Being-Literate-In-The-World
Being-literate-in-the-world Philosophers
have long debated the relationship between the world and the
language we use when we try to describe or understand it.
This work examines the status of knowledge and literacy in a
multi-modal globalized world through a Heideggerian
questioning of language and music, historically and in
schooling. While naming a thing might empower us, it also
constrains our potential as we are restricted to thinking
and speaking about the world only on language's terms. Our
reality is expressed in words; we must settle for its
limitations in our relationships with the objects, emotions,
activities, ethics and education systems that shape our
personal and social lives. We require the
meta-conceptualization of structures, objects, properties
and relations in order to form an ontology of knowledge that
includes evolving representations, sensory understandings
and embodied knowing. This aligns with recent philosophical
moves that not only concern themselves with the formal
nature and relations of being or existence, but also with
the practices, vocabularies and styles of thought in a world
of changing identities and domains of knowing.