Over a decade after publication of Thinking Again: Education After Postmodernism (1998) contention still emerges among Foucaultians over whether discursively made‐up things really exist, and whether removal of the constituent subject leaves room for agency within techniques of caring for the self. That these questions are kept alive shows that some readers have not rethought Foucault, finding what possibly comes after postmodernism. Using Wittgenstein to ‘reciprocally illuminate’ Foucault (after Tully and Marshall), I open teacher inspection and reforms to problematization, as (...) relations to bedrock rules governing games of truth. ‘How, upon entering classrooms, do inspectors know “teaching” is taking place and not crazy and fuzzy things in its name?’ Taking up Hirst's vexing question, I move beyond liberal‐analytic concept‐mapping and neo‐liberal individualism to more fully assay the political ground for judging teaching practices through genealogy. Epistemological, political and ethical concerns intersect as we approach the problem through Foucault's three axes of an historical‐ontology of the present: knowledge(s), power relations, and arts of the self. Drawing on recent Governmentality Studies in Education (Peters., 2009), we aver the impasses of postmodern relativism while finding limited ranges of agency along each axis, as teachers practice freedoms by critiquing and renegotiating rules. (shrink)

Drawing on experience teaching secondary philosophy students, I investigate meaningful engagement with Wittgenstein in a Grade 12 epistemology unit. The premise is that without some introduction to landmark philosophers of the early twentieth century, students are left out of many contemporary philosophical conversations: linguistic idealism or relativism, and nominalism versus realism. Wanting to share with students Foucault, Rorty, and Hacking, I need expedient avenues of approach. Using Wittgenstein's methods I offer practical, ‘shallow grounds’ for an eclectic syllabus conveying post-foundational epistemology, (...) justifying Wittgenstein's inclusion in a textbook written for diverse teenagers. Acknowledging teens’ marginality, I draw on Hekman and Scheman's appropriation of Wittgenstein to advance feminist critiques of enthralling traps in [masculinist] language: exploring nature/nurture boundaries (ferals, cyborgs, and ‘gender performativity’) toward combating discrimination in schools. Heeding Cavell, I.. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a reclusive and enigmatic philosopher, writing his most significant work off campus in remote locations. He also held a chair in the Philosophy Department at Cambridge, and is one of the university’s most recognized even if, as Ray Monk says, ‘reluctant professors’ of philosophy. Paradoxically, although Wittgenstein often showed contempt for the atmosphere at Cambridge and for academic philosophy in particular, it is hard to conceive of him making his significant contributions without considerable support from his academic (...) colleagues, his research fellowship and later teaching career at Cambridge. It is this conflicted relationship we explore, between the revolutionary thinker and his base within an educational institution. Starting from a brief biographical sketch of Wittgenstein’s academic life at Cambridge, including his involvement as a student and faculty member in the Moral Sciences Club, we look at how he reconceived the role of philosophy throughout this... (shrink)

When assessing North American students' oral participation in classes, should all students be subject to the same evaluation criteria or should teachers make reasonable allowances for Asian students practicing humility? How do we weigh the promotion of 'courage' through character education initiatives with traditional Asian dispositions? Viewing Asian humility in Western classrooms and as it rubs up against liberal principles of equality or justice, and a virtue ethic raises a number of philosophical questions around authenticity, polyvalence, and relativity. I approach (...) first through the lens of liberal philosophy as the 'dilemma of diversity' meets a boundary with communitarianism, and then through the contextualist lenses of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault. Drawing on Tully's political philosophy, I inspect humility as embedded in language-games and then open it to revision through comparative history, inviting participants in the teacher's game of assessment to renegotiate the rules: a process complicated by their reticence to speak up. I also use Medina and Scheman's political reading of Wittgenstein to discuss how teachers can discern humility as performative silence within the classroom, distinguishing between genealogical accounts that show how comportments could be otherwise from perspicuous inspection of interconnected language-games in current educational settings. (shrink)

Responding to Michael Luntley's article, ‘Learning, Empowerment and Judgement’, the author shows he cannot successfully make the following three moves: (1) dissolve the analytic distinction between learning by training and learning by reasoning, while advocating the latter; (2) diminish the role of training in Wittgenstein's philosophy, nor attribute to him a rationalist model of learning; and (3) turn to empirical research as a way of solving the philosophical problems he addresses through Wittgenstein. Drawing on José Medina's analysis of the fundamental (...) role of training in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, the paper offers a tour of key passages in the Investigations and other works to develop an understanding of what Wittgenstein meant by ‘mastery of techniques’. In opposition to Luntley's liberal‐individual, or his subject as rational agent, the author explores Wittgenstein's non‐foundationalist, forms of life approach to how we act with agreement. More effort must be given to differentiating Wittgenstein's view from that of the analytic school, which Luntley appears to echo despite his criticism of the analytic divide. (shrink)

