REPLY: RE: [Maths-Education] Being outdated

[Paul Ernest]

On Thu, 1 May 2003 15:11:36 +1000 Judy Mousley 
<j.mousley@deakin.edu.au> wrote:

> Of course we are all victims of fashion. Which of us has not used 
> Foucault without seeking the original idea in Derrida or elsewhere? 
> We are bound by our own or historicity -- both re. time and place.
> 
Judy -- I don't acknowledge that Foucault's ideas are all 
second hand Derrida! What about 'discursive practice'? 
Anyway this can become a game in which seeds of ideas are 
all chased back to some mythical origin, eg, 'all of 
philosophy is but a footnote to Plato' type stuff.

Even the most creative and genuinely novel ideas are 
reconfigurations and reconstructions of existing 
constellations of ideas. And I'm not  referring to Piaget's 
ideas of assimilation here, but to any genre of 
communication. 

Nor do I believe that all is anticipatorily circunscribed 
-- there's a slip of the finger to set against 
'seminal' -- nor predicted by the boundaries of language. 
In maths the axioms do not tell you all consequences until 
you work them out!

End of rant

Paul