Today, the Internet is a rich source of study materials, and Google Scholar offers free access to a large number of scientific articles. There are excellent research publications available in many more databases. Students have the option of easily copying the material. Reusing, paraphrasing, patchwriting, and ghostwriting without citing the original documents are plagiarism. Plagiarism is increasing in academics, particularly in research. This study aims to study the awareness of plagiarism and to analyze the reasons for plagiarism. The study samples (...) are the student teachers in India. For this study, we used a survey method, and the author prepared a questionnaire to collect data from the student teachers. Study respondents are the student teachers of the Regional Institute of Education Mysore; Purposive sampling was used to select samples. The total number of study respondents is 207. The findings of the study revealed that over 70 per cent of respondents mentioned reasons for plagiarism as lack of relevant literature studying, lack of preparation and time, difficulty checking every piece of work, do not know the manual citation style, lack of knowledge about bibliographic management software and also they stated that getting easily available materials on the internet is also a reason for plagiarism. The study recommends that teachers teach or conduct awareness programs on plagiarism, avoiding plagiarism, citation style, and software. (shrink)

Widely recognized as America's premiere photography critic, Coleman took an interest in emerging digital technologies long before his colleagues. In fact, the earliest text in this new book of essays concerning the advent of electronic media is from 1967. The intervening thirty years have found Coleman returning to topics such as digitized images, the shifting concept of intellectual property, the impact of computers on photography as a whole, and the social implications of the Internet and World Wide Web. A wide-ranging (...) selection of essays, lectures, and writings, The Digital Evolution makes for stimulating reading, and should be well received by those familiar with Coleman's previous collection of essays, Critical Focus. (shrink)

The fundamental question in the Marxist theory of revolution is that of the socioeconomic and class content of a revolution. Under today's conditions this question takes on primary significance and is central to the ideological struggle. Compelled to recognize the role of revolution in the development of society, bourgeois sociologists strive, however, to give the concept of revolution a new content, eliminating its class essence. Inasmuch as the revolution in science and technology now in progress is significantly changing the (...) face of the contemporary world, it is characteristic of leading Western sociologists that they seek to present the changes resulting from the technological revolution as a qualitative change in the existing system, a "transformation" of capitalism. "It is a fact," writes the prominent American sociologist and economist Adolph Berle, "that during and after the First World War the entire world was steeped in revolution, and that its base was substantially more technological than social." Technological and not social changes in society are thus proclaimed to be the most important problem of our time. (shrink)

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper (...) is the result of a collective writing process. (shrink)

Teacher-student discourse is increasingly mediated through, by and with information and communication technologies: in-class discussions have found new, textually-rich venues online; chalk and whiteboard lectures are rapidly giving way to PowerPoint presentations. Yet, what does this mean experientially for teachers? This paper reports on a phenomenological study investigating teachers’ lived experiences of PowerPoint in post-secondary classrooms. As teachers become more informed about the affordances of information and communication technology like PowerPoint and consequently take up and use these tools in (...) their classrooms, their teaching practices, relations with students, and ways of interpreting the world are simultaneously in-formed – conformed, deformed and reformed – by the given technology-in-use. The paper is framed in light of Martin Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951) and “The Thing” (1949). In these writings, Heidegger shows how a thing opens a new world to us, revealing novel structures of experience and meaning, and inviting us to a different style of being, thinking and doing. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , May 2010, Volume 10, Edition 1. (shrink)

This paper describes a one-day workshop format for introducing ethics into the engineering curriculum prepared at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM). It responds to the ethics criteria newly integrated into the accreditation process by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). It also employs an ethics across the curriculum (EAC) approach; engineers identify the ethical issues, write cases that dramatize these issues, and then develop exercises making use of these cases that are specially tailored to (...) mainstream engineering classes. The different activities and strategies employed in this workshop are set forth. Specific references are made to the cases and exercises developed as a result of these workshops. The paper ends by summarizing the different assessments made of the workshop by addressing the following questions: how did it contribute to the overall ABET effort at UPRM; could other universities benefit from a similar activity; and how did the participants evaluate the workshop? (shrink)

In addition to being one of the greatest technical philosophers of the twentieth century, John Dewey was an educational innovator, a Progressive Era reformer, and one of America’s last great public intellectuals. Dewey’s insights into the problems of public education, immigration, the prospects for democratic government, and the relation of religious faith to science are as fresh today as when they were first published. His penetrating treatments of the nature and function of philosophy, the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of life, (...) and the role of inquiry in human experience are of increasing relevance at the turn of the 21st century. Based on the award-winning 37-volume critical edition of Dewey’s work, The Essential Dewey presents for the first time a collection of Dewey’s writings that is both manageable and comprehensive. The volume includes essays and book chapters that exhibit Dewey’s intellectual development over time; the selection represents his mature thinking on every major issue to which he turned his attention. Eleven part divisions cover: Dewey in Context; Reconstructing Philosophy; Evolutionary Naturalism; Pragmatic Metaphysics; Habit, Conduct, and Language; Meaning, Truth, and Inquiry; Valuation and Ethics; The Aims of Education; The Individual, the Community, and Democracy; Pragmatism and Culture: Science and Technology, Art and Religion; and Interpretations and Critiques. Taken as a whole, this collection provides unique access to Dewey’s understanding of the problems and prospects of human existence and of the philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

