REPLY: RE: [Maths-Education] Being outdated
Paul Ernest
maths-education@nottingham.ac.uk
Thu, 1 May 2003 16:17:48 +0100 (GMT Daylight Time)
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