In 1931, three years after the publication of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the obscure masterpiece which he had intended as his habilitation thesis, Walter Benjamin wrote about it to the Swiss editor, Max Rychner: ... what I did not know at the time of its composition became more and more clear to me soon after: that, from my very particular position on the philosophy of language, there e...

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bernstein (1896-1966) studied movement in order to understand the brain. Contra Pavlov, he saw movements (thus, the brain) as coordinated. For Bernstein, the cortex was a stochastic device; the more cortexes an animal species has, the more variable its actions will be. Actions are planned with a stochastic "model of the future," and relevance is established through blind ...

ion is an important construct for mathematics educators. Empiricist accounts of abstraction, which associate abstractions with generalisations stemming from the recognition of common features amongst a set of particular instances, dominated Western mathematics education literature in the last century but have been challenged in recent years by ideas inspired by the dialectical materialist and s...