Having acknowledged the recurrent theme of education in Stanley Cavell's work, the discussion addresses the topic of scepticism, especially as this emerges in the interpretation of Wittgenstein. Questions concerning rule‐following, language and society are then turned towards political philosophy, specifically with regard to John Rawls. The discussion examines the idea of the social contract, the nature of moral reasoning and the possibility of our lives' being above reproach, as well as Rawls's criticisms of Nietzschean perfectionism. This lays the way for (...) the broaching of questions of race and America. The theme of the ordinary, which emerges variously in Cavell's reflections on Emerson, Wittgenstein and Austin, is taken up and extended into a consideration of Thoreau's ‘experiment in living’. The conversation closes with brief remarks about happiness. (shrink)

This paper examines the recent shift towards the dominance of the study of philosophy of religion, ethics and critical thinking within religious education in Britain. It explores the impact of the critical realist model, advocated by Andrew Wright and Philip Barnes, in response to prior models of phenomenological religious education, in order to expose the ways in which both approaches can lead to a distorted understanding of the nature of religion. Although the writing of Emmanuel Levinas has been used in (...) support of the critical realist model by Wright, I will consider how his and Slavoj Žižek's writings on the nature of religion might challenge the dominance of the critical realist approach and provide a conceptual framework through which it might be possible to develop an alternative approach to religious education that attends to the complexity, ambiguity and demanding nature of engaging with religious traditions. (shrink)

This paper explores Stanley Cavell’s notion of ‘passionate utterance’, which acts as an extension of/departure from (we might read it as both) J. L. Austin’s theory of the performative. Cavell argues that Austin having made the revolutionary discovery that truth claims in language are bound up with how words perform, then gets bogged by convention when discussing what is done ‘by’ words. In failing to account for the less predictable, unconventional aspects of language, the latter therefore washes his hands of (...) the expressive passionate aspects of speech. To ignore such aspects is to ignore an important moral dimension of language. Finally, I bring Cavell’s approach to bear on the epistemic criterion, which Michael Hand applies in his paper ‘Should We Teach Homosexuality as a Controversial Issue?’. I suggest that Hand’s approach, by failing to account for the linguistic dimension of truth and the expressive quality that accompanies this dimension, presents an overly narrow conception of moral education. (shrink)

Throughout history, philosophers have reflected on educational questions. Some of their ideas emerged in defense of, or opposition to, skepticism about the possibility of formal teaching and learning. These philosophers include Plato, Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Together, they comprise a tradition that establishes the impossibility of instruction and the imperative to undertake it. The value of this tradition for contemporary education is that it redirects attention away from performance assessments and learning outcomes to (...) the ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical dimensions of schooling. I argue that philosophers of education are uniquely responsible for teaching this tradition so that instruction might be undertaken in the right spirit. To this end, my essay is divided into three parts. In the first part, I explain why instructional skepticism has not been prominent in philosophy of education. I follow up, in the second part, by clarifying my choice of the term ‘instruction.’ In the third part, I sketch the instructional philosophies that ‘book-end’ this tradition: those of Plato and Wittgenstein. (shrink)

This paper will critically reconsider the potential of Dewey’s pragmatist idea of security without foundation. There is some potential in his anti-foundationalism as a form of wisdom for living beyond the risk society. I shall argue that Deweyan critical thinking needs to be further reconstructed, and even to be destabilized, if it is to exercise its best possible power of transcendence. One way to do this is to open its boundaries towards the ‘East’, towards European poststructuralism as well as towards (...) East Asia, thereby destabilizing and transcending the limit of pragmatism. And I propose to do this through the mediation of Stanley Cavell’s rereading of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s American transcendentalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In reference to the article by Hanan Alexander ‘Education in nonviolence’, the text takes up the issue of reading Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic texts for the philosophy of education. It intends to positively answer the question about the value and potential of such inspiration, focusing on concepts from two of Levinas’s Talmudic readings. The first part of the text is devoted to the characteristics of the intellectual output of the thinker. The second part analyses and discusses Alexander’s commentary on one (...) of Levinas’s Talmudic readings, ‘Toward the Other’. Alexander aims to show the specificity of the idea of education in nonviolence, heavily indebted to the Jewish tradition and thought. The third part of the text is an extension of Alexander’s comment, focuses on another Talmudic reading by Levinas, ‘Cities of Refuge’, and aims to outline the philosophical underpinnings of the idea of the pedagogy of asylum. (shrink)

Against the prevailing outcomes-based education and the instrumentalization of education, a movement has arisen towards holistic education. This aims to go beyond objective measurement of the outcomes of education in order to treat the student as a whole person. In this paper, we shall examine some strands of education in Japan which in some way or another feature the idea of the whole person. This includes the tradition of clinical pedagogy, which originated in Kyoto University, Yukichi Shitahodo’s educational anthropology (Kyoiku-Ningengaku), (...) Kuniyoshi Obara’s Zenjin Education (the education of the whole person) and holistic education. Notwithstanding the fact that such education is benevolent in intention, it can be miseducative in some respects. In the light of this, and with some reference to criticism of the idea of the whole person, we shall point to an alternative vision of education of the whole person following Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism – a perfectionism that is thoroughly anti-foundationalist and that transcends self-entrapment in circulatory discourse on the whole. In critical dialogue between the rich traditions of Japanese thought and the critical voice of liberalism raised from within the West, we hope to find a more nuanced answer to the question of how being a whole might make sense. (shrink)

This article explores the influence of Émile Durkheim on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in order both to open up the political significance of Levinas’s thought and to develop more expansive meanings of moral and political community within education. Education was a central preoccupation for both thinkers: Durkheim saw secular education as the site for promoting the values of organic solidarity, while Levinas was throughout his professional life engaged in debates on Jewish education and conceptualized ethical subjectivity as a condition (...) of being taught. Durkheim has been accused of dissolving the moral into the social, and his view of education as a means of imparting a sense of civic republican values is sometimes seen as conservative, while Levinas’s argument for an ‘unfounded foundation’ for morality is sometimes seen as paralyzing the impetus for concrete political action. Against these interpretations, I argue that their approaches present provocative challenges for conceptualizing the nature of the social, offering theoretical resources to deepen understanding of education as the site of an everyday ethics and a prophetic politics opening onto more compelling ideals for education than those dominant within standard educational discourses. (shrink)