We have arrived at an inflection point, a moment in history when the sentience, conscious- ness, intelligence, agency, and even the moral agency of many nonhuman animals can no longer be questioned without ignoring centuries of accumulated scientific knowledge. Nowhere is this more true than in our understanding of nonhuman primates (NHPs). A neu- roethics committed to probing the ethical implications of brain research must be able to respond to and anticipate the challenges ahead as brain projects globally prepare to (...) increase the use of NHPs in research. This requires adopting a less anthropocentric focus that includes nonhuman animals within its scope. But the Neuroethics Roadmap represents a missed opportunity to critically examine the future direction of research with NHPs in an ethically-responsive neuroscience. (shrink)

Humans encounter and use animals in a stunning number of ways. The nature of these animals and the justifiability or unjustifiabilitly of human uses of them are the subject matter of this volume.Philosophers have long been intrigued by animal minds and vegetarianism, but only around the last quarter of the twentieth century did a significant philosophical literature begin to be developed on both the scientific study of animals and the ethics of human uses of animals. This literature had a primary (...) focus on discussion of animal psychology, the moral status of animals, the nature and significance of species, and a number of practical problems. This Oxford Handbook is designed to capture the nature of the questions as they stand today and to propose solutions to many of the major problems. Several chapters in this volume explore matters that have never previously been examined by philosophers.The authors of the thirty-five chapters come from a diverse set of philosophical interests in the History of Philosophy, the Philosophy of Mind, the Philosophy of Biology, the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, the Philosophy of Language, Ethical Theory, and Practical Ethics. They explore many theoretical issues about animal minds and an array of practical concerns about animal products, farm animals, hunting, circuses, zoos, the entertainment industry, safety-testing on animals, the status and moral significance of species, environmental ethics, the nature and significance of the minds of animals, and so on. They also investigate what the future may be expected to bring in the way of new scientific developments and new moral problems.This book of original essays is the most comprehensive single volume ever published on animal minds and the ethics of our use of animals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Theology of Play and the Play of Theology in Thomas AquinasDavid L. Whidden IIISTUDENTS OF THOMAS AQUINAS have argued over many issues in the last 150 years or so; in fact, it is nearly impossible to get out of the very first question of the Summa Theologiae without entering into a century-long debate about the status of sacred doctrine as an Aristotelian science. We ponder whether theology meets (...) the requirements of a scientia and argue about just how to understand the task of theology in the face of Aquinas’s concern about theology as a scientia. Part of this ongoing argument is shaped by the philosophical and epistemological needs of theologians attempting to justify their positions in an academic world driven by the secular and scientific norms of the Enlightenment. Additionally, some interest in theology as a scientia is driven by the desire to provide a philosophically acceptable alternative to secular forms of reason—thus Leo’s XIII’s promotion of Thomistic philosophy.The interest in theology as a science was shaped by the historical work of Chenu in his influential articles on the topic and then by almost every other important Thomist in the last fifty years.1 Theology as a scientia is such a pressing topic that it would almost be fair to say that Thomists have developed their own scientia of theology as a scientia. [End Page 273]Beyond the modern and, perhaps, postmodern concerns driving this interest, there are good reasons to pay attention to Aquinas on the status of theology. If we focus on theology as a scientia, it is because Aquinas invites us to do so by taking up this question in one form or another at the beginning of his major theological syntheses. We are, after all, only following his lead and pondering with him just what we are thinking about, and how we are thinking, when we think about God.Within the Thomistic corpus there is, however, a minority report with regard to the status of theology. In his prologue to his commentary on Boethius’s Hebdomads, Aquinas looks at theology in a very different way, one that can supplement our understanding of sacred doctrine in its role as both an intellectual and an affective enterprise. In this commentary Aquinas journeys into a different territory and explores theology, not as a scientia, but as a kind of play—a play that evokes delight and pleasure in the one who pursues wisdom.My approach will be first to describe Aquinas’s theology with regard to regular play—the kind of recreational activities we all engage in, whether they are physical or verbal. He takes up the question of the morality of play in several places and in a way that will inform our understanding of what he means when he describes theology as play. With this understanding of regular play in place, we will then explore theology as play, based on the supposition that there is something analogical between regular play and theology as play. I will finish with some reflections on how this might contribute to our present understanding of theological work.IWhile he scatters comments about play across his corpus and mentions it in all of his theological syntheses, Aquinas gives sustained attention to play in two places: first, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, and second, in question 168 of the Secunda secundae (in the treatise on temperance) of the Summa theologiae. From the outset one will notice that one of [End Page 274] the difficulties in thinking about play with Aquinas is that the Latin word for play, ludo, is multivalent, difficult to translate, and so can sometimes mean recreational games, sometimes word play, and sometimes making fun of or deriding someone.2 Even the context does not always make it clear exactly how Aquinas is talking about play.In these two sustained treatments of play Aquinas is concerned with two main issues: first, the purpose of play; second, the morality of games and how they can be approached virtuously—with proper order. That is, he is concerned with the why and the how of games.Aquinas pursues these issues in his commentary... (shrink)

