Bibliographic record
Abstract
This semester I am leading a graduate seminar in the history of educational thought.Amongst the intimates of the program this course is also known as 'From Plato to Playdough'.Who is Playdough?This "philosopher" could be Richard Rorty or Nishitani, but more likely Foucault or Heidegger.Where we end the breathless and heady tour depends on how many seminal thinkers we get to visit and whether there will be the next bus waiting to continue the tour into the both eagerly anticipated and (to some) dreaded POMO times.An Education course like this is, most often, not only forgotten in the graduate curriculum, but also when it is offered, as in my Faculty of Education, its importance is sometimes not properly or adequately appreciated.Why bother reading dusty (or, now from the dustless online libraries) philosophical texts?Surely, we have moved well beyond Plato and Descartes in all ways: intellectually, culturally, scientifically, and technologically.Yes?With advances like genetic engineering, cell phones, internet, and brain stem cell transplant, we must have left far behind ancient Greece of the Homeric times when Olympic gods were cavorting around and Socrates was worrying about the end of the oral and beginning of the literate culture; or from the days when Galileo had to stand trial on suspicion of heresy for his heliocentric ideas, and Descartes was researching the soul's contact point with the body and came up with the theory that the contact point was the pineal gland in the brain!So why do educational philosophers continue to invoke the ghosts of the past and pour over their inscriptions almost chiseled in stone in search of what--wisdom?I confess that I myself get frustrated and discouraged sometimes in the company of educational philosophers who endlessly spout Aristotle saying this, Kant saying that.I suppose I am equally guilty of this kind of authoritative discourse as I am fond of quoting Lao Tze and Siddhartha!Moreover, I suppose that my frustration is not really about citing the long-dead (white or coloured, male or female) philosophers since I get equally discouraged with folks around me who seem to practice the same kind of devotional scholarship dedicated to their favourite contemporary or living theorists.Call this kind of academic ancestor worship an abuse of scholarship.Perhaps, what happens is that we feel important about what we do and who we are through becoming an expert on eminent scholars and theorists.A case of "borrowed glory," which is, of course, not confined to the workers in the academy: we just have to take a look at the celebrity culture around us.But, in all seriousness, surely we have more important reasons than the case of borrowed glory to invoke such illustrious names as Socrates, Aristotle, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, or any number of these key thinkers from the annals of world philosophies.In this particular issue alone, the readers will find many articles that speak of Plato and other seminal thinkers from the Western intellectual tradition.For instance, Howard Cannatella revisits Plato and Aristotle to make insightful observations and arguments about the role of art in intellectual and moral development.Today, lamentations and fury are aired over the lack of adequate and deserving support for the arts in public schooling.To know something about the ancient animosity between the (rational) philosopher and the (muse-inspired, "irrational") poet, as portrayed in Plato's Republic, may help us realize anew just how foundational the division is between reason and emotion in Western thought, and how deep-seated is the privileging of activities associated with the former over the latter.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.162 | 0.108 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".