Tag Archives: philosophy

AN ILLUMINATING PROFUNDITY

In the other direction, the foundationalism implicit in Intelligent Design is easy to identify. Although the ID cabal tries to ‘fuzzify’ and fudge this issue and insulate themselves from this obvious implication by severing a tie made by association, the tie follows from the very clear and direct association to a specific religious belief system.

The absolutist foundation is: the ‘intelligent designer’ came to center the designed creation upon the generation of Christianity. It could be said that this is what the intelligently designed creation of cosmos, (and per force milky way, solar system, earth, life, mankind, son of this God,) is all about.

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RESPONSIVE ATTITUDES

Another goldmine hiding out on the web. This time oriented around phenomenological-constructive psychology and coming out of The Virtual Faculty in New Zealand. The VF has a modest facade behind which lies enormous resources; for example: The Vysgotsky Project.

I haven’t read all the papers, (not hardly!) but could point to a thinker worth curling up with. John Shotter.

If the unceasing flow of speech entwined activity is sustained between us spontaneously, i.e., in an unforced, unplanned, and unintended fashion, what must be the nature of our everyday activities such that we can not only sustain this flow routinely in our actions, but we also, unreflectively, repair or restore it should a significant hiatus occur within it (Buttney, 1993; Shotter, 1984)? To do this, we must both be able to ‘follow’ others in our talk entwined activities, while at the same time, we must speak and act in ways that they also can ‘follow’. To follow another’s utterance entwined activities, we must actively adopt an expectant attitude toward them. Besides noting their content, their reference to the current context, we must also note their point, the changes in that context toward which they ‘gesture’ in the future. As Bakhtin (1986) puts it: “…when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on. And the listener adopts this responsive attitude for the entire duration of the process of listening and understanding, from the very beginning – sometimes literally from the speaker’s first word” (p.68).

Inside dialogical realities: FROM AN ABSTRACT-SYSTEMATIC TO A PARTICIPATORY-WHOLISTIC UNERSTANDING OF COMMUNICATION. (from above link

Lots of important reasoning/feeling meta-psychology under his name at this site. Another grabber: VICO, WITTGENSTEIN, AND BAKHTIN: PRACTICAL TRUST’ IN DIALOGICAL COMMUNITIES.

…tip of the berg.

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SHAMELESSLY DUMB

The essential humorous take on the evolution non-controversy has quickly passed into legendary status on the internet. Of course I’m speaking of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its infinite creative unraveling as both parody and pastadigm. The Verganza site is worthy of any and all attention the reader with a sense of humor can deploy. Dig the emails and their growing revelations about the true magnitude of the noodlie mythologem.

…back in the unreal worldly…Sohel’s blog is silly but I discovered Benson College writing professor Leonard Rosen’s essay on it. Insipid is never good, but sometimes it can fuel entertaining “super insipidry”.

Here’s Rosen’s thoughtful (?) banal riff on the reconciliation of science and ID.

Excerpt:

Biologists and intelligent designers may point to the same tiger, but because one asks how and the other why, they talk past each other. It’s a nondebate. And that’s what we can teach. Throughout history, into our own day, how and why — both, neither alone — have defined the human project. Nations that would be guided by one question, not both, usually make a mess of things. How has given us Einstein and Euclid; why, Virginia Woolf, Homer, Moses, and Mother Teresa. Have we not learned, even yet, to untangle these questions? They should be, and have ever been, debated endlessly, but never with much success in the same breath. We need both but must pursue each alone. At the end of life, no one wants another description of the tiger’s symmetry. We want what William Blake did: to know that those stripes, and our lives, are not accidents of matter colliding in the void. Until scientists, the masters of how, can give us that, we will ask why. There is no debate over intelligent design, only different ways of knowing and the mystery of tigers burning bright.

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DESIGNER SMACK DOWN

I’ve been tracking the instigation of the Intelligent Design crowd in their play for attention in Dover v. Kitzmiller. The battle for the hearts and minds of impressionable high school science students seems to me to be no more than this given how etched the so-called “Wedge Strategy” is at the leading edge of the long-standing historical movement to replace science with a nonsensical magical pseudoscience. It does a disservice to religion to suggest scientific explanation should be replaced by mythic explanation.

But even if this category error leaps out of the fray, it is notable that the ID brethren nowadays believe scientific methodology might be usurped simply because school boards can vote on what constitutes scientific method, and, do so through appealing to academic freedom, or, ‘studying all the sides’. Silly…

(The controversy is a red herring. The matter is settled both as a matter of the status of biological knowledge, and, the ill status of the already ruined explanatory program and ‘metaphysics’ of Intelligent Design.)

What is interesting lies in the other direction, away from science.

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THROUGH OUR UNDERSTANDING

The world before it is perceived is an infinite collection of qualities. It is up to the perceiver to use some of these qualities to differentiate one event from another. This process of differentiation is driven by desire (relevance, need, meaning…). Note that the perceiver does not “construct” reality itself; rather the perceiver constructs an understanding of reality, a model or theory which guides perception and behavior. Neither does reality alone determine perceptions and behaviors, but rather reality as experienced “through” our understanding.

PERSPECTIVES THEORY C. George Boeree Perspectives web Seven Perspectives

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SAPIENTIAL PERSPECTIVES

Wendy L. Freeman pops a killer koan at the head of this very good article by Chris Clark.

Not only do we know more about the universe, but our understanding is deeper, and the questions that we are asking are more profound. Still, our understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe has not yet caught up with what we know about it.

