This essay intends to create a path forward for philosophical work in higher education that is sensitive to the discursive, organizational, economic, epistemic, and political cultures of the institution. This essay will therefore not provide a grand theory of higher education that might be overlaid onto university practice. Instead, as we will argue, any viable philosophy of higher education must not only recognize but also be prepared to account for and harness the heterogeneity of theoretical, organizational, economic, epistemic, and professional (...) perspectives that are the ground of institutions of higher learning. (shrink)

Several years ago I began a mentoring relationship with an undergraduate student named Sadie.1 By all traditional measures, Sadie was a common student, earning slightly above average grades and participating in all the activities one might expect of a typical undergraduate. Our relationship lasted through her third and fourth years in school, and the longer I knew her, the more I understood her uniqueness. Sadie was incredibly self-reflective and had a profound love of learning, yet she took the types of (...) academic risks that, though personally and intellectually gratifying, yielded neither a narrow disciplinary focus nor the strongest grade-point average.While Sadie's approach to her own education embodies what .. (shrink)

Recently Graham Badley :631–641, 2016) made the case that the "pragmatic university” represents a viable future for the post-modern institution. In his construction of the pragmatic university, Badley largely draws upon the vision laid out by Richard Rorty. While Rorty’s neopragmatism offers an important perspective on the pragmatic institution, I believe that John Dewey’s classical pragmatism offers a richer and more capable vision of the university. The aim of this paper is to develop a view of the pragmatic university drawn (...) from Dewey’s philosophy. His writings on the university offer a unique and viable path forward because he directly engages a reconstruction of the relationship between knowledge and experience in the context of post-secondary education. (shrink)

In Knowing and Learning as Creative Action, Aaron Stoller makes the case that contemporary schooling is grounded in a flawed model of knowing, which draws together mistakes in thinking about the nature of the self, of knowledge, and of reality, which are contained in the epistemological proposition: 'S knows that p' (SP). To the contrary, Stoller argues that the German conception of Bildung must replace SP thinking as the guiding metaphor of knowing within educational research and practice. Central to this (...) reconstruction is a theory of creative inquiry which claims that knowledge emerges from embodied, social engagement in the world and therefore knowing is a form of creative action. Stoller constructs a new paradigm of knowing and learning as an emergent process of creative making, the goal of which is the cultivation of what he calls maker's knowledge, which is the capacity for and habit of creative action. (shrink)

The emergence of Large Language Models has exposed composition studies’ long-standing commitment to Cartesian assumptions that position writing as a nonmaterial, distinctly human activity. This paper develops a naturalized theory of composition grounded in Deweyan pragmatic naturalism that dissolves the nature/culture dualism embedded in contemporary theory and practice. We advance an eco-ontological account that understands compositional activity as emerging from within the matrix of animal behavior and introduce “compositional viability” to theorize how writing functions as a biosemiotic tool for environmental (...) reconstruction. This framework yields three pedagogical implications: attending to somaesthetics, cultivating writerly habits, and orienting composition toward viable action. (shrink)

This edited collection brings together a robust range of philosophers who offer theoretically and critically informed proposals regarding the aims, policies, and structures of the university. The collection fills a major gap in the landscape of higher education theory and practice while concurrently reviving a long and often forgotten discourse within the discipline of philosophy. It includes philosophers from across the globe representing disparate philosophical schools, as well as various career stages, statuses, and standpoints within the university. There is also (...) a diversity in method, approach and style, which varies from personal narratives and case studies, to philosophical genealogies, to traditional philosophical essays, and to systematic theories. The collection can serve as a theoretical resource for critically minded administrators and faculty who wish to analyze and change policies and structures at their home institutions. It will introduce them to a wide range of possible educational imaginaries, as well as provide them with productive suggestions for pragmatic change on campuses. (shrink)

in his recent text Sustainable Knowledge, Robert Frodeman argues that the unchecked proliferation of academic knowledge is unsustainable. While his account provides a basis for more sustainable disciplinary practices, it fails to show how the knowledge produced by such practices is ultimately superior to traditional academic knowledge. This essay provides an epistemic justification for sustainable knowledge. It begins by introducing the maker’s knowledge tradition as an alternative to traditional academic knowledge. It then expands and advances this tradition through Dewey’s naturalized (...) epistemology. Ultimately, it develops an account of knowledge that is not only of a higher quality than traditional knowledge but... (shrink)

When philosophers consider art, they typically do so from the standpoint of an outside observer, yielding a description of the phenomenon as though it was in actuality a mode of philosophy. Here the work appears to have been constructed as part of a purely rational process, or at least dominated by logic and cognitive intention at all meaningful points along the way. In the final account the anoetic is eclipsed by the noetic, which is taken as its most important and (...) most valid dimension.Recently Thomas C. Hilde claimed that “the typical philosopher’s vantage is nevertheless bound to present an account of art and the practices the artwork implies or conceals that is different from and sometimes a caricature... (shrink)