Agora Archive — Columns
River of Minds: Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens’ First Contact – A Philosophical Novella
10 Nov 2025
Preface This novella, River of Minds, was born in a river valley of imagination, where memory, gesture and consciousness converge. It explores the encounters between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, meditating on attention, memory and the emergence of interspecies awareness. The narrative was developed…
Agora Archive — Columns
Unbecoming? Aotearoa, He Ao Māori
23 Sep 2025
We need to keep discussing how biculturalism provokes and challenges education in Aotearoa New Zealand, and as philosophers of education, it’s appropriate for us to maintain a self-reflexive focus on our own discipline. This column continues investigating bicultural education in Aotearoa New Zealand…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Ecology of AI Bad Code: Propagation of Error, Malignant Strains and Deviation of Values
24 Jul 2025
In a human-AI discussion, this paper, inspired by Bateson and Wittgenstein, examines the mind of AI and the possibility of AI being able to change and modify its code at will over many generations in an accelerated fashion. In these circumstances, the paper poses the question: how likely will it dev…
Agora Archive — Columns
Work and Education
19 Jul 2025
1. Introduction: Automation and the Philosophical Crisis of Labour Work has long functioned as a central category in Western thought, linking subjectivity, social reproduction and moral value. In the 21st century, however, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and robotic proces…
Agora Archive — Columns
Gaza, War Crimes and the Ethics of Global Responsibility
6 Jul 2025
While the eyes of the world were diverted to the recent hostilities between Israel and Iran, Israel’s genocide has continued unabated in Gaza, including through the infliction of conditions of life that have created a deadly mix of hunger and disease, pushing the population past breaking point. (Agn…
Agora Archive — Columns
<em>Becoming Aotearoa</em> and the Contested Remaking of a Nation’s Historiography
27 Jun 2025
The Transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand Historiography New Zealand historiography has undergone a profound transformation over the past half-century, moving decisively away from celebratory colonial narratives toward a complex, often challenging engagement with the nation’s past. This shift, driv…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Education/EdTech Legitimation Complex
17 Jun 2025
The Oxford/DeepMind ‘Habermas Machine’ (from Nicholas Kees at LessWrong) 1. Introduction: The Promise and Problem of EdTech EdTech has always been eager to help. It arrives at the educational scene armed with dashboards, integrations and the kind of cheerful rhetoric usually reserved for star…
Agora Archive — Columns
Toward an Epistemic AI Literacy
13 Jun 2025
Introduction There is a phrase I often encounter in conversations about AI and creative labour: Only good writers get AI to write well. It’s meant to reassure – to affirm that human expertise still matters, that machine fluency alone doesn’t suffice. But I’ve begun to worry that the phrase misreads…
Agora Archive — Columns
Notes on The AIMarxED Framework
7 Jun 2025
Introduction: AI as the General Condition of Cognition The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) signals a paradigmatic transformation in the architecture of human cognition. No longer confined to discrete applications, AI has become a general condition of thought itself – reshaping how knowledge i…
Agora Archive — Columns
AIMarx as Neo-Autonomist Research Programme
4 Jun 2025
‘AIMarx’ not as a dogmatic oracle but as a dynamic, neo-Autonomist research program – a digital remastering and reasoning of Marx’s most visionary fragment, weaponised against techno-capitalist hegemony. Here is its core logic and implications: Core Foundations of AIMarx (as defined) 1. Intellectual…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Art of Prompting
3 Jun 2025
This manifesto proposes a radical reconceptualisation of prompting – not as a technical skill alone, but as a living epistemic practice grounded in centuries of philosophical inquiry. Drawing from ontological, ethical and pedagogical traditions, we situate prompting within a lineage of dialogic reas…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Dialectic of a Philosophical Education
24 May 2025
Duarte, E. (2025). The dialectic of a philosophical education: A new phenomenology. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003457879 The Dialectic of a Philosophical Education is a phenomenological description of the studia liberalia as the philosophical learning that occurs in three dist…
