Hegel and the dialectic of enlightenment : the recognition of education in civil society

This thesis develops an Hegelian philosophy of education by presenting the concept as the comprehension of the dialectic of enlightenment. It begins by examining recent critical theory of education which has employed Habermas's idea of communicative action in order to reassess the relationship between education and political critique. It goes on to expose the flaws in this approach by uncovering its uncritical use of critique as the method of enlightenment. Enlightenment as overcoming presupposes enlightenment as absolute education. The philosophical issues raised here are then substantially examined by returning to Habermas in order to trace the presupposition of critique as method in his theorizing. It is argued that Habermas also presupposes critique as absolute enlightenment, or overcoming, in both the emancipatory knowledge-constitutive interest and in The Theory of Communicative Action, and further, that it is this presupposition which returns as the contradiction of the dialectic of enlightenment in his work. Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment is then itself examined along with Adorno's Negative Dialectics. Here it is argued that although this work marks an educational and philosophical development over Habermas, nevertheless its authors also presuppose the identity of enlightenment, this time in the claim that the dialectic of enlightenment, and negative dialectics, are not a determinate negation. The thesis shows how Habermas and Adorno, in their respective views of the dialectic of enlightenment, repeat but do not comprehend the selfdetermination which is the actual in Hegelian philosophy. The final chapter of the thesis employs Hegelian philosophy to re-examine the aporia of education as method. It argues that the dialectic of enlightenment is actual when it is recognized as the self-education of philosophical consciousness, and is the identity and non-identity which is the concept. The implications of Hegelian philosophy of education as the recognition of misrecognition are then explored, first with regard to rethinking the identity of the teacher in civil society and developing the concept as ethical pedagogy; and then to recognizing critique as comprehensive education with regard to the state in civil society

Lucky exposures: diffraction limited astronomical imaging through the atmosphere

The resolution of astronomical imaging from large optical telescopes is usually limited by the blurring effects of refractive index fluctuations in the Earth’s atmosphere. By taking a large number of short exposure images through the atmosphere, and then selecting, re-centring and co-adding the best images this resolution limit can be overcome. This approach has significant benefits over other techniques for high-resolution optical imaging from the ground. In particular the reference stars used for our method (the Lucky Exposures technique) can generally be fainter than those required for the natural guide star adaptive optics approach or those required for other speckle imaging techniques. The low complexity and low instrumentation costs associated with the Lucky Exposures method make it appealing for medium-sized astronomical observatories. The method can provide essentially diffraction-limited I-band imaging from well-figured ground-based telescopes as large as 2.5 m diameter. The faint limiting magnitude and large isoplanatic patch size for the Lucky Exposures technique at the Nordic Optical Telescope means that 25% of the night sky is within range of a suitable reference star for I-band imaging. Typically the 1%—10% of exposures with the highest Strehl ratios are selected. When these exposures are shifted and added together, field stars in the resulting images have Strehl ratios as high as 0.26 and full width at half maximum flux (FWHM) as small as 90 milliarcseconds. Within the selected exposures the isoplanatic patch is found to be up to 60 arcseconds in diameter at 810 nm wavelength. Images within globular clusters and of multiple stars from the Nordic Optical Telescope using reference stars as faint as I 16 are presented. A new generation of CCDs (Marconi L3Vision CCDs) were used in these observations, allowing extremely low noise high frame-rate imaging with both fine pixel sampling and a relatively wide field of view. The theoretical performance of these CCDs is compared with the experimental results obtained.Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Counci

Philosophy's Higher Education

xix, 189 p. ; 22 cm