This monograph represents the first comprehensive study dedicated to the interdisciplinary French philosopher Michel Serres. As the title of this project unequivocally suggests, Serres s prolific body of work paints a rending portrait of what it means for a sentient being to live in the modern world. This book reflects Serres s profound conviction that philosopher c est anticiper / to philosophize (about something) is to anticipate ( Philosophie Magazine ). According to Serres, a philosopher is someone who possesses an (...) extremely broad base of knowledge coupled with the uncanny ability to envision what "might" transpire based upon his or her astute observations concerning phenomena that are already starting to unfold in a given society. Serres s explanation of what engaging in philosophical inquiry entails encourages us to imagine all of the present and future ramifications of certain trajectories that are clearly visible all around us. From 1968 to the present, Serres has been generating forceful, prophetic visions in his works that mingle philosophy, religion, theology, contemporary science, and literature. Comprehensive and insightful introduction both illuminates pressing contemporary issues and presages potential futures-to-come. This is a remarkable achievement and a genuine gift to readers both new and old to Serres s work. -Steven D. Brown, Professor of Psychology, University of Leicester An essential book for becoming aware of the threat of a return of obscurantism despite the development of new technologies and of the necessity of a new century of "Lumieres." -Issa Asgarally, Associate Professor, Mauritius Institute of Education, founder, Foundation for Interculturality and Peace Moser s engaging prose makes this study a great read, and he demonstrates a formidable grasp on the connections within Serres work, as well as the links between Serres and other major twentieth century thinkers. -Tom Trzyna, Professor Emeritus of English, Seattle Pacific University Both timely and thorough. His provocative critique of societal malaise, from our relationship to the planet, to ourselves, to each other, and to technology, as well as the solutions envisioned through an erudite and thoughtful analysis of Serres entire philosophical corpus is a remarkable contribution to Philosophy and French Studies. -Isaac Joslin, University of Denver Keith Moser s pioneering vision of the post-Marxist era, as reflected in the syncretism of philosophy, religion, theology, science and literature in Michel Serres body of work during the last half a century, transforms human consciousness beyond its illusory genophobia that has damaged the very semiotics of life. Moser s monograph taps into a tremendous flow of energy that evokes a passionate desire in a dead humanity to re-live and re-think. -Professor Ananta Sukla, Editor, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Keith Moser is Associate Professor of French at Mississippi State University. He is the author of "A Practical Guide to French Harki Literature, J.M.G. Le Clezio: A Concerned Citizen of the Global Village, Le Clezio dans la foret des paradoxes" (co-editor), and "Privileged Moments in the Novels and Short Stories of Le Clezio: His Contemporary Development of a Traditional French Literary Device." Moser has also contributed approximately forty essays to peer-reviewed publications such as "The French Review, The International Journal of Francophone Studies, Romance Notes, Dalhousie French Studies, Les Cahiers Le Clezio, Modern Language Review, French Cultural Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies" (Oxford), "Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment" (Oxford), and "Pennsylvania Literary Journal."". (shrink)

Video ethics in educational research involving children is a recent topic that has arisen since the increase in the use of visual mediums in research especially with the development of new and ubiquitous internet technologies and social media. This paper emerged as an expressed concerned by a group of scholars associated with the new Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy that was established in 2016. The paper is the result of a collective writing process over a period of a (...) few months that discusses visual studies in education and visual ethics in relation to qualitative research in education, and as it applies to children. The article also uses the newly established convention of open review, publishing the results with the paper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 20-37 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Teaching Mark A. Pike I think aesthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely aesthetic — if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram — it becomes the most offensive of all teaching.1George Eliot asserts that "the highest (...) of all teaching" which "deals with life in its highest complexity" is essentially aesthetic in character for it has features of the "picture" or work of art rather than the more straightforwardly instructional "diagram." Yet, George Eliot not only ascribes greatest worth to teaching that is aesthetic but considers teaching that is merely diagrammatic to be "the most offensive of all teaching." Evidently, there are similarities between pictures and diagrams but essential features present in the former are conspicuously absent from the latter. The current obsession with effectiveness in teaching and repeated attempts to reduce that which should be aesthetic and inspired to the wholly rational, diagrammatic and instrumental make George Eliot's views remarkably pertinent. Consequently, features of aesthetic teaching will be explored in this essay. In doing so it will be suggested that Martin Heidegger's ontology (theory of existence) offers a philosophical foundation for conceiving teaching in the arts as a form of engagement with students which is unreservedly aesthetic in character. As such, Heidegger provides us with a valuable position from which to counter forces that militate against the aesthetic in our schools and also provokes us to eschew all that is diagrammatic in our approach to that which is rightly aesthetic. Teaching: Drawing the Diagram or Painting the Picture? Teaching is currently being construed, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, as a technology with which to get something done or as a [End Page 20] vehicle which "delivers" a subject in an efficient or effective manner, or even as a science where the analytical approach is the method for problem solving. Even as I write, I find myself part of a proposed "delivery team" for literature education. It appears that this is the sort of language policy makers in a rational economy like to hear. Any dissenting voices, those subscribing to a view of teaching as an art itself, are considered dangerous as they jeopardize progress in our brave new world. For example, in their introduction to Effective Teaching — Evidence and Practice, Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds articulate the view that construing teaching as an art rather than a technology may be responsible for the lack of excellent teachers in our schools.2 In marked contrast to George Eliot, they suggest "the view that teaching is an 'art,' not a science" results in attention being devoted to "personal factors and qualities" which are "often idiosyncratic and difficult to influence by educational policies."3 Further, they suggest that the placing of education within the humanities tradition — is clearly wrong and probably condemns societies where it is prevalent to having only those small number of excellent teachers who inherit the "art," rather than the larger number who could acquire the applied science of a teaching methodology.4It is difficult to conceive of a position further removed from George Eliot's ideal of aesthetic teaching. There are, of course, a number of problems with reducing teaching to a technology, or an applied science, as Muijs and Reynolds prefer to call it. Such argument betrays the assumption that the world can be known in a rational, analytical and scientific way. The concomitant of this view is the misguided belief that teaching about such a world can be precisely planned, implemented and assessed. Elliot Eisner is surely more accurate when he explains that "teaching is a form of human action in which many of the ends achieved are emergent" and that these ends are often "found in the course of interaction with students rather than preconceived."5 Clearly, allowing "for the creation of ends in process" necessitates "a model of teaching akin to other arts."6 This is more... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 20-37 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Teaching Mark A. Pike I think aesthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely aesthetic — if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram — it becomes the most offensive of all teaching.1George Eliot asserts that "the highest (...) of all teaching" which "deals with life in its highest complexity" is essentially aesthetic in character for it has features of the "picture" or work of art rather than the more straightforwardly instructional "diagram." Yet, George Eliot not only ascribes greatest worth to teaching that is aesthetic but considers teaching that is merely diagrammatic to be "the most offensive of all teaching." Evidently, there are similarities between pictures and diagrams but essential features present in the former are conspicuously absent from the latter. The current obsession with effectiveness in teaching and repeated attempts to reduce that which should be aesthetic and inspired to the wholly rational, diagrammatic and instrumental make George Eliot's views remarkably pertinent. Consequently, features of aesthetic teaching will be explored in this essay. In doing so it will be suggested that Martin Heidegger's ontology (theory of existence) offers a philosophical foundation for conceiving teaching in the arts as a form of engagement with students which is unreservedly aesthetic in character. As such, Heidegger provides us with a valuable position from which to counter forces that militate against the aesthetic in our schools and also provokes us to eschew all that is diagrammatic in our approach to that which is rightly aesthetic. Teaching: Drawing the Diagram or Painting the Picture? Teaching is currently being construed, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, as a technology with which to get something done or as a [End Page 20] vehicle which "delivers" a subject in an efficient or effective manner, or even as a science where the analytical approach is the method for problem solving. Even as I write, I find myself part of a proposed "delivery team" for literature education. It appears that this is the sort of language policy makers in a rational economy like to hear. Any dissenting voices, those subscribing to a view of teaching as an art itself, are considered dangerous as they jeopardize progress in our brave new world. For example, in their introduction to Effective Teaching — Evidence and Practice, Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds articulate the view that construing teaching as an art rather than a technology may be responsible for the lack of excellent teachers in our schools.2 In marked contrast to George Eliot, they suggest "the view that teaching is an 'art,' not a science" results in attention being devoted to "personal factors and qualities" which are "often idiosyncratic and difficult to influence by educational policies."3 Further, they suggest that the placing of education within the humanities tradition — is clearly wrong and probably condemns societies where it is prevalent to having only those small number of excellent teachers who inherit the "art," rather than the larger number who could acquire the applied science of a teaching methodology.4It is difficult to conceive of a position further removed from George Eliot's ideal of aesthetic teaching. There are, of course, a number of problems with reducing teaching to a technology, or an applied science, as Muijs and Reynolds prefer to call it. Such argument betrays the assumption that the world can be known in a rational, analytical and scientific way. The concomitant of this view is the misguided belief that teaching about such a world can be precisely planned, implemented and assessed. Elliot Eisner is surely more accurate when he explains that "teaching is a form of human action in which many of the ends achieved are emergent" and that these ends are often "found in the course of interaction with students rather than preconceived."5 Clearly, allowing "for the creation of ends in process" necessitates "a model of teaching akin to other arts."6 This is more... (shrink)

