Philosophers of education have always been interested in epistemological issues. In their efforts to help inform educational theory and practice they have dealt extensively with concepts like knowledge, teaching, learning, thinking, understanding, belief, justification, theory, the disciplines, rationality and the like. Their inquiries have addressed issues about what kinds of knowledge are most important and worthwhile, and how knowledge and information might best be organised as curricular activity. They have also investigated the relationships between teaching and learning, belief and opinion, (...) knowledge and belief, and data and information. For some a key issue has been how students can become autonomous knowers. This issue has often been bound up with questions about what count as appropriate standards for reasonableness or rationality, and the conditions under which we can properly regard understanding as having occurred. During the past decade renewed interest has been shown in what is involved in becoming an authority, expert or competent performer in a given area of knowledge, as well as in how we evaluate and critique different or competing beliefs, theories, points of view or paradigms. (shrink)

Philosophers of education have always been interested in epistemological issues. In their efforts to help inform educational theory and practice they have dealt extensively with concepts like knowledge, teaching, learning, thinking, understanding, belief, justification, theory, the disciplines, rationality and the like. Their inquiries have addressed issues about what kinds of knowledge are most important and worthwhile, and how knowledge and information might best be organised as curricular activity. They have also investigated the relationships between teaching and learning, belief and opinion, (...) knowledge and belief, and data and information. For some a key issue has been how students can become autonomous knowers. This issue has often been bound up with questions about what count as appropriate standards for reasonableness or rationality, and the conditions under which we can properly regard understanding as having occurred. During the past decade renewed interest has been shown in what is involved in becoming an authority, expert or competent performer in a given area of knowledge, as well as in how we evaluate and critique different or competing beliefs, theories, points of view or paradigms. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at the Marshall family home, often attending dinn...

Michael A PetersBeijing Normal UniversityChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 and a ‘stable release’ on February 13, 2023. It belongs to OpenAI’s GPT-3 family (generativ...

This paper is the report of a meetingthat gathered many of the UK's most senioranimal scientists with representatives of thefarming industry, consumer groups, animalwelfare groups, and environmentalists. Therewas strong consensus that the current economicstructure of agriculture cannot adequatelyaddress major issues of concern to society:farm incomes, food security and safety, theneeds of developing countries, animal welfare,and the environment. This economic structure isbased primarily on competition betweenproducers and between retailers, driving foodprices down, combined with externalization ofmany costs. These issues must be addressed (...) by acombination of legislation, restructuring ofthe market, and use of public funds. Themeeting included workshops that made otherrecommendations for research and education. Themost urgent requirement is recognition thatchange is needed and development of a visionfor what that change must achieve. (shrink)

In order to explore narrativity as political action in human rights education and the relevance of uniqueness and plurality in this endeavour, this chapter first makes a shift from particularity as a collective identity of the other towards the need for plurality in any conception of rights in cosmopolitan thinking, as argued by Sharon Todd. The aim is to gain a notion of human rights learning that moves away from identity politics, from what we are, and instead engages with unique (...) relations in plural classrooms, where who one is is addressed through the notion of life narratives. The chapter then turns to Hannah Arendt and her positing of the dangers of not taking responsibility as educators to introduce students to a world which they are to transform. Finally, the chapter draws on the notion of counter‐narratives proposed by Michael Peters and Colin Lankshear. (shrink)

This paper will proceed from the assumption of scholars like Anne Fernihough, Peter Fjagsund, Michael Black, and Michael Bell that there are sufficient connecting links between the literary oeuvre of D.H. Lawrence and the philosophizing of Martin Heidegger that they warrant consideration in each other's company. The paper will attempt to provide more evidence for what these scholars have been contending. It seeks to make the case that although D.H. Lawrence and Martin Heidegger start from very different beginning (...) points, the one literary, the other epistemological (so to speak), they arrive at surprisingly similar conclusions about the deficiencies in the specifically modern way of viewing human existence and the world. The paper isolates certain of Lawrence and Heidegger's key passages relevant to the themes of science, humanism, art and death and reveals them as looking at these fundamental issues from a remarkably similar standpoint. These two metaphysicians were groping for the right path forward from the intellectual and social crises of the twentieth century and the evidence suggests they saw it as lying in the same direction. (shrink)

