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 filosofía de la educación y la educación de la filosofía

Bajo Palabra, Revista de Filosofí

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