Video ethics in educational research involving children is a recent topic that has arisen since the increase in the use of visual mediums in research (such as photovoice and video) especially with the development of new and ubiquitous internet technologies and social media. This paper emerged as an expressed concerned by a group of scholars associated with the new Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (Brill) that was established in 2016. The paper is the result of a collective writing (...) process over a period of a few months that discusses visual studies in education and visual ethics in relation to qualitative research in education, and as it applies to children. The article also uses the newly established convention of open review, publishing the results with the paper. (shrink)

In addition to being one of the greatest technical philosophers of the twentieth century, John Dewey was an educational innovator, a Progressive Era reformer, and one of America’s last great public intellectuals. Dewey’s insights into the problems of public education, immigration, the prospects for democratic government, and the relation of religious faith to science are as fresh today as when they were first published. His penetrating treatments of the nature and function of philosophy, the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of life, (...) and the role of inquiry in human experience are of increasing relevance at the turn of the 21st century. Based on the award-winning 37-volume critical edition of Dewey’s work, The Essential Dewey presents for the first time a collection of Dewey’s writings that is both manageable and comprehensive. The volume includes essays and book chapters that exhibit Dewey’s intellectual development over time; the selection represents his mature thinking on every major issue to which he turned his attention. Eleven part divisions cover: Dewey in Context; Reconstructing Philosophy; Evolutionary Naturalism; Pragmatic Metaphysics; Habit, Conduct, and Language; Meaning, Truth, and Inquiry; Valuation and Ethics; The Aims of Education; The Individual, the Community, and Democracy; Pragmatism and Culture: Science and Technology, Art and Religion; and Interpretations and Critiques. Taken as a whole, this collection provides unique access to Dewey’s understanding of the problems and prospects of human existence and of the philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

The principal theme of this paper is secondary liability ‐ to what extent should we hold those who cooperate in wrongdoing and illicit behavior accountable? We probe this question by considering a lawsuit filed by the entertainment industry against the file‐swapping services of Grokster and StreamCast. Our focus is on the legal and moral implications of this case. We argue that the courts, which have so far ruled in favor of the defendants, have misapplied the socalled Sony precedent for two (...) reasons. The business model of these companies depends on copyright infringement with advertising volume directly proportionate to the level of that infringement. Also, Sony’s safe harbor should not apply if there is active inducement of infringement. The key ethical question is the extent to which technological innovators must design and write their code to deal with infringement ex ante. We argue that purveyors of peerto‐ peer technology are formal cooperators in wrongdoing if they deliberately configure their system to enable the illicit copying of copyrighted music and movie files. We also consider the conditions for unjustifiable material cooperation, and propose these conditions as a normative standard especially relevant for software vendors. (shrink)

