Monthly Archives: January 2015

A poet who didn’t know it?

I have been introduced to the rather lovely Poetweet which has made this for me and this In principle by Sarah Honeychurch You should meet and When the speaker does not engage. I’m calling on to stop in Scotland Aye, it … Continue reading

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Uncomfortable thoughts

A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”.  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 123 Philosophy makes my head hurt. It’s hard, and it makes me think, and it challenges me to justify my inchoate beliefs when I just … Continue reading

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Posh white boys

There’s a common assumption that there is a gender bias in STEM subjects in HE, but a recent study released in Science has discovered that this is not  actually the real story, and that actually philosophy is among the five subjects with the … Continue reading

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Along the way, take time to smell the flowers

I love gardening, and I am also fond of gardening metaphors.  It’s one of the many things I like about Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor (?) of the rhizome and  Dave Cormier’s rhizomatic learning – the botanical themes that run through and … Continue reading

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Walk this way

Critical pedagogy, it is suggested, is an approach that shows, rather than tells.  In a similar vein, Wittgenstein tells us don’t think, but look!1 So am I walking the way I want to walk?  Are students really  well advised to … Continue reading

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Capitalism and Exclusion

Once we had leper colonies, places to isolate the diseased and hide them from public view.  They are closed now, in the Western world, and on the whole I doubt many of us would believe that leprosy was a sign … Continue reading

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Capitalism and Freire

  Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed,  not the situation which oppresses them”; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. (Simone de Beauvoir, … Continue reading

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