The Ghost of Laplace’s Demon: Revisiting the Anthropocene

Abstract

AbstractEducation is haunted by a dogmatic image of thought that sees learning as outcomes, representations, and a thing to be tested. The problematic of the dogmatic image of thought reactualizes in science education, where discursive systems and propositions counteract a fresh image of thought in terms of flows. In physics education, the dogmatic image of thought obfuscates seeing functives as multiplicities and posits physics education as the learning of stable singular concepts rather than functives. The first example drawn upon, utilizing Richard Feynman’s lecture, is the theory of gravity, presented here not as a concept, but as a complex function composed of functives. The second example is Pierre-Simon Laplace’s writings on probability and determinism. Both historical cases display the issues regarding the dogmatic image of thought and the fulcrum to revisit it as bodily flows. The last point raised in this chapter is how learning about the world, when seen as a flow, is connected to a double activity of thought and body, drawing extensively on Spinoza’s epistemology and Deleuze’s interpretation of it.