Presents a self-contained introduction to logic suitable for majors and nonmajors, and can be covered entirely in a one-semester course. Natural deduction systems of sentential logic and of first-order logic, truth tables, and the basic ideas of model theory are presented without superfluous discussion.

have recently provided a compelling demonstration of enhanced attentional control under post-hypnotic suggestion. Using the classic color-word interference paradigm, in which the task is to ignore a word and to name the color in which it is printed (e.g., RED in green, say ''green''), they gave a post-hypnotic instruction to participants that they would be unable to read. This eliminated Stroop interference in high suggestibility participants but did not alter interference in low suggestibility participants. replicated this pattern and further demonstrated (...) that it is not due to a visual strategy (such as blurring or looking at a different location). As a historical footnote, we describe a ''case study'' from 18 years ago in which we observed the same result using a hypnotic instruction to a single highly suggestible individual that he could not read. The elimination of Stroop interference has important implications for both the study of attention and the study of hypnosis. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida is perhaps the foremost philosopher of the humanities and of its place in the university. Over the long period of his career he has been concerned with the fate, status, place and contribution of the humanities. Through his deconstructive readings and writings he has done much not only to reinvent the western tradition by attending closely to those texts which constitute it but also he has redefined its procedures and protocols. This paper first introduces the notion of postmodern (...) nursing, its relation to the culture wars and some of the main characteristics of so‐called poststructuralism, considered as a response to the scientific pretensions of structuralism. Secondly, it provides some background to Derrida, who Althusser believed to be the most important French philosopher of the 20th century. Thirdly, it explores a recent essay where Derrida outlines seven programmatic theses or what he calls ‘seven professions of faith’ for the new humanities. Finally, and very tentatively, it suggests what such a view might contribute to the nursing humanities. (shrink)

Using a paradigm that allows a quasi-continuous tracking of memory performance over time, two experiments were designed to test the hypotheses that persons with a cognitively avoidant style of coping with threat manifest a dissociation between short-term and long-term retrieval of aversive information and persons with a vigilant coping style recall aversive information particularly well after long retention intervals, provided they are free to think about aversive events. Study 1 showed that avoiders manifest a poor memory for aversive pictures after (...) long retention intervals only. Study 2 replicated this finding. In addition, manipulation of the cognitive load during the retention interval influenced vigilants’ recall of aversive information in the predicted way. Results indicate that processes occurring during the retention interval are essential for individual difference in memory for aversive information and require similar attention as encoding, appraisal, and retrieval processes. (shrink)

Offering a political optic on transnationalism, this article shows how the Partido Acción Nacional from Guanajuato, Mexico, seeks to reconstitute Guanajuatense transnational migrants as clients and funders of state policies, as political subjects with “dual loyalty” but limited political autonomy. To co-opt migrants into development projects designed bythe state but financed bythe migrants, partyelites reconfigure the meanings of “migrant,” “region,” and “citizen.” This is contested by migrant leaders whose views of extraterritorial citizenship, translocal community, and partyloy alty differ from views (...) of the partyelites. The migrants see the state as diverting their energies from true civil societyand local development initiatives across borders. (shrink)

