My aim in this paper is to challenge the neo-Aristotelian tradition, currently dominant in contemporary theories of virtue education, by proposing the Platonic pedagogical methodology for virtue cultivation as a worthy alternative to the Aristotelian theory of education. I highlight that, in contrast to Aristotle's limited remarks concerning…

Both "Bildung" and transformative learning theory focus on the transformative nature of education. Even though they have been developed in different continents and fairly independently of each other, they intersect, and at face value, they might appear to be very similar to each other. Both notions, though are perceived differently by…

What does it mean to educate for self-awareness? How does this fit within education, with its other objectives, and other learning processes? These are key questions for more comprehensive versions of the mindful education movement. In order to provide some responses to these questions from a cohesive philosophical position, this article examines…

Derrida's autobiographical and philosophical text 'Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin" is a partial recounting of his own childhood and upbringing in Algeria at a time when it was a colony of France. It is on one level a reflection on matters related to colonialism, and especially on the effects of the imposition of…

In this article, David T. Hansen addresses a two-year-long philosophical conversation he initiated with a group of dedicated public school teachers who work in a metropolitan setting. The conversation was part of a larger inquiry pivoting around the questions of what it means to be a person in the world today, and what it means to be a person in…

This paper reports the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that epistemic appraisals form part of the structure of concepts. To date, studies of concepts have focused on the way concepts encode properties of objects and the way those features are used in categorization and in other cognitive tasks. Philosophical considerations show the…

This paper problematizes current thinking about education by arguing that the question of educational purpose is not simply a socio-political question concerned with what the ends should be and why, but can also be understood as a structural question, concerned with the way we understand education's directional impetus. We suggest that it is…

Assessment practices have been increasingly informed by a range of philosophical positions. While generally beneficial, the addition of options can lead to misalignment in the philosophical assumptions associated with different features of assessment (e.g., the nature of constructs and competence, ways of assessing, validation approaches). Such…

In this article I explore a disposition towards a critique of 'reductionism' and 'determinism' that seems to me to be very much prevalent within British sociology. I take a qualitative educational sociology that uses Bourdieusian concepts as one body of research where this disposition is expressed with particular fervour. A close examination of…

An oxymoron is a self-contradicting or incongruous word or group of words as in Lord Byron's (1788-1824) line from his satirical epic poem Don Juan; "melancholy merriment", An oxymoron is a rhetorical and epigrammatic device for effect, often revealing paradox. The effect I aim for here is the actualization of affect; affect made…

In many contemporary democracies, political conflict and polarisation have become defining features of the political culture. Similarly, drawing especially from Chantal Mouffe's agonistic pluralism and her more recent left populism, many philosophers of education have argued that political conflict and the attendant political emotions should be…

In much of the philosophy of education today, diagnoses of socio-political pathologies underpin visions of a more desirable, democratic future. However, the very philosophical act of making an educational vision responsive to (and dependent on) crises of the times is rarely, if ever, critiqued. On the contrary, a pattern of standardised research…

Charles Fowler (1931-1995) was an important thinker whose reconstructionist philosophy of music education represents an untold view worthy of examination in the modern context. Fowler described the philosophy in his dissertation completed in 1964, based on the reconstructionist theory of Theodore Brameld. He outlined seven major objectives stating…

Ameliorative analysis is a powerful new approach to understanding concepts, stemming from cutting-edge work at the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. It offers the potential to improve our understanding of a range of subject matters. One topic to which it has not yet been applied is the concept of…

Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text…