"Offering integrated coverage of both digital and computer design, this text offers well-organized, concise, yet comprehensive content, presented from a contemporary engineering viewpoint. Understanding of the material is supported by clear explanations and a progressive development of examples ranging from sample combinatorial applications to a CISC architecture built upon a RISC core. A thorough coverage of traditional topics is combined with increased attention to computer-aided design, problem formulation, solution verification, and the building of problem-solving skills."--BOOK JACKET.

This paper extends well-established arguments for the liberal potential of vocational education by advocating for the _necessity_ of craft learning in a liberal education curriculum. The case for the necessity of craft learning in liberal education is established in two parts, the first looking toward Aristotle and the second toward Heidegger. First, ideas from Aristotle are employed to articulate a vision of liberal education as that which supports the performance of our characteristic human activity. The paper then splits with Aristotle (...) to suggest that such activity is not defined by rational contemplation, but rather by the circumspective engagement with materials through which our being-in-the-world becomes apparent to us. If, as Heidegger suggests, these practical engagements demonstrate our most fundamental mode of encountering the world and one another, then any liberal education focused on the fulfillment of our potential for understanding must include some craft learning by necessity. (shrink)

3. Foucault writes: “It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine (...) and supervised for the rest of their lives.”. (shrink)

Philosophical Papers, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 175-179, March 2012.

This paper presents insights into the lived experience of maritime carpentry practices, based on six months of sensory-ethnographic fieldwork as a wooden boat builder’s apprentice. In particular, the author explores the widely-reported experience of tools ‘withdrawing’ from consciousness as craftspeople master their use. Without contradicting these interpretations – many of which are constructed by way of reference to ideas from Merleau-Ponty – the author suggests further theoretical resources to examine the perceptual experience of work after tools cease to be the (...) main focus of the craftsperson’s attention. Heidegger’s idea of ‘circumspection’ is presented as a way to illuminate the relational nature of the subsequent mode of perception, in which the work as a whole fills the consciousness, rather than the individual instruments through which the work is achieved. (shrink)