The complete works of Dr. James Muir in ascending chronological order

• * The relationship between education and political doctrine: the Isocratic heritage and a Socratic alternative. University of Oxford, Dissertation, 1995.


• "The Evolution of Philosophy of Education Within Educational Studies." Educational Philosophy and Theory Volume 28, Issue 2 (1996): pp. 1 - 26.


• "The Strange Case of Mr. Bloom." Journal of Philosophy of Education Volume 30, Issue 2 (1996): pp. 197 - 214.


• "Ancient Jewish Political Thought and the Legacy of Isocrates." The European Legacy Volume 2, Issue 5 (August 1997): pp. 827 - 840.


• "The History of Educational Ideas and the Credibility of Philosophy of Education." Educational Philosophy and Theory Volume 30, Issue 1 (1998): pp. 7 - 26.


• * "Aristotle's Logic of Education." Education Philosophy and Theory Volume 31, Number 2 (1999): pp. 251-253.


• ** "Political Doctrine, Philosophy, and the Value of Education: The Legacy of Isocrates and the Socratic Alternative." Journal of Educational Thought Volume 33, Issue 3 (1999): pp. 255 - 278.


• Includes a response from John Wilson and a subsequent reply by James Muir.
• Available for the first time electronically.


• "Notes on the Isocratic Legacy and Islamic Political Thought: The Example of Education." The European Legacy Volume 6, Issue 4 (2001): pp. 453 - 470.


• "Is There a History of Educational Philosophy? John White vs the historical evidence." Educational Philosophy and Theory Volume 36, Issue 1 (February 2004): pg. 35 - 56.


• See also: John White "Reply to James Muir."


• "Is our history of educational philosophy mostly wrong? The case of Isocrates." Theory and Research in Education Vol. 3, No. 2 (2005): pp. 165 - 195.


• "Derrida and Post-Modern Political Philosophy." The European Legacy Volume 13, Issue 4 (2008): pp. 425 - 443.

But futurist and entrepreneur Eric Knight, (founder of UP Aerospace and Remarkable Technologies) has a somewhat novel idea of what to do with the shuttles after they are done with their current duties: Send them to Mars. He says his formula is simple and will allow humans to travel to Mars in years, not decades.

Knight's proposal, which he calls "Mars on a Shoestring," outlines two shuttles going into Earth orbit, hooking them together with a truss and strapping on a powerful enough propulsion system. And that's pretty much it. A pressurized inflatable conduit would connect the two orbiters so the astronauts could go back and forth between the two shuttles.

Then comes the really cool part; a way to provide artificial gravity during the trip to Mars..."

"Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery."

"This area was like a paradise,"...Gobekli Tepe sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent—an arc of mild climate and arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt—and would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant. And partly because Schmidt has found no evidence that people permanently resided on the summit of Gobekli Tepe itself, he believes this was a place of worship on an unprecedented scale—humanity's first "cathedral on a hill."

"The first year, we went through 15,000 pieces of animal bone, all of them wild. It was pretty clear we were dealing with a hunter-gatherer site," Peters says. "It's been the same every year since." The abundant remnants of wild game indicate that the people who lived here had not yet domesticated animals or farmed.

But, Peters and Schmidt say, Gobekli Tepe's builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. "They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated—and the people with the potential to do it," Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepe's construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe's construction.

To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.

From the Wikipedia entry: "It is also apparent that the animal and other images are peaceful in character and give no indications of organised violence."

Next, and perhaps more appropriately, is a 2007 article "A History of Violence" by psycho-linguist Steven Pinker. This paper, and the associated TED talk, is not original research, but a survey of current scholarship on the origins and evolution of violence in humans. He argues that violence is at its lowest ebb now, that nature has been 'red in tooth and claw' well back into human pre-history, that our ancestors were not as peacable as we may assume, and that the threat and reality of violence was ever-present over evolutionary time. Further, although Pinker claims violent death to be statistically more likely in the past than in the present, is but one facet of a difficult and traumatic life contra the image of the 'abundance of nature' articulated by Fried. I imagine that this postulated abundance and good fortune were the exception and not the rule for the vast majority of human history. For example, common forms of death for our pre-historic, pre-state ancestors included (provided you lived pat infancy, that is): broken bones, bacterial dental infections festering until they burst and then infected the rest of your body causing death, parasites, water borne diseases, ingesting undetectable fungal infection from grains causing death, famine, drought, predation, and any other manner of misfortune that is obviated (or eliminated) in post-state, post-scientific life.

