1: A Note on Derry vs Standish

I've been going to the Institute of Education's philosophy of education seminars In UCL on Wednesday nights for nearly two decades. Two key figures in the department over that time have been Paul Standish and Jan Derry. Each offer nuanced and profound philosophical insights into education and it struck me that I ought to write a note to myself trying to get a grip on their different approaches and why despite disagreeing with their commitments in some respects (I'm neither a Heideggerian nor a Hegelian) engement with their ideas has been so fruitful and rewarding for me . 

So the following note sets out to contrast their approaches to philosophy of education. While neither can be wholly contained within the philosophical traditions they most often draw upon, the influence of Hegel in Derry’s work and Heidegger in Standish’s provides a sharp and clarifying lens through which to trace some of their most distinctive contributions. These affiliations are not limiting but illuminating: they highlight the differing conceptions of reason, language, and human formation that shape their educational outlooks. What follows is not an attempt to reduce either thinker to a philosophical school, but rather to use these traditions, Hegelian and Heideggerian, as interpretive tools to bring into focus certain recurrent differences in emphasis, style, and educational commitment that have emerged across their writings and public engagements. 

This all comes with a health warning: unlike Derry and Standish, I am not an expert in Hegel or Heidegger, and I may well make interpretive missteps along the way. However, my aim is not to offer definitive readings of either thinker, but to use their philosophical lineages as heuristic tools, ways of making sense of patterns I’ve noticed through years of listening to and thinking with (and sometimes against) their ideas. In setting these perspectives side by side, I hope to explore a set of tensions that are both philosophical and pedagogical: between discursivity and disclosure, normativity and attunement, historical formation and existential openness.

So my aim is to understand Jan Derry and Paul Standish as significant philosophers of education who, respectively, embody a Hegelian and a Heideggerian lineage. From this perspective one cannot help but see Standish's interpretation of Heidegger casts a critical light on the very foundations of Derry’s dialectical optimism. Derry, as a rigorous interpreter of Hegel, embraces the notion that reason unfolds dialectically through history as the self-realisation of Spirit. For her, the world is intelligible precisely because it is the object of reason’s self-comprehension, the rational unfolding of the Concept (Begriff). She shares Hegel’s speculative identity of thinking and being, wherein the Absolute manifests as self-knowing reason. This philosophical optimism underwrites Derry’s confidence in the dialectical process: contradictions, alienation, and fragmentation are overcome through their sublation into higher syntheses, enabling freedom to emerge in the historical unfolding of Spirit. 

For Derry, then, philosophy is not simply a reflection on the world but an active engagement with its rational totality. Yet Standish, deeply influenced by Heidegger challenges this Hegelian framework on ontological and existential grounds. Standish adopts Heidegger’s insistence that significance, the meaningfulness of Being, is not the product of conceptual cognition but precedes and grounds it. For Standish, inspired by Heidegger’s early works and sustained through his later reflections on the history of Being and technological enframing, the world is disclosed not through dialectical reason but through attunement, Stimmung, and care. This disclosure is fundamentally pre-conceptual; it situates human existence as thrown into a world of meaning that is always already given, prior to any dialectical overcoming. 

In this the fault lines between Hegel and Heidegger become the fault lines between Derry and Standish. Derry’s critique of the Heideggerian alternative is rooted in a concern that privileging attunement and pre-conceptual disclosure risks abandoning the normative and social dimension of reason. She sees in Standish’s invocation of “poetic thinking” a potential retreat into a philosophical quietism that might undermine philosophy’s emancipatory and critical potential. For Derry, the dialectical process preserves the essential social mediation through which freedom is realised and meaning is historically negotiated, a process that mere attunement cannot replace. 