The challenge of pursuing sustainability in agriculture is often viewed as mainly or wholly technical in nature, requiring the reform of farming methods and the development and adoption of alternative technologies. Likewise, the purpose of sustainability is frequently cast in utilitarian terms, as a means of protecting a valuable resource (i.e., soil) and of satisfying market demands for healthy, tasty food. Paul B. Thompson has argued that the embrace of these views by many in the consumer/environmental movement enables easy co-optation (...) by agribusiness. It also reflects a critical weakness in this movement: a lack of commitment to philosophical principles that depart from the utilitarian premises of the industrial model of agriculture. This paper draws on the writings of Thomas Berry and Liberty Hyde Bailey to identify the philosophical principles of what we call planetary agrarianism. From the perspective of planetary agrarianism, the pursuit of sustainability is a broad and challenging moral, educational, and political task. Berry helps us see that it is fundamentally a project of worldview transition, which requires a new cultural narrative that must rival, in form and appeal, the mythic power of the utilitarian industrial vision. Liberty Hyde Bailey, author of The Holy Earth (1915) and a leader in the land-grant education and nature-study movements, took up the project of worldview transition in his life work. While in some ways dated and flawed, Bailey’s writings are a valuable source of guidance for developing and pursuing a viable philosophy of agriculture for the 21st century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rembrandt and LearningRalph A. Smith (bio)IntroductionIt appears to be a defining characteristic of Rembrandt’s works—as important as the brushstrokes, the underdrawing, the types of ground and the paints used—that they move people exceedingly. [T]hey help us feel something of what the artist may have felt about youth, old age, friendship, isolation, and love.—Anthony Bailey[For] Rembrandt, imperfections are the norm of humanity, which is why he will always speak across (...) centuries to those for whom art might be something other than the quest for ideal form.—Simon SchamaArt can arouse the senses, touch the feelings, and stir the passions. In exercising these formidable powers, the artist should respect certain limits of good taste and moral propriety. Rembrandt possessed unequal skill in depicting the passions in original ways without breaking the code. Well, hardly ever.—Gary SchwartzThe National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Rembrandt Project was designed to apply state-of-the-art digital technology to the development of the multiple competencies needed for understanding and appreciating [End Page 101] Rembrandt and his time. As educational consultant to the project, I was given the assignment of conceptualizing a framework that would accommodate and illuminate the project’s purposes. This meant that I not only had to refamiliarize myself with seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture and with the national and state standards for the visual arts but also acquaint myself with the standards for socials studies; both sets of standards occupy a prominent place in the project and are the subject of the third section of this article. The overarching viewpoint from which I approached my assignment, however, was that of the humanities, a topic to which I turn first. Furthermore, since the project’s foremost concern is with masterpieces of the visual arts, I thought it apposite to address briefly some issues in aesthetics, especially those that relate to experiencing artworks appropriately. Having surveyed the project from the perspectives mentioned, I then ask to what extent it was successful in avoiding the pitfalls that often frustrate the implementation of novel ideas and methods.1The HumanitiesThe following interpretation of the humanities is condensed from the writings of two distinguished philosophers, Albert William Levi and Walter Kaufmann, and the historian Paul Gagnon. Levi, an early member of the National Council for the Humanities and for most of his career a distinguished professor of the humanities at Washington University, was once asked to define the essence of the humanities. He replied that the purposes of the humanities are to encourage persons to “to think critically, to communicate successfully, and to walk proudly with [their] tradition.”2 Noteworthy in this terse statement is its emphasis on the procedural aspects of the humanities, that is, their effects on human actions and attitudes. Such emphasis accorded well with the tradition of the Middle Ages, which construed the humanities as skills of organizing and understanding human experience. Levi, however, also acknowledged the Renaissance conception of the humanities as subject matters, thereby paying tribute to the endeavors of Renaissance scholars who devoted themselves to recovering and transmitting the literary texts of antiquity. A strong believer in historical continuity, Levi synthesized the Medieval and Renaissance traditions by proposing that the humanities be understood as skills of communication, continuity, and criticism. These skills have their substantive grounding in languages and literatures, history, and philosophy, the latter conceived as critical reflection.3 After pondering Levi’s interpretation, I added another “c,” the arts of creation, to his troika. Thus, the humanities can be understood as indispensable to human experience because they are the arts of creation, communication, continuity, and criticism.Another view of the purposes of the humanities and their relevance to the project can be found in the writings of the historian Paul Gagnon. He [End Page 102] stressed the importance of preparing the young for citizenship, personal cultivation, and vocation within a curriculum committed to the values of equity and competence.4 Gagnon interpreted the study of history as providing critical checks on reality, imparting insights into the various ways in which persons have used historical knowledge to find their place in the flow of events, and... (shrink)

Addressing Education: Purposes, Plans, and Politics is the first in the 10-volume series, Lynchburg College Symposium Readings, 3rd edition. Each volume presents primary texts organized around an interdisciplinary, liberal arts theme such as education, politics, social issues, science and technology, morals and ethics. The series has been developed by Lynchburg College faculty for use in the Senior Symposium and the Lynchburg College Symposium Readings Program (SS/LCSR). While these programs are distinctive to Lynchburg College, the texts are used on many (...) college campuses across the nation, as well as by readers interested in significant original texts on important topics. Addressing Education: Purposes, Plans, and Politics offers primary source readings on a wide range of topics in education. Here are the original writings that readers often only read about. In this volume, the educators speak for themselves in selections and excerpts from Plato (360 B.C. E.) to Paolo Freire (1968). Familiar luminaries Mann, Rousseau, DuBois, Keller, Jefferson, 21 in all gather together all in one volume to deliver these pivotal ideas with incomparable impact. Whether consumed cover-to-cover or piece-by-piece, the volume invites useful, critical debate on this important topic. (shrink)

This volume raises provocative questions about the status of words and literature in contemporary culture. It argues that words and images are equal and that the vast number of text messages, e-mails, tweets, comments, blogs, and daily social network posts confirms textuality's central role in new media. This is especially true of writing, as old and new forms mix online and off, reconfiguring so prolifically that no single theory can explain it, let alone project its future. This volume explores (...) multiple questions in depth: are microblogs a new literary genre? What happens when Japanese haiku crosses cultures? Is writing still an act of individuality or has it become a modern technological innovation? (shrink)

Drawing on the sociocultural approach, this study aims to explore EFL learners’ perceptions toward collaborative writing, and the role that learners’ emotions play as a factor influencing their collaboration and achievements in face to face and Blackboard Chatbox as applied in their EFL classes. A mixed-methods research approach was used with a sample of 58 male students enrolled in writing courses at three levels at the Department of English Language and Translation, Qassim University. Three instruments were used for (...) data collection; a 45-item closed-ended questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and the learners’ overall performance. The findings shown that most learners have positive perceptions toward studying online through Blackboard, and Blackboard Chatbox. Furthermore, Blackboard Chatbox could provide necessary affordances to facilitate learners’ emotion, which could enhance their collaborative writing. However, no significant difference was observed between learners’ performance in the two models of instruction. Taken together, the results of the present study enhance current understanding of the role of learners’ emotions in collaborative writing with the use of technology. (shrink)

