Richard Peter Bailey

I examine Harry Frankfurt’s work on caring, love, and the structure of the will as a resource for understanding meaning in life. I distinguish meaning in life from happiness and moral goodness and situate Frankfurt within subjectivist, objectivist, and hybrid theories. I then reconstruct an implicit Frankfurtian account in which a life is meaningful when it is shaped by self-defining cares and loves that generate volitional necessity and narrative coherence. I argue that Frankfurt identifies the subjective conditions of meaningful living rather than offering a complete theory of meaning. This is a substantive feature of his position: reasons are grounded in what persons care about and love, not in objective standards. Building on this insight, I develop a constructive Frankfurt-inspired hybrid account that combines the subjective structure of caring with evaluative reflection on the worthiness of what is loved. This proposal is a philosophical and theological extension of Frankfurt’s account, not an interpretation of his own position. It preserves his analysis of caring, love, and volitional necessity while treating meaningful lives as requiring both wholehearted commitment and concern for evaluative worth. I conclude by considering implications for philosophy, theology, and empirical research.

Educational theory has often been organised by representational models that treat learning as the acquisition, storage, and manipulation of internal symbolic content. Recent work in radical enactive cognition, sensorimotor enactivism, and ecological psychology challenges this assumption by locating cognition in embodied, situated, and environmentally structured activity. This article synthesises these philosophical developments with empirical work in embodied design, multimodal learning, teacher noticing, and hybrid learning environments. Its central concern is the epistemic pivot through which coordinated bodily action becomes disciplinary discourse: how learners move from perceptual-motor engagement with tasks, artefacts, and others to forms of reasoning that can be named, justified, assessed, and institutionally recognised. We argue that non-representational pedagogy should not be understood as a rejection of language, symbolic artefacts, or explicit instruction. Rather, it reframes these as mediating practices that stabilise and transform embodied participation. The analysis clarifies implications for curriculum design, teacher education, assessment, inclusive pedagogy, and AI-supported hybrid learning environments, while cautioning against treating embodiment as a general pedagogical slogan. A viable non-representational pedagogy must explain how embodied activity is organised, redescribed, and authorised as knowledge within educational institutions.

“Martial arts” is a popular phrase in popular and academic discourse but notoriously difficult to define. This article addresses the challenge of defining martial arts, demonstrating the multifarious and sometimes contradictory nature of how the term is conceived in different contexts. Consulting a range of perspectives, the article is critical of essentialist positions in locating a permanent set of features common to all martial arts because definitions under such positions fail to consider these practices’ fluidity, hybridity, and historical evolution. Instead, the article advances a more pragmatic and contextual definition of martial arts, appealing to nominalism and diaeresis to build context-specific definitions appropriate for particular analytical or practical purposes. Acknowledging the diversity and complexity inherent in martial arts, the article suggests that scholars and practitioners can move beyond strict classification and engage in more fruitful discussions regarding these practices’ history, culture, and philosophy. Lastly, the article promotes a more inclusive and dynamic system that recognises both traditional and modern forms of martial arts without being constrained by the strictures of essentialist definitions.

Truth has had a hard time in much recent educational and social scientific writing. Veriphobia, the fear of truth, can be witnessed in the work of postmodernists, radical social constructivists, pragmatists, and others. Although it manifests itself in numerous ways, there remain certain frequently appearing symptoms, and these are examined in this paper. It is suggested that the veriphobic stance is inherently self-contradictory. It is also fatal for serious and meaningful research and inquiry. Once veriphobia has been treated, researchers can stop worrying and start loving truth again.

ABSTRACT Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in the topic of a meaningful life among philosophers, psychologists, and the general public. Yet despite this interest, the thinker who is perhaps most closely associated with meaning and mental health, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, has been largely overlooked by academic researchers. This article offers some redress to this situation by exploring the status of his central idea, the Will to Meaning, by locating it within contemporary philosophical discussions of Meaning in Life, and examining the coherence of the difference elements of Frankl’s published works. A combination of biographical, historical and philosophical analysis, including reference to the thinkers who helped his ideas, such as Kierkegaard and Scheler, provides a constructively critical account of Frankl’s existential theory of meaning. It is suggested that Frankl’s theory, with amendments, provides a useful contribution to contemporary discussions in the field.

Thomas Kuhn is a rarity. Widely regarded as one of the most influential theorists of the physical sciences, he has also, largely through his concept of the ‘paradigm’, had a sustained effect on the social sciences and education. His classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is read and cited by scholars in an astonishing range of disciplines, in part due to its acquired association with progressive social research and practice. This article takes issue with Kuhn’s conceptions of science and its translation into educational practice, and suggests that they do not deserve the warm embrace they have received. It is argued that Kuhn’s popularity among progressive thinkers is somewhat ironic, since his portrayal of ‘normal science education’ is inherently indoctrinatory, presenting insurmountable barriers to acceptance as part of a liberal educational philosophy.