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This chapter examines the philosophical dimensions of Vygotsky's legacy. Vygotsky was a profoundly original thinker, but he was not one whose independence of thought caused him to neglect the ideas of others. On the contrary, Vygotsky was exceptionally well-read. He had an impressive command of the European psychological literature and considerable knowledge of adjacent fields, such as anthropology and educational theory. His appreciation of literature and literary theory is well-known and justly celebrated. Less often remarked upon, however, is his debt to philosophy. In this field, too, he was well-versed, having majored in philosophy and history at the Shanyavsky People's University. Vygotsky was much influenced by the philosophical vision of Marx and Engels: Almost all of the many references to their writings in Vygotsky's Collected Works are to philosophical themes. He was also inspired by a number of philosophers who had influenced Marx and Engels, notably Hegel (whom Vygotsky had read in high school), Spinoza, and Feuerbach. Marxism and its antecedents, however, by no means exhaust Vygotsky's philosophical interests. He cites numerous other philosophers, including Aristotle, Bergson, Brentano, Descartes, Dewey, Dilthey, Fichte, Hobbes, Husserl, James, Kant, Lichtenberg, Malebranche, Nietzsche, Neurath, Plato, and Scheler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L. S. Vygotsky was an early twentieth-century Russian psychologist whose writing exerts a significant influence on the development of social theory in the early years of the twenty-first century. The greater part of his legacy was produced in the 10 years that preceded his death in 1934. It now influences a wide range of disciplines and professions. His nondeterministic, nonreductionist account of the formation of mind provides current theoretical developments with a broadly drawn, yet very powerful sketch of the ways in which humans shape and are shaped by social, cultural, and historical conditions. As David Bakhurst notes in Chapter 2, Vygotsky insisted that in order to understand the mature human mind, we must comprehend the processes from which it emerges. These ideas were originally forged at a time of rapid and intense social upheaval following the Russian Revolution. They were developed by a scholar who was charged with developing a state system for the education of “pedagogically neglected” children (Yaroshevsky, 1989, p. 96). This group included the homeless, of which there were a very large number. Thus, he was working at a time of profound social change (which was influenced by the Soviet adaptation of Marxist theory to social and political practice) and also working with a group of people who had profoundly different cultural experiences from “mainstream” members of society. He sought ways of intervening in the lives of these young people that would either compensate for or ameliorate their experience of marginalization. Consequently, it is, in some way, unsurprising that he should have attempted to develop a theory of social, cultural, and historical formation of the human mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1991, a human corpse was used in a sculpture by an American artist; and another artist dipped a crucifix in a container filled with his own urine to make a model called Piss Christ. In 1990, the controversial photographs of the late Robert Mapplethorpe were exhibited, including depictions of one man stuffing his fist up another man's rectum. All of these cases provoked massive controversy, and they were part of a wider pattern of debate in the developed – some might say, overdeveloped – nations of the West. In February 1989, a British jury had ruled that the use of human foetuses as earrings in a work of art was an outrage to public decency. The ten-to-two majority, far from being seen as conclusive, provoked a new debate: should they have the right to dictate what can or cannot be enjoyed by the minority? That question of a desirable balance between expressive freedom and the social order is as old as the law itself, but it has been posed with particular intensity in the past century, ever since art proclaimed itself the new religion and Matthew Arnold proclaimed that the place of the priests would now be taken by poets. The high modernists contended that life was justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, or else not at all. This led them to challenge bourgeois proprieties in a series of well-publicised contests, beginning when the Lord Chamberlain banned a performance of Wilde's Salomé in London in 1894, and culminating in the unbanning of Lady Chatterley's Lover after the famous trial of 1960. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The winter 1963 issue of the humanities journal Diogenes included an article (originally published somewhat earlier in French) entitled “Orientalism in Crisis,” by Anouar Abdel-Malek. A veteran of the Egyptian communist movement, which the Nasser regime had ruthlessly suppressed, Abdel-Malek now lived in exile in France. His 1962 book on Nasser's Egypt, later published in English as Egypt: Military Society, was a trenchant critique of Nasserism in theory and practice. But in “Orientalism in Crisis” Abdel-Malek had a different purpose: he sought to convince his readers of the urgent need to “undertake a revision, a critical reevaluation of the general conception, the methods, and implements for the understanding of the Orient that have been used by the West, notably from the beginning of the last century, on all levels and in all fields.” Abdel-Malek argued that the arduous labors of even the best Orientalist scholars had often been undermined by defective, if not pernicious, “postulates, methodological habits and historico-philosophical concepts.” These included the treatment of “the Orient and Orientals as an ‘object’ of study, stamped with an otherness … customary, passive, nonparticipating … non-active, non-autonomous … understood, defined – and acted [upon] – by others.” This was in turn linked to what Abdel-Malek saw as “an essentialist conception of the countries, nations and peoples of the Orient under study” which reduced them to ethnic stereotypes, ultimately tending toward racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the end of the thirteenth century the era of the Crusades was essentially over: there was little interest or energy among western European Christians for further campaigns to regain the Holy Land. In Spain, however, the Reconquista continued until only Granada in the far south remained under Muslim rule, though many Muslims (and Jews) continued to live in the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. In the 1220s western Europeans first received reports that a powerful new invader had come out of central Asia and was attacking the heartlands of Islam. At first some believed that these defeats for Islam had been inflicted by the armies of the legendary Prester John, great king of a fabled long-lost Christian land somewhere in the East. It soon became evident that these invaders were not fellow Christians but the very same pagan, thoroughly terrifying and seemingly invincible Mongols (sometimes called Tatars) who overran much of Russia in the 1230s and by 1241 were attacking Poland and Hungary. The sudden death of the Mongol Khan (chieftain) in 1242 brought expansion into central Europe to a halt, but the Mongol conquest of Persia continued and in 1258 a Mongol army seized Baghdad and extinguished the ‘Abbasid caliphate. These developments allowed Latin Christians to hope that the Mongols had been sent by God to destroy Islam once and for all, and efforts were made to secure an alliance with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 2 of the book "Canonization, Colonization, Decolonization: A Comparative Study of Political and Critical Works by Minority Writers" is presented. It explores the colonial and canonical control over post-colonial writers. It cites the case of Africa, whose writers discovered that Eurocentric representation of their history and literature has been a misrepresentation, as they mistakenly portrayed Africa as a primitive and unrecognized culture. It discusses the marginalization of Third World writers on the basis of language.

