First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper analyzes the entanglement of the modern concepts of freedom, autonomy, and the modern notion of the subject and how a passion for and insistence on freedom has undermined the reconstruction of human subjectivity in Heidegger and Foucault, and how such passion has also limited the educational effort at addressing the problems brought to education by the modern notion of the subject. Drawing on Levinas, it suggests that a new understanding of freedom as heteronomy will allow us to envision (...) an open subjectivity that is essential for education. Particularly, it looks at Gert Biesta’s recent campaigns for “subjectification” and “the gift of teaching” to analyze the underlying contradictions caused by the entanglement of freedom and subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper is an enquiry into the meaning of teaching. I argue that as a result of the influence of constructivist ideas about learning on education, teaching has become increasingly understood as the facilitation of learning rather than as a process where teachers have something to give to their students. The idea that teaching is immanent to learning goes back to the Socratic idea of teaching as a maieutic process, that is, as bringing out what is already there. Against the (...) maieutic conception of teaching I argue for an understanding of teaching in terms of transcendence, where teaching brings something radically new to the student. I explore the meaning of the idea of transcendence through a discussion of Kierkegaard and Levinas, who both criticise the maieutic understanding of teaching and, instead, argue for a transcendent understanding of teaching—an understanding of teaching which they refer to as ‘revelation.’ Whereas Kierkegaard argues that revelation—which he understand as a process of ‘double truth giving’—lies beyond the power of the teacher, Levinas interprets revelation as the experience of ‘being taught.’ I use Levinas’s suggestion in order to explore the distinction between ‘learning from’ and ‘being taught by’ and argue that teaching has to be understood in the latter sense, that is, in terms of the experience of ‘being taught.’ To connect the idea of teaching to the experience of ‘being taught’ highlights that teaching can be understood as a process of ‘truth giving’ albeit that (1) this ‘gift’ lies beyond the powers of the teacher, and (2) the truth that is given, has to be understood in terms of what Kierkegaard calls ‘subjective truth’—which is not relativistic truth but existential truth, that is, truth that matters for one’s life. Understanding teaching in these terms also opens up new possibilities for understanding the role of authority in teaching. While my argument implies that teachers cannot simply and straightforwardly ‘produce’ the experience of ‘being taught’—so that what matters has to do with the conditions under which the gift of teaching can be received—their actions and activities nonetheless matter. In the final section of the paper I therefore argue that if we want to give teaching back to education, we need to resist the depiction of the teacher as a disposable and dispensable ‘resource’ that students can learn from or not, and need to articulate and enact a different story about the teacher, the student and the school. (shrink)

In this essay, Mordechai Gordon interprets Martin Buber's ideas on dialogue, presence, and especially his notion of embracing in an attempt to shed some light on Buber's understanding of listening. Gordon argues that in order to understand Buber's conception of listening, one needs to examine this concept in the context of his philosophy of dialogue. More specifically, his contention is that closely examining Buber's notion of embracing the other is critical to making sense of his conception of listening. Gordon's analysis (...) suggests that, in Buber's model, listening involves a kind of active attentiveness to another's words or actions, engaging them as though they are directed specifically at us. Gordon's discussion of dialogue and listening also indicates that the relation between speaking and listening is one of reciprocity and mutual dependence and that listening plays an essential role in initiating many dialogues by creating a space in which two people can embrace each other as complete individuals. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the question of how toapproach the writings of Emmanuel Levinas fromthe point of view of education. I argue thatLevinas has challenged the modern conception ofsubjectivity which underpins modern education.Instead of providing a new conception ofsubjectivity, his work should be understood asan attempt to account for the awakening of theuniqueness of the subject in ethical terms. Thecentral idea is that we come into presencethrough responding, through taking up – or notdenying – the undeniable responsibility whichprecedes our (...) subjectivity. Levinas not onlyprovides us with a new way to `understand'subjectivity. `Responding' also suggests a wayto approach Levinas's writings that goes beyondthe simple application of his `truths' toeducational practice. Levinas's writingschallenge their reader to articulate a unique,unprecedented response. It is argued that thepapers to which this paper is a response alldisplay this approach to Levinas's writings. Itis further argued that `responding' is not onlya way to read Levinas, but ultimately a way tothink about education itself. To learn (fromLevinas) is to respond (to Levinas). (shrink)

Dewey's book on Democracy and Education established his credentials in the field of education and once counted as his most important book. It has been re-published in many editions and continuously in print ever since the original publication in 1916.

The most influential of contemporary philosophers, Jacques Derrida, explores the idea of friendship—and its political consequences, past and future—through writings by Aristotle, Nietzsche, Cicero, and more. Until relatively recently, Jacques Derrida was seen by many as nothing more than the high priest of Deconstruction, by turns stimulating and fascinating, yet always somewhat disengaged from the central political questions of our time. Or so it seemed. Derrida’s “political turn,” marked especially by the appearance of Specters of Marx, has surprised some and (...) delighted others. In The Politics of Friendship Derrida renews and enriches this orientation through an examination of the political history of the idea of friendship pursued down the ages. Derrida’s thoughts are haunted throughout the book by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, “my friends, there is no friend” and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. The exploration allows Derrida to recall and restage the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy and political thought—friendship and enmity, private and public life—have become madly and dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar and male-centered notion of fraternity and the virile virtue whose authority has gone unquestioned in our culture of friendship and our models of democracy The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy. This remarkable book, his most profoundly important for many years, offers a challenging and inspiring vision of that future. (shrink)

A collection of five essays of French philosopher Nancy, originally published in 1985-86: The Inoperative Community, Myth Interpreted, Literary Communism, Shattered Love, and Of Divine Places.