In Book II of the Physics Aristotle remarks, “If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature.” Aristotle is here contrasting nature and art. Nature provides the raw materials (here wood); art provides the means for fashioning those materials (here into a ship). For Aristotle, art consists in the knowledge and skill to produce an object and presupposes the imposition of form on the object from outside. On the other hand, nature consists in (...) capacities inherent in the physical world--capacities that produce objects, as it were, internally and without outside help. Thus in Book VII of the Metaphysics Aristotle writes, “Art is a principle of movement in something other than the thing moved; nature is a principle in the thing itself.” Consequently, Aristotle refers to art as completing “what nature cannot bring to a finish.” Thomas Aquinas took this idea and sacramentalized it into grace completing nature. (shrink)

In “Body, Cyborgs and the Politics of Incarnation,” Bruno Latour recounts the story of Professor Paul Churchland, his colleague, carrying a portrait of his wife. “Nothing unusual in this,” Latour writes. “No, except that this picture was an image produced by computed tomography, a CT scan of his wife’s inner brain, in full colour”. The image of Professor Church-land proudly showing off a full-color CT of his wife’s beautiful brain has a wonderful sense of absurdity to it, and its punch (...) line depends on the reader being jolted by the strangeness of medical imagery standing in place of portraiture—no matter how stunning the cerebellum.However.. (shrink)

Background Citizen science is increasingly prevalent in the biomedical sciences, including the field of human genomics. Genomic citizen science initiatives present new opportunities to engage individuals in scientific discovery, but they also are provoking new questions regarding who owns the outputs of the research, including intangible ideas and discoveries and tangible writings, tools, technologies, and products. The legal and ethical claims of participants to research outputs become stronger—and also more likely to conflict with those of institution-based researchers and other stakeholders—as (...) participants become more involved, quantitatively and qualitatively, in the research process. It is not yet known, however, how genomic citizen science initiatives are managing the interests of their participants in accessing and controlling research outputs in practice. To help fill this gap, we conducted an in-depth review of relevant policies and practices of U.S.-based genomic citizen science initiatives. Methods We queried the peer-reviewed literature and grey literature to identify 22 genomic citizen science initiatives that satisfied six inclusion criteria. A data collection form was used to capture initiative features, policies, and practices relevant to participants’ access to and control over research outputs. Results This analysis revealed that the genomic citizen science landscape is diverse and includes many initiatives that do not have institutional affiliations. Two trends that are in apparent tension were identified: commercialization and operationalization of a philosophy of openness. While most initiatives supported participants’ access to research outputs, including datasets and published findings, none supported participants’ control over results via intellectual property, licensing, or commercialization rights. However, several initiatives disclaimed their own rights to profit from outputs. Conclusions There are opportunities for citizen science initiatives to incorporate more features that support participants’ access to and control over research outputs, consistent with their specific objectives, operations, and technical capabilities. (shrink)

In a world in which everything is reduced "to the play of signs detached from what is signified," Levinas asks a deceptively simple question: Whence, then, comes the urge to question injustice? By seeing the demand for justice for the other—the homeless, the destitute—as a return to morality, Levinas escapes the suspect finality of any ideology.Levinas’s question is one starting point for In Proximity, a collection of seventeen essays by scholars in eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, history, and religion, and their readings (...) of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Wordsworth, Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, and Mendelssohn. The title In Proximity alone speaks volumes about Levinas’s philosophy and its relevance today. "If it is true that we are, through technology, moving closer and closer to one another," writes editor Melvyn New, then "the importance of proximity and our response to it cannot be overstated." For the contributors to this volume, the question of whether we may, ethically, appropriate the object of study for our own causes has become vital. Levinas asks us to see ourselves, our own reading, "in proximity" to what is not ourselves, not our understanding of the world.The dialogue created among the essays themselves establishes an enormous diversity of texts and ideologies to which Levinas can contribute something of significant value. At a time when the secondary literature on Levinas and his work is expanding explosively, the cross-disciplinary voices gathered together in In Proximity come at precisely the right time. (shrink)

Supermax prisons are often described as "high_tech." Observers seem to mean two things by this. The first is that these "prisons within prisons" are a technology in themselves: hard_edged and brightly lit, the fortress_like supermax clearly signals its specialized purpose of isolation and control. The second is that supermax prisons rely heavily on specialized, relatively new technologies: computerized systems produce new forms of intensive surveillance while special teams armed with electronic shields maintain control over prisoners.But as Leo Marx observed (...) several years ago in this journal, "technology is a hazardous concept" . We need to see the technology of the supermax prison in these terms if we are to understand its effects. My aim here is to consider three aspects of the technology of supermax. The first is the sense in which the supermax prison is itself a "machine" _ a specific invention with a purpose and meaning closely linked to its features as a technology. This aspect is important for understanding what makes the construction of these prisons so attractive to correctional professionals and so seemingly acceptable to the general public. The second aspect is the use of specialized tools of control inside the supermax prison. These internal solutions to problems of order _ I will discuss computerized surveillance, special response teams, and stun technology _ offer clues to how specific technologies intersect with intensive confinement to frame punishment as decisive "action" produced by prisoners' "choices" and analogous to "war." Finally, supermax technology imposes specific practices and ways of being on both prisoners and prison staff. These need to be understood not only for how they augment and intensify other negative aspects of these environments, but also for their potential to affect prisoners in quite different ways depending on individual vulnerabilities.A common theme running through my discussion of each of these aspects of supermax is that the appearance of specialized technology constitutes what Garland describes, for penal practices in general, as a "signifying practice" . Beyond its immediate effects during use, supermax technology offers the cultural gloss of a "high_tech solution" that helps to frame problems _ some of them caused by supermax confinement in the first place _ largely in terms of their susceptibility to technical intervention. In other contexts "technology" signifies a "clean," profitable, scientific, and masculine approach: direct action on manageable problems. The spillover of this imagery into prisons _ in association with other meanings of crime and punishment _ is one element serving to obscure the larger issues posed by mass incarceration. As Marx points out, the reification of technology has the effect of producing an aura of inevitability. I will return to this point at the end to consider briefly how a framing of supermax primarily in terms of technology can itself be seen as hazardous. (shrink)

