832 research outputs found
Impudent practices
This article explores aspects of eros in education in relation to ideas of indirectness associated with the French concept of pudeur, sometimes translated as ‘modesty’. It explores lines of thought extending through Emerson and Nietzsche but reaching back to Plato's Symposium. This is a means of exposing the ‘impudence’ of some aspects of contemporary education and of pointing towards a conception of eros that is otherwise obscured
‘Language must be raked’: Experience, race, and the pressure of air
This article begins by clarifying the notion of what Stanley Cavell has called ‘Emersonian moral perfectionism.’ It goes on to explore this through close analysis of aspects of Emerson’s essay ‘Experience,’ in which ideas of trying or attempting or experimenting bring out the intimate relation between perfectionism and styles of writing. ‘Where do we find ourselves?’ Emerson asks, and the answer is to be found in part in what we write and what we say, injecting a new sense of possibility and responsibility into our relation to our words. But the language we speak and the lives that go with it are at the same time burdened with a past, and in the case of English, and in the American context especially, it is marked with a kind of repression relating to questions of slavery and race. These matters are implicated in questions of constitution, in both general and specifically political senses. Hence, inheritance and appropriation become causes of critical sensitivity, as do the forms of praise and acknowledgment that should meet them. The article explores ways of thinking through Emerson’s relation to these aspects of experience and seeks to find responses pertinent to today
Lines of Testimony
The topic of testimony has gained increased prominence in recent years in epistemology, where it is typically taken to refer to the possible acquisition of knowledge through the understanding and acceptance of someone else's judgement. There is no doubt that learning in this way is a prominent feature of education. This conception of testimony contrasts, however, with the more restricted way in which it is commonly understood: everyday usage situates the concept in such contexts as places of worship and courts of law. Testimony in these contexts is likely to be seen by the epistemologist as a special case of testimony in the wider sense, but is this accurate? With reference to contrasting traditions in philosophy and drawing on examples from film and literature, this paper considers the relationship between the epistemological and the everyday senses of testimony, exploring the significance of these matters for questions of teaching and learning as well as for the understanding of language as a whole
Numerical Evidence for Divergent Burnett Coefficients
In previous papers [Phys. Rev. A {\bf 41}, 4501 (1990), Phys. Rev. E {\bf
18}, 3178 (1993)], simple equilibrium expressions were obtained for nonlinear
Burnett coefficients. A preliminary calculation of a 32 particle Lennard-Jones
fluid was presented in the previous paper. Now, sufficient resources have
become available to address the question of whether nonlinear Burnett
coefficients are finite for soft spheres. The hard sphere case is known to have
infinite nonlinear Burnett coefficients (ie a nonanalytic constitutive
relation) from mode coupling theory. This paper reports a molecular dynamics
caclulation of the third order nonlinear Burnett coefficient of a Lennard-Jones
fluid undergoing colour flow, which indicates that this term is diverges in the
thermodynamic limit.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure
Making sense of data: fact and value
Data can seem to be the very foundation of research, the sine qua non of enquiry into education. Yet this thought can be troubled by questions about the provenance of data or about how something comes to be constructed as data in the first place. And most researchers face questions about what to do with data when it arrives—where, in the social sciences more than the physical sciences, results of tests rarely show conclusively what to do next, and where, in light of this, interpretation comes to the fore. The present essay discusses problems of objectivity and subjectivity, and of fact and value, as these arise in relation to these matters. The idea that the mind is more or less separate from the body and the idea that there is a realm of fact distinct from the realm of value in many respects laid the way for contemporary notions of objectivity and subjectivity, not least in the social sciences. Yet both are now widely discredited. The present discussion will illustrate the nature of the reappraisal that, in consequence, is needed. The argument that unfolds will help to reveal the need for a reorientation of education—in research, policy, and practice—such that the role and importance of the exercise of judgement is better understood. There are implications here for research methods training and for the funding that facilitates responsible enquiry into education
The philosophy of education, and the education of philosophy. La filosofÃa de la educación y la educación de la filosofÃa
Bajo Palabra, Revista de FilosofÃ
Statistics of Certain Models of Evolution
In a recent paper, Newman surveys the literature on power law spectra in
evolution, self-organised criticality and presents a model of his own to arrive
at a conclusion that self-organised criticality is not necessary for evolution.
Not only did he miss a key model (Ecolab) that has a clear self-organised
critical mechanism, but also Newman's model exhibits the same mechanism that
gives rise to power law behaviour as does Ecolab. Newman's model is, in fact, a
``mean field'' approximation of a self-organised critical system. In this
paper, I have also implemented Newman's model using the Ecolab software,
removing the restriction that the number of species remains constant. It turns
out that the requirement of constant species number is non-trivial, leading to
a global coupling between species that is similar in effect to the species
interactions seen in Ecolab. In fact, the model must self-organise to a state
where the long time average of speciations balances that of the extinctions,
otherwise the system either collapses or explodes. In view of this, Newman's
model does not provide the hoped-for counter example to the presence of
self-organised criticality in evolution, but does provide a simple, almost
analytic model that can used to understand more intricate models such as
Ecolab.Comment: accepted in Phys Rev E.; RevTeX; See
http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks/ecolab.html for more informatio
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