Conversely, Standish warns that Derry’s Hegelian optimism risks perpetuating the very forgetting of Being that Heidegger diagnoses as the hallmark of Western metaphysics. The identity of reason and reality, the claim that “the real is the rational,” is, for Standish, the metaphysical error that has culminated in the technological enframing that threatens to obscure the more originary conditions of meaningful existence. Heidegger’s “poetic thinking” thus offers a vital corrective: not to discard reason entirely, but to resist the will to total conceptual mastery and to cultivate an openness to Being that acknowledges finitude, mystery, and the limitations of human understanding. Standish’s emphasis on the ontological difference and the history of Being resonates with Heidegger’s diagnosis of nihilism, technological domination, and rootlessness in modernity, conditions that require a fundamental reorientation of our relation to the world. 

Derry, meanwhile, maintains that the historical unfolding of Spirit, with all its contradictions and tensions, remains the best framework for addressing the challenges of modernity through reasoned critique and transformative action. The dialogue between Derry and Standish thus embodies a profound philosophical tension between the dialectical movement of reason and the ontological attunement to Being. It challenges the assumption that meaning and freedom are reducible to rational self-comprehension or conceptual totality. Yet it also contests the notion that philosophy should abandon its normative and historical commitments in favor of a contemplative dwelling with Being. This debate serves as a reminder that the legacies of Hegel and Heidegger continue to offer complementary, if often conflicting, resources for thinking through the human condition and education. Derry’s Hegelianism anchors philosophy in the historical and social dynamics of reason, emphasising the transformative power of dialectical reconciliation. Standish’s Heideggerian stance insists on the primacy of ontological disclosure and the ethical demand of poetic thinking, challenging philosophy to reckon with its own limitations and the call to dwell authentically within finitude. 

In reflecting on their exchange, one is compelled to consider whether a fruitful philosophical path might lie in sustaining the tension between these positions, neither collapsing Being into reason nor retreating from history into attunement alone, but cultivating a reflective openness that honors the normative aspirations of dialectical reason while embracing the ontological insights Heidegger brought to light. It is this delicate balance, that may hold the key to rethinking philosophy’s future in an age marked by technological enframing and metaphysical uncertainty. In this light Derry, inflecting Hegel, Standish, channelling Heidegger, converge on the problem of modern subjectivism but from markedly different angles, creating a dialogue that illuminates the broader crisis at the heart of Western philosophy. 

Derry situates Hegel squarely within this crisis of subjectivity. Standish situates himself within Heidegger’s initial critique of the Logic, a move that crystallises the tension between the rationalist legacy and its purported terminus, and helps explain the tension as well as the convergence between Derry and Standish. So what is Heidegger's critique ? For Heidegger Hegel’s Logic does not represent a triumphant culmination but rather a dead end, where the very project of rational metaphysics halts because it fails to engage the original ground of meaningfulness. To unpack this, one must recall Heidegger’s diagnostic of Western metaphysics from Aristotle onward, where “being” (Sein) is inseparable from the act of predication. Standish seems comfortable with this. 

Derry, on the other hand, emphasises that for Aristotle, and thus for Hegel, predication is the “face” of being, the way entities become intelligible within the logos. Heidegger’s - and so Standish's - quarrel begins here: logic, construed as the science of predication, has monopolised the space of metaphysical inquiry, such that meaningfulness itself becomes derivative of conceptual articulation. Heidegger does not dismiss Hegel’s concern for meaningfulness outright; rather, he charges Hegel with not truly thinking this meaningfulness on its own terms. Instead, Hegel subsumes it under Geist, assuming the meaningfulness of being as foundational to the unfolding of spirit, freedom, and rational self-realisation. 

For Derry’s reading, Hegel’s telos is the realization of freedom, self-consciousness becoming aware of itself as free, actualised in “being-with-self-in-another” through the ethical life. The failure to fully realise or acknowledge this striving leads to a negation of the project itself, a self-defeat in both knowing and practical action. This dynamic, in Hegelian terms, manifests already in the opening of the Phenomenology of Spirit: the idealised subject naively assumes the world is “immediately” given through sense perception. Heidegger’s critique, which I take to have been evoked by Standish throughout his philosophical presentations regarding education, is that this assumption is a profound error. 