What significance does the body have in the process of teaching and learning? In what way can the thoughts of a contemporary junior-level teacher in this regard be connected to the theory of the lived body formulated by the French phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), and vice versa? The aim of this paper is to illuminate, enable understanding and discuss the meaning of the body in the learning process, with specific focus on the learning of writing as embodied experience. (...) In the process, the boundaries of learning are also explored. While understanding the significance both of learning as embodied experience and of the boundaries of learning is essential within the educational field, in this paper the discussion is limited to exploring how learning as embodied experience and the boundaries of learning can be viewed by taking Merleau-Ponty's notions as theoretical starting points. In an attempt to answer the aim and connect the paper's theoretical point of departure with a voice from a teacher, an interview with a junior-level teacher was conducted. The paper thus offers a theoretical contribution to the field of educational research, but one in which the theory is exemplified by, and connected to, a teacher's voice. Accordingly, the paper concludes by summarising the common understandings of learning held theoretically by Merleau-Ponty and made real in the activities of the contemporary junior-level teacher. (shrink)

Extraterrestrial Altruism examines a basic assumption of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): that extraterrestrials will be transmitting messages to us for our benefit. This question of whether extraterrestrials will be altruistic has become increasingly important in recent years as SETI scientists have begun contemplating transmissions from Earth to make contact. Technological civilizations that transmit signals for the benefit of others, but with no immediate gain for themselves, certainly seem to be altruistic. But does this make biological sense? Should we (...) expect altruism to evolve throughout the cosmos, or is this only wishful thinking? Is it dangerous to send messages to other worlds, as Stephen Hawking has suggested, or might humankind benefit from an exchange with intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy? Would extraterrestrial societies be based on different ethical principles, or would we see commonalities with Earthly notions of morality? Extraterrestrial Altruism explores these and related questions about the motivations of civilizations beyond Earth, providing new insights that are critical for SETI. Chapters are authored by leading scholars from diverse disciplines—anthropology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, computer science, cosmology, engineering, history of science, law, philosophy, psychology, public policy, and sociology. The book is carefully edited by Douglas Vakoch, Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute and professor of clinical psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The Foreword is by Frank Drake. This interdisciplinary book will benefit everybody trying to understand whether evolution and ethics are unique to Earth, or whether they are built into the fabric of the universe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 121-122 [Access article in PDF] Harold Tarrant. Plato's First Interpreters. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 263. Cloth, $55.00. This is Tarrant's third book on the ancient Platonist tradition, following his Scepticism or Platonism? (1985) and Thrasyllan Platonism (1993). In those earlier volumes his focus was on the first centuries bc and ad. Here his scope is much (...) wider. Stating that "Platonic interpretation is today at a crossroads," he has written a book that explores "ancient attempts to wrestle with this corpus," with the ultimate objective "to encourage a fresh, almost primitive reading of Plato himself" (vii).He begins engagingly by confronting the ancients with questions any modern reader of Plato must ask: What kind of text is this? Are there doctrines here? Where do I look for Plato's doctrines? The second part of his book is a historical survey, taking us from Plato, the early Academy and Aristotle, through the Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial period, and concluding with the principal Neoplatonist interpreters. In the third and longest part, he focuses on the interpretation of specific dialogues, giving most space to the Gorgias and Theaetetus, but also dealing in particular detail with the Meno, Parmenides, and Philebus. Something is said about every dialogue, but Tarrant writes only briefly about such major works as the Republic and Timaeus. He explains his selectivity (not very convincingly) as due to his wish to "discuss issues of meta-interpretation, with emphasis on the period before Plotinus" (198).Taking his book as a whole, one realizes that few strands of modern interpretation were not prefigured to quite a large extent in antiquity. The two most obvious exceptions are the chronological and developmental approach (Early, Middle, and Late), at present under strong attack from some quarters, and the theological, numerological, and allegorical readings practiced by Neoplatonists. Plato's ancient interpreters were doctrinal unitarians, but they implicitly anticipated our tendency to distinguish "Socratic dialogues," which some of them called "gymnastic" and "inquisitive," from such "canonical" works as the Phaedo,Republic, Symposium, and Timaeus, to which they applied the labels "dogmatic" and "expository." And they recognized that both types of characteristics could be found in the same dialogue, as in the Meno and Theaetetus. Plato himself, they proposed, spoke primarily through the voices of Socrates, Timaeus, and the Eleatic and Athenian strangers; but other characters, such as Pausanias in the Symposium, or Protagoras in the dialogue of that name, utter thoughts with some philosophical value. In explaining difficult passages of one dialogue, they would typically refer to passages from other parts of the corpus. An especially intriguing instance is the strategy of the Anonymous Commentator on the Theaetetus, who reads the Meno into the dialogue on which he is officially commenting.Ancient scholars, just like ourselves, asked questions about the unifying themes of complex dialogues. Hence the sub-titles given to certain works: "On the soul" for the Phaedo, and "On justice" for the Republic, etc. For Olympiodorus (whose commentary on the Gorgias Tarrant has recently co-edited [Leiden, 1998]), earlier interpreters have seriously erred by giving too limited an account of that dialogue's scope. It is not, he says, simply about rhetoric, nor about justice and injustice; nor is its theme the divine demiurge (as some Neoplatonists had strangely proposed, on the basis of the concluding myth). Rather, the subject of the Gorgias is "the ethical principles that lead to constitutional well-being" (125). [End Page 121] However, Olympiodorus's eminently "sensible" reading (as Tarrant calls it) is deeply embedded in the Neoplatonic contrast between the "purificatory virtues" of the Phaedo and the "constitutional virtues" of Republic4.Strong or weak scepticism, esotericism, unwritten doctrines, spurious versus genuine, a canon of central dialogues, dramatic considerations, and the philosophical importance or non-importance of the dialogues' prologues—all of these are interpretive approaches that Tarrant surveys in this immensely learned book, and all of them continue to resonate for us. Modern scholars, who emphasize the literary and philosophical unity of each dialogue, are walking... (shrink)