Chris Clark Ways of Knowing: Science and Mysticism Today

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PROXIMALICITIES

In the March ending blast I wandered around my own lightly held framing of that time, yesterday. My frame changes, adapts. Obviously learning can’t be criticized on its own terms because it doesn’t really present any of its own terms. Various descriptions and atomizations hover around the barest actuality: a system is moved to a state different than its initial state.

In this respect, I read criticism of (whatever) learning theory as always being meta-theoretical and meta-critical. In that there are orders of theorization, their critical relations are also always matters of dialectics and perspectivism. Since there is no classic ordering available, no Newtonian moment for learning theory, meta-learning theory is fundamentally synthetic and, at beguiling times, is archly creative and open-ended, ambiguous; is often post-modern, ‘regimed’.

“The reflection or ‘constructivist’ view of experiential learning dominating adult education has drawn attention to the importance of reflection and the need to adjust pedagogy to acknowledge the importance of multi-dimensional experience. But the critical challenges cited in the previous section have shown that overly-deterministic understandings of human perceptions of experience, overly-cognitive understandings of relations between experience and knowledge, and overly-managerial interventions of educators in people’s learning from experience limit our theorizing, and threaten to repress both experiencing and learning processes. As Elana Michelson (1999) continues to remind us, “experience exceeds rational attempts to bound it, control, and rationalize it according to pre-existing social categories and sanctioned uses” (p. 151).”

Tara Fenwick. Experiential Learning: A Theoretical Critique Explored Through Five Perspectives (available at Ms. Fenwick’s academic portal, along with many other gems; her paper on Stephen Covey is terrific.)

Elana Michelson. Carnival, paranoia and experiential learning Ingenta [pay])

“This led me back to the tailor shops for another round of ethnographic fieldwork to try to characterize everyday math. The differences were striking, leading to the conclusion that the tailors’ math practices-that were supposed to be quintessential “formal,” “abstract,” “decontextualized” kinds of knowledge from the point of ill view of the formal/informal model-were socially situated, and had a contextually embedded character. This in turn led to the conclusion that it was not just the informal side of life that was composed of intricately context-embedded and situated activity:
there is nothing else.

And further, if there is no other kind of activity except situated activity, then there is no kind of learning that can be distinguished theoretically by its “de-contextualizalion,” as rhetoric pertaining to schooling and school practices so often insists. This has two implications at least: (1) that decontextualizalion practices, are socially, especially politically, situated practices (Lave, 1993)4; (2) examples of apprenticeship, which do not mystify and deny the situated character of learning, offer an easier site for the understanding and theorizing of learning than do schools.”

Jean Lave. Teaching, as Learning, in Practice (part of the resources @University of Miami and Florida International University’s “Cultural-Historical Activity Circle”.

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FEED ME MORE

We have come to this world to accept it, not merely to know it. We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy. The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence. But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed. From our very childhood habits are formed and knowledge is imparted in such a manner that our life is weaned away from nature and our mind and the world are set in opposition from the beginning of our days. Thus the greatest of educations for which we came prepared is neglected, and we are made to lose our world to find a bagful of information instead. We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him grammar. His hunger is for the Epic, but he is supplied with chronicles of facts and dates…Child-nature protests against such calamity with all its power of suffering, subdued at last into silence by punishment.

Rabindranath Tagore, Personality,1917: 116-17 excerpt@infed

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A WHALE OF A TALE

Ken Miller desolves Phillip E. Johnson in this exchange of letters about intelligent design. Johnson is, in my estimation, the worst philosopher who has ever descended from primitive primates. But his inability to fit together his propositions logically is not as pathetic as the content of those propositions.

PBS.NOVA How Did We Get Here (1996)

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STEP TRAINING

Are some experiences more “experiential”?

Scale of Experientiality. Gibbons and Hopkins (1980)

(The schema embedded in the paper is a thought provoker.)

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LOST IN SPACE

The web site is an old school vertical sprawl, the subjects under consideration endless in number and magnitude, the format dialectical, yet, it’s the darn pragmatic mission I wish to highlight:

As you may realise from reading this website, my partner (philosopher Geoff Haselhurst) and I are building a large philosophy website which is the source (and inspiration) for most of the Philosophy, (and some Vintage Erotica and Fine Art) images and quotes in The Philosophy Shop.

For custom products and gifts that are a little different, we have a unique range of Philosophy Prints, Clothes and Apparel with quotes and portraits of Famous Philosophers (from Ancient Greek Philosophy and Metaphysics, Eastern Philosophy and Mysticism, to Modern Western Philosophy and Science).

SpaceAndMotion and erotica.

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FROM THE HERMETICA

Having conceived that nothing is impossible to you, consider yourself immortal and able to understand everything, all art, all learning, the temper of every living thing. . . . Collect in yourself all the sensations of what has been made, of fire and water, dry and wet; and be everywhere at once, on land, in the sea, in heaven; be not yet born, be in the womb, be young, old, dead, beyond death. And when you have understood all these at once – times, places, things, qualities, quantities – then you can understand God. (Hermetica, trans. Brian P. Copenhaver, Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Mynga Futrell starts a little journey in today’s entry, Worldview Diversity. From there, check out the research results summarized in George Bishop’s paper, What American Really Believe, at secularhumanism.org. From the same site, biologist Richard dawkins weighs in on The Improbability of God. Perhaps belief is more complicated? Step next to Anil Mitra’s Intriguing, Being, Mind, and the Absolute. (This long paper is an example of a class of speculations on what underlies a worldview; the class: “Knowledge has an aspect as relationship… and another aspect as being”.)

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