The Erotic Reconstitution of Democratic Life: From Socrates to Today

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Although we are in “a battle for the soul of democracy,” almost nothing has been done to raise public consciousness about what that means. This session, and related surrounding conversations, seek to remedy that: to show how our philosophically instituting and politically institutionalizing souful eros as the educational principle of democratic life is the definitive long-range solution not just for our current political woes but for the psycho-logical woes underlying them. We seek to show the Socratic Revolution laying the basis for an erotic democracy to still be the most fundamental revolution in human history. And how the central task of our times may well be first to draw up and then to submit for popular approval its definitive constitution.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Philosophical Studies in Education

Cosponsor

• SIG-Dewey Studies

Chair

• Bruce J. Novak, Foundation for Ethics and Meaning

Papers

• Unearthing the Erotically and Poetically Democratic Plato - Jill Frank, Cornell University

• The Cultivation of Personhood as the Soil of the Erotic Soul - David T. Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Illuminating the Simultaneously Interior and Interpersonal Dynamic of Soulful Learning - Rebecca Sullivan, Montrose School

• A Journey to Leadership in a University Both Socially Woke and Soulfully Awake - Stanton E. F. Wortham, Boston College

• Unearthing a Natural Transcendentalism: Neuro-Phenomenology and the Poetic Neo-Platonism of the Late Dewey and Husserl - Bruce J. Novak, Foundation for Ethics and Meaning

Discussants

• Kerry T Burch, Northern Illinois University

• Cara Elizabeth Furman, Hunter College - CUNY