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...

This article provides a critical and global overview of current research into public opinion about science and technology (S&T). Although several sets of high-quality data exist, there remains a lack of international coordination and irregular release of new data in forms that can be widely used. The article highlights a range of key challenges that those involved in collecting and reporting public opinion data about S&T can address to provide society with a more comprehensive and more integrated picture of attitudes (...) and understanding about S&T around the world. (shrink)

This paper notes how Jim influenced my own use of Foucault and also focuses on two of James Marshall's New Zealand oriented texts. In the first, Discipline and Punishment in New Zealand Education he provides a Foucauldian genealogy of New Zealand approaches to both punishment and discipline, in particular corporal punishment. The second, his 1996 book co‐written with Michael Peters, Individualism and Community: Education and Social Policy in the Postmodern Condition, analyses political philosophy and social and educational policy as New (...) Zealand changed from being a welfare state since the 1930s to a neoliberal one since the mid 1980s. Foucauldian understandings about power, bio‐power, governmentality, autonomy and subjectivity are brought to bear in their analysis. (shrink)

The book is concerned with the shifting notions of self and identity and develops a Foucauldian analysis that examines these inherently philosophical notions in ...

Volume 52, Issue 13, December 2020, Page 1347-1357.

The idea of finding Foucault first looks at the many influences on Foucault, including his Nietzschean acclamations. It examines Foucault’s critical history of thought, his work on the orders of discourse with his emphasis on being a pluralist: the problem he says that he has set himself is that of the individualization of discourses. Finally, it addresses his work on the culture of the self which became a philosophical and historical question for Foucault later in his life as he investigated (...) the historical form of relations between subjectivity and truth in Western philosophy since Antiquity and how philosophy as an activity taught about the care of the self. The conclusion suggests some ways that students might approach his work as they proceed in finding Foucault and their own selves. (shrink)

A two-wave panel study with data collected before and after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was used to assess whether the accident changed views toward nuclear energy, a non–fossil fuel energy alternative. While the spill appears to have had little impact on mean attitudes toward nuclear energy, an interaction between environmental worldview and attention to oil spill news suggests the importance of exploring conditional relationships. Specifically, modeling suggests that only those without relatively pro-environmental worldviews became more positive about nuclear (...) energy and nuclear decision makers when they paid more attention to oil spill news. (shrink)

Nicholas Gresson 2001L-RUniversity of Auckland, Faculty of Education PhD graduates in 2001:Elizabeth Grierson/Gresson, Tina Besley, Ho-Chia Chueh, Janet Mansfield, Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul, Nesta De...

Kia kaha Aotearoa, be strong New ZealandTo bear witness to the aftermath of a terrorist atrocity as a national outpouring of grief and a memorialising of those who have passed away is a very touchi...

Risk analysis and regulatory systems are usually evaluated according to utilitarian frameworks, as they are viewed to operate “objectively” by considering the health, environmental, and economic impacts of technological applications. Yet, the estimation of impacts during risk analysis and the decisions in regulatory review are affected by value choices of actors and stakeholders; attention to principles such as autonomy, justice, and integrity; and power relationships. In this article, case studies of biotechnology are used to illustrate how non-utilitarian principles are prominent (...) in risk analysis and regulatory review and to argue that these relationships should be carefully considered as we consider nanotechnology oversight systems for its products. We argue that there are not distinct separations between “science-based” review systems, in which evaluations of the consequences of technological products are primarily considered, and principles of integrity, justice, non-maleficence, and autonomy. It should further be expected that, given research into fair treatment during decision-making processes, attention to ethics will affect how citizens assess emerging technologies. Finally, a more holistic approach for evaluating oversight systems for the products of nanotechnology is suggested, one which does not draw a sharp distinction between risk analysis, regulation, and respect for non-utilitarian values. (shrink)

Using the tools of modern political economics and combining economic theory with a bird's-eye view of the data, this book reinterprets Smith's pillars of prosperity to explain the existence of development clusters--places that tend to ...

Following Aristotle’s description of youth and brief discussion about indoctrination and parrhesia, the article historicizes Socrates’ trial as the intersection of philosophy, education and a teacher’s influence on youth. It explores the historic-political context and how contemporary Athenians might have viewed Socrates and his student’s actions, whereby his teachings were implicated in three coups led by his former students against Athenian democracy, for or which he accepted little or no responsibility. Socrates appears subversively anti-democratic. This provides grounds that challenge the (...) dominant and standard philosophical account of Socrates as one of the great teachers, perhaps the greatest in the Western tradition, and critiques the way philosophy so often presents a de-contextualized and ahistorical picture. Concerns about the influence of education, teachers and indoctrination on youth have existed since ancient times. Currently, many states, especially, but not only, democracies, are concerned about Islamic fundamentalist teachings potentially leading to terrorism. The article presents contemporary exemplars from four countries: Austria, Kenya, the UK and Saudi Arabia. The crucial question remains: to what extent is it reasonable to hold a teacher responsible for a student’s subsequent actions? (shrink)

Following Aristotle’s description of youth and brief discussion about indoctrination and parrhesia, the article historicizes Socrates’ trial as the intersection of philosophy, education and a teacher’s influence on youth. It explores the historic-political context and how contemporary Athenians might have viewed Socrates and his student’s actions, whereby his teachings were implicated in three coups led by his former students against Athenian democracy, for or which he accepted little or no responsibility. Socrates appears subversively anti-democratic. This provides grounds that challenge the (...) dominant and standard philosophical account of Socrates as one of the great teachers, perhaps the greatest in the Western tradition, and critiques the way philosophy so often presents a de-contextualized and ahistorical picture. Concerns about the influence of education, teachers and indoctrination on youth have existed since ancient times. Currently, many states, especially, but not only, democracies, are concerned about Islamic fundamentalist teachings potentially leading to terrorism. The article presents contemporary exemplars from four countries: Austria, Kenya, the UK and Saudi Arabia. The crucial question remains: to what extent is it reasonable to hold a teacher responsible for a student’s subsequent actions? (shrink)

The 2001 and 2012 National Science Foundation surveys of public attitudes and knowledge about science were used to model perceptions of scientists and explore whether the predictors of such perceptions have changed over time. The available data indicate that the relative impact of the available predictors changed in only minor ways between the two time periods. Predictors of views about scientists include age, gender, and scientific knowledge, regardless of time period. Science museum attendance and primary source of science news were (...) only rarely significant predictors. A limitation of the modeling is that the available predictors do a relatively poor job predicting both positive and negative views about scientists. This may suggest the need to reconsider which questions get included in the biennial National Science Foundation science and technology survey or the measures used to assess views about scientists. (shrink)

_Teaching, Responsibility, and the Corruption of Youth_ explores the notion of responsibility in a complex world focusing on practices of truth-telling, interculturalism and ethnocentrism, the sources of anti-Westernism, the end of multi-culturalism, the refugee crisis and the demands of global citizenship.

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first (...) appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

a. The literature on biopolitics emerged 1970s with Michel Foucault’s ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, part five of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction :For a long time,...

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...) Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. (shrink)

This is Introduction to the PESA conference 2014 held in Hamilton, NZ, is devoted to the conference theme of ‘Education as philosophies of engagement’. We provide a brief analysis of the modern history of ‘philosophies of engagement’ since the Second World War examining the notion of socially responsible writing and teaching.