23 research outputs found
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 Earthās 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%ā10% 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