Intelligence Reconsidered
Realities of Teaching at the Age of AI: Between the “Humanistic” Goals and the Concrete Situations
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Metka Zupancic
The focus of this paper is teaching French within a department of applied linguistics at the University of Primorsko in Slovenia, with a program of interlingual interactions that focuses, in this case, mostly on the relationships between English and French, with an addition of a primary language, Slovene. The author of this paper, a Professor Emerita from the University of Alabama, with over forty years of higher-education experiences, has recently been teaching (by contract) a variety of French courses that raise concerns about students’ autonomy in a particular language and the acquisition of their skills that are profoundly affected by their extensive use of AI. The new students’ attitudes and behaviors toward learning in general have radically put in question the established forms of teaching and the humanities values on which teachers have been basing their methodologies. More largely, the core humanities values that have been privileged for decades if not even for centuries have recently been affected in unpredictable ways that ultimately concern students’ capacities to think independently and act accordingly, not just in an academic setting, but in their preparation for an active professional life.
In the Picture: Paintings as Organizational Behavior
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session James Callaghan
The question “What is art?” is a commonplace of basic discussions – and courses - of art and aesthetics. A less common – but more interesting – formulation inquires what it means when we ask what it is that an artist (broadly understood) creates when they create a work of art. Instead, such inquiries have frequently defaulted since the time of Plato to discussions involving mimesis, the relation of art to reality, what constitutes beauty and how it is to be evaluated, or aspects of psychology or cultural significance. To be sure, all such aspects are (in fact) relevant – but is that what an artist sets out to accomplish, and is that what the viewer, reader, or listener seeks? Although a brilliant and entertaining writer, one wonders if Plato ever gave genuine concerted – non-polemical – thought to the mechanics and purposes of that craft; investigations that might have better colored his aesthetics. As the Middle Ages began to wane, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) - a practicing writer and under-recognized theoretician – brought a poet’s consideration to such matters. Scattered amongst his writings, Boccaccio’s brief observations on the crafting of poems and paintings help shed light upon the creative endeavor, its products, and their meaning(s). Leveraging thoughts from Boccaccio, plus modern theorists and semioticians, the author presents a portrait of the purpose, mechanics, atmospherics, and importance of artistic creation that challenges conventional aesthetic principles rooted (still) in essentially Platonistic and Albertian sources.
Issues in Historical Methodologies in the Research of Nationalism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Golda Akhiezer
One of the problems in humanities research is that the use of methodologies belonging to specific schools of thought frequently yields opposite conclusions about the same object under study. This phenomenon often appears in the field of historical research and cultural studies, where the interpretation of processes from the viewpoint of historical materialism, deconstructivism, positivism, and various other scholarly trends at times create different and often incompatible histories or models of culture. One of the striking examples of this state of affairs is the research on nationalism which attracted a noticeable scholarly attention from the second half of the 20th century. Its history, aspects of its development, and its other features have become the subject of investigation by numerous scholars. Their conclusions contradict one another about the same aspects related to the phenomenon of nationalism, sometimes presenting black and white picture. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate major factors for the methodological pitfalls of historical research in the case of the study of nationalism, and to suggest possible ways of avoiding them.