This research aimed to show the political stance of the Muslim majority represented by the Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia (MoRA RI) towards non-Muslim leadership through the translation of the Qur’an. It examined the differences in the translation of the Qur’an based on the theory of translation as a political act. A total of 19 phrases or collocated words ittahaza awliya were found in the corpus of the Qur’an. The researchers approached the study with a critical (...) discourse analysis approach, and conducted contrastive analysis on translations of these collocated words in four editions of translations of the Qur’an published officially by MoRA RI from 1965 to 2019. The results proved that interference in translation of the collocation ittaḥaẓa awliya is caused by the influence of the source text, and that the political situation and ideology influenced the translation of the Qur’an in Indonesia. The political direction of the Indonesian government, especially MoRA RI, tended to provide more opportunities for non-Muslims to become leaders today, as seen in the 2019 edition. While the translation edition published before tended to close the possibility of non-Muslims becoming leaders. This finding shows the government’s stance on democracy for non-Muslims, which according to previous research findings has declined with the rise of Islamic populism in Indonesia.Contribution: This article provides an explanation of one side of the difficulty of translating collocation [ittaḥaẓa awliya] in the Qur’an and at the same time shows the political direction of the government of the Republic of Indonesia regarding the politics of non-Muslim leadership. (shrink)

Two problems are considered here. One relates to who has moral status, and the other relates to who has moral responsibility. The criteria for mattering morally have long been disputed, and many humans and nonhuman animals have been considered “marginal cases,” on the contested edges of moral considerability and concern. The marginalization of humans and other species is frequently the pretext for denying their rights, including the rights to health care, to reproductive freedom, and to bodily autonomy. There is broad (...) agreement across cultural and philosophical traditions about the capacities and responsibilities of moral agents. I propose an inclusive and expansive way of thinking about moral status, situating it not in the characteristics or capacities of individuals, but in the responsibilities and obligations of moral agents. Moral agents, under this view, are not privileged or entitled to special treatment but rather have responsibilities. I approach this by considering some African communitarian conceptions of moral status and moral agency. I propose that moral agency can also be more expansive and include not just individual moral agents but collective entities that have some of the traits of moral agents: power, freedom, and the capacity to recognize and act on the demands of morality and acknowledge and respect the rights of others. Expanding who and what is a moral agent correspondingly extends moral responsibility for respecting rights and fostering the conditions for the health and well-being of humans and animals onto the collective entities who uniquely have the capacity to attend to global-scale health threats such as pandemics and human-caused climate change. (shrink)

Organ donation after the circulatory determination of death requires the permanent cessation of circulation while organ donation after the brain determination of death requires the irreversible cessation of brain functions. The unified brain-based determination of death connects the brain and circulatory death criteria for circulatory death determination in organ donation as follows: permanent cessation of systemic circulation causes permanent cessation of brain circulation which causes permanent cessation of brain perfusion which causes permanent cessation of brain function. The relevant circulation that (...) must cease in circulatory death determination is that to the brain. Eliminating brain circulation from the donor ECMO organ perfusion circuit in thoracoabdominal NRP protocols satisfies the unified brain-based determination of death but only if the complete cessation of brain circulation can be proved. Despite its medical and physiologic rationale, the unified brain-based determination of death remains inconsistent with the Uniform Determination of Death Act. (shrink)