Human knowing is not merely responsive; it demands articulation. Without the ability to say what one knows, one forfeits freedom itself. Thus, the conatus of freedom is not only a striving toward self-realisation but a demand to make intelligible what is known, a task Hegel’s dialectic attempts to fulfill from the outset by assuming the Absolute and the eventual reconciliation of subject and object. Yet, from Heidegger’s vantage, as relayed by Standish, this very assumption undercuts the project’s foundational authenticity. Metaphysics, construed as thinking upon thinking without further condition, is an illusion born from forgetting the originary meaningfulness that precedes conceptual knowing. Heidegger’s notion of meaningfulness is primordial and non-discursive rooted in Stimmung, an attunement or pre-reflective disclosure that cannot be captured by predicative logic or dialectical synthesis. Hegel remains firmly in the rationalist tradition, albeit historicised and developmental, where logic is the ultimate measure of reality and philosophy’s task is the unfolding of conceptual necessity culminating in the Science of Logic. The consequences of this entrenched rationalism are far-reaching, especially in an age of technological enframing where Being is reduced to mere presence and calculability. 

Standish highlights Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity’s forgetfulness: a loss of the original relation to meaningfulness, manifesting in conformity, thoughtlessness, and alienation. Against this, Heidegger urges a reconception of philosophy’s task, one that eschews analytic delimitation of concepts or epistemic certainty. Philosophy, he insists, must become interpretive, not in the sense of translating meaning into propositions, but as a mode of disclosure (Erschlossenheit) that awakens attunement to Being itself. This interpretive mode challenges those (like myself) who question the coherence of non-propositional disclosure. If truth conditions cannot apply, I ask, is there any meaningful content at all? Standish counters this with an appeal to everyday interpretive practices: reading literature, understanding human actions, experiencing art, these cannot be reduced to paraphrase or propositional clarity. The significance encountered here is lived, embodied, and often resistant to neat conceptualisation. 

This lived experience parallels Kant’s emphasis on the primacy of practical reason and the irreducibility of the personal perspective. Heidegger’s philosophy, then, reclaims this dimension by insisting that Being discloses itself prior to and beyond propositional articulation. Philosophy’s role is to cultivate openness, to dwell poetically with the mystery of Being, rather than to master or exhaust it conceptually. Thus, the confrontation between Derry’s Hegelian inflection and Standish’s Heideggerian reframing reveals a profound shift: from the rationalist project of self-conscious mastery to a hermeneutic ethics of care, attunement, and finitude. It is not merely a dispute over metaphysical method, but a reorientation of philosophy’s relation to life, meaning, and the human condition in the aftermath of metaphysics. The conversation between Derry and Standish thus invites reflection on how this reorientation might reshape contemporary philosophical practice and our collective existential horizons and in particular with respect to how we understand education.. 

The core tension animating this discourse is Standish's Heideggerian claim that meaningfulness, understood as the primordial, non-discursive attunement of Dasein to its world, both exceeds and undergirds any attempt at conceptual articulation. Heidegger’s insistence that human beings dwell originally in a horizon of significance that is not first mediated by propositions or predications challenges the very foundation of the rationalist tradition, of which Hegel’s system is often deemed the apex. Yet, this challenge is not an outright rejection of the rational enterprise but a call to reconsider its limits and the presuppositions it carries. From Derry’s Hegelian perspective, this poses a difficult dilemma. The rationalist project, culminating in the Science of Logic, aspires to render intelligible the very structure of thought itself, tying being and knowing in an intricate developmental process. Freedom, for Hegel, is the telos toward which Geist strives through self-reflection and ethical life. Meaningfulness, in this view, is inseparable from conceptual self-understanding; it is realised fully only when Geist comes to know itself as free and enacts this freedom in communal life. 

