AAPT Members American Association of Philosophy Teachers

Elon University's student paper has a brief article on Yoram Lubling's upper level American Philosophy seminar, whose essays were published as a book by AuthorHouse publishing:

The Pendulum - Philosophy class has book of essays published

The book is titled "The Only Sin is Limitation: Essays on R.W. Emerson's multi-faceted influence on America." Students found a publisher and were able to get the book published this past December, thanks to a helpful endorsement by professor of philosophy Arthur Lothstein at Long Island University, a professor who once taught Lubling himself.

Philosophy of Memory - LiveJournal.com

Knowledge, mural by Robert Lewis Reid. The painting suggests knowledge is within a book, a view in contrast with Socratic thinking

Whilst researching on the extended mind, I came upon this passage by Plato on writing, knowledge and memory

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geo

Saccades are the voluntary movements of the eyes which serve to bring a new part of the visual field into the foveal region. Saccadic eye movements can reveal global aspects of perception, such as the scan patterns and fixation locations of subjects inspecting human faces.

The dust is settling over Apple's iPad. As predicted, the product has polarized geeks across the world. Fans b

Cider and beer residue on the side of a glass. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/livenow/2728832048/

At the heart of cognitive science is the notion of a representation: How the mind represents the world during perception and how we relate to these representations when we think.

Representations are the objects of thought, the building blocks of mental experience. Representations have been considered imagist

Mock-up of what Phylomon might look like.

I'm intrigued by The Phylomon Project. In the year of biodiversity, the Science Creative Quarterly (SCQ) are compiling a bunch of cards with the key statistics of species on them, emulating Pokemon. Apparently primary school kids can remember 120+ types of Pokemon creatures, but know less than 50% of common wildlife species. My concern with the project is that they have missed out on the fun.

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Slide from Eric Mazur's lecture, "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer"[.pdf]

On Thursday 14th January I attended a lecture "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer"[.pdf], by physicist and learning pioneer, Eric Mazur at the University of Queensland. Mazur says:
I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather

No, you don't want to know:
Q&A: Slavoj Žižek, professor and writer | Life and style | The Guardian

What is the worst job you've done?

Teaching. I hate students, they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.

Isn't that everything that is wrong with our discipline? Public intellectuals have this way of starting out as 'original and interesting promoter of the discipline' and ending as 'embarrassing caricature hell-bent on destroying the discipline' but has anyone made that transition more quickly than Zizek?  Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. Students are stupid and boring.

Maybe it's time we stop calling him a 'philosopher' and start using title for which he's most qualified: 'psychoanalyst.' "The most dangerous psychoanalyst in the west" has a bit of a different ring to it doesn't it?

iPhone application 'Forget Me Not'

In my previous blog post I discussed Locke's CommonPlace book and information overload in the 16th century. Now, my attention turns to what we use today.

Whilst Google manages our common knowledge extremely well, it does not help us remember the most basic and arguably important data for success, people's names.

Dale Carnegie, in his infamous book, How to Make Friends