This chapter presents an opinionated account of how to understand the contributions of experience, especially with respect to the role of cognitive science, in developing and assessing metaphysical theories of reality. I develop a methodological basis for the idea that, independently of work in experimental philosophy focused on explications of concepts, contemporary metaphysical theories with a role for experiential evidence can be fruitfully connected to empirical work in psychology, especially cognitive science. My argument is not that cognitive science should replace (...) the metaphysician’s use of a priori theorizing and ordinary experience as a guide to metaphysical reality. Rather, we should enrich our perspective on a priori theorizing and ordinary experience as a guide to metaphysical reality by drawing on any relevant work in cognitive science. (shrink)

Neural reuse is a form of neuroplasticity whereby neural elements originally developed for one purpose are put to multiple uses. A diverse behavioral repertoire is achieved by means of the creation of multiple, nested, and overlapping neural coalitions, in which each neural element is a member of multiple different coalitions and cooperates with a different set of partners at different times. Neural reuse has profound implications for how we think about our continuity with other species, for how we understand the (...) similarities and differences between psychological processes, and for how best to pursue a unified science of the mind.After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain(2014; henceforthAfter Phrenologyin this Précis) surveys the terrain and advocates for a series of reforms in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The book argues that, among other things, we should capture brain function in a multidimensional manner, develop a new, action-oriented vocabulary for psychology, and recognize that higher-order cognitive processes are built from complex configurations of already evolved circuitry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. By IRIS MURDOCH. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane; New York: Viking, 1992. $35.00. Dame Iris Murdoch is familiar to most people as a witty and en· gaging novelist whose twenty-four hooks of fiction can he read on a variety of levels. They are wonderful stories, hut the philosophically acute reader will also enjoy Murdoch's judgments, polemics, and inhouse jokes about philosophers and philosophical (...) views. Comparatively few people are aware of Murdoch's previous scholarly studies: Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, The Sovereignty of the Good, The Fire and the Sun; and Acastos. Even so, those familiar with these hooks will recognize the profound impact she has had on debates within moral philosophy. She has been at the forefront of the move· ment that has rehabilitated the central importance of such notions as goodness, the Good, virtue, and the moral life as a journey. So it is not surprising that Murdoch has returned to the genre of philosophical argument to advance her views on the relationship between metaphysics and morals. But it is surprising that her argument exhibits neither the clarity of thought characteristic of the analytic philosophy in which she was trained nor the dramatic narrative of her novels. Indeed the hook reads like a collage of lecture notes, complete with extensive quotations from other people's thoughts with minimal com· mentary. Further, the chapter titles (e.g., " Fact and Value," " Schopenhauer," " Consciousness and Thought-I," " Derrida and Struc· turalism," " Consciousness and Thought-II," "Notes on Will and Duty," " Axioms, Duties, Eros," " Void ") shed little light on the overall structure or argument of the hook. One cannot help hut have the impression that Murdoch spent less time crafting the argument of this hook than she does in crafting the story line and characters of her novels. This is not to say, of course, that there is not much to he learned from Murdoch's perspective. She is remarkably erudite, and her discussion of various themes, figures, and issues often yields fascinating insights. But the whole is considerably less than the sum of its often interesting parts. I have already suggested that this is partly because of the structure and style in which the hook is written. But the hook 687 688 BOOK REVIEWS is also disappointing, and perhaps more determinatively, because of the overall perspective she seeks to deploy and defend. Readers of Murdoch's work have heretofore often wondered about the relationship between her avowed Platonism and her interest in Christianity. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals has the virtue of clarifying that relationship, hut the result is unpersuasive. At the heart of Murdoch's Platonism is her recasting of the allegory of the cave from The Republic. The moral life is an arduous struggle to ascend from the cave (represented, as in her earlier works, by " the fat, relentless ego ") by a dispossession of the self so that we can apprehend a little less imperfectly the perfect form of the Good. As Murdoch puts it, Plato assumes the internal relation of value, truth, cogmtion. Virtue (as compassion, humility, courage) involves a desire for and achievement of truth instead of falsehood, reality instead of appearance. Goodness involves truth.seeking knowledge and ipso facto a discipline of desire. ' Getting things right ', as in meticulous grammar or mathematics, is truth-seeking as virtue. Learning anything properly demands (virtuous ) attention. Here the idea of truth plays a crucial role (as it does also in Kant) and reality emerges as the object of truthful vision, and virtuous action as the product of such vision. This is a picture of the omnipresence of morality and evaluation in human life (p. 39). Such a depiction ought to resonate quite deeply with Christians, something not lost on Murdoch when she writes a few pages earlier: "There are innumerable points at which we have to detach ourselves, to change our orientation, to redirect our desire and refresh and purify our energy, to keep on looking in the right direction: to attend upon the grace that comes through faith " (p. 25). But Murdoch's "grace" and her "truth-seeking as virtue," among other themes, involve something quite different from what Christians... (shrink)