But, to Pinker's points:

This change in sensibilities is...perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth. In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion...now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

[T]he choice to focus on relative rather than absolute numbers brings up the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of 100 to be killed or 1 percent in a population of one billion. Yet, despite these caveats, a picture is taking shape. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. Nor could it possibly be explained by evolution in the biologist's sense: Even if the meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favor the genes for meekness quickly enough. In any case, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for violence. Social psychologists find that at least 80 percent of people have fantasized about killing someone they don't like. And modern humans still take pleasure in viewing violence...What has changed, of course, is people's willingness to act on these fantasies. The sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that European modernity accelerated a "civilizing process" marked by increases in self-control, long-term planning, and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. These are precisely the functions that today's cognitive neuroscientists attribute to the prefrontal cortex.

The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy...This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence—don't strike first, retaliate if struck—but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation.

Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities...

See also this entry at BoingBoing.net on the same article that links to a now-offline New Republic bibliographic companion that features this text:

• Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization (1997). An archeologist looks at skeletons, weapons, and ethnographic accounts of tribal warfare. Forget the noble savage: Hobbes was right. War has always been hell.

So what can we conclude from Gobekli Tepe and Pinker's arguments:

1. Non-material social concepts such as primitive religion and worship affected organization and social relations as much, if not more, than material relations such as the so-called 'relations of production'. Veneration brought people together and fostered cultivation and not the reverse.
2. Humans have always had, and will always have, the capacity for large scale violence regardless of the types of social arrangement. Even if violence is not always manifest in war or assault, the threat and capacity remains.
3. Ever refined normative stipulations have curbed violence from the past into the present. Thus non-material ideas have helped curb violence more than the theories of relations of production, or historical materialism could account for.
4. If we are to study anthropological texts at all, we should study more current research of which there is an abundance.

I am not anthropologist, so this is distinctly non-specialist literature, so if you know any other documentation on the topics introduced by Fried, it would be valuable to contribute.

Truth in advertising, I've only read about 100 pages into Fried. He takes a long time to actually get into his argument (well after he finishes surveying pre-WWII anthro literature), so I hope I am not misrepresenting the main thrust of his argument. Corrections or rejoinders are welcome.

1. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War
2. Plato, Apology of Socrates; Republic; Gorgias
3. Aristotle, Politics; Nicomachean Ethics [Portions of each, NE is horribly boring]
4. Xenophon: Education of Cyrus
5. Augustine, City of God, selections (Book II, Chapters 2, 21; V, 12-21; XII, 1-8; XIV,
1-9, 28; XIX, 1-7, 12-17, 21, 24-28)
6. Thomas Aquinas, selections from Summa Theologiae etc. (all of volume edited by Dino Bigongiari, Hafner publ.)
7. Machiavelli, Prince; Discourses
8. Hobbes, Leviathan
9. Locke, Second Treatise of Government; Letter on Toleration
10. Rousseau, First Discourse, Second Discourse; Social Contract
11. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Parts 1 & 2; Political Writings (in H. Reiss, ed., Cambridge U. P.)
12. Hegel, Philosophy of Right
13. J. S. Mill, On Liberty
14. Marx (and Engels), ed. R. Tucker, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; “Theses on Feuerbach”; The German Ideology, Part I; Capital, Volume One: all of Part I (Commodities and Money); Part II, Chapter VI only (The Buying and Selling of Labor Power)
15. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil
16. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Part One; Part Two, Ch. 4; Political Liberalism (portions of each - they're LONG), Introduction; Lectures 1, 3, and 4.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Kennedy’s death came just two months after Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis. Kennedy had broken the news to supporters of King’s assassination while campaigning in Indianapolis and delivered what was to become a famous speech.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY: For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust, of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.


My favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote, “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”


What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

 

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.—But, for true need,—
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stirs these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women's weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man's cheeks!—No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall,—I will do such things,—
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep;
No, I'll not weep:—
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I'll weep.—O fool, I shall go mad!

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.[...] I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success. But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.

I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers ... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.

Where and why humans made skates out of animal bones

"Archaeological evidence shows that bone skates (skates made of animal bones) are the oldest human powered means of transport, dating back to 3000 BC. Why people started skating on ice and where is not as clear, since ancient remains were found in several locations spread across Central and North Europe.

In a recent paper, published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society of London, Dr Formenti and Professor Minetti show substantial evidence supporting the hypothesis that the birth of ice skating took place in Southern Finland, where the number of lakes within 100 square kilometres is the highest in the world.

“In Central and Northern Europe, five thousand years ago people struggled to survive the severe winter conditions and it seems unlikely that ice skating developed as a hobby” says Dr Formenti. “As happened later for skis and bicycles, I am convinced that we first made ice skates in order to limit the energy required for our daily journeys”.

Formenti and Minetti did their experiments on an ice rink by the Alps, where they measured the energy consumption of people skating on bones. Through mathematical models and computer simulations of 240 ten-kilometre journeys, their research study shows that in winter the use of bone skates would have limited the energy requirements of Finnish people by 10%. On the other hand, the advantage given by the use of skates in other North European countries would be only about 1%.