This article surveys philosophical and scientific issues arising from questions about animal consciousness. These questions include: which animals have consciousness and what (if anything) that consciousness might be like. Just what sort(s) of science can bear on these questions is a live issue, but investigations of the behavior and neurophysiology of a wide taxonomic range of animals, as well as the phylogenetic relationships among taxa are relevant. Such questions are also deeply philosophical, with epistemological, metaphysical, and phenomenological dimensions. Progress will (...) ultimately require interdisciplinary work by philosophers willing to engage with the empirical details of animal biology, as well as scientists who are sensitive to the philosophical complexities of the issue. The article discusses motivations for studying animal consciousness, and the common framing of such issues by analogy to the human case. Various concepts of consciousness, their historical background, and the related epistemological and metaphysical issues are described. Theories about the structure and function of consciousness are identified and assessed in the context of ideas about the evolution and distribution of consciousness, and comparative approaches to specific cognitive capacities that have often been taken to indicate that humans are not the only conscious animals. (shrink)

Scientific reasoning is—and ought to be—conducted in accordance with the axioms of probability. This Bayesian view—so called because of the central role it accords to a theorem first proved by Thomas Bayes in the late eighteenth ...

This essay reviews Michael Peters' book The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future, an edited collection of his articles exploring the concept of the Chinese Dream. The essays starts with the analogy between dreams and their role in psychoanalysis and dreams as an ideal representation of a nation's ethos. The introductory part illustrates this analogy with the example of the growing importance of the Chinese Dream. The central part of the essay examines the most important aspects of Peters' (...) book The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future. The concluding part raises the importance of education in the national dream narrative. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight why R. S. Peters' conceptual analysis of ‘education’ was such an important contribution to the normative field of philosophy of education. In the article, I do the following: 1) explicate Peters' conception of philosophy of education as a field of philosophy and explain his approach to the philosophical analysis of concepts; 2) emphasize several (normative) features of Peters' conception of education, while pointing to a couple of oversights; and 3) suggest how (...) class='Hi'>Peters' analysis might be used to reinvigorate a conversation on one central educational aim—that of how we might educate citizens for the 21st century. (shrink)

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect. -/- In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the (...) conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, José Casanova, Nilüfer Göle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood. -/- Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age is edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 8, July 2020, Page 820-820.

Conspiracy theories play a troubling role in political discourse. Online forums provide a valuable window into everyday conspiracy theorizing, and can give a clue to the motivations and interests of those who post in such forums. Yet this online activity can be difficult to quantify and study. We describe a unique approach to studying online conspiracy theorists which used non-negative matrix factorization to create a topic model of authors' contributions to the main conspiracy forum on Reddit. This subreddit provides a (...) large corpus of comments which spans many years and numerous authors. We show that within the forum, there are multiple sub-populations distinguishable by their loadings on different topics in the model. Further, we argue, these differences are interpretable as differences in background beliefs and motivations. The diversity of the distinct subgroups places constraints on theories of what generates conspiracy theorizing. We argue that traditional “monological” believers are only the tip of an iceberg of commenters. Neither simple irrationality nor common preoccupations can account for the observed diversity. Instead, we suggest, those who endorse conspiracies seem to be primarily brought together by epistemological concerns, and that these central concerns link an otherwise heterogenous group of individuals. (shrink)

This paper focusses on our concerns about revelations about sexual harassment in universities and the inadequate responses whereby some universities seem more concerned about their own reputations than the care and protection of their students. Seldom do cases go to criminal court, instead they mostly fall within employment relations policies where the use of non-disclosure agreements are double edged, such that some perpetrators remain nameless even if the person offended against wants details made public. Of course if the staff member (...) does not resign or take retirement prior to potential dismissal, but remains in the institution, the grapevine still works. Universities too often become complicit in cover-ups at the expense of further potential victims of sexual misconduct. It has been with much dismay that we found that despite extensive training and writing about ethics some senior professors in philosophy fields have been accused and found wanting, disabusing us of the virtue assumption. Despite these recent instances where perpetrators have been named and been publicised in the media, we found that this is not in fact new, so not only does the paper look to the past, but also extensively it uses contemporary accounts, reports and documents from USA, UK, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. These seem to be the tip of the iceberg, so our hope is that all students and staff in universities (and in fact all institutions where there are inherent power imbalances) will not only feel safe, but that they will be safe as universities become genuinely ethical institutions. (shrink)

