Making Sense of Education provides a contemporary introduction to the key issues in educational philosophy and theory. Exploring recent developments as well as important ideas from the twentieth century, this book aims to make philosophy of education relevant to everyday practice for teachers and student teachers, as well as those studying education as an academic subject.

First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental _Phénoménologie de la perception _signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers. _Phenomenology of Perception _stands in the great phenomenological tradition of Husserl, (...) Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and "intellectualism" on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world. Merleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synaesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Merleau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a comprehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations. Also included is a new foreword by Taylor Carman and an introduction to Merleau-Ponty_ _by Claude Lefort. Translated by Donald A. Landes. (shrink)

Phenomenology -- Perception -- Embodiment -- Behaviour -- Being human -- Time -- Other people, society, history -- Art and perception.

Discursive accounts of the body have been prominent recently. While acknowledging the usefulness of these, the author, drawing upon specific philosophers of the body and a wide range of other theorists, focuses attention on the experiencing body which she refers to as 'creatural existence’. Thinking in terms of the creatural, she argues, can better situate human beings in their environment, thus emphasizing a kind of 'ecological notion of subjectivity’, in which place-based existence is understood anew. The educational implications of focusing (...) on what bodies 'do' and not so much in terms of how they are socially inscribed, presents them as practico-sensory totalities which should perhaps be seen as systems rather than an as mere organisms or entities. Such an articulation of creatural existence emphasizes animality, and in so doing reminds us of the centrality of the senses in all knowing and doing, including crucially, in relation to those practices which we have understood as 'work'. Multi-sensorial education is a major sub-theme of the book and the author argues persuasively for this by means of a critical analysis of the ocularcentrism that is characteristic of contemporary culture. (shrink)

David Carr; Knowledge and Curriculum: four dogmas of child-centred education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 151–162.

David Carr; Knowledge and Curriculum: four dogmas of child-centred education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 151–162.

Recent educational theorising about the nature of teaching, learning and assessment has made much of a distinction between processes and products and of so-called process models of education und curriculum. Following on from reflections on the historical provenance and subsequent evolution of process talk in psychology and the philosophy of mind it is argued in this article that such talk can only import serious conceptual confusion and ambiguity into our attempts to understand clearly and adequately the business of human learning. (...) In the light of this it would be altogether better for us to expunge the language of process from the discourse of education. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recent educational theorising about the nature of teaching, learning and assessment has made much of a distinction between processes and products and of so-called process models of education und curriculum. Following on from reflections on the historical provenance and subsequent evolution of process talk in psychology and the philosophy of mind it is argued in this article that such talk can only import serious conceptual confusion and ambiguity into our attempts to understand clearly and adequately the business of human (...) learning. In the light of this it would be altogether better for us to expunge the language of process from the discourse of education. (shrink)

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.

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others.

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the _body_ to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others. Perhaps above all, Merleau-Ponty's (...) insights about the embodied mind are a bold and refreshing challenge to the new era of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, as scientists and psychologists discover the centrality of the body to mind and intelligence. (shrink)

Embodied cognition is a recent development in psychology that practitioners often present as a superseding standard cognitive science. In this outstanding introduction, Lawrence Shapiro sets out the central themes and debates surrounding embodied cognition, explaining and assessing the work of many of the key figures in the field, including Lawrence Barsalou, Daniel Casasanto, Andy Clark, Alva Noë, and Michael Spivey. Beginning with an outline of the theoretical and methodological commitments of standard cognitive science, Shapiro then examines philosophical and empirical arguments (...) surrounding the traditional perspective, setting the stage for a detailed examination of the embodied alternative. He introduces topics such as dynamical systems theory, ecological psychology, robotics, and connectionism, before addressing core issues in philosophy of mind such as mental representation and extended cognition. This second edition has been updated and revised throughout and includes new chapters that both expand on earlier topics and that introduce new material on embodied concepts, preference formation, and emotion. Including helpful chapter summaries and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Embodied Cognition, Second Editionis essential reading for all students of philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive science. ition has been updated and revised throughout and includes new chapters that both expand on earlier topics and that introduce new material on embodied concepts, preference formation, and emotion. Including helpful chapter summaries and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Embodied Cognition, Second Editionis essential reading for all students of philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What makes this work so important is that it returned the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.

At the time of his death in May 1961, Maurice Merleau-Ponty held the chair of Philosophy at the College de France. Together with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he was cofounder of the successful and influential review Les Temps Modernes. However, after Merleau-Ponty's two studies of Marxist theory and practice (Humanisme et Terreur and Les Aventures de la Dialectique), he alienated both orthodox Marxists and "mandarins of the left" such as Sartre and de Beauvoir. Perhaps his most lasting contribution (...) to the interpretation of human existence was his formulation of a positive philosophical approach to psychology the foundations of which were clearly outlined in The Structure of Behavior and later more fully developed in Phenomenology of Perception. (shrink)

A great deal of philosophy of mind in the modern era has been driven by an intense aversion to Cartesian dualism. In the 1950s, materialists claimed to have succeeded once and for all in exorcising the Cartesian ghost by identifying the mind with the brain. In subsequent decades, cognitive science put scientific meat on this metaphysical skeleton by explicating mental processes as digital computation implemented in the brain's hardware.