Excerpt from La Logique de Hegel S'il n'en est pas de meme chez nous on peut du moins remar quer que le nom de Hegel, qui naguere encore semblait tout a fait oublie, se rencontre assez frequemment sous la plume de nos philosophes les plus autorises. M. Fouillee, en particulier, le cite a maintes reprises'dans ses deux derniers livres Le Mouvement posuiviste et Le Mouvement idealiste. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find (...) more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Transcript of speeches by a Hindu philosopher, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hinduism.

This article offers a critical reflection of Lizal’isidinga laKho (hymn 116) and Wazidala iinto zonke (hymn 16) written by Tiyo Soga and recorded in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA) hymnal book. From the perspective of black theology of liberation (BTL), I historicise and contextualise hymn 116 and hymn 16 to debunk the argument that Tiyo Soga was alien to the lives, experiences of suffering and pain of his people. The article posits that hymn 116 and hymn 16 are (...) black spirituals that articulate the contexts Soga found himself as a black person during the times of the frontier wars. Therefore, utilising blackness as a heuristic approach, I argue that the songs do not just historicise the experiences of black people in the times of the frontier wars, but they are prayers and/or laments from Soga that ask God to spare the lives, the culture, and value systems of black people in a world that seeks the destruction of their being, history, and culture. The songs emphasise the black struggle for justice and liberation encouraging black people never to succumb to the definitions given to them by those who seek the destruction of black personhood. The article locates Soga within the frontier wars to illustrate his own experiences as black person, then examines and presents Lizal’isidinga laKho, Wazidala iinto zonke as black spirituals born in a time of war to give hope to those who have been conquered and subjugated in the unjust wars of colonisation. Hymns 116 and 16 contribute to the decolonial turn discourse –unthinking of the west – because they emphasise the black struggle for liberation and justice.Contribution: The contribution of this article is its focus on the way in which the intersection of religious studies, social sciences, and humanities generates an interdisciplinary contested discourse. (shrink)

Upon discovering that certain beliefs we hold are contingent on arbitrary features of our background, we often feel uneasy. I defend the proposal that if such cases ofcontingency anxietyinvolve defeaters, this is because of the epistemic significance of disagreement. I note two hurdles to our accepting thisDisagreement Hypothesis. Firstly, some cases of contingency anxiety apparently involve no disagreement. Secondly, the proposal may seem to make our awareness of the influence of arbitrary background factors irrelevant in determining whether to revise our (...) beliefs. I show that each of these problems can be successfully accommodated by theDisagreement Hypothesis. (shrink)

The concept of artificial intelligence is not new nor is the notion that it should be granted legal protections given its influence on human activity. What is new, on a relative scale, is the notion that artificial intelligence can possess citizenship—a concept reserved only for humans, as it presupposes the idea of possessing civil duties and protections. Where there are several decades’ worth of writing on the concept of the legal status of computational artificial artefacts in the USA and elsewhere, (...) it is surprising that law makers internationally have come to a standstill to protect our silicon brainchildren. In this essay, it will be assumed that future artificial entities, such as Sophia the Robot, will be granted citizenship on an international scale. With this assumption, an analysis of rights will be made with respect to the needs of a non-biological intelligence possessing legal and civic duties akin to those possessed by humanity today. This essay does not present a full set of rights for artificial intelligence—instead, it aims to provide international jurisprudence evidence aliunde ab extra de lege lata for any future measures made to protect non-biological intelligence. (shrink)

