The severity of the challenges made to traditionally and historically accepted understandings of truth, what is true, what is false and "fake," and even what is real, continues unabated in American public discourse. Nevertheless, the primary argument in this paper does not aim to identify the causes of the breakdown of representation…

In this presidential address, the author discusses how to find inspiration when writing about the history of education. He says that while the Muse can sometimes be elusive, we do not have to search far and wide to find her. The author finds his inspiration through reading, writing and talking to his colleagues and students and also by asking the…

In response to the intensifying vocationalisation and instrumentalisation of education, scholars have invoked the ideal of leisure and its educational embodiment in the tradition of liberal learning. Drawing on the work of Josef Pieper, this article seeks to bring to the fore an overlooked yet fundamental aspect of leisure, that of existential…

Soyoung Lee and Paul Standish have criticised my article 'Levinas: Ethics or Mystification?' for misunderstanding and misrepresenting the phenomenological subtleties of Levinas's formulation of ethics. However, although their arguments are cogent and persuasive, I still cannot see how Levinas's 'ethics of the Other', regardless of its merits qua…

In 1932 Dewey and Tufts issued an extensively revised edition of their famous Ethics of 1908. Both versions are now available as public domain resources on the Internet, and teachers are likely to assign the second edition, since it reflects the authors' mature views. However, at least as regards Dewey's treatment of virtue, I argue that the…

The concept of educational questions has often been taken up topically, or as a related component to topics within philosophy of education. The rabbit hole approach provides a new perspective for attempting to discover the characteristics of educational questions and to engage with six authors, Biestra, Bingham, LeGrange, Andreotti, Saeverot and…

In this article we develop the idea that there exists a unique educational love and that it moreover can be identified as essential to education. First, developing Arendt's claim that education is about the existing generation introducing newcomers to the world, we argue that the object-side of educational love is not the student, but first and…

The Douglas Fir Group (2016) argued that applied linguistics needed new interdisciplinary perspectives, and I suggest here that the concepts provided by new materialism might aid in gaining such perspectives. New materialism foregrounds the material nature of humans, discourses, machines, other objects, other species, and the natural environment,…

Colin Koopman identifies a longstanding tension between experiential givenism and linguisticism in forms of pragmatism, and offers semiotics as a candidate for resolving this. In this paper, I offer a pansemiotic account that construes the universe as events, and experience as implication in events. This process account resonates strongly with…

In this paper, I explore the ancient Greek concept of paideia to contribute to an ongoing revitalisation of educational theory that positions freedom as central to the educational process. I also analyse the current crisis in public life in Europe as a consequence of neglect or inability to incorporate educational theory in the formation of school…

In this paper, I invoke various matterings of felt in order to generate a practice of writing that engenders bodily difference that is affective, moving, and wooly. In attending to 'how to write as felt,' as a touching encounter, I consider how human and nonhuman matter composes (Haraway in Staying with the trouble: making Kin in the Chthulucene,…

This article argues that ordinary virtue trait attributions presuppose the existence of "realistic" traits that fall short of, for example, Aristotelian ideals and that debate about the existence of virtue traits should be reoriented in the light of this fact. After clarifying and motivating that basic thesis, we discuss what the…

The world of Carroll's Wonderland narratives, in which language tests its own limits, overlaps with Wittgenstein's world of counterexample, and such convergence becomes most overt in Wittgenstein's example of a nonsensical scale in his "Philosophical Investigations" (§142). Wittgenstein does not find much use for such a scale, but in…

This chapter introduces intersectionality as a framework for understanding how educational developers' personal identities inform both individual practice and the broader field.

In recent decades, critiques of neoliberalism have been widespread within the scholarly literature on education. Despite the lack of a clear definition of what neoliberalism in education is and entails, researchers from different fields and perspectives have widely criticized the neoliberal educational mindset for its narrowness, lack of…