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Index: Psychology, Philosophy & Education

Those hunky, tousle-haired, philosophical Americans.

Monday, 23 July 2012

Antony O’Hear: If only ‘we simply could dismiss Professor Romano as the Humpty-Dumpty of higher education (he is, apparently, something called Critic-at-Large of The Chronicle of Higher Education) and move on to something else – reading some philosophy, perhaps. ‘

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Philosophy, flying from the shelves and landing in pizzerias.

Wednesday, 4 July 2012

‘One of the most pleasurable pieces of analytic philosophy I’ve come across is itself an article entitled “Pleasure,” where, in a mere nine pages, all the reigning understandings of pleasure are gently deflated. Its author, the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-76), was among the dominant figures in mid-century analytic philosophy. He was also a supremely graceful prose stylist, the coiner of phrases like “the ghost in the machine,” and, not incidentally, a votary of Jane Austen.’

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On Sculpture.

Monday, 2 July 2012

Anthony O’Hear: I suppose, in most sculpture there will be several final causes, several purposes for which the work is done; but as human work, it will have always have some final causality, and in having it, a sculptural object will be distinguished from a purely natural stone, however similar the two might be in appearance. A whole host of other questions, about form and meaning, will then come into play in determining our response to the sculptural object.

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Can Creative Writing really be taught in British universities?

Sunday, 22 April 2012

Michelene Wandor: Writer-teachers are not being paid to write, but, rather, to teach. Their imaginative output (poetry, drama, prose) is now called ‘research’, within the academy, while still being deemed ‘literature’ outside it. It’s an issue which CW avoids

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Joseph de Maistre’s ‘different sort of progress’.

Saturday, 25 February 2012

Anthony O’Hear: There is one respect in which Maistre might himself be too much a figure of his own age: he is as much a believer in progress as his Enlightenment opponents. It is just a different sort of progress.

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Event: Raymond Tallis – The Francis Bacon Lecture, 29 February 2012.

Saturday, 25 February 2012

Since the brain is an evolved organism, Neuromania leads to Darwinitis, the assumption that, since Darwin demonstrated the biological origins of the organism Homo sapiens, we should look to evolutionary theory to understand what we are now; that our biological roots explain our cultural leaves. In fact, we belong to a community of minds that has developed over the hundreds of thousands of years since we parted company from other primates.

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Finally, a word in opposition to a belief in trout-turkeys.

Saturday, 14 January 2012

It might be a surprise to non-metaphysicians to discover the extent to which it is questionable whether the familiar objects we see and interact with – the dogs, trees, iPods, and so on – really exist. And yet, these familiar objects are actually very strange. For example, we take for granted that very same object can change all of its properties, and all of its matter, and yet somehow remain the same object. but how can that be?

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‘I really like intellectuals. Besides, I’m an intellectual myself’.

Thursday, 8 December 2011

What is an intellectual? In general, someone seriously devoted to what used to be called the “life of the mind”: thinking pursued not instrumentally, for the sake of practical goals, but simply for the sake of knowing and understanding.

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The evolution of mystery.

Saturday, 3 December 2011

Maurice Maeterlinck: There is a hopefulness in man which renders him unwilling to grant that the cause of his misfortune may be as transparent as that of the wave which dies away in the sand or is hurled on the cliff, of the insect whose little wings gleam for an instant in the light of the sun till the passing bird absorbs its existence.

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American universities: on the way down?

Tuesday, 15 November 2011

American higher education has produced great scientists and scholars, as well as thousands of professionals and business people who know the values and methods of scholarship and science at first hand. It has also proved resilient. At times, trustees, politicians and administrators have tried to limit free inquiry. They have harmed individuals and institutions, but the system’s complexity and variety has preserved it from ruin.

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• Higher ed’s dilemma: too many docs, not enough ports.

Monday, 10 October 2011

The unchanged language of supervisors and students reflects that. We tell students that there are “alternatives” to academic careers. We warn them to develop a “Plan B” in case they do not find a teaching post. And the very words in which we couch this useful advice make clear how much we hope they will not have to follow it—and suggest, to many of them, that if they do have to settle for employment outside of academe, they should crawl off home and gnaw their arms off.

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• Shelf life: just check out these items.

Tuesday, 20 September 2011

The long-forgotten volumes that emerged from that excavation were quickly funneled through the occasionally deviant filter of none other than Richard Prince, the artist who for decades has been compiling and reworking the artifacts and autographs of what he calls “anything Beat, hippie or punk,” along with everything else that has struck his eclectic fancy over the years. It’s a peculiar way to make a living, and one that more than a few of us wish we’d thought of.

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• The passion of Harvard students forced to bear the cross of Gmail.

Sunday, 4 September 2011

Just think of the forwarding issues! Should one forward one’s school email from one Gmail account to another Gmail account? Or should one keep—and consistently check—two separate Gmail accounts at the same time? That just seems absurd.

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• Are teenage book-readers for real? The College Board wants to know.

Wednesday, 31 August 2011

The College Board claims to ensure that tests are fair to all students, regardless of their background or ethnicity. Why, then, would the College Board ask a question about reality entertainment?

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• Fire this time: How the Arab Spring plays in London.

Monday, 29 August 2011

Anthony O’Hear: A few weeks ago, the Arab Spring notwithstanding, we had no inkling of what would happen in London and other English cities as soon as August 2011. We had no sense of what power to the people – welcomed by some of us in Cairo and Benghazi – might come mean in the world’s oldest democracy, now, so to speak, and in England, facilitated as it was here just as in North Africa by social media.

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