This paper draws attention to the tendency of a range of technologies to reduce pedagogical interactions to a series of datafied transactions of information. This is problematic because such transactions are always by definition reducible to finite possibilities. As the ability to gather and analyse data becomes increasingly fine-grained, the threat that these datafied approaches over-determine the pedagogical space increases. Drawing on the work of Hegel, as interpreted by twentieth century French radical philosopher Alexandre Kojève, this paper develops a model (...) of relational pedagogy which highlights three points of incompatibility with a datafied learning environment reduced to finite measures. Firstly: Kojève’s accont of authority in Hegel posits two aspects to the mimetic relation between teacher and student: recognition and realisation, which belong to the ipseity or about-self-ness of the subject, and are incompatible with a general definition of data. Secondly, the Hegelian approach to human historical time, in particular the assertion that time and desire are begun in the future, not the past, renders it incompatible with mathematical time as used in data processing. Finally, from these it is possible to derive a distinctive notion of the work of pedagogy, grounded in Kojève’s realist reading of Hegel, irreducible to information processing. In consequence of this threefold irreducibility, the paper draws attention to a need for relations of human pedagogical work to be inherent in the design of educational technologies and highlights the dangers of presuming a machine intelligence model in the design of learning environments. (shrink)

Creating android and humanoid robots to furnish companionship in the nursing care of older people continues to attract substantial development capital and research. Some people object, though, that machines of this kind furnish human–robot interaction characterized by inauthentic relationships. In particular, robotic and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been charged with substituting mindless mimicry of human behaviour for the real presence of conscious caring offered by human nurses. When thus viewed as deceptive, the robots also have prompted corresponding concerns regarding (...) their potential psychological, moral, and spiritual implications for people who will be interacting socially with these machines. The foregoing objections and concerns can be assessed quite differently, depending upon ambient religious beliefs or metaphysical presuppositions. The complaints may be set aside as unnecessary, for example, within religious traditions for which even current robots can be viewed as presenting spiritual aspects. Elsewhere, technological cultures may reject the complaints as expression of outdated superstition, holding that the machines eventually will enjoy a consciousness described entirely in materialist and behaviourist terms. While recognizing such assessments, the authors of this essay propose that the heart of the foregoing objections and concerns may be evaluated, in part, scientifically – albeit with a conclusion recommending fundamental revisions in AI modelling of human mental life. Specifically, considerations now favour introduction of AI models using interactive classical and quantum computation. Without this change, the answer to the essay's title question arguably is ‘no’ – with it, the answer plausibly becomes ‘maybe’. Either outcome holds very interesting implications for nurses. (shrink)

Preemption is a substantial threat to achieving racial equity. Since 2011, states have increasingly preempted local governments from enacting policies that can improve health and reduce racial inequities such as increasing minimum wage and requiring paid leave.

Explores the nature and relation of history and becoming in the work of Gilles Deleuze. How are we to understand the process of transformation, the creation of the new, and its relation to what has come before? In History and Becoming, Craig Lundy puts forward a series of fresh and provocative responses to this enduring problematic. Through an analysis of Gilles Deleuze's major solo works and his collaborations with Felix Guattari, he demonstrates how history and becoming work together in (...) driving novelty, transmutation and experimentation. What emerges from this exploration is a new way of thinking about history and the vital role it plays in bringing forth the future. (shrink)

While the Internet has emerged as a significant resource for women negotiating the questions and circumstances that arise during conception, pregnancy and childbirth, it remains unclear what role the Internet plays in challenging the current biomedical paradigm and empowering women to make meaningful choices. This article explores how women use the Internet to manage their pregnancies and mediate their doctor–patient relationships, particularly examining the role of social class and personal health history in shaping such Internet use. Drawing from in-depth interviews (...) with white middle-class mothers, the findings show that rather than using technology to resist the dominant biomedical paradigm, most women turned to online resources that affirmed mainstream medical authority and continued to rely on their doctors. By providing the means to confirm normalcy and take control in their reproductive experiences, the Internet enables socially privileged women to more fully perform the informed patient role in order to demonstrate their competence as mothers. (shrink)

This paper will address the question of the revolution in Gilles Deleuze's political ontology. More specifically, it will explore what kind of person Deleuze believes is capable of bringing about genuine and practical transformation. Contrary to the belief that a Deleuzian programme for change centres on the facilitation of ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ and pure ‘lines of flight’, I will demonstrate how Deleuze in fact advocates a more cautious and incremental if not conservative practice that promotes the ethic of prudence. This will (...) be achieved in part through a critical analysis of the dualistic premises upon which much Deleuzian political philosophy is based, alongside the topological triads that can also be found in his work. In light of this critique, Deleuze's thoughts on what it is to be and become a revolutionary will be brought into relief, giving rise to the question: who really is Deleuze's nomad, his true revolutionary or figure of transformation? (shrink)

