In Descartes's Meditations, one of the key texts of Western philosophy, the thinker rejects all his former beliefs in the quest for new certainties. Discovering his own existence as a thinking entity in the very exercise of doubt, he goes on to prove the existence of God, who guarantees his clear and distinct ideas as a means of access to the truth. He develops new conceptions of body and mind, capable of serving as foundations for the new science of nature. (...) Subsequent philosophy has grappled with Descartes's legacy, questioning many of its conclusions and even his basic approach, but his arguments set the agenda for many of the greatest philosophical thinkers, and their fascination endures.This new translation includes the Third and Fourth Objections and Replies in full, and a selection from the rest of Descartes's exchanges with contemporaries that helped to shape and expound his philosophy. (shrink)

In the light of the modern idea of a sovereign and self-transparent subject, the paper evaluates the philosophical and ethical relevance of Bildung. As a first step, (the early) Nietzsche's and Adorno's criticism of Bildung is explicated, a criticism based upon the thinkers' critical stance towards the modern epistemological relation of subject and object. However, neither thinker abandons the concept of Bildung. The second part of the paper accordingly reconstructs Nietzsche's and Adorno's adherence to Bildung understood as a different relationship (...) of subject and object within Bildung. In the paper's concluding reflections there is an attempt to assess the systematic educational consequences, and to shed light on the ethical relevance, of a non-transparent subject of Bildung. (shrink)

In the light of the modern idea of a sovereign and self-transparent subject, the paper evaluates the philosophical and ethical relevance of Bildung. As a first step, (the early) Nietzsche’s and Adorno’s criticism of Bildung is explicated, a criticism based upon the thinkers’ critical stance towards the modern epistemological relation of subject and object. However, neither thinker abandons the concept of Bildung. The second part of the paper accordingly reconstructs Nietzsche’s and Adorno’s adherence to Bildung understood as a different relationship (...) of subject and object within Bildung. In the paper’s concluding reflections there is an attempt to assess the systematic educational consequences, and to shed light on the ethical relevance, of a non-transparent subject of Bildung. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetics, Education, the Critical Autonomous Self, and the Culture IndustryMarianna Papastephanou (bio)IntroductionE Lucevan le Stelle disconnected both from Tosca and Puccini becomes incidental music and brings strong recollections of the detergent advertisement it once coated. Last Year in Marienbad has caused some of the deepest yawn relief to many hopefuls for the title of the sophisticated who wished to cash out the film's cultural and social capital. A painting (...) by a well-known artist in the living room of a middle-upper-class residence often matches the colors of the carpet, and a piece of African art in the corner testifies to the hosts' cosmopolitan respect for otherness and the proper dose of hybridity in their selfhood. The young of the family are said to search for freedom from the puritan lifestyle in Ecstasis. Or, they rebel against the oppressive order of the system through idolizing music bands of an unconventional style and, as a matter of fact, of "unconventional" wealth accumulated precisely through the systemic exploitation of their idolization. The whole family, including the discontented young, will unite in the enjoyment of a new movie in which, just as in hundreds before it, police detectives can solve cases only after their suspension from duty and foreigners prefer to converse in perfect English when they are alone. What all members of the family are sure of by the end of the day, some of them through the prism of heavy drinking and others in the sober appreciation of the latest reality show, is that they exercised once again their free will in all instances. For they oriented their desires, treated as natural and self-posited, to objects they initially lacked but "autonomously" and "critically" found and selected from a rich and all-encompassing marketplace of culture. [End Page 75]How are art, its education, and its educational ideals of autonomy and critique related to this particular cultural reality that I have highlighted? Pseudo-individualism, escapism, Ersatzbefriedigung, fetishization, reification, and educationalization are some of the terms Adorno employed to approach the reality of artistic production and reception in capitalist times while preserving the distance that art offers for critiquing reality.1 In contrast with the above-sketched reality, in Adorno's ultimate aesthetic vision through art the self is not supposed to "forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image."2 Adorno attacks the drive toward a "totally administered" society—that of late capitalism—which "reduces every aspect of present-day life to the dead level of conformist popular 'taste' as dictated by a wholesale culture industry given over to the purposes of mass indoctrination."3 Fundamentally, the culture industry hinders the formation of autonomous, critical, and independent individuals.4I shall argue that such a theoretical framework gives us additional insight through which to combat what has already been perceived in pedagogical discourse as educational inability to cultivate reflective and critical subjectivities. Instead of autonomy, education nurtures narcissism. and instead of critique, it promotes appeasement5 —all the more so when education succumbs to the culture industry or fails to encourage students' critical stance to its imperatives.My position here is that by reclaiming their own valuable connection to reflective artistic experience and reception, aesthetic theory and art education can contribute to a reconceptualization of autonomy and critique and, perhaps more importantly, to a reorientation of educational practice.6 Adorno's aesthetics is exceptionally relevant to this aim because his work exemplifies in a unique way the necessary awareness of the antinomic qualities of autonomy and critique, their ineluctable dependence on society and culture, and their secret culpability in domination. Moreover, Adorno's cultural criticism comprises an unsurpassable diagnosis of those social pathologies that leads away from critical and reflective subjectivity and offers conceptual means for setting a critical eye on some current impoverished practices of teaching art. Above all, Adorno's aesthetic theory displays a remarkable topicality regarding contemporary positions on purely artistic concerns and contentions. Thus, the current neglect of his work in aesthetic educational theory7 must be dealt with since accommodation of such aesthetics within art educational discourse will serve significantly the latter's... (shrink)

