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)

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)

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)

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)

Con el surgimiento de las teorías del razonamiento rebatible ha sido creada una nueva clasificación de argumentos que distingue entre argumentos deductivos y argumentos derrotables. Tal distinción conlleva dos supuestos básicos: los argumentos derrotables son no monotónicos, y los deductivos no son derrotables. En este trabajo se muestran los problemas a los que conducen tales supuestos, como así también los que surgen de la definición usual de “argumento derrotable”. Para ello, se adopta la postura metodológica de distinguir entre el aspecto (...) lógico y el aspecto dialéctico del fenómeno argumentativo. Por último, se propone un criterio alternativo de clasificación de argumentos que evite los mencionados problemas. (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)

The first book dedicated to Gilles Deleuze's seminal study of Henri Bergson's philosophyHenri Bergson is widely accepted as one of the most significant thinkers for Gilles Deleuze's work. It is also frequently noted that Deleuze is largely responsible for having revived and contoured the prevailing interest in Bergson's work. Craig Lundy gives readers of Deleuze and Bergson an opportunity to discover and fully connect with an encounter that continues to exert enormous influence over the course of contemporary thought.Key FeaturesProvides (...) a critical analysis of Deleuze's engagement with Bergson, situating it within the broader trajectory of Bergson's 20th-21st century receptionExplains the origin of concepts central to Deleuze's work, such as multiplicity and the virtualDemonstrates in detail how the various components of Deleuze's Bergsonism work together to create a productive and progressively emergent whole". (shrink)

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)

This book sets out in plain language ethical questions of direct relevance to business today. This new edition expands the range of issues covered and includes a chapter on international business ethics, drawing extensively from Asian examples.

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)

Plotinus on the Soul is a study of Plotinus' psychology, which is arguably the most sophisticated Platonist theory of the soul in antiquity. Plotinus offers a Platonist response to Aristotelian and Stoic conceptions of the soul that is at the same time an innovative interpretation of Plato's Timaeus. He considers the notion of the soul to be crucial for explaining the rational order of the world. To this end, he discusses not only different types of individual soul but also an (...) entity that he was the first to introduce into philosophy: the so-called hypostasis Soul. This is the first study to provide a detailed explanation of this entity, but it also discusses the other types of soul, with an emphasis on the human soul, and explains Plotinus' original views on rational thought and its relation to experience. (shrink)

The present note revisits the joint work of Leonard Goddard and Richard Routley on significance logics with the aim of shedding new light on their understanding by studying them under the lens of recent semantic developments, such as the plurivalent semantics developed by Graham Priest. These semantics allow sentences to receive one, more than one, or no truth-value at all from a given carrier set. Since nonsignificant sentences are taken to be neither true nor false, i.e. truth-value gaps, in this (...) essay we show that with the aid of plurivalent semantics it is possible to straightforwardly instantiate Goddard and Routley’s understanding of how the connectives should work within significance logics. (shrink)

How should business deal with society's increasing demands for ethical and social responsibility? In plain language this book considers these and other ethical questions of direct relevance to business in the 1990s. It discusses the nature of ethics, ethical reasoning, the use of stakeholder analysis, and other central concepts used in business ethics. Using mainly, but not exclusively, Australian cases and specific examples, the book covers issues such as fairness in business dealings, advertising ethics, discrimination, and codes of ethics.

We prove that if $$\mathcal {A}$$ A is an infinite Boolean algebra in the ground model V and $$\mathbb {P}$$ P is a notion of forcing adding any of the following reals: a Cohen real, an unsplit real, or a random real, then, in any $$\mathbb {P}$$ P -generic extension V[G], $$\mathcal {A}$$ A has neither the Nikodym property nor the Grothendieck property. A similar result is also proved for a dominating real and the Nikodym property.

This paper examines the idea of the integrity of academic practice. We offer an account of the integrity of professional practice in general before applying it to academic professional practice within the contemporary, western university. We then introduce the concept of integrity traps and explain how they can make it difficult for academics working within a contemporary university environment to maintain their integrity.

