•  459
    China Confronts Kant When University Students Experience the Angst of Freedom
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 48 (6). 2016.
    An existential interpretation of student angst in Chinese universities raises issues of autonomy and freedom. The governance arrangements in China create a conflict for Chinese students who in their coursework are urged to become critical-minded and open-minded. In this essay, Kant’s moral theory provides access to this phenomenon. His theory of duty–rationality–autonomy–freedom relates the liberty of thought to principled action. Kantian ideals still influence western business and university pr…Read more
  •  119
    The Implications for Science Education of Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 45 (5): 546-570. 2013.
    Science teaching always engages a philosophy of science. This article introduces a modern philosophy of science and indicates its implications for science education. The hermeneutic philosophy of science is the tradition of Kant, Heidegger, and Heelan. Essential to this tradition are two concepts of truth, truth as correspondence and truth as disclosure. It is these concepts that enable access to science in and of itself. Modern science forces aspects of reality to reveal themselves to human bei…Read more
  •  68
    The survival value of informed awareness
    with Jeffrey Kinsella-Shaw
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (1): 137-154. 2007.
    Various hypotheses about the importance of psycho-neural concomitants are reviewed and their implications discussed for the 'easy' and 'hard' problems of consciousness -- especially, as viewed by cognitive and ecological psychology. In Ecological Psychology, where the subjective-objective dichotomy is repudiated, these concepts are without foundation, and are replaced by informed awareness, which is argued to play an important, perhaps, indispensable role in goal- directed actions and thus to ha…Read more
  •  35
    Marshall—making Wittgenstein smile
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 37 (3). 2005.
    In the 1980s and 1990s the discipline of philosophy of education had an impact on schooling and the public service in New Zealand because of the contracted work of James Marshall and Michael Peters. This personal reflection by Robert Shaw is a tribute to James Marshall and provides insight into the relationship between Ministry officials, the community, and educational researchers.
  •  22
    Perhaps because of their dismissal of him as living ‘une carrière à l’américaine’, there have been few attempts to explore the relationship between the work of Gregory Bateson and that of Deleuze and Guattari. This paper offers two ways in which we might do this. First, it explores the concepts, such as plateau of intensity and rhizome, which migrate from Bateson into Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This helps focus on this text as an attempt to create and imagine non-schismogenic forms of social …Read more
  •  13
    The purpose of the MBA degree: The opportunity for a Confucian MBA to overcome neoliberalism
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 49 (12): 1173-1183. 2017.
    This paper is a prolegomena to discussions about a differentiated Confucian MBA curriculum. We draw upon Kant’s notion of individual autonomy and our observations of practice to argue that there are three models extant for the MBA degree. One of these, that which emphasizes leadership, holds considerable potential if it develops in the context of a genuinely Confucian university. This distinctive MBA—which could emerge in China—would express Confucian metaphysics and thus actively embrace China’…Read more
  • Proceedings of the ANZAM conference, Adelaide, Australia
    Australia and New Zealand Academy of Management. 2010.
  • This paper examines the use of the phenomenological method in business and management research.