This book presents three of the works of Abdu'l-Bahá, son of the founder of the Bahá'i Faith, dealing with social and political issues.00In 'The Secret of Divine Civilization' (1875) Abdu'l-Bahá supports the administrative and broader social reforms of Mirzá Hosayn Khán, but looks mainly for organic reform through the efforts of Iranian intellectuals to waken and educate the masses. In this work, Abdu'l-Bahá gives virtuous and progressive Islamic clerics a leading role among these intellectuals, indeed most of his appeals are (...) directed specifically to them. 'A Traveller's Narrative' (1889/90) is an authoritative statement of the broad lines of Bahá'i social and political thinking. 'The Art of Governance' (1892/93) was written as Iran entered a pre-revolutionary phase, and ideas that we recognise today as the precursors of political Islam were spreading. It sets out the principles underlying the ideal relationship between religion and politics and between the government and the people.00In addition to presenting the first parallel text translations of these works, the Persian texts incorporate notes on variants in the early published sources. An introduction outlines the intellectual and political landscape from which Abdu'l-Bahá wrote, and in which his expected readers lived. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 205 Seiten: 37-86.

Motivated ignorance is an incentivized absence of knowledge that arises in circumstances of unequal power relations, a self-protective non-knowing which frees individuals from having to reflect on the privileges they have in virtue of membership in a dominant social group. In philosophical discussions, the term “motivated ignorance” gets used interchangeably with “willful ignorance.” In the first half of this paper, using Charles Mills’ (2007) white ignorance as the defining case, I argue that this is a mistake. A significant swath of (...) cases of motivated ignorance are non-willful, or deep, following Rik Peels (2010). But in all cases, benefits accrued to some in virtue of their social position are gained and maintained at the expense of harms to others. In the second half of this paper, I argue that these harms are what ground attributions of culpability in cases of motivated ignorance and drive the normative requirement that the subject know better, so long as the facts in question are ordinarily and easily knowable (in a sense to be specified). Willfulness is not a necessary condition for culpability, even if it is a sufficient one. (shrink)

Do firms benefit from their voluntary efforts to alleviate the many problems confronting society? A vast literature establishing a “business case” for corporate social responsibility appears to find that usually they do. However, as argued herein, the business case literature has established only that firms usually benefit from responding to the demands of their primary stakeholders. The nature of the relationship between the interests of business and those of broader society, beyond a subset of powerful primary stakeholders, remains an open (...) question despite this vast literature. This article develops a set of propositions that highlight constraints on firms’ ability to profit from CSR and outlines a set of managerial challenges on which researchers must focus their attention to truly determine whether and when firms can profit by responding to the needs of society. (shrink)

To construct their first lexicon, infants must determine the relationship between native phonological variation and the meanings of words. This process is arguably more complex for bilingual learners who are often confronted with phonological conflict: phonological variation that is lexically relevant in one language may be lexically irrelevant in the other. In a series of four experiments, the present study investigated English–Mandarin bilingual infants’ abilities to negotiate phonological conflict introduced by learning both a tone and a non-tone language. In a (...) novel word learning task, bilingual children were tested on their sensitivity to tone variation in English and Mandarin contexts. Their abilities to interpret tone variation in a language-dependent manner were compared to those of monolingual Mandarin learning infants. Results demonstrated that at 12–13 months, bilingual infants demonstrated the ability to bind tone to word meanings in Mandarin, but to disregard tone variation when learning new words in English. In contrast, monolingual learners of Mandarin did not show evidence of integrating tones into word meanings in Mandarin at the same age even though they were learning a tone language. However, a tone discrimination paradigm confirmed that monolingual Mandarin learning infants were able to tell these tones apart at 12–13 months under a different set of conditions. Later, at 17–18 months, monolingual Mandarin learners were able to bind tone variation to word meanings when learning new words. Our findings are discussed in terms of cognitive adaptations associated with bilingualism that may ease the negotiation of phonological conflict and facilitate precocious uptake of certain properties of each language. (shrink)