The commentators expressed concerns regarding the relevance and value of non-computational non-symbolic explanations of cognitive performance. But what counts as an “explanation” depends on the pre-theoretical assumptions behind the scenes of empirical science regarding the kinds of variables and relationships that are sought out in the first place, and some of the present disagreements stem from incommensurate assumptions. Traditional cognitive science presumes cognition to be a decomposable system of components interacting according to computational rules to generate cognitive performances (i.e., component-dominant (...) dynamics). We assign primacy to interaction-dominant dynamics among components. Though either choice can be a good guess before the fact, the primacy of interactions is now supported by much recent empirical work in cognitive science. Consequently, in the main, the commentators have failed so far to address the growing evidence corroborating the theory-driven predictions of complexity science. (shrink)

Abstract This paper defends an argument from interpretation against the possibility of massive error. The argument shares many important features with Donald Davidson's famous argument, but also key differences. I defend the argument against claims that it begs the question against scepticism and that it leaves the sceptic with an obvious means of escape.

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)

C'est une edition corrigee et augmentee des articles de Darowski, publies precedement - a partir de 1978 - dans differentes revues. Ils concernent tous la Philosophie des jesuites en Pologne et en Lituanie au XVIIe et XVIIIe siecle. Les resumes ou summaria se trouvent a la fin de chaque chapitre. A la fin du livre, l'Auteur a ajoute quelques reflexions methodologiques et historiques sur l'art d'ecrire la philosophie des jesuites en Pologne du XVIe au XVIIIe siecle, ainsi que la bibliographie (...) recente de la philosophie des jesuites de la meme epoque. (shrink)

influence exerted by the virtual gaming community. As Sue Morris documents, in multiplayer games social rules soon develop among the gamers involved: ...

Damian Byers analyzes the form Husserl gives to the problem of knowledge—the way this form influences the development of the phenomenological method, and the results of its application. In a very clear fashion, Byers presents Husserl’s understanding of the roles of intentionality, idealism, temporalization, and kinesthesia in the constitution of knowledge. Drawing upon all of Husserl’s major texts, he corrects many misapprehensions about Husserl’s doctrines of intentionality and idealism. Byers argues that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is both a philosophy of (...) closure and control and a philosophy of openness and vulnerability. (shrink)

Under the UDHR, all persons have the right to "seek and to enjoy . . . asylum from persecution." From this designation as fundamental followed codification of the right in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating (collectively 'the Convention'), the "centrepiece" of treaties and customary norms that make up international refugee law. It defines and regulates the status and rights of refugees; its purpose is to safeguard the basic rights of persons "outside (...) their country of origin," who have fled due to a legitimate fear of persecution. Fundamentally, it guarantees that asylees and refugees enjoy rights without discrimination; without penalization for illegal territorial entry; and, without expulsion or return to "territories where . . . life or freedom would be threatened on account of . . . race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion," —or 'non-refoulement'. What follows is background on development of the principle of non-refoulement, evasive US Asylum Cooperative Agreements ('ACAs') and implementing legislation, and the resulting erosion to the right to asylum. (shrink)

While some may argue that universities are in a state of crisis, others claim that we are living in a post-university era; a time after universities. If there was a battle for the survival of the institution it is over and done with. The buildings still stand. Students enrol and may attend lectures, though most do not. But virtually nothing real remains. What some mistakenly take to be a university is, in actuality, an “uncanny” spectral presence. The encompassing ethico-philosophical question (...) is this: what is it about spectral space and the feeling of absence with regard to the university that is important to understand? The Spectral University is characterized by the absence of what used to give the university its constitutive form and structure; of what is essential to the university as an important place of learning and growth. What is gone is the ability to pursue the academic virtues. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to assess in a critical way the views presented by Graeme Smith in his book A Short History of Secularism as well as in his paper Talking to Ourselves: An Investigation into the Christian Ethics Inherent in Secularism. According to Smith, secular Western societies are underpinned by Christian ethics. An example of a moral norm that – in Smith’s opinion – derives from medieval Christianity and shapes the moral condition of the members of contemporary (...) societies, is the concern about the poor. My criticism of Smith’s thesis is based on the distinction between moral norms and the ways of justifying them. Referring to this distinction, my objective is to show that certain norms which appear to be the same cannot be treated as identical due to the significant differences in their justification. (shrink)

