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I—The Presidential Address
The neglected Platonic dialogue Euthydemus is peculiar in many ways. It is, apparently, an extensive catalogue of bad arguments by disgraceful sophists; but its complex composition suggests that this focuses attention on the shape and nature of argument—attention that some think Plato is incapable of giving. He uses the idiom of games, and of seriousness and play, to provoke reflection on logical and syntactic structure and their normative features; but to see how he does so we need to consider the complex background of the fiction of a Platonic dialogue, and its use of surprise and humour. Comparison with the bbc Radio 4 game ‘Mornington Crescent’ might help.
Journal Article
Connecting Theories : Exploring Networking Strategies for the Work of Bakhtin and Vygotsky Through Teacher and Student Perspectives on Mathematical Methods
My thesis began as a practical problem addressing the undervaluing of informal mathematical language and methods used by low prior attaining students. I wanted to gather teacher and student perspectives on mathematical methods. I began by exploring the dialogic theory of Bakhtin but discovered a debate in the field about whether Bakhtin's work could be used as an extension of Vygotsky's dialectic theory. As a result, I used Radford's connecting theories framework (2008) to shape an investigation which explores principles, methodology and research questions as points of connection between the theories of Vygotsky and Bakhtin. Linking the networking approaches of Prediger et al. (2008), to Radford's connecting theories allowed me to analyse the work of other authors in the field and develop my own analytical framework based on Vygotsky and Bakhtin. I used this framework both to analyse transcriptions of teacher group discussion and student group discussion based around examples of student work, and to explore networking approaches. Initially, I used \"comparing\"/ \"contrasting\" approaches to extend my understanding of Bakhtin's and Vygotsky's theories before adopting a \"combining\" networking approach to further investigate the perspectives of students on mathematical methods. I used a dialectic approach to represent the significance of the curriculum in discussion around mathematical methods, and a dialogic approach to analyse the detail of how the context and socio-cultural background shapes impacts on discussion. I concluded that a connecting theories approach allowed for analysis of more data and a deeper level of analysis than using a single theory. Through connecting theories, I also investigated the possibility of analysing mathematical methods as utterances using Bakhtin's work. I suggest that Bakhtin and Vygotsky's theories can be effectively networked to provide analysis and suggest a number of future steps to either apply the networked theories to practical problems or further theoretical issues.
Dissertation
Italo Calvino in Japan, Japan in Italo Calvino : a Cross-Cultural Encounter
Italo Calvino (1923-1985) travelled to Japan in the autumn of 1976 and, throughout his career, got acquainted with Japanese literature and culture: this encounter is attested to by the 'Japanese shelf' of his Roman library and by several authorial reflections, but has been granted little attention so far. The aim of this research project is to highlight for the first time the semiotic relevance of Calvino's contact with Japanese cultural configuration, as an epitome of the author's gradual relativisation of Eurocentrism, logocentrism and anthropocentrism. In particular, this study addresses Japanese gardens in light of their role in Calvino's reflections on the interdependency between the human and the other-than-human. This deconstruction of a hierarchical humanism is discussed by interlacing trans-cultural and post-human coordinates, which illuminate the poetical and philosophical mature formulation of Calvino's age-long ecological awareness. Moreover, if Buddhist meditation, as well as many poetical, artistic and architectural expressions that capture Calvino's attention in Japan can be understood as forms of praxis - interrelation of theory and practice -, they are here put in dialogue with the author's development of dialectical materialism over time, especially in his last completed work, Palomar (1983). By investigating Calvino's treatment of perspective changes, language, silence, void, time and death in his works, this thesis brings to the fore the manifold contradictions, potentialities and dialectical processes that inform these themes in Calvino's oeuvre, which fruitfully interact with his exploration of Japanese (and in general non-Western) art, literature and thought in the late 1970s.
Dissertation