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child is among the most comprehensive of all international human rights covenants. It was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1989, following a decade of discussion and debate relating to its content, and has now been ratified by every nation in the world except the United States. This level of endorsement and broad acceptance of its provisions establishes the articles of the CRC as global norms for the treatment of children and (...) standards for the dignity and respect that is due them. The CRC provides a global agenda for children and childhood and has been described as “an authoritative, universal definition of the rights of children and young people” (Hammarberg.. (shrink)

The rise of learning analytics, the application of complex metrics developed to exploit the proliferation of ‘Big Data’ in educational work, raises important moral questions about the nature of what is measurable in education. Teachers, schools and nations are increasingly held to account based on metrics, exacerbating the tendency for fine-grained measurement of learning experiences. In this article, the origins of learning analytics ontology are explored, drawing upon core ideas in the philosophy of computing, such as the general definition of (...) information and the information-theoretic account of knowledge. Drawing upon a reading of Descartes Meditatio II, which extends the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion into a pedagogy of intentionality, the article identifies a fundamental incompatibility between the subjective experience of learning and the information-theoretic account of knowledge. Human subjects experience and value their own information incommensurably with the ways in which computers measure and quantify information. The consequences of this finding for the design of online learning environments, and the necessary limitations of learning analytics and measurement are explored. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology tends to be associated with a massively modular cognitive architecture. On this framework of human cognition, an assembly of specialized information processors called modules developed under selection pressures encountered throughout the phylogenic history of hominids. The coordinated activity of domain-specific modules carries out all the processes of belief fixation, abstract reasoning, and other facets of central cognition. Against the massive modularity thesis, I defend an account of systemic functional adaptedness, according to which non-modular systems emerged because of adaptive (...) problems imposed by the intrinsic physiology of the evolving human brain. The proposed reformulation of evolutionary theorizing draws from neural network models and Cummins’ (1975) account of systemic functions to identify selection pressures that gave rise to non-modular, domain-general mechanisms in cognitive architecture. (shrink)

In 1914, on the eve of the Great War, the eminent scholar and polymath, Theodore Merz, published what would be the final volume of his magisterial history of nineteenth-century European thought. A belated review of this volume appeared in the April 1918 issue of the American Historical Review. This particular review, though favorable, was inexplicably unsigned. Our paper offers compelling evidence that the author of this unsigned review was George H. Mead, the pragmatist philosopher from the University of Chicago. The (...) paper is organized in the following fashion. First, several types of documentary evidence are cited in support of the claim that Mead authored the unsigned review. Second, content analysis is used to identify themes in the review that reflect the distinctive intellectual concerns of Mead. One such concern was the ability of research-based science to address and rectify problematic aspects of social life. The concluding section of the paper reprints in its entirety Mead’s 1918 review. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 51 - 75 History occupies a somewhat awkward position in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Although they often criticise history as a practice and advance alternatives that are explicitly anti-historical, such as ‘nomadology’ and ‘geophilosophy’, their scholarship is nevertheless littered with historical encounters and deeply influenced by historians such as Fernand Braudel. One of Deleuze and Guattari’s more significant engagements with history occurs through their reading and theory of universal history. (...) In this paper I will explicate and critically analyse the nature of this universal history vis-à-vis its most pertinent counterpoint: Hegel’s philosophy of world history. In contrast to Hegel’s form of historicism, which universalizes by virtue of a unitary and totalizing force, Deleuze and Guattari develop a universalizing mechanism that is strictly devoid of any privileged essence. Following, Deleuze and Guattari’s form of universal history is marked above all by contingency as opposed to necessity. In this paper I will show precisely how. I will also go on to demonstrate how Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history offers the promise of an historical ontology commensurate with the processes of creativity and becoming, provided that appropriate steps are taken to reaffirm the radical contingency at its heart. (shrink)

This collection situates Deleuze's work and several of his most important concepts in the context of his post-Kantian predecessors, further illuminating both the breadth of his philosophical heritage and the manner in which he moves beyond it. Through a series of studies by leading scholars in the field, At the Edges of Thought sheds new light on key philosophical encounters with thinkers such as Maimon, Kleist, Hölderlin, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Feuerbach in Deleuze's texts. Readers are invited to join with (...) Deleuze as he traverses and transforms post-Kantian philosophy, taking it towards the very edges of thought. (shrink)

