted world of significations. For Castoriadis, this kind of subjectivity is not readily available in every kind of social organization; rather, it is a possible product of a society that has instituted itself explicitly or autonomously. This socially instituted reflexivity is for Castoriadis historically associated with democracy, politics and philosophy. In the second part, the discussion is extended to the non-human realm and the world of the living being. Here, too, meaning—or proto-meaning in the case of the living being—is a constituent in the formation of a world. In this discussion, where Francisco Varela is an important source, concepts such as meaning, signification, normativity and purpose are introduced in the natural sciences, or rather, the sciences of human and non-human nature. The aim of the paper is twofold: on the one hand, to introduce pedagogical reflections into discussions about human on non-human nature; and, on the other, to develop a richer conceptual repertoire for exploring educational phenomena than what is immediately available. An important background, in both cases, is the possibility of ecological crisis, which poses new problems for educators.

Bedrijfskunde is verreweg de populairste studie van Nederland. Iedereen heeft wel een algemeen beeld van de inhoud van deze studie: je leert over management, economie en boekhouden. Maar wat is eigenlijk het ideaal dat in bedrijfskundestudies schuilgaat?

Este artigo discutirá como o romance A Montanha Mágica (1924), de Thomas Mann, pode iluminar a compreensão do conceito de liberdade e como será tanto fonte quanto objeto de estudo deste texto, além da pretensão de demonstrar a relevância do Humanismo, visão de mundo recorrente neste livro, como chave
de compreensão do mundo moderno.