This paper articulates a conception of organizational justice based on the promise of a mode of organizing that does not violate the particularity of each and every other person. It argues that the decisive condition for such a form of justice resides in the realities of the cultural practices of an organization as they are apparent in the conduct of people in relation to multiple others. These are practices that can only seek justification in the primary right of each person (...) to be regarded with absolute alterity. It also argues that a degree of violence is unavoidable within any practical ordering of justice and that any consideration of ethics and justice in organizations must account for such violence and seek to negotiate its existence on ethical terms. The organizational justice that is referred to is one sensitive to the exercise of its own power and authority in the context of its unavoidable violation of its basis in ethics. This is a justice that is ethically necessary, but is never sure of itself. (shrink)

The Renaissance sceptic and medical doctor Francisco Sanchez has been rather unduly neglected in scholarly work on Renaissance scepticism. In this paper I discuss his scepticism against the background of the ancient distinction between Academic and Pyrrhonian scepticism. I argue that Sanchez was a Pyrrhonist rather than, as has been claimed in recent years, a mitigated Academic sceptic. In keeping with this I shall also try to show that Sanchez was crucially influenced by the ancient medical school of empiricism, a (...) school closely allied with Pyrrhonism. (shrink)

The global ecological crisis is upon us. From global warming to the long-term implications of ocean acidification, air and water pollution, deforestation, and the omnipresent dangers of nuclear technology the future of our planetary home is threatened. Yet in the midst of the unfolding crisis, the conventional ideologies of the twentieth century and their representations of nature remain unchallenged by both the defenders of capitalism and capitalism's most radical critics. The Distortion of Nature's Image illustrates how the anti-naturalism of late (...) capitalist society, in which nature is reified into the emptiness of mere matter, simply a thing to be dominated, is subtly complemented by the failure of the Left to go both beyond the historic limitations of Marx's ninteenth-century viewpoint and beyond anarchism's blind faith in "natural law." However, an alternative for comprehending nature and the ecological crisis as historical and social phenomena remains open in the dialectical naturalism of Western Marxism and Murray Bookchin's social ecology. By examining in closer detail how Bookchin's social ecology politicizes the concept of nature, as well as how precursory models in Western Marxist thought provide a foundation for this, Damian Gerber illustrates how the notion of an ecological society remains a decisively political question. (shrink)

From climate change to fossil fuel dependency, from the uneven effects of natural disasters to the loss of biodiversity: complex socio-environmental problems indicate the urgency for cross-disciplinary research into the ways in which the social, the natural and the technological are ever more entangled. This ground breaking text moves between environmental sociology and environmental geography, political and social ecology and critical design studies to provide a definitive mapping of the state of environmental social theory in the age of the anthropocene. (...) Environments, Natures and Social Theory provokes dialogue and confrontation between critical political economists, actor network theorists, neo-Malthusians and environmental justice advocates. It maps out the new environmental politics of hybridity moving from hybrid neo-liberals to end times ecologists, from post environmentalists to cyborg eco-socialists. White, Rudy and Gareau insist on the necessity of a critical but optimistic hybrid politics, arguing that a more just, egalitarian, democratic and sustainable anthropocene is within our grasp. This will only be brought into being, however, by reclaiming, celebrating and channeling the reconstructive potential of entangled hybrid humans as inventive hominids, creative gardeners, critical publics and political agents. Written in an accessible style, Environments, Natures and Social Theory is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students across the social sciences. (shrink)

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)

This book examines the centrality of integrity in relation to a variety of philosophical and psychological concerns that impinge upon the ethical life.