As debate continues around the nature and values of education, it is important to ask the question of what factors motivate a student to engage with the ends of an educational institution. In this paper, a broad, holistic view of learner motivation, derived from Aristotelian ethics, is used to provide a model to drive institutional change. Focussing on the approach of one Higher Education institution to the particular accommodations required for students with disabilities, the paper identifies three factors which motivate (...) students, a failure to engage with the aims and ends of the educational project, a failure to see that a particular learning aim is worth attaining, and a simple lack of will‐power to attain it. To each of these failures a social cause is identified, and a change in both the institutional culture and the individual learner's approach to their education is suggested. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to excavate and analyse Henri Bergson’s “problematic” thinking. This task will be prosecuted through a close reading of his two-part introduction to The Creative Mind – the text in which Bergson most concisely and conclusively articulates the “problematic” character of his work. As I will attempt to show in this paper, Bergson’s work is “problematic” in two respects, one to do with methodology and the other metaphysics. These two, furthermore, are intimately entwined: on the (...) one hand, Bergson’s method of problematisation emerges from the findings of his metaphysical inquiries, while on the other, it is through the application of his problematising method that the findings of his metaphysical inquiries can be deemed as reliably accurate. In exploring this “problematic” intersection of Bergson’s methodology and metaphysics, I will first discuss what Bergson takes to be one of the biggest problems for philosophy: the lack of adequate “precision.” As we will see, many of the major themes and concepts of Bergson’s work, such as duration and intuition, both spring from and converge on his efforts to address this problem. The pursuit of precision also calls for a “problematic approach” that is appropriate for the metaphysical reality it seeks to handle – an approach I will outline in the second part of this paper. This will be followed by a discussion of how Bergson’s problematic method/metaphysics involves a critique of what he refers to as “fictitious,” “phantom” or “pseudo-problems.” This “negative” aspect of Bergsonian problematisation will then be reconsidered in the final part of the paper alongside its “positive” dimension – posing problems in terms of time. (shrink)

This paper will examine the relation between philosophical thought and the various milieus in which such thought takes place using the late work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It will argue that their assessment of this relation involves a rearticulation of philosophy as an historiophilosophy. To claim that Deleuze and Guattari promote such a form of philosophy is contentious, as their work is often noted for implementing an ontological distinction between becoming and history, whereby the former is associated with (...) the act of creation and the latter with retrospective representations of this creative process. Furthermore, when elaborating on the creative nature of philosophical thought, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to philosophy as a 'geophilosophy' that is in contrast to history. Nevertheless, this paper will demonstrate that far from abandoning the category of history, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the relations between philosophical thought and relative milieus suggests to us an historical ontology and methodology that is a critical part of philosophy’s nature. (shrink)

Evolutionary Psychology (EP) tends to be associated with a Massively Modular (MM) cognitive architecture. I argue that EP favors a non-MM cognitive architecture. The main point of dispute is whether central cognition, such as abstract reasoning, exhibits domain-general properties. Partisans of EP argue that domain-specific modules govern central cognition, for it is unclear how the cognitive mind could have evolved domain-generality. In response, I defend a distinction between exogenous and endogenous selection pressures, according to which exogenous pressures tend to select (...) for domain-specificity, whereas the latter, endogenous pressures, select in favor of domain-generality. I draw on models from brain network theory to motivate this distinction, and also to establish that a domain-general, non-MM cognitive architecture is the more parsimonious adaptive solution to endogenous pressures. (shrink)

This paper will explore the possibility of a creative philosophy of history in the work of Gilles Deleuze. It will do so by focusing on Deleuze’s concepts of ‘intensity’ and ‘depth’, as discussed in his seminal work Difference and Repetition . By analysing these concepts in light of several historical thinkers whom Deleuze significantly draws upon (Bergson, Péguy and Braudel), I will show in this paper how Deleuze promotes a theory of history that is not opposed to his philosophy of (...) becoming and creativity, but in concert with it. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The way we measure values is foundational to their study. This paper explores the empirical findings and theoretical discussions in the literature concerning an essential quality for any measure of values, its validity. We discuss an important debate on validity within the literature concerning the ability of value measures to predict value-related behaviour. We interrogate a key assumption behind the value-behaviour link, namely that a participant’s responses on a valid value measure will predict their behaviour. Ultimately, we make the (...) case that a better understanding of the relationship between values and behaviour may be possible if we also consider social norms. (shrink)

