More and more lately, commentators who have defended Socrates have emphasized the extent to which he uses non-rational means of educating his interlocutors, and commentators have downplayed the extent to which he means to offer arguments that provide justification or are rationally persuasive. The trend is refreshing since students of Socrates…

In this paper we explore the idea of an equity of imagination in the context of learning in the art museum. We mean by this a shared mental space in which artworks and publics are afforded mutual agency and power to generate meaning, with opportunities to conjure new meanings for shifting and changing contexts. We focus on how this can emerge…

This article scrutinises the ontological nature of democracy and the implications that different ontological assumptions might have for educational practice. To achieve this, we use Karen Barad's notion of diffraction to read John Dewey's, Ernesto Laclau's and Barad's theoretical insights through one another. Our starting point is Dewey's famous…

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…

Education theory has been exhibiting a renewed rejection of education's instrumentality to political and economic influences against a policy trend that implicitly considers education a mere pragmatic tool. This paper suggests an ontological investigation that goes beyond normatively supporting or rejecting the instrumentality of education. It…

In this article, I first problematize the concept of rationality as educational ideal through the use of feminist philosophy. I then offer an alternative concept of rationality as educational ideal based on my reading of Catherine Malabou's work on plasticity, epigenesis, and rationality. In a last part, I explore the ontological and normative…

R. S. Peters and a small group of contemporaries set the foundations for analytic philosophy of education in the 1960s, a field which continues to this day. This article asks about the value of analytic philosophy of education today, and proposes alterations to its initial aims and methods to make its value clearer. I outline some critiques of…

According to Jennifer Billman, western evaluation bias against indigenous thinking is due to ontological incompetence. If so, the solution she offers (a highly abstract list of criteria) is inadequate since it fails to address let alone resolve a wide range of philosophical dilemmas at the intersection of logic and ontology. Furthermore, it fails…

In thinking about the death and loss of a professional colleague the authors identify with the "tumult of feelings" that Simone Beauvoir notes in speaking of death. They occasion the void of understanding of this loss with a reflection on the nature of friendship. In doing so they align themselves with philosopher, Alexander Nehamas,…

Inductive reasoning is used when generalizing from particular cases to a general theory. The purpose of this paper is to present some highlights in the history of the problem of induction through notes on a selection of writers from ancient Greece to modern times. These notes contribute to the argument that there is a fundamental problem with…

Patricia Carini (1932-2021) was a progressive educator and thinker who was among the key figures of open education. This article reflects on her work, illuminating its quality as an art of listening. The idea of listening has been of primary importance within the tradition of progressive education in the United States and internationally.…

This article argues that curriculum work can benefit from signifiers of Bildung to promote democracy in public education. The argument is built on the premise that cultural and intellectual traditions that value Bildung presume a link between the inner cultivation of the individual and the development of better societies (Horlacher 2017). I start…

A foundational principle of neo-Aristotelian character education is that virtue can be cultivated, in particular through the emulation of moral role models, such as teachers. Yet despite the pedagogical appeal of role modelling, what emulation involves remains methodologically unclear. In this paper, I suggest that part of this ambiguity lies in a…

Artificial intelligence technologies have become a ubiquitous part of human life. This prompts us to ask, "how should we live well with artificial intelligence?" Currently, the most prominent candidate answers to this question are principlist. According to these approaches, if you teach people some finite set of principles or convince…

Embedded in society, digital infrastructure has changed citizens' lives. Young people therefore need to develop digital competence and digital citizenship, and schools have an important role in this regard. To prepare new schoolteachers for this role, teacher educators (TEDs) need professional digital competence (PDC) that includes knowledge,…