Subsequent studies performed by Formenti and Minetti have shown how fast and how far people could skate in past epochs, from 3000BC to date."

"Political philosophy is the attempt to replace our opinions about political fundamentals by knowledge about them. Its first task consists therefore in making fully explicit our political ideas, so that they can be subjected to critical analysis. "Our ideas" are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers' teachers; they are abbreviations and resides of the thought of the past...By being transmitted to later generations they have possibly been transformed, and there is no certainty that the transformation was effected conscious and with full clarity. At any rate, what were once certainly explicit ideas passionately discussed, although not necessarily lucid ideas have now degenerated into mere implication and tacit presuppositions. Therefore, if we want to clarify the political ideas we have inherited, we must actualize their implications, which were explicit in the past, and this can be done only by means of the history of political ideas. This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas. To this extent the philosophic effort and the historical effort have become completely fused."

"I see a close analogy between John von Neumann's blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto."

"obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years, with its assumption that biological processes can be understood by studying genes and molecules. What is needed instead is a new synthetic biology based on emergent patterns of organization...[there is] evidence that Darwinian evolution does not go back to the beginning of life. When we compare genomes of ancient lineages of living creatures, we find evidence of numerous transfers of genetic information from one lineage to another. In early times, horizontal gene transfer, the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent."

"Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere."

"Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance."

"This picture of living creatures, as patterns of organization rather than collections of molecules, applies not only to bees and bacteria, butterflies and rain forests, but also to sand dunes and snowflakes, thunderstorms and hurricanes. The nonliving universe is as diverse and as dynamic as the living universe, and is also dominated by patterns of organization that are not yet understood...The big problems, the evolution of the universe as a whole, the origin of life, the nature of human consciousness, and the evolution of the earth's climate, cannot be understood by reducing them to elementary particles and molecules."

For Israel and the Occupied Territories, Amnesty says Israel killed more than 650 Palestinians last year, three times the number of Palestinians killed in 2005. Half of the Palestinians killed last year were unarmed civilians. The Palestinian death toll included 120 children. During the same period, Palestinian militants killed 27 Israelis – including 20 civilians and one child.

Some of the proposals are political dynamite, so it is small wonder the Home Office briefing paper is marked "restricted".

Its contents dare to say what ministers cannot. On drugs, for example, it reports: "There is mounting evidence of the impossibility of winning the war against drugs supply." Furthermore, if the "Government did succeed in cutting the supply of heroin" the price of the street drug would rise, driving addicts to more desperate and dangerous criminal acts to pay for their habit.

The warning is alarming, and undermines the policy of targeting drug smugglers. Perhaps this is why the report containing this damaging analysis has never been published, particularly since its authors were the Home Secretary's own policy advisers...

The strategists say: "There is a strong argument that prohibition has caused or created many of the problems associated with the use or misuse of drugs. One option for the future would be to regulate drugs differently, through either over-the-counter sales, licensed sales or doctor's prescription."...

Proposal

Prescribe pure heroin instead of methadone to "the most chaotic and dependent users" who commit crimes to feed their habit. Concludes that "wider roll-out" would "reduce drug-related crime" and improve the health of addicts.

What happened

Three trials have been set up by the National Health Service to see if giving addicts injectable heroin instead of methadone reduces crime and improves their health. Trials end this year and the programme is likely to be extended across the country to the most dependent users.

Left on the shelf: legalise and regulate all drugs

Proposal

Legalise and regulate drug use to reduce organised crime and cut out the profits made by dealers. The Government should consider over-the-counter sales of currently illegal drugs, licensing drug retailers or allowing doctors to write prescriptions.

What may happen

Legalising drug supply has been firmly rejected by the Government because it would sanction the use of drugs. The policy of targeting drug smugglers and dealers continues, despite the report's warning that reducing the drug supply drives up the price and increases crime.

Heroin is to be prescribed on the NHS to hard-core drug addicts under secret plans being prepared by the Government...The proposal follows a recommendation in a restricted Home Office report on crime, which proposes prescribing heroin to addicts and licensing sales of heroin and crack cocaine...

It adds: "Given the failure of supply-side interventions to have any significant effect on the drugs market, it is worth considering a greater management of the market by wider rolling out of injectable heroin prescription for highly dependent users through the NHS."...

Civil servants say that in Switzerland, where doctors prescribe heroin rather than methadone to "recidivist veteran users", 26 per cent have given it up, and criminality and unemployment have been reduced...

Home Office sources said yesterday that three trials of heroin prescription have produced positive preliminary results. The NHS prescriptions are likely to be made available to hard-core users across the country next year. The Home Office said that only persistent users who have failed to respond to methadone would qualify.

The review warns that the Government is fighting a losing battle against drug smugglers. "There is mounting evidence of the impossibility of winning the war against drugs supply," it says. It suggests legalising the supply of drugs and licensing their distribution or supplying them "over the counter" to combat crime.