In 'On the nature of truth and falsehood' Russell offers both a multiple relation theory of judgment and a correspondence theory of truth. It has been a prevailing understanding of the Tractatus that Wittgenstein rejects Russell’s multiple relation idea but endorses the correspondence theory. Ramsey took the opposite view. In his 'Facts and Propositions', Ramsey endorses Russell’s multiple relation idea, rejects the correspondence theory, and then asserts that these moves are both due to Wittgenstein. This chapter will argue that Ramsey’s (...) ascriptions are both correct. The extent of the agreement between Ramsey and Wittgenstein will be argued, moreover, to count definitively against standard understandings of Ramsey as a redundancy theorist of truth. Wittgenstein is no correspondence theorist and Ramsey is no redundancy theorist; rather, both philosophers offer identity theories of truth. (shrink)

Recent research has begun to investigate sensory processing in relation to nonclinical variation in traits associated with the autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We propose that existing accounts of autistic perception can be augmented by considering a role for individual differences in top-down expectations for the precision of sensory input, related to the processing of state-dependent levels of uncertainty. We therefore examined ASD-like traits in relation to the rubber-hand illusion: an experimental paradigm that typically elicits crossmodal integration of visual, tactile, and (...) proprioceptive information in an unusual illusory context. Individuals with higher ASD-like traits showed reduced effects of the rubber-hand illusion on perceived arm position and reach-to-grasp movements, compared to individuals with lower ASD-like traits. These differences occurred despite both groups reporting the typical subjective experience of the illusion concerning visuotactile integration and ownership for the rubber hand. Together these results suggest that the integration of proprioceptive information with cues for arm position derived from the illusory context differs between individuals partly in relation to traits associated with ASD. We suggest that the observed differences in sensory integration can be best explained in terms of differing expectations regarding the precision of sensory estimates in contexts that suggest uncertainty. (shrink)

Introduction: education, philosophy and politics -- Writing the self: Wittgenstein, confession and pedagogy -- Nietzsche, nihilism and the critique of modernity: post-Nietzschean philosophy of education -- Heidegger, education and modernity -- Truth-telling as an educational practice of the self: Foucault and the ethics of subjectivity -- Neoliberal governmentality: Foucault on the birth of biopolitics -- Lyotard, nihilism and education -- Gilles Deleuze's 'societies of control': from disciplinary pedagogy to perpetual training -- Geophilosophy, education and the pedagogy of the concept - (...) Humanism, Derrida and the new humanities -- Politics and deconstruction: Derrida, neoliberalism and democracy -- Neopragmatism, ethnocentrism and the politics of the ethnos: Rorty's 'postmodernist bourgeois liberalism' -- Achieving America: postmodernism and Rorty's critique of the cultural left -- Deranging the investigations: Cavell on the philosophy of the child -- White philosophy in/of America. (shrink)

Since the first publication of Insight and Illusion in l972, a wealth of Wittgenstein's writings have become accessible. Accordingly, in this edition Professor Hacker has rewritten six of his eleven original chapters and revised the others to incorporate the new abundant material. Insight and Illusion now fully clarifies the historical backgrounds of Wittgenstein's highly different masterpieces, the Tractatus and the Investigations, and traces the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought. Hacker explains all of Wittgenstein's writings in detail, focusing on his critique of (...) metaphysics, his famous "private language argument," and his account of self-consciousness. (shrink)