The article focuses on the environmental and ecological justice of the political system. A framework of international/global governance is already well established. It seems hardly likely that history will go into reverse. Both the destructive potential of international war as a means of settling disputes and the growing interdependence among nations means that national governments will continue to seek co-operation and national sovereignty will continue to be eroded. The questions to be addressed, therefore, are whether the currently emergent framework is a good one and whether it requires further modification. If this seems a remarkably Eurocentric view of the history of the international system, one should remember that the ideas and institutional forms developed in Europe were not unique. There are similarities as well as differences between European political cultures and political cultures which had already developed or were developing simultaneously in human societies in other parts of the world.

Focuses on social critic and historian C.L.R. James's views on multiculturalism, Eurocentrism and political correctness. Birth and childhood in Trinidad; Controversies in James's writing and speeches; Censure from supporters of nationalism within the African diaspora.

This chapter provides an overview of the world-system and the limits of modernity in the context of Eurocentrism. Two opposing paradigms, the Eurocentric and the planetary, characterize the question of modernity. The first, from a Eurocentric horizon, formulates the phenomenon of modernity as exclusively European, developing in the Middle Ages and later on diffusing itself throughout the entire world. Weber situates the problem of universal history with the question: to what combination of circumstances should the fact be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which, as most like to think, lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.

The article focuses on multiculturalism, anti-racism and social work in Europe. In the article, the author considers how the struggles of groups who have been racially oppressed have contributed to broadening our understanding of the dynamics of racism in Europe and to the development of anti-racist social work services. According to the author, despite claims to the contrary in some anti-racist writings, which refer to a 'Eurocentric' version of social work, the notion of a 'European' social work is illusory. At the level of macro-analysis, the issue of the forms of racism being transmitted through social work practice does become important. The author says that it would be erroneous to conceive of Eurocentrism as indicating a homogeneous European culture or even sense of 'white' identity. The author defines racism as a set of practices, which assumes the inherent superiority of one 'race' over others and thereby the right to dominate. The author further writes that the dominant group's racialised definition of their reality is constantly being challenged by individuals and groups that have been subjected to the 'othering' process.

The article discusses feminism in utopian writings. It states that like any utopia, feminist utopia is both prophetic and critical, but differs with other utopias by basing projected futures of women on female values. It transcends Eurocentrism in the study of feminist utopia by looking at the female rule's structural theme.

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all she skims off, all that she violates and starves. James Mill writes in his History of British India that “whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India, can be expressed in writing. As soon as every thing of importance is expressed in writing, a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year, in his closet in England, than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and his ears, in India.” Mill argues that the entire reality of what was for him an “object” called “India” can be defined by being captured in writing, just as its territory had been defined by being captured by the armies of the East India Company. He is “correct” to the extent that imperial rule from London relied upon the minute documentation of the endless activities of the Company in India, so that what was being judged and decided upon by the directors in London were not the material activities themselves, but rather the documents produced alongside them – not, in other words, the “realities,” but the “representations.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vicinity of China to our Indian territories … must necessarily draw our attention to that most ancient and wonderful Empire, even if we had no commercial intercourse with its more distant and maritime provinces; and the benefits, that might be obtained from a more intimate connexion with a nation long famed for their useful arts, and for the valuable productions of their country, are too apparent to require any proof or illustration. Sir William Jones, and others, recognized the demand for a code of Indian law; but unhappily thought of no better expedient than that of employing some of the natives themselves; as if one of the most difficult tasks to which the human mind can be applied, a work to which the highest measure of European intelligence is not more than equal, could be expected to be tolerably performed by the unenlightened and perverted intellects of a few Indian pundits. The sea is between us. The mass of that element, which, by appearing to disconnect, unites mankind, is to them a forbidden road. It is a great gulf fixed between you and them, – not so much that elementary gulf, but that gulf which manners, opinions and laws have radicated in the very nature of the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list of charts on child welfare research for articles published in the 2004 issue of the book "Child Welfare Revisited: An Africentric Perspective" is presented. They include the Pearson correlation coefficients, comparison of eurocentric and ecological Africentric assessments and patterns of parental child-rearing practices.

A part of the book "Beginning in Honors: A Handbook," Fourth Edition, by Samuel Schuman is presented. It explores the curriculum given by the honors program to the faculty members and students. It also highlights the content of the courses which focuses on the classical masterpiece reading lists and Eurocentric nature.