The present article continues my work in logomachy and the philosophy of education. It turns to Bernard Stiegler's concept of the 'idiotext' as the means of terming what I have previously called 'particular sets of sense'. The gambit of the article is that 'intropy' (uncertainty provoked by informational complexity) provides a very useful concept…

This article seeks to explore the metaphor 'darkness and light' and its relevance to education through hauntological study. It draws on the ideas of Derrida and Fisher to reveal that the metaphor functions in binary form and holds significations of truth, goodness and knowledge to subordinate oppositional ideas of darkness. Despite the everyday…

"Prosthesis" and the "human hand" have been terms used by various philosophers in order to describe the interaction that binds together the human being and the technical artefact -- Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida being among the most important of these philosophers. In Bernard Stiegler's philosophy, however, these notions…

This paper takes up Shannon Rodgers' 2016 critique of curriculum writers' call for observable verbs ("Minding our metaphors in education." "Educational Philosophy and Theory" 48 (6), pp. 563-578), and argues that a more effective line of critique should focus not on metaphorical thinking, but on the notion of observation…

When "The Myth of Sisyphus" describes those who live in the "rarefied air of the absurd" (p. 86), Camus uses the word fidelity. This signals a recognition of both defeat and the demand for struggle. This suggests a humility. Education can be said to have this characteristic; it is constantly in service to the new and yet…

This article takes up the educational challenge of the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Specifically, the author explores the question of: how can we talk about a universal conception of human rights in a way that both respects the need for cultural pluralism and the necessity to protect those rights and freedoms that all…

Could there be a better instance of ethical conflict at the scene of the modern Western university than the case of Martin Heidegger, who in 1933 became a Nazi, arguably to elevate his own standing and career? In this article I examine the opposing ethical forces that animated Heidegger's brief foray into Nazism, to ask whether the same forces…

This article seeks to explore the implications of Jean-Luc Nancy's reading of the subject for educational philosophy by connecting his re-interpretation of Descartes to his later thinking on what he names the ontological singular plural. Nancy's re-imagining of the Cogito coalesces around the figure of the mouth ("la bouche") through…

Inspired by Heidegger's philosophy, this article calls for revisiting the role of education and offers an educational goal of examining the meaning of being a human being. Through interpreting the ontological difference, awareness of wholes is suggested as a crucial means for discovering new meanings about ourselves, and Heidegger's perception of…

Over the last decades, education has shifted more clearly to a learner-centered understanding, including particularly constructivism, leaving little room conceptually for a substantive role for the teacher. This article develops a Levinasian framework for understanding the teacher as other. It begins by exploring the spatial metaphors of Levinas's…

This article takes "measurement" as a will to determine or fix space and time, which allows for a comparison of ontological models of space and time from Western and Maori traditions. The spirit of "measurement" is concomitantly one of fixing meaning, which is suggested as the essence of the growth of the scientific genre of…

This paper takes issue with Derek Sankey's: "Minds, Brains, and Differences in Personal Understanding", "Educational Philosophy and Theory", 39 (2007), pp. 543-558 on the questions of the post-pedagogical classroom and the forms of knowledge. I then try to show that a theory of meaning framed in terms of normative pragmatics is better able than…

One of the tasks of Jean-Paul Sartre's later work was to consider how an individual could live freely within a free community. This paper examines how Sartre describes the process of group formation and the implications of this discussion for education. The paper begins with his metaphor of a bus queue in order to describe a series. Then, by means…

This paper plays with education through the analogy of karaoke to tease out the instructions of a situated educational practice. Here, Cremin's conceptualization of education as a deliberate, systematic and sustained effort is employed as a starting point to enable an understanding of educational practice between members elicited by karaoke. Using…

Currently, global society is delicately poised on a civilisational threshold similar to that of the feudal era. This is a time when outmoded institutions, values, and systems of thought and their associated dogmas are ripe for transcendence by more relevant systems of organization and knowledge (Davidson, 2000). The foundations of the modern era…