The concept of experience by John Dewey revisited: conceiving, feeling and “enliving”. Dewey takes a few steps towards a differentiation of the concept of experience, such as the distinction between primary and secondary experience, or between ordinary (partial, raw, primitive) experience and complete, aesthetic experience. However, he does not provide a systematic elaboration of these distinctions. In the present text, a differentiation of Dewey’s concept of experience is proposed in terms of feeling, “enliving” (a neologism proposed in this paper) and (...) conceiving. Feeling refers to the basic mode of experience where action, emotion, cognition and communication constitute an original unity. Enliving, aesthetic experience, constitutes the lifeworld, as a person-in-world experience. Even though enliving is holistic and relational, a certain distance emerges between action, emotion and cognition which allows contemplation and choice. Conceiving, on the other hand, refers to the isolating and abstracting understanding of the world with even greater distance between action, emotion and cognition. Such a differentiation provides a clearer understanding of the scope of education. It avoids the risks of regressive tendencies in the concept of experience, and it helps to include conceiving within the realm of experience. (shrink)

This article suggests reading Theodor Adorno not as a notoriously pessimistic sociologist but as a committed public educator. Partly drawing on still unpublished transcripts of lectures, public talks and radio broadcasts from the 1950s and ’60s, the article offers an account of Adorno’s concept and practice of a ‘democratic pedagogy’. The key question is how we should understand the difference between Adorno the social philosopher, on the one hand, and Adorno the educator, on the other. It is argued that Adorno’s (...) pedagogical interventions are not a footnote to his social theory, but a key to understanding his entire oeuvre. (shrink)

Beginning with a discussion of the Informal Logic Movement and the renewed interest in critical thinking in education, this book critically assesses the work of Robert Ennis, Richard Paul and John McPeck.

Discusses the nature of thought and volition, examines past philosophical theories, and clarifies the relation between will and freedom.

This book, first published in 1990, takes a critical look at the major assumptions which support critical thinking programs and discovers many unresolved questions which threaten their viability. John McPeck argues that some of these assumptions are incoherent or run counter to common sense, while others are unsupported by the available empirical evidence. This title will be of interest to students of the philosophy of education.

As a painfully outdated institution the school is accused of: being alienating, closing itself off to society and to the needs of young people; reproducing social inequality and consolidating existing power relations; demotivating youth; showing a lack of effectiveness and having great difficulty with employability. And last but not least, the school is considered redundant: the school, where learning is bound to time and place, is no longer needed in the digital era of virtual learning environments. The ultimate charge: the (...) school is a product of outdated ways of distributing knowledge and expertise, determined by primitive technologies of the past. Adieu school. This book advocates the acquittal of the school. It argues that many of the allegations against the school are motivated by an age-old fear and even hatred toward one of its radical but essential characteristics: that the school provides ‘free time' and transforms knowledge and skills into 'common goods', and therefore has the potential to give everyone, regardless of background, natural talent or aptitude, the time and space to leave their known environment, rise above themselves and renew (and thus change in unpredictable ways) the world. This defence of the school starts from an investigation of what makes a school a school and pinpoints why the school has value in and of itself. It reveals the various attempts to rob the school of its scholastic character, that is, to tame the school. The ultimate aim is to elaborate a touchstone that helps to defend as well as to re-invent school. -/- Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons are members of the Laboratory for Education and Society, KU Leuven. They share an interest in research on the public dimensions of education and are currently elaborating a philosophy of schooling. (shrink)