In their final book, Deleuze and Guattari state that the practice of philosophy ‘calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist’. This call is deeply problematic: aside from its aristocratic overtones, it is difficult to ascertain what it might sound like, how to give it voice, and what might come of it. But it is also problematic in form. In this paper I will explain how. After investigating its genesis in Deleuze’s engagements (...) with Nietzsche and Bergson, I will outline the geography of the call as it appears in the mature work of Deleuze and Guattari. Aided by this analysis, the paper will conclude by making some tentative remarks on what is to be done with the call for a new earth and people – or, more accurately, what might be done with it, for the benefit of what is to come. (shrink)

Global citizenship education (GCE) within schools in England is increasingly being reoriented to address a statutory duty to promote fundamental British values (FBV). This multi-method study investigates the influence of critical GCE within initial teacher education in reshaping awareness, understanding and disposition towards FBV amongst beginning teachers. Findings highlight a tension between growing confidence and understanding of how to implement the FBV agenda and the development of autonomous dispositions of the kind demanded for the practice of critical GCE. Four teacher (...) orientations towards FBV are developed and explored, demonstrating the role of practice-based learning for the cultivation of critical dispositions. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child can be useful in pediatric bioethics. Adopted in 1989, the CRC reflects norms that have been deliberated upon for a long period of time and endorsed by most nations. The United States is now the only country that has not ratified the CRC.1 International human rights law shares many key moral concepts with clinical pediatric bioethics, and the CRC provides a considered language common to many (...) jurisdictions that can assist bioethicists in their daily practice and help health-care organizations in their policy development and international interactions. There may, however, be practical challenges with using the CRC in the practice of.. (shrink)

The increasingly ubiquitous use of technology has led to the concomitant rise of intensified data collection and the ethical issues associated with the privacy and security of that data. In order to address the question of how these ethical concerns are discussed in the literature surrounding the subject, we examined articles published in IEEE Security and Privacy, a magazine targeted towards a general, technically-oriented readership spanning both academia and industry. Our investigation of the intersection between the ethical and technological dimensions (...) of privacy and security is structured as a bibliometric analysis. Our dataset covers all articles published in IEEE Security and Privacy since its inception in 2003 to February 06, 2014. This venue was chosen not only because of its target readership, but also because a preliminary search of keywords related to ethics, privacy, and security topics in the ISI Web of Knowledge and IEEE Xplore indicated that IEEE Security and Privacy has published a preponderance of articles matching those topics. In fact, our search returned two-fold more articles for IEEE Security and Privacy than the next most prolific venue. These reasons, coupled with the fact that both academia and industry are well-represented in the authorship of articles makes IEEE Security and Privacy an excellent candidate for bibliometric analysis. Our analysis examines the ways articles in IEEE Security and Privacy relate ethics to information technology. Such articles can influence the development of law, policy and the future of information technology ethics. We employed thematic and JK-biplot analyses of content relating privacy and ethics and found eight dominant themes as well as the inter-theme relationships. Authors and institutional affiliations were examined to discern whether centers of research activity and/or authors dominated the overall field or thematic areas. Results suggest avenues for future work in critical areas, especially for closing present gaps in the coverage of ethics and information technology privacy and security themes particularly in the areas of ethics and privacy awareness. (shrink)

A century ago Henri Bergson was a world-wide celebrity. However, after the world wars his philosophy had already fallen into disfavor, disdain and oblivion. Prominent molecular biologists claimed to have hammered the final nail in the coffin of vitalism. Francis Crick himself, with prophetic hubris, called any future vitalist a crank. Things were not much different amongst analytic philosophers who, more concerned with clarity than precision, saw in Bergson’s works hardly more than poetry and mysticism. In fact, ‘vitalism’ became a (...) one-word argument against itself. And yet, ironically, vitalism refused to die. Half a century ago, Gilles Deleuze wrote a seminal interpretation of Bergson’s philosophy. After providing a concrete articulation of Bergson’s method of intuition, Deleuze studied the progression of Bergson’s concepts of duration, memory, and the élan, and paired them with his own concepts of multiplicity, the virtual and differentiation. Now, in a lucid and crisp book, Craig Lundy unpacks Deleuze’s Bergsonism. Not only does the book afford a better grasp of Bergson’s genius, but it also allows us to trace the origin of some key notions in Deleuze’s philosophy. Moreover, Lundy’s effort is particularly opportune in the context of the current revival of Bergson’s thought. In a time when it is becoming increasingly strenuous to cash the promissory notes of scientific materialism, reductionism and mechanicism, Lundy’s Deleuze’s Bergsonism represents an invaluable opportunity to better understand the philosopher of time and life par excellence. (shrink)