Can on-line ‘place-based learning’ be more than a facsimile or ritual? Using a phenomenology of my pandemic practice, I investigate the meaning of ‘place-based learning:’ entertaining Aristotle’s seminal thought on place as a container to venture into contemporary phenomenological inquiries where places and things are not only conceptually implicated by each other, but immanent and potentially powerful elements in learning experiences. Bonnett’s (2021) ecologizing of education shows that authentic forms must be embodied and emplaced in order to open learners to (...) the more in situ, deeply-contextualized and yet ‘transcendental’ and ‘ecstatic’ reception of the more-than-human realm of nature (as what comes-forth, phusis). But this Heideggerian narrative with which I resonate poses challenges for students and place-based educators. Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach, itself modelled on place-based investigation of language (our ‘home city’), draws me back from metaphysical inclinations to dwell constructively on ordinary discourses rooted in educational practices. (shrink)

Guarding against reliance on his own biography and romantic tendencies in Bildungsroman literature, I draw parallels to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of the journey trope and place-based inquiry in the Philosophical Investigations, as an exploration of concept development and confusion that exhorts and guides readers in traversing the borderlands of their own cultural–linguistic practices. l recall Wittgenstein’s journey in search of himself: his retreat from Cambridge to a remote hut in Norway, leading him on a philosophical search for meaning. This self-transformative (...) (Bildung) process of writing the Philosophical Investigations offers new ways for thinking the concept of ‘place’: not the bounding limit of things/beings; rather, working through the linguistic turn in philosophy, as potentially meaningful ‘sites’ in conceptually familiar/unfamiliar landscapes of native languages. The Investigations also carries ancient Heraclitian and Homeric tropes of homecoming and authenticity: ‘searching ourselves’ and ‘becoming who we are’, as found in Wittgenstein’s call to ‘know our way about’—rediscovering the grammatical order operating out of view but pervading the world as we see and know it, as well as setting its limits. Awareness of different languages of place is crucial to appreciating Indigenous discourses of Land-based education—a topic central to discussions of incorporating Indigenous knowledge while decolonizing education. Rethinking Bildungsroman literature in postcolonial terms—through the lens of reconciliation, renaissance, and resurgence —I call for careful listening to Indigenous peoples’ storied landscapes instead of fact-checking them: recognizing their sovereign right to self-govern their own education and resources. The goal is not to assess the truths of Land-based education, as in some epistemological inquiries, nor to make them accessible as pedagogical resources or instruments for non-Indigenous educators. The aim rather is to promote respect for its deep, nearly inaccessible context within Indigenous grammars and ways of life. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Comparing the early, analytic attempt to define “sound” teaching with the current use of criteria‐based rating schemes, Jeff Stickney turns to Wittgenstein’s holistic, contextualist approach to judging teaching against its complex “background” within our form of life. To exemplify this approach, Stickney presents cases of classroom practice, auditioning dance students, teacher inspection, and mentoring student teachers. These examples highlight problems with the epistemological and criterial construal of teaching, in that both sets of rules tend to constrict unnecessarily (...) the ranges of “reasonable” practice. Shifting to the contextualist approach, according to Stickney, reveals these occluded, political aspects of assessing the “soundness” of teaching and invites a renegotiation of arbitrary limits. (shrink)

In his later lectures, published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault surveys different modalities of obtaining ‘truth’ about one's self and the world: from Socrates to the Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans and early church writers. Genealogically tracing this opposition between knowing self and world, he occasionally invites phenomenological enquiry into how this epistemic couplet bears on education. Drawing on three vignettes familiar to educators, my investigation explores modes of discovering self and world through counselling, distributed governance in the classroom (...) and the arts of writing. In each case we confront a paradox of freedom, in that agency is needed, already, to liberate the self from the world. An exegetical task is to show how Foucault worked through this philosophical problem, of relevance to many situations in education, by re-reading Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger. (shrink)