Physical education is often justified within the curriculum as academic study, as a worthwhile activity on a par with other academic subjects on offer and easy to assess. Part of the problem has been that movement studies in physical education are looked upon as disembodied and disconnected from its central concerns which are associated with employing physical means to develop the whole person. But this, Merleau-Ponty would say, is to ignore the nature of experience and to consider the cognitive aspects (...) of our perceptual experience in isolation from the personal meaning gained when looked at from the ?inside? or participatory perspective of the moving agent. In this sense, physical education has lost meaning for some students because our embodied relationship with the world is not an external or contemplative one. Phenomenology, according to Merleau-Ponty, is significant for physical education because it highlights what it is like to be embodied and recognises the role corporeal movement and embodiment plays in learning, in, by and through physical education. What makes this account educationally significant for physical education is that the whole person should benefit by the experience, as it includes an emphasis on all three educational domains (the psychomotor, the cognitive and the affective), rather than as separate physical and mental qualities that bear no relation to each other. (shrink)

A detailed study of scientific theories of human nature and the possible ways in which human behavior can be predicted and controlled.

Embodied Cognition is an approach to cognition that departs from traditional cognitive science in its reluctance to conceive of cognition as computational and in its emphasis on the significance of an organism's body in how and what the organism thinks. Three lines of embodied cognition research are described and some thoughts on the future of embodied cognition offered.

Embodied cognition often challenges standard cognitive science. In this outstanding introduction, Lawrence Shapiro sets out the central themes and debates surrounding embodied cognition, explaining and assessing the work of many of the key figures in the field, including George Lakoff, Alva Noë, Andy Clark, and Arthur Glenberg. Beginning with an outline of the theoretical and methodological commitments of standard cognitive science, Shapiro then examines philosophical and empirical arguments surrounding the traditional perspective. He introduces topics such as dynamic systems theory, ecological (...) psychology, robotics, and connectionism, before addressing core issues in philosophy of mind such as mental representation and extended cognition. Including helpful chapter summaries and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, _Embodied Cognition_ is essential reading for all students of philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

A line of research within embodied cognition seeks to show that an organism’s body is a determinant of its conceptual capacities. Comparison of this claim of body determinism to linguistic determinism bears interesting results. Just as Slobin’s (1996) idea of thinking for speaking challenges the main thesis of linguistic determinism, so too the possibility of thinking for acting raises difficulties for the proponent of body determinism. However, recent studies suggest that the body may, after all, have a determining role in (...) cognitive processes of sentence comprehension. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate into the philosophical concept of human embodiment in relation to physical education. As human beings we do not only have a body that we can control, but we ”are” our body and live embodied in the world, as the German thinker, Helmuth Plessner, puts it in one of his many contributions to the philosophical anthropology of the 20th century. Elaborating on this concept of human embodiment the paper explores a form of physical (...) re-education that takes as its starting point this aspect of being in the body which has been and is still being underestimated even in the physical educational system. Re-educating the body in this aspect includes becoming more aware of the states, postures and expressions of the body so as to be able to remain connected to the body and to get to know oneself better as being in the body. (shrink)

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are “stored”, not as representations in the mind, (...) but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stored, not as representations in the mind, (...) but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

Reexamines the Western philosophical tradition, looking at the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self.

Researching Lived Experience introduces an approach to qualitative research methodology in education and related fields that is distinct from traditional approaches derived from the behavioral or natural sciences—an approach rooted in the “everyday lived experience” of human beings in educational situations. Rather than relying on abstract generalizations and theories, van Manen offers an alternative that taps the unique nature of each human situation. The book offers detailed methodological explications and practical examples of hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry. It shows how to orient oneself (...) to human experience in education and how to construct a textual question which evokes a fundamental sense of wonder, and it provides a broad and systematic set of approaches for gaining experiential material that forms the basis for textual reflections. Van Manen also discusses the part played by language in educational research, and the importance of pursuing human science research critically as a semiotic writing practice. He focuses on the methodological function of anecdotal narrative in human science research, and offers methods for structuring the research text in relation to the particular kinds of questions being studied. Finally, van Manen argues that the choice of research method is itself a pedagogic commitment and that it shows how one stands in life as an educator. (shrink)

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

In Being There, Andy Clark weaves these several threads into a pleasing whole and goes on to address foundational questions concerning the new tools and..

Shapiro tests these hypotheses against two rivals, the mental constraint thesis and the embodied mind thesis. Collecting evidence from a variety of sources (e.g., neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and embodied cognition) he concludes that the multiple realizability thesis, accepted by most philosophers as a virtual truism, is much less obvious than commonly assumed, and that there is even stronger reason to give up the separability thesis. In contrast to views of mind that tempt us to see the mind as simply being (...) resident in a brain or body, Shapiro argues for a far more encompassing integration of mind, brain, and body than philosophers have supposed. (publisher, edited). (shrink)

"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noe. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noe argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought — that ...

In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that the human mind is not bound inside the head but extends into body and environment.

In treating cognition as problem solving, Andy Clark suggests, we may often abstract too far from the very body and world in which our brains evolved to guide...