Weber and Coyote : polytheism as a practical attitude

This document is the Accepted Manuscript of an article accepted for publication in Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions. Under embargo until 9 September 2018. The final, definitive version is available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11841-018-0641-1Hyde claims that the trickster spirit is necessary for the renewal of culture, and that he only lives in the ‘complex terrain of polytheism’. Fortunately for those of us in monotheistic cultures, Weber gives reasons for thinking that polytheism is making a return, albeit in a new, disenchanted form. The plan of this paper is to elaborate some basic notions from Weber (rationalisation, disenchantment, bureaucracy), to explore Hyde’s thesis in more detail and then to take up the question of the plurality of spirits both around and within us and whether the trickster is one of them. Weber has three roles in this argument. First, he theorises rationalisation, disenchantment and bureaucracy; second, he offers an argument that in a certain sense polytheism is returning (if it ever went away); and third, he presents a way to translate the mytho-poetic register in which Hyde works into terms acceptable to social science of a more materialist bent. The claim of the paper is that polytheism as a practical attitude means recognising that there are diverse and contradictory ethical orders built into the world around us and active with our psyches. Weber explains why this is especially difficult for us (because our lives are so thoroughly rationalised), and Hyde offers us the hope that we may be tricky enough to cope.Peer reviewe

The Case for Teaching Syllogistic Logic to Philosophy Students

Reprinted in Gil, Lancho & Manzano (eds) Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Tools for Teaching Logic. (2006: ISBN84-690-0348-8) 81-86.Syllogistic logic is a superseded theory, so why bother to teach it? In fact, it has many benefits for general philosophy students. Some are virtues of syllogistic logic alone; others arise from the contrast between syllogistic and mathematical logics. Syllogistic is a better vehicle for teaching general notions such as validity and soundness. Its several techniques for checking validity allows students to distinguish validity from the procedures to check for it. It supports students’ readings of historical philosophical texts. The contrast with mathematical logics supports meta-logical discussion and reduces alienation as students find that some great dead logicians share their intuitions. In any case, syllogistic logic is not intellectually dead. The work of Blanché and Béziau demonstrates this.Peer reviewe

Aspects of Humanism : An eight week course

Humanists have no official doctrine. Humanism is a loose family of views, united by the thought that the business of living is usually and on the whole worthwhile, and that belief in supernatural beings has nothing to offer people who are trying to live well. The thoughts gathered in these notes and lectures are not intended to supply a Humanist creed. Rather, they are an attempt to think through some of the issues that arise for Humanists today, and to present them in a way that will stimulate others to work out their own ideas. Inevitably, they reflect my own concerns and opinions. As the intention is to stimulate debate, I have in many cases left matters open. Where I offer a definite opinion, I do so in the expectation (and hope) that others will disagree with it, discuss it and improve on it. Please feel free to send me your comments at [email protected] Your course leader will organise your in-class activities and explain how your group will use these course materials. I want to make just one suggestion: bring a notebook and pen. Use it during meetings to record your thoughts about the topics under discussion and your reasons for holding (or changing) your views. If you can’t make up your mind about some question, try to write down precisely what is holding you up. That way, you will build up a private journal of your thoughts about Humanism, and make connections among the topics and between the course and your prior knowledge and experience. No-one will read it or try to make you read it aloud. There is no textbook for this course, but for each week, I have picked out a reading from a relevant book and these have been collected together in a Sourcebook accompanying this Handbook. I am grateful to Andrew Copson and the South Place Ethical Society, British Humanist Association and Rationalist Association for inviting me to prepare this course. I hope you enjoy working through it as much as I did. I am also grateful to the Humanist Philosophers’ Group for giving me plenty to think about. Graduates of the University of Hertfordshire philosophy programme will recognise some of the material here

Book Review: What is a Mathematical Concept? edited by Elizabeth de Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, and Alf Coles

This is a review of What is a Mathematical Concept? edited by Elizabeth de Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, and Alf Coles (Cambridge University Press, 2017). In this collection of sixteen chapters, philosophers, educationalists, historians of mathematics, a cognitive scientist, and a mathematician consider, problematise, historicise, contextualise, and destabilise the terms ‘mathematical’ and ‘concept’. The contributors come from many disciplines, but the editors are all in mathematics education, which gives the whole volume a disciplinary centre of gravity. The editors set out to explore and reclaim the canonical question ‘what is a mathematical concept?’ from the philosophy of mathematics. This review comments on each paper in the collection

Why the naïve Derivation Recipe model cannot explain how mathematicians’ proofs secure mathematical knowledge

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Philosophia Mathematica following peer review. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 7 July 2018 The version of record [Lavor, B., 'Why the Naive Derivation Recipe Model Cannot Explain How Mathematician's Proofs Secure Mathematical Knowledge', Philosophia Mathematica (2016) 24(3): 401-404, is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/philmat/nkw012. © The Author [2016]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.The view that a mathematical proof is a sketch of or recipe for a formal derivation requires the proof to function as an argument that there is a suitable derivation. This is a mathematical conclusion, and to avoid a regress we require some other account of how the proof can establish it.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Reverse Pedagogy: a citizens' assembly approach to the BAME awarding gap

© 2020 The Author(s). This an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This project took a bottom-up approach to the BAME awarding gap. The aim was to create the right conditions for BAME students to lead the conversation and shape the recommendations. Knowledge is power. Students were therefore provided with the same information and research as those in senior management and academic positions in the University of Hertfordshire (UH). The project’s ambition was to combine student experience and structured research to assess current policies and guide future policymaking directed at the BAME awarding gap.Non peer reviewe

As Thurston says? : On using quotations from famous mathematicians to make points about philosophy and education

© 2020 Springer-Verlag. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-020-01154-w.It is commonplace in the educational literature on mathematical practice to argue for a general conclusion from isolated quotations from famous mathematicians. In this paper, we supply a critique of this mode of inference. We review empirical results that show the diversity and instability of mathematicians’ opinions on mathematical practice. Next, we compare mathematicians’ diverse and conflicting testimony on the nature and purpose of proof. We lay especial emphasis on the diverse responses mathematicians give to the challenges that digital technologies present to older conceptions of mathematical practice. We examine the career of one much cited and anthologised paper, WP Thurston’s ‘On Proof and Progress in Mathematics’ (1994). This paper has been multiply anthologised and cited hundreds of times in educational and philosophical argument. We contrast this paper with the views of other, equally distinguished mathematicians whose use of digital technology in mathematics paints a very different picture of mathematical practice. The interesting question is not whether mathematicians disagree—they are human so of course they do. The question is how homogenous is their mathematical practice. If there are deep differences in practice between mathematicians, then it makes little sense to use isolated quotations as indicators of how mathematics is uniformly or usually done. The paper ends with reflections on the usefulness of quotations from research mathematicians for mathematical education.Peer reviewe