Understanding the School Curriculum: Theory, Politics and Principles

Alex Moore’s (2015) Understanding the School Curriculum: Theory, Politics and Principles explores how the school curriculum works through its becoming as it navigates reproductive paranoia and (r)evolutionary schizophrenia. Moore suggests that the school curriculum inevitably intersects with political and socio-economic interests as well as the globalization movement. In this light, the book stimulates the reader to ponder questions such as, “Who decides what kind of knowledge we should have in this wider, ever-changing world?” and “How have issues around knowledge developed with the school curriculum?” and “What sort of future could educators imagine for alternative knowledge, educational practice and society?” Such questions haunt the book, while promoting the educator and the learner to risk weaving a creative becoming and thereby moving the realm of knowledge from the boundary of instrumental rationality to the horizon of dynamics of humanity.

The Order of Reasons: Martial Gueroult and the Structural Genesis of Philosophical Systems

In his review of Martial Gueroult’s book on Spinoza, Deleuze claims that it is a perfect example of his own methodology and furthermore that Spinoza’s theories are the most suitable and definitive object for such a method. Gueroult’s method then should not be regarded as a straightforward tool for providing a historical account of past philosophies, but instead as pertinent to a definite philosophy of the history of philosophy whose conditions can be found in the same sort of “genetic rationalism” as is employed within philosophical systems like Spinoza’s. The coherence that Deleuze detects is between the method employed by Gueroult and the objects to which it is applied; and those objects appear as realizations of the historical conditions of philosophy. The article argues that Gueroult’s monographs had introduced Deleuze to the “genetic or constructive philosophy” of Spinoza, Descartes or Fichte in which those philosophers had employed the same kind of transcendental method to address the historical structural changes of the philosophical problems, From this Deleuze came to understood the possibility that becoming applies to philosophy. In order to support this thesis, the article first introduces Martial Gueroult’s notion of the philosophy of the history of philosophy; then it shows how this can be applied as a method to the study of past philosophical systems; and it deals finally with Deleuze’s personal and original application of this method to produce a creative becoming of philosophy.

The Fateful Releasement into World-Time: On the Temporality of Freedom in Heidegger, 1927-1937

Heidegger’s notion of freedom depends on an original temporality more fundamental than world-time (the time of determinism). This paper asks whether freedom means a withdrawal from world-time or a releasement into it. Being and Time discloses Dasein’s drifting-along in world-time as inauthentic. In this way, it secures freedom from determinism, but also gives the impression that authenticity, as a resoluteness, entails a withdrawal from world-time. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics shows that Heidegger is well aware of the problem of withdrawal. He focuses on the attunement of boredom, which delivers Dasein back into world-time. The tension of the authentic moment of vision is too intense to endure, therefore Dasein has to remove this tension and thus to release itself into world-time. “The Origin of the Work of Art” extends the boredom of Dasein to a metaphysical boredom of Being in general. The earth, the undifferentiated ground of Being, cannot be given at once in totality. Instead, it bears an impulse toward the work, in which Being is individuated in world-time. “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same” refigures this tension in Nietzsche’s metaphysics between creative Becoming and fixated Being and concludes that Becoming, in order to create or subsist at all, has to be “infected” by Being, thus entering world-time. Freedom is better understood as a releasement into world-time. This is a tragic event, but it is also the only way freedom may overcome the bondage of world-time: by incorporating the latter as a transient stage of its own.

From Manipulation to Co-creation: Whitehead on the Ethics of Symbol-Making

This chapter asks whether there is a third way beyond the two deeply problematic options of either 1) allowing ourselves to be the manipulated objects of a transcendent symbolism (whether ‘projected’ onto a traditionally conceived divinity, or cynically attributed to the ruthless hands of politico-economic power); or 2) appointing ourselves the quasi-divine rulers of a world whose mastery is predicated on the reducibility of the latter to a set of abstract, manipulable symbolic units, i.e. the ‘laws of nature,’ or – as the case may be – the laws of economics, which is every bit as ruthless in its exploitive logic of value-extraction. It suggests that there isindeed a third role for us in relation to symbolism besides being an object of symbolic manipulations or a manipulator of objects through symbols—a unique mode of symbol-making (or symbol-revision) emergent in the harmonized interstices between our inner and outer realities. It would aim at both experiencing and transmitting the power of something like what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘a life’ – that unique quality of the living that is universal in its singularity. Symbols are not merely fabulations of our imagination, but are produced through the indeterminate and dynamically ecological relations of creative becoming.

Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism: Exploring the Numinous Potential of Replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Description:I wrote this in 2007 as a student trying to think about Blade Runner through both religious studies and anthropology. An updated version is in progress.Excerpt:"By threatening binary systems and insisting on an identity of plurality, replicants and cyborgs are granted access to a sanctuary in which they can interface with the numinous place of origin; the place Jenna Tiitsman describes as the chaotic “territory of creation.” The following analysis is a journey of exploration to mapthe cyborg sanctuaries in that chaotic territory of Tiitsman’s “creative becoming.” This expedition will explore the web of shared conversation between discourse in three regions: investigation into human reactions to robot humanness, relational ordering of religious experience, and the capacity of cyborgs to access the numinous.At the intersection of these cognitive spaces emergent from the “territory of creation” are conceptual-crossroads where cyborgs mediate access to the supernatural. To situate these emergent conceptual-crossroads within more familiar cognitive spaces with supernatural access, I will refer to them as the temples of cyborgism."Keywords: Blade Runner, cyborg, uncanny valley, numinous, creation, supernatural.Please cite as:Oman-Regan, Michael P. 2007. "Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism: Exploring the Numinous Potential of Replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner." Manuscript. SocArXiv, Open Science Framework. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/vwa79

Decolonizar o pensamento: apontamentos e entrelaçamentos epistêmicos com a Educação Ambiental

A Educação Ambiental vem produzindo uma narrativa sobre o que é importante considerar em suas análises e as especificidades do lugar em suas relações com a cultura local. Este artigo traz elementos sobre a emergência de uma abordagem pós-colonial para se repensar esses e outros aspectos da Educação Ambiental. As inferências diretas as dicotomias, aos esssencialismos e as dogmatizações problematizam os efeitos da colonialidade seguida da modernidade, com referência à Educação Ambiental. O modo “menor” de vida se constitui em uma variação contínua, um devir criativo de desvio de uma constante, logo numa pluralidade singular de práticas que se verificam nos modos de existência, nas relações com o lugar, com as culturas, com as narrativas produzidas, enfim em suas diferentes maneiras descolonizadoras de se relacionar com o Outro. Environmental Education has produced a narrative in which it is important to consider in its analyzes and the specificities of the place in its relations with the local culture. This article presents elements on the emergence of a postcolonial approach to rethink these and others aspects to Environmental Education. Direct inferences to dichotomies, to essentialisms and dogmatizations problematize the effects of coloniality followed by modernity to rethink environmental education. The "minor" way of life is constituted as a continuous variation, a creative becoming of the deviation of a constant, thus in a singular plurality of practices that are verified in the modes of existence, in the relations with the place, with the cultures, with the narratives produced in their different decolonizing ways of relating to the other.