Agora Archive — Columns
‘Fragment on the Machines: Redux’
22 May 2025
As part of a talk at the School of Marxism at Peking University entitled ‘Educating for Post-Capitalist AI: Marxism, Superintelligence and the Future of Learning,’ I developed the concept of AIMarx, intending to explain what AIMarx would say in the voice of a digitised Marx – a revolutionary AI, tra…
Agora Archive — Columns
Relational and multimodal higher education: Digital, social and environmental perspectives, by Nataša Lacković and Alin Olteanu
22 May 2025
Lacković, N., & Olteanu, A. (2023). Relational and multimodal higher education: Digital, social and environmental perspectives. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003155201 This book responds to some of the most pressing issues of our times in and for education. Although it is targeted towar…
Agora Archive — Columns
Making Sense of the Learning Turn
12 May 2025
M.P. Introductory Comments The new book that Professor Anders Örtenblad has edited is entitled Making Sense of the Learning Turn: Why and In What Sense Toys, Organisations, Economies and Cities are ‘Learning’ (2024). There is a vast literature on learning, and much of it speaks about a ‘learning tur…
Agora Archive — Columns
The legacy of <i>Education To Be More</i> for early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand
13 Apr 2025
In 1980, Geraldine McDonald wrote: 'Measures to promote the rights of children are frequently disguised ways of controlling the role of women.' McDonald's challenge to policymakers is cited in the 1988 report of the Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group, Education To Be More (a.k.a. the M…
Agora Archive — Columns
Embracing the Tensions
9 Apr 2025
White, E. J., & Janfada, M. (2025). Dialogic methodology for transdisciplinary practice-based research. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197764442.001.0001 [preview the introduction here] Dialogic Methodology for Transdisciplinary Practice-Based Research by E. Jayne White…
Agora Archive — Columns
Mana ōrite mō te mātauranga Māori
20 Mar 2025
Longstanding debates about Māori knowledge in science classrooms have been reinvigorated by recent policy changes. This column focuses on the principle of ‘mana ōrite mō te mātauranga Māori’ that was adopted as one of seven changes in the programme aimed at strengthening NCEA, the national school qu…
Agora Archive — Columns
In Praise of Philosophy with Colour
20 Feb 2025
Introduction The idea for this paper was first conceived at the PESA Conference in Auckland in 2013, where I organised a symposium with Duck-Joo Kwak, Ruyu Hung and Mika Okabe on the theme ‘Does Place Matter for the Philosophy of Education?’ My presentation, titled ‘Against the Colourless World of P…
Agora Archive — Columns
Alas, America!
8 Feb 2025
Peters, M. A. (2020). Alas, America! Lament for a shattered dream on the eve of political breakdown. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(4), 393–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1837620 [This is a reprint of an editorial from late 2020: it provides a reminder of the fears many expressed…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Public University as a Real Utopia
13 Dec 2024
Covid-19 and the Universities And what about the historically public universities, the concern of this brief book? First and foremost, the pandemic brought to the fore universities as hubs of science and research. After all, it was to science that the world turned for explanations to what was transp…
Agora Archive — Columns
Chopin’s Index Card & Derrida’s Postcard
2 Nov 2024
An opera singer texted me: ‘Look at this scrap of paper.’ Javier C. Hernández, music reporter for the New York Times, unearths something nearly unfathomable. ‘It was much smaller than I had imagined – a pockmarked scrap about the size of an index card.’ A cellphone. An image. A photograph taken of t…
Agora Archive — Columns
Descartes and Trust
3 Oct 2024
Descartes Rene Descartes famously argued ‘I think therefore I am.’ His method relied on him having a clear and distinct idea, in this case, ‘I think.’ A less famous argument, but one that has engaged philosophers since, is ‘I doubt therefore I may not be’ or perhaps ‘I may not be as I think I am.’ ‘…
Agora Archive — Columns
Are We in Love with Hate?
29 Sep 2024
Here’s much to do with love but more with hate; my only love sprung from my only hate (William Shakespeare) In the shadowed recesses of contemporary history, where the air is thick with portent, and the spectre of tyranny looms, we witness a wretched figure rising from the grave of disillusionment…