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What is the ultimate end of higher education? Giambattista Vico, echoing Socrates’s Delphic oracle, claimed that the ultimate end of all education is self-knowledge. I fully agree with Vico’s claim, but also radically extend his idea about education, in accordance with contemporary and futuristic Kantianism, and then apply it specifically to contemporary and near-future higher education. In 1784, Kant published an essay called “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in which he argued that the fundamental thesis of “enlightenment” or Aufklärung is that all rational human animals are strictly obligated to think for themselves and to act freely, with resolution and courage, in accordance with sufficient respect for their own and everyone else’s human dignity. Taking together Vico’s Socratic idea about self-knowledge, with Kant’s idea about enlightenment, and then creatively revising-&-updating them both to fit the contemporary 21st century existential, moral, and sociopolitical predicament of humankind, then in my view, the ultimate end of higher education is not only (i) self-knowledge, but also (ii) rational autonomy in thinking, caring, and acting, (iii) authentic human creativity, and (iv) sufficient respect for everyone’s human dignity. In turn, the four-part conjunction of these ultimate ends is what I call radical enlightenment. Therefore, I’m saying that the ultimate end of higher education is radical enlightenment.

In Hegel’s Philosophy of History, one encounters the idea of the “cunning of reason” [List der Vernunft], which describes the unintended (universal) consequences of (particular) individual actions. However, the Philosophy of History is one of the most (if not the most) maligned of Hegel’s works, attacked by non-specialists and anti-Hegelians who use it to easily stereotype and dismiss Hegel, for instance, as a teleological anti-individualist, while most serious Hegel interpreters avoid this work at all costs. To redress the lack of serious attention to Hegel’s Philosophy of History, this paper aims to offer the strongest possible reading of Hegel’s weakest “text,” reading it alongside his strongest, the Science of Logic, thereby bringing together two seemingly contradictory instances of the cunning of reason in Hegel’s corpus. In the Logic, the cunning of reason shows how the universal emerges through the means which individuals use toward their particular ends. However, in the Philosophy of History, the cunning of reason describes how the universal acts through individuals, as it were, behind their backs and, problematically, Hegel goes on to claim that the universal (spirit [Geist]) ultimately sacrifices individuals on the “slaughter bench” of history to advance its own purpose(s). This paper’s two-part thesis is: (1) the cunning of reason in the Philosophy of History is an internal illusion of the structure of cunning of reason in the Logic, and (2) this illusion is absolutely necessary. In particular, this paper builds upon the Hegel interpretations of Todd McGowan and Slavoj Žižek.

Hermeneutic analysis (Hermeneutics) of texts is a new branch of Islamic studies that seeks to discover the messages, signs and hidden meanings of revelation and Quranic verses. The mystical views of Mohy al-Din Ibn Arabi, one of the greatest mystics of the Islamic world, are mostly based on the meta-textual hermeneutics assigned to him and interpretations far from the appearance of Quranic verses Hermeneutical views of Ibn Arabi of revelation and Quranic verses can be assayed and studied in his works including Futuhat Al Makkyyah, Fusus Al Hikam as well as the Quranic exegeses which are attributed to him. In present essay, we first study Ibn Arabi’s general perspective of “Revelation” and then continue to discuss the hermeneutic analysis of his theory of “Continuous Revelation” and finally we compare Ibn Arabi’s theory with Roland Barthes’ theory of “Open-Closed Texts”. The results of the present study show that the manifestation and emergence of the mystical theory of “Continuous Revelation” is of a literary and artistic nature and despite certain differences, one can find considerable similarities and compatibilities with the theory of “Closed-Open Texts”. To put it otherwise, this essay explains the considerable similarity of Ibn Arabi’s mystical theory of “continuous revelation” and Roland Barthes’ “closed-open texts” from the point of view of the emergence and infusion of hermeneutical meanings in/ into the reader’s mind and demonstrates that regardless of the mystical nature of the theory of “continuous revelation” its objective appearance and emergence has taken form based on the literary and artistic dimensions.

Following the advances in AI produced by the deep learning revolution (2012 to present), AI now has a whole range of applications in industry and commerce. Unfortunately, many of these applications are widely considered to be morally wrong. This situation is illustrated by the example of deepfake pornography. Other examples are more nuanced and there is argument about whether they are morally wrong or not. This is illustrated by the example of targeted advertising which has been defended as acceptable. The arguments for and against targeted advertising are discussed. An account is given of an interesting experiment by Janet Vertesi in which she tried to keep her pregnancy a secret from marketing companies and ended up by being suspected of criminal activity. The conclusion is that targeted advertising is bad and should be abolished.

Experience and subjectivity influence how texts are read, with reading involving “filling in the blanks”. This impacts the usefulness of intercoder reliability exercises in collaborative textbook analysis. Specifically, scholars’ individual backgrounds limit possibilities for substantive and meaningful intercoder reliability, particularly in international, cross-cultural, and multicultural settings. In this case, reliability is a problematic goal in textbook content analysis, possibly precluding substantive recognition of reader subjectivity—of researchers as well as students and teachers. In contrast, we argue that collaboration in textbook research can reveal the multifaceted nature of texts and generate multi-perspectival interpretations which are more meaningful in diverse contexts.