Simone de Beauvoir, best known outside France as a leading modern feminist theorist, is also recognized as a writer of literature, philosophy, and drama. In this essay, James D. Marshall aims to present Beauvoir, not as a mere entry in the history of French philosophy, nor as an under-laborer to Jean-Paul Sartre, but as someone who has important…

In 1975 I published an article on Gilbert Ryle's task/achievement analysis of teaching (Marshall, 1975), arguing that teaching was in Ryle's sense of the distinction a task verb. Philosophers of education were appealing to a distinction between tasks and achievements in their discussions of teaching, but they were often also appealing to Ryle's…

In this article, the author provides a self-portrait of his intellectual life. He states that his educational journey has always been something of an ongoing fight from his first day at primary school, to the secondary school curriculum and a social philosophy, and what he learned practically in the Navy. Changing the philosophy curriculum in…

Freud saw the dream as occupying a very important position in his theoretical model. If there were to be problems with his theoretical account of the dream then this would impinge upon proposed therapy and, of course, education as the right balance between the instincts and the institution of culture. Wittgenstein, whilst stating that Freud was…

In this paper the author looks at two forms of philosophical argument or critique. These are derived by himself from the work of the late Kantian scholar, Stephan Korner who, in his book "What is Philosophy?" (1969), draws a number of distinctions between different forms of "philosophical" argument or critique. The two forms of derived argument,…

At the micro-level of the interaction between teacher and learner, the production of docile bodies and the constitution of normalised forms of subjectivity, Michel Foucault's work on power was clearly innovative in its challenge to the authority of the teacher. He challenges it in two ways at least. First, philosophically, his work challenges…

The formal introduction of technology into the New Zealand curriculum and educational objectives related to creating the "knowledge society" raise philosophical questions about the nature or essence of technology, the identity of the self, and implications for Maori and their beliefs in the intertwined relationships of humans and all aspects of…