One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated (...) social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated (...) social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

Michael Foucault's writing has shaped the teaching of half a dozen disciplines, ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But none of his books offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader precisely serves that purpose. It contains selections from each area of Foucault's thought, a wealth of previously unpublished writings, and an interview with Foucault during which he discusses his philosophy with unprecedented candor.

Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self- Reassurance In his famous introduction to the collection of his studies on the sociology of ...

A sequel to Levinas' Totality and Infinity.

The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France, one of the world's most prestigious institutions. Faculty at the college give public lectures, in which they can present works-in-progress on any subject of their choosing. Foucault's were more speculative and free-ranging than the arguments of such groundbreaking works as The History of Sexuality or Madness and Civilization . In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses upon the ways (...) the "self" and consequently "self-study" have been conceived since the days of antiquity, starting with Socrates. Definitions and conceptions of "self-study" in Greek and Roman literature, Foucault argues, remain in force today, and underlie modern interpretations of the self. Engaging, engrossing, and provocative, The Hermeneutics of the Subject reveals Foucault at the height of his powers. (shrink)

"One of the greatest problems of education," Kant observes, "is how to unite submission to the necessary restraint with the child's capability of exercising his free will." The famous philosopher explores potential solutions to this dilemma, stressing the necessity of treating children as children and not as miniature adults. Rather than a systematic study of theories, this succinct treatise encompasses Kant's thoughts on the subject of education. His positive outlook includes a conviction that human nature can be continually improved. To (...) achieve this end, he advocates raising the science of education to academic status-an innovative notion for the 18th century, and a landmark in modern Western education theory. Annette Churton translation. (shrink)

Because higher education brings members of academic communities in direct contact with students, the reflective higher education student is in an excellent position for developing two important intellectual virtues: confidence and humility. However, academic communities differ as to whether their members reach consensus, and their teaching practices reflect this difference. In this essay, Ward Jones argues that both consensus‐reaching and non‐consensus‐reaching communities can encourage the development of intellectual confidence and humility in their students, although each will do so in very (...) different ways. (shrink)

A masterful series of interviews with Levinas, conducted by French philosopher Philippe Nemo, which provides a succinct presentation of Levinas's philosophy.

Like the latter, it unites into one and the same function the possibility of giving things a sign, of representing one thing by another, and the possibility of causing a sign to shift in relation to what it designates. The four functions that define the ...

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)

The centerpiece of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality is the analysis of what Foucault terms the “repressive hypothesis,” the nearly universal assumption on the part of twentieth-century Westerners that we are the heirs to a Victorian legacy of sexual repression. The supreme irony of this belief, according to Foucault, is that the whole time that we have been announcing and denouncing our repressed, Victorian sexuality, discourses about sexuality have actually proliferated. Paradoxically, as Victorian as we allegedly (...) are, we cannot stop talking about sex. Much of the analysis of the first volume of the History of Sexuality consists in an unmasking and debunking of the repressive hypothesis. This unmasking does not take the simple form of a counter-claim that we are not, in fact, repressed; rather, Foucault contends that understanding sexuality solely or even primarily in terms of repression is inaccurate and misleading. As he said in an interview published in 1983, “it is not a question of denying the existence of repression. It’s one of showing that repression is always a part of a much more complex political strategy regarding sexuality. Things are not merely repressed.”1 Foucault makes this extremely clear in the introduction to the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, when he writes. (shrink)

French philosophy since World War II has been preoccupied with the issue of difference. Specifically, it has wanted to promote or to leave room for ways of living and of being that differ from those usually seen in contemporary Western society. Given the experience of the Holocaust, the motivation for such a preoccupation is not difficult to see. For some thinkers, especially Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze, this preoccupation has led to a mode of philosophizing that (...) privileges difference as a philosophical category. Nancy privileges difference as a mode of conceiving community, Derrida as a mode of conceiving linguistic meaning, Levinas as a mode of conceiving ethics, and Deleuze as a mode of conceiving ontology. _Reconsidering Difference_ has a twofold task, the primary one critical and the secondary one reconstructive. The critical task is to show that these various privilegings are philosophical failures. They wind up, for reasons unique to each position, endorsing positions that are either incoherent or implausible. Todd May considers the incoherencies of each position and offers an alternative approach. His reconstructive task, which he calls "contingent holism," takes the phenomena under investigation—community, language, ethics, and ontology—and sketches a way of reconceiving them that preserves the motivations of the rejected positions without falling into the problems that beset them. (shrink)

Reconsidering Difference has a twofold task, the primary one critical and the secondary one reconstructive. The critical task is to show that these various privilegings are philosophical failures.

In education, art has often been perceived as entertainment and decoration and is the first subject to go when there are budget cuts or test-score pressures. Drawing on Emmanuel Lévinas's idea of the primacy of radical alterity that breaks the totality of our being, enables self-transformation and ethics, and ensures community as a totality of singularities, and on Maurice Blanchot's expansion of radical alterity to art, Guoping Zhao argues that the role of art in education must be reconsidered and greatly (...) expanded. Art as alterity takes students beyond where they are and what they have, and teaches them to appreciate and respect difference and diversity. If art as alterity is so essential to human subjectivity and society, and if education is conceived as a process of human growth and formation, art as alterity is essential to education and needs to be more seriously engaged and more fully integrated into the whole educational process instead of being isolated in arts education. Zhao concludes the essay by pondering the pedagogical implications of such a reconsideration of art as alterity in education. (shrink)

In this essay, Vasileios Pantazis examines how two philosophers having different orientations acknowledge and study the phenomenon of the “encounter” and its fundamental importance to human life and education. On the one hand, Otto Friedrich Bollnow drew on existential philosophy and philosophical anthropology in his analysis of the encounter, while Alain Badiou, on the other hand, used psychoanalysis, mathematics, and Plato in exploring the concept. The approach Pantazis takes in this essay aims at fusing the concept of the encounter as (...) developed by Bollnow with a philosophical view, specifically Badiou's understanding of the encounter in the context of his concept “event of truth.” Through the “fusion of horizons,” as Hans‐Georg Gadamer put it, between these two views, Pantazis seeks to enrich the concept of the encounter and to draw out a renewed meaning for philosophical and educational theory. (shrink)