Salient thoughts

thecritic-x:

This post will be extensive, but I believe that the details that will be captured in my explanation are important in providing a logical support for my theory. I will be discussing the relationship between the quality and longevity of roleplays and the quantity of them here on Tumblr: the more…

zeezeescorner:

Visualising Critical Thinking: Series of short videos on how to formulate scientific arguments

Australian company Bridge 8 have visualised critical thinking concepts in a very clever way. Here’s their description of their work: 

Bridge8 cowrote produced, animated and directed a series of six critical thinking animations for TechNyou, an emerging technologies public information resource funded by the Australian Government Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education (DIISRTE).

It forms part of an education resource which covers basic logic, faulty arguments and the developing critical thinking skills. It’s designed for year 8-10 (but is just as appropriate for a general adult audience) and focuses on science issues. The accompanying education resource is found here.

All the videos are entertaining, informative and brief (2 minutes each). The video above is about the importance of formulating solid scientific arguments. Here’s some info about the others:

2) Broken Logic On non-sequiturs.

3) The Man who was made of straw About the difference of forming a scientific premise and making oversimplified arguments.

4) Getting Personal. How to avoid attacking a person and their opinions/behaviour and how to separate trusting an expert from trusting the scientific evidence they present. Example from environmentalism and climate change.

5) The Gambler’s Fallacy. Separating patterns of chance, luck and coincidence from probabilities. For example: sick people take some pills and then they get better. Was it the medicine that helped or some other cause? This needs to be tested.

6) A precautionary tale. Explains the precautionary principle. What are theories? They are scientific facts that have been tested empirically. They reflect the best knowledge science has available, but facts are never 100 percent certain because all knowledge is an evolving process. 

These videos are beautifully drawn and incredibly useful resources for visual sociology as well as for other sciences.

Initial link via Brainpickings.

(via fyeahsociology)

grandejouissance:

Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 1 of 7

This is the first in a series of three lectures in which French philosopher Michel Foucault examines Western culture’s conceptual development of individual subjectivity. He gave these lectures, in English, at UC Berkeley, beginning on April 12, 1983, roughly a year before he died. There are some negligable distortions in the tape.

Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

I am absolutely in love with this man and his thought. I think it’s safe to say that I would make passionate love to him if he were to miraculously rise from the dead (and be AIDS-free). Also, his English is surprisingly good. After hearing him in French, I never expected him to sound like this in English.

(via philosophy-of-praxis)

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought- our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things,and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with avery fine camel hair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (via uncritical-critical-theory)

If you mean by ethics a code that would tell us how to act, then of course The History of Sexuality is not an ethics. But if by ethics you mean the relationship you have to yourself when you act, then I would say that it intends to be an ethics, or at least to show what could be an ethics of sexual behavior. It would be one that would not be dominated by the problem of the deep truth of the reality of our sex life. The relationship that I think we would need to have with ourselves when we have sex is an ethics of pleasure, of intensification of pleasure.

—Michel Foucault, speaking of the question of ethics in The History of Sexuality Volume One.  (via fiveoclockbot)

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

—Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (via pnoom)

argonautsofanthropology:

I readily admit that the title is annoyingly provocative on purpose. Part of the reason is because I want to draw people’s attention where it’s nearly impossible to focus attention; on the internet, on tumblr.

However it is a genuine question, and one which I not only direct towards…

(Source: aileenkwun)

therelentlessprocessionoftime:

”When you have [thus] formed the chain of ideas in the heads of your citizens, you will then be able to pride yourselves on guiding them and being their masters. The stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains, but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their…

onlyaneye:

Passage from Foucault on the Hetrotopic

The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place.

In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that…

boyswithbiblenames:

Who am I these days? The boy in my bed is sleeping in the shape of an upside down L. I’m in the bottom left corner: alone, in fetal position.

Three a.m. and you would think my eyes would be begging to shut. Instead, they’re drowning. Rivers run down my cheeks, I’m trying not to be loud.

Who…