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The focus of this article is on the role played by members of the Society of Jesus, the Order of the Oratorians, and the Jewish community in the introduction of Modern science in Portugal during the 18th century. The record of their publications prove, contrary to common stereotypes on the permanent conflict between science and religion, that they all embraced Modern, anti-Aristotelian, natural philosophy fairly equally and unreservedly. The rhetoric they used in manuscript Dedications to prospective patrons also show that they were actively engaged in shifting Modern science from a context of private consumption to one of public circulation. I acknowledgethat the dissemination of Modern science in Portugal during the 1700’s was slow and protracted. This phenomenon, however, was not, as typically argued, caused by scientific conservatism on the part of the religious Orders, or the ill will of patrons of the sciences, but by the political motives of enlightened despots João V, José I and his Prime-Minister the Marquis of Pombal.

Juan Bautista Amorós (Silverio Lanza) and Ángel Ganivet have both been labelled as precursors to the Generation of 1898 and to Spanish authors active in the early decades of the twentieth century. This article, by contrast, reads Amorós’s and Ganivet’s work beside that of Antonio Flores, a 'costumbrista' author who died in 1865. The affinities of these mid- and late nineteenth-century writers suggest that there are alternatives to teleological literary histories that are constructed around a narrative of turn-of-the-century rupture; if Amorós and Ganivet are said to have much in common with early twentieth-century authors, and can be shown to share as much with Flores, then the narrative of radical rupture becomes less appealing. More importantly perhaps, probing the nature of these affinities opens up new vistas on the nineteenth-century literary landscape. 'Ayer, hoy y mañana' (1863–4) by Flores, 'Historia de un pueblo' (1889–93) by Amorós, and 'La conquista del reino de Maya' (1897) by Ganivet are radically different in subject matter, style and form, yet the three texts nevertheless share a set of key characteristics. First, they are all self-conscious or metafictional texts. Second, they deploy a range of apparently incompatible generic conventions. Third, they articulate problems associated with temporality, and more specifically with futurity. The insistent use of metafictional devices shatters the epistemological assumptions of progress and of traditionalist nostalgia alike. Linear understandings of time are similarly interrogated with consequences for concepts such as the spirit of the age, progress, civilization or empire. The futures these texts envision are best avoided, while their pasts are better left behind, leaving their destinations uncertain. Reading Flores, Amorós and Ganivet with an eye to the self-conscious text, generic miscellany and future time, reveals a body of nineteenth-century Spanish literature that feasts on contradiction and paradox, and that understands knowledge to be contingent, temporality to be directionless, and both to be radically unstable.

Gaston Bachelard’s position toward the philosophy of Henri Bergson is most interesting. In La Dialectique de la durée (1936), Bachelard claims that “of Bergsonism we accept everything but continuity” and that the rest of his book will be an attempt to show the possibility of a “discontinuous Bergsonism”. In this paper, I focus on the reaction of Bachelard to works of Bergson such as the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), L’Evolution créatrice (1907), and Durée et simultanéité: à propos de la théorie d’Einstein (1922) and demonstrate that even though the conditions necessary for the possibility of a discontinuous Bergsonism are not the same ones which Bachelard had in mind when he accepted most of Bergsonism, their phenomenologies of the scientific spirit were analogous.

We present our {coteaching | cogenerative dialoguing} model in which historically existing boundaries between academic research and everyday teaching are considered. In coteaching, all individuals (teachers, teachers in training, supervisors, and researchers) participate in assisting students to learn; sitting on the sidelines and watching (objectifying) others is not permitted. In cogenerative dialoguing, these individuals and student representatives talk about their experience of teaching and learning in order to develop generalizations that open new possibilities for future action. On the basis of these generalizations and new action possibilities, changes are brought about in the environment to further enhance students' learning. Thus, {coteaching | cogenerative dialoguing} serves multiple purposes: besides the obvious context for teaching in a collective manner, it provides a context to research teaching, induct new teachers, supervise new and practicing teachers, assist teachers in development (that is, learning to teach). The structure of the {coteaching | cogenerative dialoguing} model is parallel to two dialectical pairs of concepts, {praxis | praxeology} and {understanding | explanation}, central to our epistemology and methodology, respectively. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0003372

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