Taking Wittgenstein's love of music as my impetus, I approach aporetic problems of epistemic relativity through a round of three overlapping (canonical) inquiries delivered in contrapuntal (higher and lower) registers. I first take up the question of scepticism surrounding ‘groundless knowledge’ and contending paradigms in On Certainty (physics versus oracular divination, or realism versus idealism) with attention given to the role of ‘bedrock’ certainties in providing stability amidst the Heraclitean flux. I then look into the formation of sedimented bedrock knowledge, (...) or practices of knowing, by comparing Wittgenstein's remarks on animal habituation and initiate training into human forms of life. In the latter case, mastery of techniques—our common education—secures agreement in judgment. Finally, I entertain Wittgenstein's obscure references to Einstein's Relativity in Zettel, showing initiate training as a way of ‘setting the clocks’ with variable degrees of certainty, relative to the language‐games played. Together, these three approaches help us to stop the ‘endless circling’ when philosophers try to address knowledge questions through the logic of object and designation, or verification of correspondence between propositions and things. Instead, attention moves to the way we educate our children and how we employ agreements and bedrock certainties in practices. (shrink)

Offering a cautionary tale about the abuses of paradigm‐shift rhetoric in secondary school reforms, the paper shows potential misuses and ethical effects of the relativistic language‐game in post‐compulsory education. Those initiating the shift often shelter their reform from the criticism of non‐adepts, marginalizing expert teachers that adhere to ‘antiquated’ or ‘folk’ pedagogies. The rhetoric herds educators uncritically into the citadel of new discourses and policies that often lack practical foundations; consequently, teachers often dissimulate compliance to the reform in order to (...) evade surveillance within such disciplinary apparatuses as teacher training and regimes of inspection. Turning to Foucault, the author views education reforms in terms of power relations within a form of governance: ‘games of truth’, or political and veridical discourses in which dividing practices for sorting out ‘sound’ and ‘unsound’ teaching practices become institutionalised. Wittgenstein's attention to initiate training in practices points to an alternative to naïve forms of relativism; educators must incorporate the new techniques they gradually master and adapt within a viable, shared form of life. Instead of teachers’ normalization and subjugation in what Foucault refers to as education ‘blocks’, new pedagogic practices are better adopted ‘freely’ as arts of self‐transformation. With Hacking, Foucault and Wittgenstein's accounts of the true‐and‐false are blended into an ‘historical ontology’ of present and emergent paradigms: a critique of the limits set down within education reforms that sanction or legitimize certain conduct. Sympathetic to the journal call, this kind of philosophical investigation and genealogical critique of teaching practices gives us a perspicuous view of the local, contingent and at times arbitrary nature of change initiatives. Critical awareness of how our pictures of education can captivate us heightens respect for professional eclecticism. Without ignoring the mandates and official scripts of public education reforms, experienced educators need to be able to conserve their tried and warranted ‘best practices’, while negotiating ranges of tolerance for alternative means. (shrink)

In this paper I show that two arguments for the inconsistency of skeptical theism fail. After setting up the debate in Introduction section, I show in The initial debate section why Mylan Engel’s argument (Engel 2004) against skeptical theism does not succeed. In COST section I strengthen the argument so that it both avoids my reply to Engel and parallels Jon Laraudogoitia’s argument against skeptical theism (Laraudogoitia 2000). In COST* section, I provide three replies—one by an evidentialist theist, one by (...) a closure-denying theist, and one by a necessitarian theist, and argue that the necessitarian’s reply successfully rebuts the inconsistency charge. I conclude that skeptical theism which accepts God’s necessary existence is immune to both kinds of arguments for its inconsistency. (shrink)

This article addresses the pressing issue of what process courts should use to identify those questions whose resolution lies beyond their appropriate capacity and legitimacy. The search for such a process is a basic constitutional problem that has defied a clear answer for well over a hundred years. The chequered history of earlier attempts illustrates why commentators have once again begun to gravitate towards institutional approaches. The general features of institutional approaches include emphasis on uncertainty, judicial fallibility, systemic impact, collaboration (...) between branches of government and incrementalism in judging. These features, however, are relied upon in support of two conflicting views of the role of judges in public law adjudication. One is restrictive, and advocates sharp limitations to the ambit of judicial review. The other is contextual, and, in stark contrast, it proposes to expand the ambit of review in reliance on the idea of using principles of restraint to structure the exercise of judicial discretion. While this article does not take sides between them, it nonetheless seeks to refine the contextual institutional approach by outlining a general framework for reasoning with principles of restraint, and by addressing some of the key difficulties such a reasoning process would face. (shrink)

The Manhattan Project, the allies' project during the Second World War to build the atomic bomb, did not represent a radical break in the development of twentieth-century science but rather an acceleration of developments already underway, ...

In this paper I show that two arguments for the inconsistency of skeptical theism fail. After setting up the debate, I show why Mylan Engel's argument (Engel 2004) against skeptical theism does not succeed. I then strengthen the argument so that it both avoids my reply to Engel and parallels Jon Laraudogoitia's argument against skeptical theism (Laraudogoitia 2000). In the final section I provide three replies—one by an evidentialist theist, one by a closure-denying theist, and one by a necessitarian theist, (...) and argue that the necessitarian's reply successfully rebuts the inconsistency charge. I conclude that skeptical theism which accepts God's necessary existence is immune to both kinds of arguments for its inconsistency. (shrink)

When Michael Peters asked me to write this editorial on the significance of Wittgenstein and Foucault for philosophy of education I accepted with modest reservation: ‘Only if I can write this piece...