Heidegger’s emphasis on attunement (Befindlichkeit) and resonance appears to bypass this conceptual self-knowledge and risks reducing meaning to something ineffable, unaccountable, or mystical, something that eludes the very conditions by which we claim to know anything. Yet Standish’s interpretation of Heidegger, reveals a more nuanced position. The “meaningfulness that lies beyond discursive reach” is not a call for irrationalism or for an apophatic retreat into silence. Instead, it is a gesture toward the experiential substratum from which all conceptual meaning arises, a substratum that remains alive only insofar as it is not fully captured by discourse. In other words, meaningfulness in Standish’s thought is a lived precondition for conceptual thought, a background from which language and logic emerge but which they never exhaust. 

This distinction is critical, for it suggests that Standish’s critique is not a rejection of reason but a caution against its hegemony. Reason must be understood as emerging from a more originary openness to being, a “letting be” (Gelassenheit) that respects the recalcitrant otherness of the world and our embodied, situated engagement with it. Rationality, then, must be reconceived as responsive rather than dominative, a form of attunement that does not seek to subsume or control but to listen and dwell. I think this captures much of what Standish has been arguing in the field of philosophy of education over the time I have been engaged with his work. 

However, this philosophical recalibration is not without its perils. The question remains: how can such a non-discursive meaningfulness be communicated, shared, or taught without lapsing into mere sentimentality or cultural nostalgia? Here, the critique of Heidegger’s cultural politics becomes unavoidable. The same longing for “authentic” rootedness that animates his ontology can, and arguably did, slip into a problematic provincialism, a rejection of modern pluralism and cosmopolitanism that is ethically troubling and politically compromised. This entanglement underscores the challenge facing any philosophy that attempts to move beyond idealism without abandoning critical self-reflection. Heidegger’s romanticised attachment to a certain Lebenswelt - the village well, the steeple, the artisanal craft - cannot simply be dismissed as quaint. It is part and parcel of an ontological vision that risks reifying a particular cultural horizon as the universal ground of meaning. Such an ontological provincialism, as Adorno and later Habermas have warned, may inadvertently pave the way for forms of exclusion and domination that Heidegger’s thought ostensibly aims to overcome. 

Derry’s Hegelian-inflected critique therefore resonates here as a necessary corrective. The teleology of freedom and ethical life, however mediated by conceptual self-consciousness, provides an indispensable framework for resisting these tendencies. Freedom, in Hegel’s sense, is not merely individual self-realisation but involves recognition, mutuality, and the institutional realisation of ethical norms. This notion demands a horizon of universalisability that can check the particularistic impulses latent in any ontological account rooted in localised attunement. Thus, the paradox identified at the outset, the idealist tradition both culminates in a terminus and seeds its own overcoming, finds renewed expression. If Heidegger’s philosophy seeks to think with Hegel against Hegel, then it must also reckon with the ways in which it reproduces the very idealist presuppositions it seeks to transcend. In this spirit, to think with Heidegger against Heidegger, as Habermas advises, is to hold open a critical space where the insights of originary meaningfulness and attunement are integrated with, rather than opposed to, the normative demands of reason, freedom, and ethical life. 

This integration remains a philosophical task of enduring significance, especially in our contemporary age marked by technological enframing and social fragmentation. The challenge is not to reject either horizon wholesale but to articulate a dialogue between them, a dialogue that recognises the limits of discourse without descending into irrationalism, that acknowledges the roots of meaning in pre-conceptual attunement without succumbing to provincialism, and that affirms the imperative of freedom and mutual recognition in the face of ontological and cultural crisis. Philosophy itself, or at least a certain classical conception of it, has long been predicated on the aspiration to a kind of pure, disembodied thought, a thinking that, ideally, detaches itself from the contingencies of history, language, and social practice in order to grasp truth in its immediacy. There is undeniable power in this ideal; it promises an unmediated access to the structures of reason and being. Yet, if we accept this as the defining criterion, then the rejection of empirically unassisted thinking might indeed appear as the death knell of philosophy. But the stakes, and the possibilities, are richer than this binary suggests. 

