Critical thinking, considered as a version of informallogic, must consider emotions and personal attitudesin assessing assertions and conclusions in anyanalysis of discourse. It must therefore presupposesome notion of the self. Critical theory may be seenas providing a substantive and non-neutral positionfor the exercise of critical thinking. It thereforemust presuppose some notion of the self. This paperargues for a Foucauldean position on the self toextend critical theory and provide a particularposition on the self for critical thinking. Thisposition on the self is (...) developed from moretraditional accounts of the self from Descartes toSchopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. (shrink)

The article starts from the questions: what is it to be an inhabitant or citizen of a globalised world, and how are we to think of education in relation to such inhabitants? We examine more specifically the so–called ‘European area of higher education’ that is on the way to being established and that can be regarded as a concrete example of a process of globalisation. In the first part of the paper we try to show that the discursive horizon, and (...) the concrete techniques and strategies that accompany the establishment of this space of higher education, invite the inhabitants of that space to see themselves as entrepreneurial and autonomous entities. In the second part we show how this specific kind of subjectivation (this production of subjects), related as it is to this globalised space, involves what we call an immunisation that also affects our thinking and our ideas in and about education. To refer to this as a kind of immunisation implies that globalisation could in fact be considered a closing or enclosing rather than an opening up. We argue, therefore, that this immunisation needs to be refused in favour of the invention of other kinds of subjectivity, other ways of speaking and writing about the world and about education, such that we relate to ourselves in a different way. (shrink)

The paper deals with the way postmodernism has been discussed within philosophy of education and argued for by some authors within this context, and with what this kind of postmodernism can offer to education and to philosophy of education. Particular attention is paid to one of the basic presuppositions, namely the requirement to break with the cultural heritage and look for radical alternatives. A second paper will develop a different view of human action, following the later Wittgenstein, and draw on (...) Frankfurt's ideas on‘the importance of what we care about’ to revitalise the conception of the educational project. (shrink)

Michel Foucault is often criticised in English-speaking circles for being interested only in power as domination, and of being uninterested in freedom and social reform. This paper shows, however, that Foucault's overarching concern was with the constitution of the self under conditions of modernity. It emphasises the significance of his interest in the Classical project of ‘Self-care’, and of his countermodernist educational programme in which the skills of self-governance and the ethical (non-dominating) governance of others, as well as the practice (...) of freedom through self-creation, are the key ingredients. (shrink)