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 54, Issue 5, Page 1278-1305, October 2020.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This volume bridges this longstanding divide by demonstrating how rigorous experimental methods can be applied to understanding key existential concerns, ...

This paper argues against two prominent accounts of what it is to "promote a desire," found in the work of Stephen Finlay and Mark Schroeder.

Industrial wind turbines have been operating in many parts of the globe. Anecdotal reports of perceived adverse health effects relating to industrial wind turbines have been published in the media and on the Internet. Based on these reports, indications were that some residents perceived they were experiencing adverse health effects. The purpose of the WindVOiCe health survey was to provide vigilance monitoring for those wishing to report their perceived adverse health effects. This article discusses the results of a self reporting (...) health survey regarding perceived adverse health effects associated with industrial wind turbines. (shrink)

This article is a response to commentaries on my book, Killing in War, by Cécile Fabre, Alex Leveringhaus and Victor Tadros. It discusses the implications of the approach I have defended for the morality of war for such issues as internecine killing in war, humanitarian intervention and the bases of individual liability to attack in war.

Protein synthesis inhibitors prolong the half‐lives of most mRNAs at least fourfold in the somatic cells of higher eukaryotes and in yeast cells. Some mRNAs are stabilized because the inhibitors affect mRNA‐specific regulatory factors; however, hundreds or thousands of other mRNAs are probably stabilized by a common mechanism. We propose that mRNA stabilization in cells treated with a translation inhibitor reflects a physiological process that occurs during each mitosis and is important for cell survival. Transcription and translation rates decline drastically (...) during a 1–2 hour interval of mitosis. We hypothesize that translational repression during this interval somehow inactivates a critical component of the mRNA degradation machinery. As a result, mRNA half‐lives are prolonged during the interval when transcription is repressed. If labile mRNAs were not stabilized during mitosis they, and perhaps also the labile proteins they encode, would be depleted as the cell entered G1 phase, with deleterious consequences. Stabilization during mitosis, or in response to translation inhibitors, thus preserves the capacity of the cell to synthesize essential proteins as it enters G1 or recovers from inhibitor treatment. mRNA stabilization might serve a similar purpose during starvation or any stress negatively affecting translation. (shrink)

Researchers have proposed that blocking facial feedback via glabellar-region botulinum toxin injections can reduce depression. Random-effects meta-analyses of studies that administered GBTX...

Plato’s simile of the cave has for over two millennia been the model for a particular understanding of the limitated nature of human knowledge. Castoriadis’s understanding of human knowledge differs from Plato’s in that the artificiality of knowledge, and by extension of culture and society in general, is seen not as a barrier to true knowledge but as a necessary precondition for any knowledge whatsoever. Plato dreams of leaving the cave and encountering the world in the clear light of day; (...) Castoriadis contends that the labyrinth of human creation is our only means of encountering the real. Plato tries to use philosophy to design a way out of the traps humans find themselves in, traps they build for themselves. Castoriadis seeks no such escape and believes that to make such an ultimate escape the business of philosophy or politics is misguided, if not dangerous. (shrink)

The exhibition Off Beat: Jeff Nuttall and the International Underground showcases the archive of Jeff Nuttall, a painter, poet, editor, actor and novelist. As the exhibition illustrates, Nuttall was a central figure in the International Underground during the 1960s through to the early 1970s. During this time he collaborated with a vast network of avant-garde writers from across the globe, as well as editing the influential publication My Own Mag between 1963 and 1967.

We study the wisdom of the crowd in three sequential decision‐making tasks: the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), optimal stopping problems, and bandit problems. We consider a behavior‐based approach, using majority decisions to determine crowd behavior and show that this approach performs poorly in the BART and bandit tasks. The key problem is that the crowd becomes progressively more extreme as the decision sequence progresses, because the diversity of opinion that underlies the wisdom of the crowd is lost. We also (...) consider model‐based approaches to each task. This involves inferring cognitive models for each individual based on their observed behavior, and using these models to predict what each individual would do in any possible task situation. We show that this approach performs robustly well for all three tasks and has the additional advantage of being able to generalize to new problems for which there are no behavioral data. We discuss potential applications of the model‐based approach to real‐world sequential decision problems and discuss how our approach contributes to the understanding of collective intelligence. (shrink)