Sharrad, Scott After the Census in 2011, the Australian Bureau of Statistics under took a major review of the questions it asks, how it asks them and how it presents them on Household Forms. Consequently, there was a large campaign around the question, 'What is the person's religion?' The push was on to either change the wording, split the question or to bring the 'no religion' option to the top of the list.

Sharrad, Scott; Bartholomeusz, David; Henderson, Stewart.

Sharrad, Scott The Council of Australian Humanist Societies has been in existence for over 50 years and in that time it has been kept running by some incredibly committed individuals. Over that time, the way CAHS and organised Humanism in general have operated in Australia has remained more or less the same. Indeed, in the September 1975 issue of the Australian Humanist - just 10 years after the formation of CAHS - Chairman Nick Stenning was lamenting the lack of (...) volunteers at the national level and real communication between state societies; a common complaint that is still to be heard around the traps today. (shrink)

Sharrad, Scott It is never a popular thing to say, 'We're in trouble.' But that is exactly what needs to be said about organised Humanism in Australia at the moment.

The rise and spectacular fall of the friendship between the two great philosophers of the eighteenth century, barely six months after they first met, reverberated on both sides of the Channel. As the relationship between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume unraveled, a volley of rancorous letters was fired off, then quickly published and devoured by aristocrats, intellectuals, and common readers alike. Everyone took sides in this momentous dispute between the greatest of Enlightenment thinkers. In this lively and revealing book, Robert (...) Zaretsky and John T. Scott explore the unfolding rift between Rousseau and Hume. The authors are particularly fascinated by the connection between the thinkers’ lives and thought, especially the way that the failure of each to understand the other—and himself—illuminates the limits of human understanding. In addition, they situate the philosophers’ quarrel in the social, political, and intellectual milieu that informed their actions, as well as the actions of the other participants in the dispute, such as James Boswell, Adam Smith, and Voltaire. By examining the conflict through the prism of each philosopher’s contribution to Western thought, Zaretsky and Scott reveal the implications for the two men as individuals and philosophers as well as for the contemporary world. (shrink)

Introduction to the Special Volume, “Method, Science and Mathematics: Neo-Kantianism and Analytic Philosophy,” edited by Scott Edgar and Lydia Patton. At its core, analytic philosophy concerns urgent questions about philosophy’s relation to the formal and empirical sciences, questions about philosophy’s relation to psychology and the social sciences, and ultimately questions about philosophy’s place in a broader cultural landscape. This picture of analytic philosophy shapes this collection’s focus on the history of the philosophy of mathematics, physics, and psychology. The following (...) essays uncover, reflect on, and exemplify modes of philosophy that are engaged with these allied disciplines. They make the case that, to the extent that analytic philosophers are still concerned with philosophy’s ties to these disciplines, we would do well to pay attention to neo-Kantian views on those ties. (shrink)

Prior to the initiation of spontaneous movement, evoked potentials can be seen to precede awareness of the impending movement by several hundreds of milliseconds, meaning that this recorded neural activity is the result of unconscious processing. This study investigates the neural representations of impending movement with and without awareness. Specifically, the relationship between awareness and ‘idling’ cortical oscillations in the beta range was assessed. It was found that, in situations where there was awareness of the impending movement, pre-movement evoked potentials (...) were associated with a decrease in beta range oscillations. In contrast, when awareness of the impending movement was not present, the onset of the pre-movement potential was associated with tonic levels of beta range oscillations. A model is considered where by distributed neural activity remains outside of conscious awareness through the persistence of tonic slow wave cortical oscillations. (shrink)

Scott Carson; John White on State Control of the Curriculum [1], Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 63–68, https://doi.o.

N. Scott Arnold argues that the most defensible version of a market socialist economic system would be unable to realize widely held socialist ideals and values. In particular, it would be responsible for widespread and systematic exploitation. The charge of exploitation, which is really a charge of injustice, has typically been made against capitalist systems by socialists. This book argues that it is market socialism--the only remaining viable form of socialism--that is systematically exploitative.

William H. Poteat’s thought, while indebted to Michael Polanyi, originates in Poteat’s own project of remembering all articulate significances to their pre-articulate grounding in the mindbody. He invented the term mindbody both to overstep the traditional distinction between mind and body and to name the living arche of all meaning and meaning-discernment. In focusing on the recovery of the mindbody as the bedrock ontological matrix for the aquisition of speech, the act of explicit reference par excellence, Poteat radicalizes and advances (...) Polanyi’s efforts to reclaim the tacit roots of all explicit knowledge. (shrink)

In the current landscape, child care is increasingly being seen as a place for early education, and systems are largely bundling child care in the Early Care and Education sphere through funding and quality measures. As states define school readiness and quality, they often miss critical elements, such as equitable access to quality and cultural traditions. This article provides a summary of the various definitions and structures of child care. It also discusses how the current child care policy conversation can (...) and ought to be infused with a framework grounded in the context of institutional racism and trauma. Models and examples will explore the differences between state government regulations, and how those differ than the regulation and structure of child care in Indian Country. (shrink)

I reconstruct Buber’s conception of personhood and identify in his work four criteria for personhood— uniqueness, wholeness, goodness, and a drive to relation—and an account of three basic degrees of personhood, stretching, as a kind of “chain of being,” from plants and animals, through humans, to God as the absolute person. I show that Buber’s “new” conception of personhood is rooted in older Neoplatonic notions, such the goodness of all being and the principle of plenitude. While other philosophers have used (...) reason and memory to distinguish persons, I find that Buber instead takes these to be specific to humanity, and I explore Buber’s account of a “fall” from a state of nature into a historical mode, such that our humanity threatens our personhood. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A Cybernetic Approach to Contextual Teaching and Learning” by Philip Baron. Upshot: I expand on Philip Baron’s discussion of conversation theory and its applications. I go on to address the question of how to help learners, as a collective, become more sophisticated in their understandings of ethics and epistemology.

An affirmative post-structural philosophy of organization inspired by Arnold Gehlen's philosophical anthropology, Michel Foucault's history of medicine and Gille Deleuze's early philosophical works. This book offers a deep and detailed analysis of the problems faced and their solutions.

In her early work on Modernist poetry and avant-garde poetics, Julia Kristeva proposed a bifurcated view of the poetic text as simultaneously constituted by both a “genotext” and a “phenotext.” Reading the “genotext” of any given poem might start by “pointing out the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices and melodic devices ”; and, in her words, it would also need to take into consideration “the way semantic and categorial fields are set out in syntactic (...) and logical features.” This essay seeks to demonstrate how Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge might be analyzed at the level of its genotext, taking as its primary example the first of the book’s eighty poems to illustrate how a straightforwardly genotextual analysis might proceed. The essay contends that, by closely observing the genotext of Mullen’s poetry in Muse & Drudge, one may eventually arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the “polyvocal” and “polymorphous” nature of the language and poetic design of the poems in this enigmatic collection. (shrink)