The pragmatist tradition, in particular, offers an alternative path that moves beyond such either-or thinking and it is no surprise, given the context, that Dewey and American pragmatism have been hugely important to philosophers of education confronting the issues highlighted by engagement with Hegel and Heidegger. From this vantage, what must be relinquished is not reflection or thought as such, but the idea that thought could ever operate in isolation from the historical, linguistic, and social milieus that shape it. Rather than conceiving philosophy as a detached spectator or legislator of being, pragmatism insists that thought is embedded within ongoing practices of sense-making, practices that are provisional, revisable, and profoundly contingent. In this view, philosophy is continuous with life; it is an experimental engagement, a process of inquiry shaped by problems that arise within particular contexts rather than an immutable pursuit of ahistorical absolutes. 

Heidegger, especially as reconstructed by Standish, seems caught in a different bind. His privileging of the history of being as a metaphysical matrix beyond ordinary historical or sociopolitical explanation effectively places philosophy within an esoteric domain that resists empirical or genealogical scrutiny. The history of being is posited as something fundamentally prior and non-derivative, immune to the modes of critique that define other domains of knowledge. This move risks enshrining philosophy as a mythic or fideistic endeavor rather than a reflective practice subject to challenge and revision. Here lies a critical divergence: what grounds the plausibility of Heidegger’s ontology if it disallows the very instruments -historical investigation, sociological analysis, empirical inquiry - that might test or qualify its claims? Without recourse to such tools, we are left with a narrative that risks becoming closed off to critique, a metaphysical mythology resistant to falsification or amendment. This is precisely the vulnerability that pragmatists sought to circumvent by embedding philosophy firmly within the flux of lived experience and collective inquiry. 

Consider John Dewey’s approach, which rejects the logical prejudice without retreating into metaphysical transcendence. Dewey situates thought within the dynamic processes of inquiry that are historically and socially mediated. Philosophy becomes a method of experimental problem-solving, not a sovereign arbiter standing apart from the conditions of life. This reorientation dissolves the dualism between thought and world, between philosophy and everyday existence. Philosophy is not the absolute guardian of an inaccessible history of being; it is a mode of reflective practice that evolves alongside the social and material conditions from which it emerges. In contrast, the Heideggerian framework, at least in the form that Standish presents, seeks to hold a precarious middle ground. It wishes to jettison the hubris of rationalism and the logical prejudice, yet simultaneously insists on a privileged philosophical insight into the history of being that remains inaccessible to ordinary forms of understanding. This tension threatens to render philosophy at once foundational and yet impervious to criticism, invested with a metaphysical authority that its own rejection of rationalism seems to undermine. 

This instability, I suggest, is precisely what pragmatism diagnoses. To truly abandon the logical prejudice and the demand for intelligibility as a precondition for being may mean surrendering the aspiration for philosophy as a transcendent, infallible guardian of truth. Instead, it invites a humbler conception of philosophy as a fallible, embedded, and responsive activity, one that participates in the unfolding of meaning without claiming mastery over it. Perhaps then, Heidegger’s sidelining of pragmatism and related traditions requires reconsideration. Rather than mourning the loss of a metaphysics that secures being in a transcendental history, we might embrace a philosophy that acknowledges its own situatedness and revisability. A philosophy that accepts the provisional nature of its claims but remains committed to the communal and practical work of sense-making. Such a philosophy may not satisfy the yearning for ultimate foundations, but it may prove more fruitful in negotiating the complexities of a pluralistic and rapidly changing world. In this light, the silence or poetic evasion characteristic of Heidegger’s later thought need not be the final word. Instead, the relinquishment of metaphysical absolutes might open the door to a more modest, more engaged, and ultimately more human philosophy, one attentive to the demands of history, language, and social life, and open to the ongoing task of living well in a world that resists final capture. 