This paper inquires the ways in which paper folding constitutes a mathematical practice and may prompt a mathematical culture. To do this, we first present and investigate the common mathematical activities shared by this culture, i.e. we present mathematical paper folding as a material reasoning practice. We show that the patterns of mathematical activity observed in mathematical paper folding are, at least since the end of the nineteenth century, sufficiently stable to be considered as a practice. Moreover, we will argue (...) that this practice is material. The permitted inferential actions when reasoning by folding are controlled by the physical realities of paper-like material, whilst claims to generality of some reasoning operations are supported by arguments from other mathematical idioms. The controlling structure provided by this material side of the practice is tight enough to allow for non-textual shared standards of argument and wide enough to provide sufficiently many problems for a practice to form. The upshot is that mathematical paper folding is a non-propositional and non-diagrammatic reasoning practice that adds to our understanding of the multi-faceted nature of the epistemic force of mathematical proof. We then draw on what we have learned from our contemplations about paper folding to highlight some lessons about what a study of mathematical cultures entails. (shrink)

Les années 1930 et 1940 marquent une période de crise pour le libéralisme. Des auteurs aussi divers que Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Walter Lippmann ou encore Michael Polanyi et Louis Rougier se réunissent lors de deux événements fondateurs, le colloque Walter Lippmann en 1938 et la création de la Société du Mont-Pèlerin en 1947, pour repenser le libéralisme. Cette refonte du projet libéral les pousse à établir un diagnostic relatif à la crise du libéralisme, remontant, pour les auteurs mentionnés, (...) à la Révolution française. Cet article se propose de montrer la cohérence du projet néolibéral à partir de leur diagnostic historique dans cette période de crise. En effet, en critiquant la Révolution française et ses effets comme participant d’un rationalisme néfaste, ayant donné naissance aussi bien au laissez-faire qu’aux divers collectivismes, les néolibéraux reprennent explicitement des concepts des critiques de la révolution, au premier rang desquels Edmund Burke. Le concept de tradition, compris comme recouvrant des règles sociales et juridiques ayant lentement évolué de façon à constituer des dispositifs de coordination permettant nos actions, est ainsi très largement repris et valorisé par les néolibéraux. Nous interprétons ainsi la théorie néolibérale à partir de cette recatégorisation du concept de tradition, et pointons les affinités des positions néolibérales avec le conservatisme philosophique. Ce rapprochement fait apparaître plusieurs tensions conceptuelles entre d’une part un évolutionnisme culturel et d’autre part la défense de valeurs occidentales substantielles. (shrink)

Unraveling the molecular detail of insulin receptor activation has proved challenging, but a major advance is the recent determination of crystallographic structures of insulin in complex with its primary binding site on the receptor. The current model for insulin receptor activation is that two distinct surfaces of insulin monomer engage sequentially with two distinct binding sites on the extracellular surface of the insulin receptor, which is itself a disulfide‐linked (αβ)2 homodimer. In the process, conformational changes occur both within the hormone (...) and the receptor, the latter resulting in the disruption of the intracellular interactions that hold the kinase domains in their basal state and in the initiation of the phosphorylation events that drive insulin signaling. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the extant structural data relating to hormone binding and how it effects receptor activation, as well as to discuss the issues that remain unresolved. (shrink)

Michael A. Petersa and Fazal Rizvib aBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China; bMelbourne University, Melbourne, Australia Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘no...

Open Peer Review: Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT)Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University, PR ChinaIn 2016 EPAT started experimenting with open peer review for articles that were part...

In recent years there has been a bold revival in the field of natural theology, where “natural theology” can be understood as the attempt to demonstrate that God exists by way of reason, evidence, and argument without the appeal to divine revelation. Today's practitioners of natural theology have not only revived and recast all of the traditional arguments in the field, but, by drawing upon the findings of contemporary cosmology, chemistry, and biology, have also developed a range of fascinating new (...) ones. -/- Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology brings together twenty experts working in the field today. Together, they practice natural theology from a wide range of perspectives, and show how the field of natural theology is practiced today with a degree of diversity and confidence not seen since the Middle Ages. Aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and graduate students, the volume will also be of interest to researchers in philosophy, theology, biblical studies, and religious studies, as an indispensable resource on contemporary theistic proofs. (shrink)