Objective: To explore the relationship between the presentation of suffering and support for euthanasia in the British news media.Method: Data was retrieved by searching the British newspaper database LexisNexis from 1996 to 2000. Twenty-nine articles covering three cases of family assisted suicide were found. Presentations of suffering were analysed employing Heidegger’s distinction between technological ordering and poetic revealing.Findings: With few exceptions, the press constructed the complex terrain of FAS as an orderly or orderable performance. This was enabled by containing the (...) contradictions of FAS through a number of journalistic strategies: treating degenerative dying as an aberrant condition, smoothing over botched attempts, locating the object of ethical evaluation in persons, not contexts, abbreviating the decision making process, constructing community consensus and marginalising opposing views.Conclusion: The findings of this study support the view that news reporting of FAS is not neutral or inconsequential. In particular, those reports presenting FAS as an orderly, rational performance were biased in favor of technical solutions by way of the legalisation of euthanasia and/or the involvement of medical professionals. In contrast, while news reports sensitive to contradiction did not necessarily oppose euthanasia, they were less inclined to overtly support technical solutions, recognising the importance of a trial to address the complexity of FAS. (shrink)

Development has become the main obsession for Third World countries. It is usually associated with the mastery of scientific and technological processes. Since strictly speaking there is no transfer of teohnology, poor countries cannot solve their problens by simply profiting from a technology freely flowing from advanced nations. Other alternatives must be considered. At the same time, the notion of development itself must be criticised and a developed notion of development must be achieved and applied. Such an achievement could (...) be the contribution of the developing countries to the world as a whole. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

As space satellites orbit the earth on a regular basis and scientists find more sophisticated ways to splice genes, we are all faced with the responsiblity of reconciling the lengths to which technology must comply with morality. This book presents a variety of moral controversies of concern in this day and age of technological advancement. The contributors study a wide range of relevant topics such as: current technological development and the ethical inquiries it prompts; risk-cost benefit analysis and other (...) assessment methods; freedom of information and national security, and university-corporate research agreements; national and international technology transfers; and, technology policy-making typologies. The current controversies examined draw from information, gene-splicing, health care, space, energy, and material technologies. (shrink)

This article evaluates the role of art – particularly mechanically reproduced forms of art – in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. The central claim is that both thinkers share the same conviction as to the emancipatory potentials of the work of art. Yet, they evaluate the effects of technological innovation differently. The underpinnings of this later resolved discord, however, are philosophical. In contrast to Benjamin’s belief in the possibility of mass mobilization, for Adorno the relevant category (...) remains unequivocally the individual subject. (shrink)

The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus is famous for having turned botany into a systematic discipline, through his classification systems—most notably the sexual system—and his nomenclature. Throughout his life, Linnaeus experimented with various paper technologies designed to display information synoptically. The list took pride of place among these and is also the common element of more complex representations he produced, such as genera descriptions and his “natural system.” Taking clues from the anthropology of writing, this essay seeks to demonstrate that (...) lists can be considered as genuine research technologies. They possess a potential to generate research problems of their own but also pose limitations to inquiries that can be overcome only by the use of new media. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Amusement, Delight, and Whimsy: Humor Has Its Reasons that Reason Cannot Ignore” by Edith K. Ackermann. Upshot: Ackermann tackles “humor” as an agentive participant in the process of knowledge construction. Performing her thesis in her writing, she give a reflective account of how oblique ways of knowing have always been present in debates concerning epistemology, albeit not given equal status as rational ones. As such, her endeavors in this text are geared towards lifting (...) up the position of “humor” to a much deserved higher level in educational and learning practices. Consequently, our endeavors in this commentary are targeted towards a little more in this direction by focusing on how “humor” becomes a way of accessing the process of knowledge construction and of unraveling its significance. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical discussions about technology mirror a profound distance between technical practice and moral thought. I consider the origins of this gap as reflected in both ancient and modern writings. The philosopher's version of technocracy ? rushing forward with the analysis of moral categories in the hope that policy?makers or the public will find them decisive ? does nothing to bridge this gap and is, therefore, a forlorn strategy. The trouble is not that we lack good arguments and theories, (...) but rather that modern politics does not provide appropriate roles and institutions in which the activity of defining the common good in technology policy is a legitimate project. I find glimmerings of an alternative practice in the ?Scandinavian approach? to democratic participation in technological design. (shrink)

Festschrift in honor of 60th birthday of Āgamānaṅdasvāmikaḷ, 1896-1961; collection of his speeches and writings on Vedanta and other aspects of Hindu philosophy.