Derry’s reading of Hegel and the ontological depth of Standish’s Heidegger, pushes us further into the tension between critique and resignation that this diagnosis of modernity embodies. From Hegel, we inherit the idea that history is not merely a sequence of facts or events but a self-unfolding of spirit, a process where contradictions emerge, clash, and resolve in new forms of freedom and self-awareness. Yet Heidegger’s history of being, as Derry highlights, seems to sidestep this dialectical movement, opting instead for a kind of tragic fate that befalls being itself, where the forgetting is total, and the hope for reconciliation or synthesis is withheld. It is a history without progress, a turning away rather than a movement forward. This is where the tension between Derry’s interpretation and Standish’s reading becomes most acute. Standish’s Heidegger often holds onto the mythic and the primordial in a way that precludes the kind of self-critical, immanent critique that Hegel’s dialectic demands. Hegel insists that the negations and alienations within history are not final; they are moments through which Spirit comes to know itself and to realise freedom. Heidegger offers no such promise, only a lament over an ontological fall and a call to authenticity that remains obscure in its practical implications. 

Derry, by contrast, draws out from this impasse a kind of practical urgency, an insistence that we must attend to how modern enframing, this Gestell, shapes not only our technologies and sciences but our very modes of being-in-the-world. But unlike Heidegger, who ultimately brackets politics as subordinate to this ontological condition, Derry’s approach suggests that this diagnosis compels political reflection, precisely because the estrangement it names threatens to erode the conditions of collective life and meaningful action. Moreover, Derry’s infusion of Hegelian dialectics opens space for a reflective politics that neither naively trusts progress nor resigns itself to fatalism. The recognition of estrangement becomes itself a moment in the dialectic, a negative that demands a response, a new synthesis that might reconfigure our relation to technology, education, and social life without simply reproducing the enframing logic. 

This is where the pragmatist lineage re-enters the frame with force. If Heidegger’s history of being risks becoming a closed circle, a mythic narrative immune to contestation, pragmatism insists on an open-ended process of inquiry and experimentation that refuses to settle for metaphysical finality. Derry, taking these currents together, gestures toward a philosophy that is both deeply attuned to the moods and conditions Heidegger diagnoses and radically committed to the practical work of reorientation within history. The legacy of this reading, then, is to challenge us not only to recognise the ontological conditions of our time but to imagine how new forms of dwelling and meaning-making might emerge from the fractures and estrangements of modern life. It is to see philosophy not as the guardian of a fixed history of being but as a practice of collective sense-making, one that grapples with the difficult openness of a world no longer given but perpetually remade. And so her question comes with renewed urgency: if enframing threatens to reduce all experience to mere utility, if the history of being threatens to obscure our capacity for genuine attunement, how do we respond? Not with metaphysical resignation or reactionary retreat, but with a commitment to inventing new modes of dwelling, new ways of attuning ourselves to the world and to each other that resist reduction, that preserve openness, that reclaim the possibility of meaning itself. 

If this is even close to the right ballpark then we can see that Derry’s inflection of Hegelian dialectic and Standish’s Heideggerian ontological insight offers a critical toolset to philosophy of education: one that neither dissolves into despair nor lapses into dogma but holds fast to the paradox that modernity demands, an openness to transformation grounded in a sober reckoning with loss. Philosophy, then, becomes less a matter of fixed truths than an ongoing, collective striving to dwell meaningfully within a world at once alien and familiar. Derry’s inflection of Hegel and Standish’s Heidegger brings us squarely to the crossroads where philosophy’s historicist rationality and ontological attunement converge and collide. 

Interestingly I've seen Standish as performing two distinct yet intertwined registers of Heidegger’s thought. On the one hand, there is a generative, pluralistic Heidegger, one that opens space for the irreducible richness of lived experience, the aesthetic, the relational, and the pre-conceptual domains that resist being fully captured by Derry's rationalist, Hegelian frameworks. This register challenges the very assumption that Being must always be rendered intelligible through conceptual mediation, inviting us instead to dwell with the moods and disclosures that exceed discursive reason. On the other hand, Standish presents a “melodramatic Heideggerianism” that frames humanity as trapped irrevocably within the enframing Gestell, an ontological crisis of meaning that feels all but terminal. This darker reading, often associated with a prophetic diagnosis of decline, underscores the weight of estrangement and the near-impossibility of retrieval, where attunement to Being itself is blocked beneath the surface of rational thought. The tension between these two modes - openness and closure, disclosure and foreclosure- marks the dialectic at the heart of Heidegger’s legacy as interpreted by Derry and Standish alike. 

