Leading Frankfurt School theorist, Herbert Marcuse, possessed an intricate relationship with higher education. As a professor, Marcuse participated in the 1960s student movements, believing that college students had potential as revolutionary subjects. Additionally, Marcuse advocated for a college education empowered by a form of praxis that…

Today professionals have to deal with more uncertainties in their field than before. We live in complex and rapidly changing environments. The British philosopher Ronald Barnett adds the term "supercomplexity" to highlight the fact that "we can no longer be sure how even to describe the world that faces us" (Barnett, 2004).…

While most educational practices today place an excessive amount of attention on discourse, this article attaches great importance to the reciprocity between speech and silence by drawing from the writings of Plato's Socrates, Augustine, and Paul Gauguin for whom this reciprocity is of the essence in learning. These three figures teach that…

The position of the philosophy of education in theoretical or practical philosophy was the main subject of debate between Paul Hirst and Wilfred Carr. In his support for practical philosophy, Carr argues that in order to bridge the theory/practice gap and deconstruct the illusory intactness of philosophy of education from developments in the…

Class discussions about ethical, social, philosophical and other controversial issues frequently result in disagreement. This leaves a problem: has there been any progress? This article introduces and analyses the concept "collective epistemic progress" in order to resolve this problem. The analysis results in four main ways of…

The value of the arts is often measured in terms of human creativity against instrumental rationality, while art for art's sake defends against a utility of art. Such critiques of the technical and formulaic are themselves formulaic, repeating the dualism of the head and the heart. How should we account for this formula? We should do so by…

This article explores the pedagogical significance of non-static and hybrid utopian readings and writings by focusing on Margaret Cavendish's educationally-philosophically neglected female utopia "The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World." It questions the exaggerated, inflated and exclusivist emphasis on the…

There remains a concern in philosophy of education circles to assert that teaching is a social practice. Its initiation occurs in a conversation between Alasdair MacIntyre and Joe Dunne which inspired a Special Issue of the "Journal of Philosophy of Education." This has been recently utilised in a further Special Issue by Chris Higgins.…

Wittgenstein often refers to matters of learning, and there have been efforts to extract a social conception of learning from his writings. In the first half of this article, I look at three such efforts, those of Meredith Williams, Christopher Winch, and David Bakhurst, and I say why I think these efforts fail. As I go on to argue, though, there…

The process of education, and in particular that involving very young children, often involves students' taking their teachers' word on a good many things. At the same time, good education at every level ought to inculcate, develop, and support students' ability to think for themselves. While these two features of education need not be regarded as…

This article discusses three related aspects of know-how: skill, transversal abilities and project management abilities, which are often not distinguished within either the educational or the philosophical literature. Skill or the ability to perform tasks is distinguished from possession of technique which is a necessary but not sufficient…

After a brief overview of what intellectual virtues are, I offer three arguments for the claim that education should aim at fostering "intellectual character virtues" like curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and intellectual honesty. I then go on to discuss several pedagogical and related strategies for achieving this aim. (Contains…

A certain conception of the relevance of virtue epistemology to the philosophy of education is set out. On this conception, while the epistemic goal of education might initially be promoting the pupil's cognitive success, it should ultimately move on to the development of the pupil's cognitive agency. A continuum of cognitive agency is described,…

This article argues that Robert Brandom's work can be used to develop ideas in the area of social epistemology. It suggests that this work, precisely because it was influenced by Hegel, can make a significant contribution with philosophical anthropology at its centre. The argument is developed using illustrations from education: the first, from…

This article argues that the Seven Solutions in the US, and the Research Excellence Framework in the UK, manifest the vice of epistemic insensibility. Section I provides an overview of Aristotle's analysis of moral vice in people. Section II applies Aristotle's analysis to epistemic vice, developing an account of epistemic insensibility. In so…