Editorial preface to the fourth edition and modified translation -- The text of the Philosophische Untersuchungen -- Philosophische untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations -- Philosophie der psychologie, ein fragment = Philosophy of psychology, a fragment.

Discourse on Thinking questions that must occur to us the moment we manage to see a familiar situation in unfamiliar light.

A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...) is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (shrink)

The question concerning technology.--The turning.--The word of Nietzsche: "God is dead."--The age of the world picture.--Science and reflection.

Required reading at more than 100 colleges and universities throughout North America.

The focus of this volume, which collects both recent and now-classic essays, is the historical emergence of concepts and objects, through new uses of words and ...

Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict ...

A landmark discussion between two great thinkers, vital to an understanding of twentieth-century philosophy and intellectual history.

Provides a short introduction to Kant, emphasizing Kant's own view of his philosophy. Deleuze offers an overview of the whole of Kant's critical philosophy.

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

For the uninitiated, there are two major tendencies in the modeling of human cognition. The older, tradtional school believes, in essence, that full human cognition can be modeled by dividing the world up into distinct entities -- called __symbol s__-- such as “dog”, “cat”, “run”, “bite”, “happy”, “tumbleweed”, and so on, and then manipulating this vast set of symbols by a very complex and very subtle set of rules. The opposing school claims that this system, while it might be good (...) at concluding that Paris is the capital of France or that there must be blood flowing in the left-rear leg of a cow, can never capture the full measure -- indeed, the essence -- of human cognition. For them, the essential features of cognition emerge from the combined effects of myriad, tiny actions far below the surface of consciousness. This is the camp to which Paul Churchland belongs. (shrink)

A Neurocomputationial Perspective illustrates the fertility of the concepts and data drawn from the study of the brain and of artificial networks that model the...

Argues that educators should help students piece together authentic narratives about themselves and about society, and not to focus so much on teaching students to process information.

Martin Heidegger is, perhaps, the most controversial philosopher of the twentieth-century. Little has been written on him or about his work and its significance for educational thought. This unique collection by a group of international scholars reexamines Heidegger's work and its legacy for educational thought.

This article provides somephilosophical ``groundwork'' for contemporary debatesabout the status of the idea(l) of critical thinking.The major part of the article consists of a discussionof three conceptions of ``criticality,'' viz., criticaldogmatism, transcendental critique (Karl-Otto Apel),and deconstruction (Jacques Derrida). It is shown thatthese conceptions not only differ in their answer tothe question what it is ``to be critical.'' They alsoprovide different justifications for critique andhence different answers to the question what giveseach of them the ``right'' to be critical. It is arguedthat (...) while transcendental critique is able to solvesome of the problems of the dogmatic approach tocriticality, deconstruction provides the most coherentand self-reflexive conception of critique. A crucialcharacteristic of the deconstructive style of critiqueis that this style is not motivated by the truth ofthe criterion (as in critical dogmatism) or by acertain conception of rationality (as intranscendental critique), but rather by a concern forjustice. It is suggested that this concern should becentral to any redescription of the idea(l) ofcritical thinking. (shrink)

I ought to be no more than a mirror, in which my reader can see his own thinking with all its deformities so that, helped in this way, he can put it right. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p.18e How much we are doing is changing the style of thinking and how much I'm doing is changing the style of thinking and how much I'm doing is persuading people to change their style of thinking. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, p. 28.

Recently, Derrida has pointed to the university to come and the future of the professions within a place of resistance, and yet maintained the historical link to two ideas that mediate and condition both the humanities and the performative structure of acts of profession: human rights and crimes against humanity. Derrida maintains that the ‘modern university should be unconditional’, by which he means that it should have the ‘freedom’ to assert, to question, to profess, and to ‘say everything’ in the (...) manner of a literary fiction. This article reviews what Derrida calls ‘the future of the profession or the university without conditions’. Second, it focuses on a series of criticisms raised by Richard Rorty against Derrida’s concept of literature and on Derrida’s status as a ‘private ironist’. Third, the article examines Derrida in relation to the ends of literature and the university, under the impact of globalization and new technologies of communication. Finally, in a postscript the article returns to the concept of the university and its postcolonial possibilities. (shrink)

Reinvigorating critical theory by extending its range and its intellectual trajectories through strategies of inclusiveness that respect and build on parallel traditions, the authors reinterpret Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger in relation to central figures and themes of critical theory.

In this paper I investigate ‘the confessional’ as an aspect of Wittgenstein's style both as a mode of philosophising and as a mode of ‘writing the self’, tied explicitly to pedagogical practices. There are strong links between Wittgenstein's confessional mode of philosophising and his life—for him philosophy is a way of life —and interesting theoretical connections between confessional practices and pedagogy, usefully explored in the writings of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. The Investigations provides a basis and springboard for understanding (...) the notion of ‘writing the self’ as a pedagogical practice which encourages a confessional mode compelling us to tell the truth about ourselves and, thus, creating the conditions for ethico-poetical self-constitution. (shrink)

This book takes up, and takes seriously, the institutional sites and pedagogical investments of professional identity for college English teachers and examines how these site and investments both constitute and complicate the space of our politics.

This latest book by one the world's leading protagonists in the field will be welcomed not just by psychologists but by students, academics and professionals interested in social constructionism across a wide range of subjects. Social Construction in Context explores the potentials of social constructionist theory when placed in diverse intellectual and practical contexts. It demonstrates the achievements of social constructionism, and what it can now offer various fields of inquiry, both academic, professional and applied, given the proliferation of the (...) theory across the social sciences and humanities. (shrink)

This paper discusses Stanley Cavell's approach to the Investigations,focusing upon his essay – `Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening ofWittgenstein's Investigations'. First, the paper investigates the waysin which Cavell makes central the figure and `voice' of the child to hisreading of the opening of the Investigations. Second, it argues thatCavell's Notes provides a basis for a Wittgensteinian pedagogics,for not only does it hold up the figure of the child as central to the Investigations but it does so in a philosophical (...) style that, thoughdistinctively Cavell's own, comes closest to the spirit of philosophizing inWittgenstein's sense. Third, the paper concludes by discussing the complexvocal and figural structure of the Investigations which serves tohighlight different aspects of the figure of the child and the child's `voice'. (shrink)

This collection of essays provides an introduction to Nietzsche's thought and educational writings, and examines questions concerning the centrality of values for education in postmodernity.