During psychotherapy, patient and therapist tend to spontaneously synchronize their vocal pitch, bodily movements, and even their physiological processes. In the present article, we consider how this pervasive phenomenon may shed new light on the therapeutic relationship– or alliance– and its role within psychotherapy. We first review clinical research on the alliance and the multidisciplinary area of interpersonal synchrony. We then integrate both literatures in the Interpersonal Synchrony (In-Sync) model of psychotherapy. According to the model, the alliance is grounded in (...) the coupling of patient and therapist’s brains. Because brains do not interact directly, movement synchrony may help to establish inter-brain coupling. Inter-brain coupling may provide patient and therapist with access to another’s internal states, which facilitates common understanding and emotional sharing. Over time, these interpersonal exchanges may improve patients’ emotion-regulatory capacities and related therapeutic outcomes. We discuss the empirical assessment of interpersonal synchrony and review preliminary research on synchrony in psychotherapy. Finally, we summarize our main conclusions and consider the broader implications of viewing psychotherapy as the product of two interacting brains. (shrink)

Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...) and affective) dispositions. Frames thereby guide how we interpret, respond to, and navigate the world. I show that these perspectives are epistemically powerful and indispensable. I argue that flawed perspectives, and the distorting frames that produce them, are deeply pernicious and I examine their relationship to oppression. (shrink)

How did the human brain evolve so that consciousness of art could develop? In The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain, Robert Solso describes how a consciousness that evolved for other purposes perceives and creates art.Drawing on his earlier book Cognition and the Visual Arts and ten years of new findings in cognitive research, Solso shows that consciousness developed gradually, with distinct components that evolved over time. One of these components is an adaptive consciousness that includes (...) the ability to imagine objects that are not present--an ability that allows us to create visual art.Solso describes the neurological, perceptual, and cognitive sequence that occurs when we view art, and the often inexpressible effect that a work of art has on us. He shows that there are two aspects to viewing art: nativistic perception--the synchronicity of eye and brain that transforms electromagnetic energy into neuro-chemical codes--which is "hard-wired" into the sensory-cognitive system; and directed perception, which incorporates personal history and knowledge--the entire set of our expectations and past experiences. Both forms of perception are part of the appreciation of art, and both are products of the evolution of the conscious brain over hundreds of thousands of years.Solso also investigates the related issues of neurological and artistic perception of the human face, the effects of visual illusions, and the use of perspective. The many works of art used as examples are drawn from a wide range of artistic traditions, from ancient Egypt to Africa and India and the European Renaissance. (shrink)

B L Curtis; Learning and Intentionality, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 105–121, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

Cognitive neuroscientists are turning to an increasingly rich array of neurodynamical systems to explain mental phenomena. In these explanations, cognitive capacities are decomposed into a set of functions, each of which is described mathematically, and then these descriptions are mapped on to corresponding mathematical descriptions of the dynamics of neural systems. In this paper, I outline a novel explanatory schema based on these explanations. I then argue that these explanations present a novel type of dynamicism for the philosophy of mind (...) and neuroscience, componential dynamicism, that focuses on the parts of cognitive systems that fill certain functional roles in producing cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

Elwyn Richardson’s experimental approach to teaching and learning and Oruaiti was officially sanctioned, but the history of education in Aotearoa/new Zealand shows that teachers have been typically conformist. In this article, I suggest that positivist paradigms from the industrial age continue to shape classroom teaching, partly because of norms of individualism, and partly because neoliberal understandings have become central in the functioning of our schools and society. Teaching is an activity that promotes the ethics of a community or society by (...) promulgating some ideas and marginalising others. In Aotearoa/new Zealand, many of our students struggle with the collective orientation of their community traditions and the societal emphasis on individualism. Modernist beliefs in social progress through technology still permeate education policy. Promoting communitarian understandings requires more open-ended approaches to teaching such as Richardson demonstrated. With digital technologies gaining progressively greater influence in schools, the opportunities for social connectedness have been enhanced alongside an increasing emphasis on individual devices. This article briefly explores interconnections between experimentation, context and community. (shrink)