Derry's Hegelianism underscores the normative stakes of this dialectic. She acknowledges the essential role of interpretive reason while simultaneously pointing to its limits: moments of genuine understanding often transcend syllogistic demonstration, unfolding instead through what might be called a co-attunement or a shared mood that resists codification. Her thinking often resonates with the Pittsburg Hegelian Robert Brandom here where she recognises that the poetic and affective dimensions of comprehension reveal how meaning is both culturally mediated and normatively charged, even if it evades formal rationality. This nuanced perspective invites us to hold reason and attunement in productive tension rather than opposition. Importantly, her admiration for Hegel serves as a reminder that philosophy’s task remains fundamentally historical and diagnostic. Hegel’s vision of philosophy as the self-comprehension of the present contrasts with Heidegger’s deeper diagnosis of a blocked ontology, yet both thinkers compel us to reckon with the conditions that shape our time. 

The dialectic between Hegel’s rational freedom and Heidegger’s ontological estrangement resists easy resolution, posing an enduring challenge to any attempt to name or overcome modernity’s crisis. Both Standish and Derry critique institutionalised interpretation - after all, they're engaged with education  - and this highlights the real-world consequences of this ontological predicament. The abdication of critical normativity to reductive or scientistic frameworks, whether managerialism or extreme performativity, exemplifies the very enframing Heidegger warns against, threatening to close off the space of meaningful disclosure altogether. For Standish this institutional dimension situates Heidegger’s thought not merely as abstract metaphysics but as a pressing political and cultural diagnosis, one whose stakes reach into the foundations of academic and social life. 

 Heidegger’s phenomenological method does not attempt to articulate what lies beyond language but to map the conditions under which articulation fails. This subtle point preserves the tension between what can be said and what must remain attuned, between conceptual grasp and the abyss of meaning’s withdrawal. In this irresolvable tension, between Hegelian historicity and Heideggerian attunement, between interpretive normativity and non-discursive disclosure, between richness and catastrophe, philosophical thinking finds its persistent challenge and its abiding vitality. From the perspective of this interplay between Standish and Derry is precisely an unresolved interplay that demands our ongoing attention, inviting us to think not for closure but for openness, not for final answers but for the continual re-questioning of what it means to dwell meaningfully in a world marked by both estrangement and possibility. 

Derry’s approach to the philosophy of education, deeply inflected by her Hegelian grounding, emphasises the historical and dialectical development of self-consciousness through communal and institutional processes. For her, education is fundamentally about the unfolding of Geist, the cultivation of reason, freedom, and ethical life within a historical community. This means education is not merely the transmission of information or skills but the active shaping of individuals who come to understand themselves as participants in a shared historical and cultural project. It is through language, dialogue, and conceptual reflection that learners engage in the dialectical process of becoming self-aware subjects capable of contributing to the collective rational spirit. Derry’s vision is thus normative and aspirational: education is a formative practice aimed at realising human freedom and social cohesion through reasoned understanding. She stresses the importance of curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional structures that support critical thinking and ethical formation. Her critical sensibility also nuances this Hegelian framework, attending carefully to the ways in which exclusion,  power dynamics, and social inequalities have historically shaped educational access and content. Education for Derry is a site not only for intellectual growth but also for emancipatory transformation, challenging entrenched hierarchies and opening space for marginalised voices. 