"A consistently clear, comprehensive and accessible introduction which carefully sifts Foucault's work for both its strengths and weaknesses. McHoul and Grace show an intimate familiarity with Foucault's writings and a lively, but critical engagement with the relevance of his work. A model primer." -Tony Bennett, author of Outside Literature In such seminal works as Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish , and The History of Sexuality , the late philosopher Michel Foucault explored what our politics, our sexuality, our societal conventions, (...) and our changing notions of truth told us about ourselves. In the process, Foucault garnered a reputation as one of the pre-eminent philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century and has served as a primary influence on successive generations of philosophers and cultural critics. With A Foucault Primer , Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace bring Foucault's work into focus for the uninitiated. Written in crisp and concise prose, A Foucault Primer explicates three central concepts of Foucauldian theory-discourse, power, and the subject-and suggests that Foucault's work has much yet to contribute to contemporary debate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christian Ethics in a Technological Age by Brian BrockDavid W. GillChristian Ethics in a Technological Age Brian Brock Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 408 pp. $34.00Brian Brock is a lecturer in moral and practical theology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and the author of Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Eerdmans, 2007). Christian Ethics in a Technological [End Page 188] (...) Age was originally Brock’s doctoral thesis at King’s College, London. Brock begins by highlighting and finding wanting the modern practice of “technology assessment” as epitomized in the establishment of the US Office of Technology Assessment in 1972. We live in a world, a milieu, of ever-multiplying new technologies and technological artifacts. “Technology assessment” attempts to evaluate their impacts as thoroughly as possible through scientific, managerial methods. Costs and benefits, benefits and harms, short-term and long-term, near and distant effects: how can we measure what we know and extrapolate to what we need to know?In part 1 Brock engages in some detail the thinking of Martin Heidegger, George Grant, and Michel Foucault on technology. Although Heidegger and Foucault in particular are not ultimate authorities for Brock, his chapters on their work provide a helpful philosophical critique of the inadequacies of today’s narrow managerial approaches to technological assessment. The real problems lie much deeper: in the ways technology reflects and restructures our whole way of thinking about life, materiality, subjects and objects, and means and ends.Having used Heidegger, Grant, and Foucault to unmask the complex reality of technology in the modern era, Brock turns in part 2 to Augustine, Karl Barth, and Bernd Wannenwetsch to try to build a Christian theological ethics of technology and work that will, in the end, provide a richer texture for our interactions with the questions raised by new technologies. In briefest terms, he argues that our questions and judgments about technology should arise within the church gathered for worship rather than within the management team gathered for measurement of effects. It could be said that in the former it is God who questions technology whereas in the latter technology and its servants constitute an implicit challenge to God and the world external to themselves.Brock’s study will be of particular interest to students of his primary six sources: Heidegger, Grant, Foucault, Augustine, Barth, and Wannenwetsch, whose ideas and quotations dominate the pages of this book. Without any doubt Christian Ethics in a Technological Age is a significant work that deserves careful consideration in graduate seminars and among specialists in the field; nonetheless, I have three criticisms. First, the work would have been much stronger if it demonstrated awareness and understanding of the work of Jacques Ellul, Carl Mitcham, Albert Borgmann, and other leading thinkers in this arena. Second, Brock’s writing style (long, complex Germanic sentence structures, eccentric vocabulary choices such as the recurrent use of “purchase”) gets in the way of successful communication—especially with the very managers and technologists he presumably would like to influence. Third, while sympathizing with his rejection of managerial formulas for analysis, some much more concrete and practical counsel on the implications of his position would have been [End Page 189] helpful. How do trust and trustworthiness get reestablished? How does a worshipping congregation hear God’s guidance about its particular engagements with technologies? We have some eloquent statements of the concepts but little by way of illustration or example.David W. GillGordon-Conwell Theological SeminaryCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Karl Morrison discusses historical writing at a turning point in European culture: the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. Why do texts considered at that time to be masterpieces seem now to be fragmentary and full of contradictions? Morrison maintains that the answer comes from ideas about art. Viewing histories as artifacts made according to the same aesthetic principles as paintings and theater, he shows that twelfth-century authors and audiences found unity not in what the reason read in a (...) text but in what the imagination read into it: they prized visual over verbal imagination and employed a circular, or nuclear, spectator-centered perspective cast aside in the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Twelfth-century writers assimilated and transformed a tradition of the conceptual unity of all the arts and attributed that unity to the fact that art both conceals and discloses. Recovering that tradition, especially the methods and motives of concealment, provides extraordinary insights into twelfth-century ideas about the kingdom of God, the status of women, and the nature of time itself. It also identifies a strain in European thought that had striking affinities to methods of perception familiar in Oriental religions and that proved to be antithetic to later humanist traditions in the West. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

What can--and what can't--philosophy do? What are its ethical risks--and its possible rewards? How does it differ from science? In Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Bernard Williams addresses these questions and presents a striking vision of philosophy as fundamentally different from science in its aims and methods even though there is still in philosophy "something that counts as getting it right." Written with his distinctive combination of rigor, imagination, depth, and humanism, the book amply demonstrates why Williams was one of (...) the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Spanning his career from his first publication to one of his last lectures, the book's previously unpublished or uncollected essays address metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as well as the scope and limits of philosophy itself. The essays are unified by Williams's constant concern that philosophy maintain contact with the human problems that animate it in the first place. As the book's editor, A. W. Moore, writes in his introduction, the title essay is "a kind of manifesto for Williams's conception of his own life's work." It is where he most directly asks "what philosophy can and cannot contribute to the project of making sense of things"--answering that what philosophy can best help make sense of is "being human." Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline is one of three posthumous books by Williams to be published by Princeton University Press. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument was published in the fall of 2005. The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy is being published shortly after the present volume. (shrink)

Students experience different levels of autonomy based on the mediation of self-regulated learning, but little is known about the effects of different mediation technologies on students' perceived SRL strategies. This mixed explanatory study compared two technology mediation models, Icourse and Icourse+Pigai, with a control group that did not use technology. A quasi-experimental design was used, which involved a pre and post-intervention academic writing test, an SRL questionnaire, and one-to-one semi-structured student interviews. The aim was to investigate 280 (...) Chinese undergraduate English as a foreign language students' academic writing performance, lexical complexity, and perceptions of self-regulated strategies in academic writing. One-way ANCOVA of writing performance, Kruskal-Wallis test of lexical complexity, ANOVA of the SRL questionnaire, and grounded thematic content analysis revealed that, first, both Icourse and Icourse+Pigai provided significant support for the development of SRL strategies vs. the control group, although there was no significant difference between the two groups. Second, Icourse+Pigai-supported SRL was more helpful for improving students' academic writing performance because it enabled increased writing practice and correction feedback. Third, Icourse+Pigai-supported SRL did not significantly improve students' lexical complexity. In conclusion, we argue that both learning management systems and automated writing evaluation platforms may be used to assist students' SRL learning to enhance their writing performance. More effort should be directed toward developing technological tools that increase both lexical accuracy and lexical complexity. We conclude that the technical tools used in this study were positively connected to the use of SRL techniques. However, when creating technologically mediated SRL activities, students' psychological study preferences should be considered. (shrink)

Traditionally, writing is viewed as a code that stands in one-to-one correspondence to spoken language, which is therefore also viewed as a code. However, this is a delusion, which is shared by educators and has serious consequences for cognition, both on individual and on social levels. Natural linguistic signs characteristic for the activity of languaging and their symbolizations are ontologically different phenomena; speech and writing belong to experiential domains of different dynamics. These dynamics impact differently on the linguistic/behavioral (...) strategies of individuals and communities, viewed as second- and third-order living systems operating in a consensual domain as structure-determined systems. Failure to acknowledge this contributes to the spread of functional illiteracy in modern societies, which may lead to cognitive/communicative dysfunction. Technology-enhanced new literacies challenge the value of traditional written culture, raising questions about the relationship between speech and writing and their roles in human evolution. (shrink)