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 article I begin by discussing the persistent problem of relations between educational inequality and the attainment gap in schools. Because benefits accruing from an education are substantial, the ‘gap’ leads to large disparities in the quality of life many young people can expect to experience in the future. Curriculum knowledge has been a focus for debate in England in relation to educational equality for over 40 years. Given the contestation surrounding views about curriculum knowledge and equality I consider (...) the thinking of two philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, and their work on justice, to trouble the curriculum framework and discourse of knowledge promoted through the policy text of The Importance of Teaching: The Schools White Paper (2010) and later associated policy reforms to the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) curriculum in England. The Schools White Paper aims to make the curriculum more challenging to students by introducing tight controls in terms of the assessment framework and curriculum knowledge. I argue that, when considered through Derrida's perspective on language and meaning and Levinas' view on the ethical responsibility for the other, the reforms present obstacles to the search for a just curriculum. I look to the work of Sharon Todd and Paul Standish for a re-imagination of curriculum as or through relations in the light of Derrida's and Levinas' philosophies. (shrink)

In the article, Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon asks, Did Plato have a philosophy of listening, and if so, what was it? Listening is the counterpart of speaking in a dialogue, and it is no less important. Indeed, learning from the dialogue is less likely to occur as people participate unless listening as well as speaking takes place. Haroutunian-Gordon defines a philosophy of listening as a set of beliefs that fall into four categories: (1) the aim of listening; (2) the nature of listening; (...) (3) the role of the listener; and (4) the relation between the listener and the speaker. The beliefs, as they fall into these four categories, have implications for one another, and, because they are logically related, constitute a philosophy of listening. In the article, Haroutunian-Gordon argues that Plato had a philosophy of listening and describes its components. (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)

Education has long been charged with the taskof forming and shaping subjectivity andidentity. However, the prevailing view ofeducation as a project of producing rationalautonomous subjects has been challenged bypostmodern and poststructuralist critiques ofsubstantial subjectivity. In a similar vein,Emmanuel Levinas inverts the traditionalconception of subjectivity, claiming that weare constituted as subjects only in respondingto the other. In other words, subjectivity isderivative of an existentially priorresponsibility to and for the other. Hisconception of ethical responsibility is thusalso a radical departure from the prevailingview (...) of what it means to be a responsible moralagent. In this paper, I use jazz improvisationas a metaphor to focus on three interrelatedaspects of ethical responsibility on Levinas'saccount: passivity, heteronomy, andinescapability. I then point toward some waysin which reframing responsibility andsubjectivity along this line might offer newpossibilities for conceiving subjectivity andmoral agency in education. (shrink)

This article seeks to open up a re-examination of the relationship between thought and language by reference to two philosophers: John Austin and Jacques Derrida. While in traditional philosophical terms these thinkers stand far apart, recent work in the philosophy of education has highlighted the importance of Austin’s work in a way that has begun to bridge the philosophical divide. This article seeks to continue the renewed interest in Austin in educational research, yet also take it in new direction by (...) exploring Austin’s wider philosophical concern within the William James Lectures with the nature of language. The significance of the philosophical turn to language has entered the agenda of a number of philosophers of education in recent years. The main aim of this article will be to present, as a starting point for further work, an account of language that does justice to the way language actually operates. The article will argue that Austin’s account of the performative opens up new possibilities in this regard and yet—for reasons that will be made clear—also fails in the final instance to carry these through. By illustrating the way Derrida’s philosophy works, contrastingly, to take these possibilities to their full conclusion, I will argue that Derrida succeeds in bringing a radically new conception of language to the fore. The article will end by pointing towards some of the implications of the initial exploration conducted here to be developed elsewhere—particularly for the ways we think about thinking. (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.

There can be no mistaking the importance of Caputo's work." —Edith Wyschogrod "No one interested in Derrida, in Caputo, or in the larger question of postmodernism and religion can afford to ignore this pathbreaking study.

Continental philosophy over the past two decades has increasingly turned its attention to social and political matters. Two key figures involved in this move, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, have advanced a position centering on the idea of singular community . This article sets out the basic features of this idea and contrasts it with Habermas' theory of communicative or dialogical community . Habermas is open to the criticism that his theory of community is constructed according to an unduly narrow (...) construal of legitimate argumentation and democratic participation. The idea of community advanced by Nancy and Agamben, in contrast, appears to lack any credible criteria of community inclusion or identity. In conclusion, it is suggested that both theories of community fall short by neglecting the task of constructing and preserving actual sites of collective democratic action and resistance. (shrink)

"... thought-provoking and meditative, Lingis’s work is above all touching, and offers a refreshingly idiosyncratic antidote to the idle talk that so often passes for philosophical writing." —Radical Philosophy "... striking for the ...

In this paper I discuss some conditions forunderstanding teaching as an act ofresponsibility towards an other, rather than asan instrumental act identified throughepistemology. I first put the latter intocontext through a critical reading of teachingas it is inscribed in humanistic discourses oneducation. Within these discourses, I explorehow students are treated as objects ofknowledge that reinforce the teacher's ego. Icontend that the taking up of this positionmakes not only an ethical relation to thestudent impossible, but also disqualifies anytype of meaningful social (...) relation. Therefore Iargue that teachers have to give up theirposition on the safe side of knowledge andparticipate in the time of risk when meetingthe other means to take responsibility for thatother from a position of vulnerability.Moreover, it is precisely because of this riskthat teaching as an ethical relation becomespossible and where it begins to resound withpoetry. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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)