Standish, approaches the philosophy of education through his Heideggerian lens, foregrounding attunement, being-in-the-world, and the disclosure of meaning beyond conceptual mastery. For him, education is not about the transmission of a fixed body of knowledge or rational development but about cultivating a mode of openness to experience and to the world’s meaningfulness. This involves fostering in learners an existential awareness, an attunement to the moods, silences, and possibilities that shape human existence. Education becomes a practice of “dwelling,” where learners are encouraged to encounter phenomena, artworks, or texts not as objects to be dissected but as invitations to attuned engagement. Standish is skeptical of overly institutionalised or rationalist education systems that prioritise standardised outcomes or technical skills at the expense of authentic presence and existential understanding. His approach values phenomenological methods, narrative, and poetic expression as ways to reawaken the capacity for wonder, anxiety, and reflection that Heidegger identifies as essential to authentic being. Education, in this view, is a practice that can counteract the technological enframing of modern life by recovering spaces of silence, ambiguity, and non-instrumental attunement. 

In the end, what becomes clear is that neither Derry nor Standish can be fully understood through the lens of Hegel or Heidegger alone. Their respective engagements with these traditions are not rigid affiliations but evolving dialogues, shaped and enriched by other philosophical voices, most notably those of the pragmatist tradition. In both cases, a shared interest in pragmatism serves not as a third position but as a fertile ground that nurtures and complicates their Hegelian and Heideggerian inheritances.For Derry, pragmatism, particularly as it emerges in Dewey and Vygotsky, offers a dynamic account of meaning, learning, and concept formation that resonates deeply with her Hegelian orientation. The emphasis on mediated development, on the role of social practices and language in shaping thought, allows her to reformulate epistemological and educational questions in ways that retain a commitment to normativity without collapsing into proceduralism. Dewey’s notion of experience as inquiry and Vygotsky’s attention to the cultural-historical development of higher psychological functions both extend and ground the Hegelian insight that thought is not given but formed.

Standish, meanwhile, finds in pragmatism, particularly in someone like Stanley Cavell, a kind of post-metaphysical ethos that supports his Heideggerian-hermeneutic reading of Wittgenstein. Here, language is not a medium for representing the world but a space of attunement, a living practice in which meaning arises from use, gesture, and responsiveness. His engagement with Wittgenstein is thus less about rules and more about forms of life, silence, and the ethical texture of our ordinary encounters. Pragmatism, in this register, offers a vision of education as a way of being in the world, not just a way of knowing it.In this convergence, one through Dewey and Vygotsky, the other through Wittgenstein and a post-analytic pragmatism, we see that Derry and Standish are not simply repeating old philosophical allegiances. They are using them, working with and against them, in pursuit of educational thinking that is responsive, generous, and alive to the complexities of human life. Their differences sharpen into complementarity when seen in this light: one reminds us of the power of reason as a social and developmental force; the other, of the necessity of openness, receptivity, and dwelling. And both, in their own ways, suggest that education is where philosophy must do its most careful, and most human, work.

Derry emphasises the communal, historical, and normative dimensions of education, with a clear political and ethical project. Standish is more existential, individual, and focused on ontological openness. Derry’s vision is forward-looking and transformational within society’s collective frameworks, while Standish’s is oriented toward a more immediate, pre-reflective reorientation of the learner’s relation to being. Together, their perspectives offer a dialectical tension that enriches contemporary philosophy of education. Derry reminds us that education must cultivate critical, reasoned engagement with history, society, and ethical life, always attentive to questions of justice and inclusion. Standish challenges us to preserve and revive the more primordial, existential dimensions of learning, the moods and disclosures that evade formalisation but nonetheless shape our sense of meaning. 

The challenge for educational theory and practice inflecting their approaches is to hold these perspectives in productive conversation: how to nurture reason and critical awareness without suppressing attunement and openness; how to build inclusive, normative communities of learners without reducing education to technocratic administration; and how to foster a pedagogy that is both emancipatory and existentially authentic. In this interplay, Derry and Standish have offered complementary, if sometimes uneasy, pathways to rethinking education’s purpose in an age marked by both technological enframing and pressing social crises. Their inflected Hegelianism and Heideggerianism thus frame a rich terrain for imagining education as simultaneously a historical project and a lived, attuned encounter with being. I think this is what I have taken from watching them work over the time I've been at the Institute of Education and it's been fascinating and enriching.