Philosophy of Education Notes

Jennifer Nagel’s says in ordinary life, knowledge seems easy to spot. We constantly attribute it to ourselves and others. We rely on it. We organise conversation around it. Yet the moment we begin to reflect in a certain way, knowledge seems to evaporate. Merely mentioning the possibility of error, the broken clock, the unseen bus, the hidden defeater, is often enough to make us retract earlier attributions. Nagel’s Locke Lectures, “Recognizing Knowledge: Intuitive and Reflective Epistemology”, take this divergence seriously as a phenomenon to be explained rather than as a nuisance to be brushed aside.

I was told by Y to read the utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick because he has a notion of esoteric action and she said that that's important. So I did and she was right. It is. So hat's off to Y and Henry is what I say. What follows is an argument for a position that will appear, at first sight, politically deflationary and theoretically ungenerous. It is neither. It is a position that arises from taking metaphysics seriously in a period when educational institutions are increasingly saturated by managerial, technological, and political pressures that distort the grounds of the very values they publicly proclaim.

If one reads the recent scholarship on Confucianism and Aristotle with the metaphysical lenses of Kit Fine and Timothy Williamson firmly in view, a far more aggressive conclusion emerges than is usually admitted in contemporary moral education and comparative philosophy. The conclusion is not merely that transplanting Confucian ren or Aristotelian phronesis into modern digital, neoliberal, or authoritarian contexts is difficult. The conclusion is that, strictly speaking, it is impossible to instantiate these virtues in their original sense under radically altered social ontologies. Educationalist theories that attempt such transplants are therefore trying to do something impossible.

I went to a book launch of Aline Nardo's book 'Evolutionary Theory and Education' and was struck by how pervasive the notion of progress is in educational thinking. Philosophers at the event didn't really worry too much about that and went hell for leather about refining what progression meant and how to make it happen. It seemed to me that that might be the problem.

My claim is that assessment cultures routinely treat vagueness as if it were ambiguity: as if there must be a hidden, stipulable rule that would make borderline cases disappear, and the job is just to find it and implement it. I shall argue that the Williamson and Sorensen epistemic tradition, and Fine’s 2020 “global” turn, can be used together rather than as rivals to show why this is a mistake and that much follows from this.

Ruth Barcan Marcus is not usually discussed in philosophy of education. Her name is more familiar in logic and metaphysics, where she is known for early work on quantified modal logic, identity, essentialism and moral dilemmas. Yet if we step back from the technical details and look at the picture of rationality that emerges from her essays, we find a conception that cuts across many of the assumptions that now shape educational theory and policy. Where much current thinking, often implicitly, treats rationality as either a mathematical ideal in the style of Quine or as a language centred practice in the style of Davidson, Brandom or certain continental and Wittgensteinian approaches, Marcus offers a more naturalistic, object centred and conflict tolerant account. It is a view of rationality as the management of modal, moral and doxastic commitments by embodied agents in an actual world, not the maintenance of a tidy web of propositions or the mastery of a single discourse.

A contemporary philosophy of education must begin by specifying what kind of questions it is entitled to answer and what counts as a good answer in those domains where education operates. It must state how knowledge is made available to learners in schools and colleges, by what norms teachers justify their claims, how different kinds of subject matter shape those norms, and what limits prevent education from pretending to be an all purpose tribunal over culture or science. If we start from the neo Kantian framework reconstructed by Beiser in his The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880, rather than from a Hegelian one, we gain a disciplined way of carrying out that programme.

According to Frederick Beiser's brilliant The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism 1796 -1880 neo Kantian philosophy of aesthetic education begins from a boundary. It holds firmly to the separation of theoretical and practical reason and refuses to collapse aesthetic judgement into moral judgement. On this view the arts are practices with their own aims and standards. Ethics has its own domain with its own kind of necessity. The two can and often do interact within a life and within institutions, but they do not reduce to one another.

Bowie’s simple but far reaching reversal regarding philosophy of art is that philosophy does not merely interpret art. Art often shows philosophy what it has forgotten about meaning. In Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy he tracks this claim through a long line of sources. He begins before Kant with Montaigne, Descartes and Hume to show how modern ideas of the self emerge, and why they quickly run into the problem of how experience becomes intelligible at all. He then argues that the problem cannot be solved by piling up propositions, because much of what makes sense in lived practices is not propositional in the first place. This is where aesthetics enters as a basic mode of disclosure rather than as decoration.

Consequentialism says that right action is action that brings about the best overall consequences, given the aims we care about. On Sellars’ way of working, we do not start by postulating a mysterious property of "goodness". We begin with the public practices that already guide decision and justification. We then make explicit the roles that consequentialist terms play within those practices. Finally, we ask what we are committed to when we use those terms correctly.

Gellner’s mature articulation of his model of Nationalism sharpens the distinction between two universal features of human life while insisting that their historical interplay gives rise to the non-universal phenomenon of nationalism. “Society,” he writes, “is made up of culture and organisation.” Culture, in this view, is not genetically inscribed behaviour but a set of “patterns of conduct generated by emulation.” While certain cognitive or linguistic capacities may be rooted in biological preconditions, like Chomsky’s idea that language acquisition presumes a universal grammar, the actual transmission and content of culture are unconstrained by biology. Culture, in this model, can change rapidly and even deliberately.

I want to say that this is something that I think in my usual half baked and confused way. And it's probably to do with the fact that I still see things through the lens of the Philosopher Ernest Gellner and I think in a way he foresaw this. His anthropology of reason revealed that rationality was never truly universal. It was a style of cognition produced by a specific social formation: industrial society, with its need for impersonality, precision, and continuous innovation. Rationalism, he argued, emerged from a particular cultural ecology: it was not the antidote to culture, but a culture in its own right.