The Vastness of the Embodied Self - A Phenomenological Investigation of Dancers' Self-consciousness. The CRAG Confluence, Edinburgh 3rd - 5th December 2015 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Education and the illusions of emancipation
Educational Studies in Mathematics, 2012
In this article, I deal with the question of emancipation in education. In the first part of the article, I argue that contemporary concepts of emancipation are explicitly or implicitly related to the idea of the sovereign subject articulated by Kant and other philosophers of the Enlightenment. I contend that our modern enlightened concepts of emancipation rest on a dichotomy between an autonomous and self-sufficient subject and its sociocultural world. Referring to current research in mathematics education, I show how this dichotomy leads to intrinsic contradictions that haunt ongoing educational practices. These contradictions, I contend, are manifested in the hopeless efforts to bridge the gap between the deeds and thoughts of an autonomous individual and the regimes of reason and truth in which the individual finds itself subsumed. In particular, I argue that emancipation as understood in the enlightened modern sense remains a chimeric and unfulfillable dream. In the second part of the article, I suggest that emancipation can still be an orienting vector of educational practice and research, but it needs to be conceptualized differently: emancipation needs not be predicated in terms of individuals’ freedom and individualist autonomy, but in critical–ethical terms.
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2016
In his book The Formation of Reason (2011), David Bakhurst asserts that the end of education is autonomy, which he explains is the power to determine what to do and think in the light of what there is reason to do and think. I want to ask how we must conceive education, if this is its end. As a change in the broadest sense, education has not only an end, but also a beginning, not only a whither, but also a whence. But not any two things can be joined as the whence and the whither of a change. I want to ask where education begins, if autonomy is where it ends. This requires that I consider an idea that is prominent in Bakhurst's book, which concerns the whence of education: a human being is born an animal and changed into a person, education effecting the change. This idea figures in Bakhurst's argument for the claim that reason is a social and historical reality. The child is born with a first nature, which is biological and individual; it equips the child with animal powers: feeling, desire, perception. Receiving education, the child acquires a second nature, which is social and historical; it equips the child with personal powers: thought and reasoning, intellect and will. I contend that the idea of a change from animal to person is incoherent. Consequently, education is not the agent of such a change. Reason is not impressed on the child as a second nature; it is always already present as a character of its first nature. Education, instead of being the source of reason in the child, is the source of habits of reason in the child. This not only does not exclude, it entails that reason is actual only as a socio-historical form. For reason is actual only in its habits. I proceed as follows. I begin by raising suspicion of the idea that education turns an animal into a person by observing that this could not result in autonomy. Then I explain why there is no such change. To this end, I consider what kind of concept the concept of person is: as the concept of plant and animal, it signifies a character of the form of an individual, a character of the principle of its being, being one, being good. It follows that no species and no living being spans the difference of animal from person. Hence we must reconsider the role of reason, the personal power, in education. As reason is not brought about by education, it may be its condition. Indeed, when we consider the consciousness that constitutes education, we realise that in this transaction reason is in fact in both terms: in her who educates as well as in him who is being educated. And this will let us see how autonomy can be the end of education. The notion of person and reason that emerges may be yet further removed than Bakhurst's is from the social constructivism he criticises so effectively.
Rethinking Education and Emancipation: Being, Teaching, and Power
Harvard Educational Review, 2010
This essay describes two central principles for a renewed emancipatory pedagogy across educational contexts: the recognition of an essential equality between students and teachers and a liberatory agency that uncovers and builds on students' effectivity as beings against domination. While critical educational theory traditionally conceives of the human as a condition to be developed through the process of conscientization, De Lissovoy argues for the recognition of the human as the already existing fact of a body in struggle. He proposes an understanding of the human as the ontological kernel of the selves of students and teachers, as it asserts itself before contests over knowledge and identification. Building from recent work in cultural studies and philosophy that confronts the question of being as a political problem, the author develops an original understanding of emancipation as the discovery and affirmation of the persistent integrity and survival of beings in struggle.
Journal of the Philosophy of Education Vol III (2018)
2018
We don't need no education," Pink Floyd famously sings in the rock opera The Wall; "We don't need no thought control." The themes implied in these lines-issues concerning the role of the professor or teacher, the value of freedom in education, the importance of the concept of the individual, the treatment of education as a commodity-recur in the essays and articles collected in this volume. Thus we read of the representation of the authoritative voice in the fictional education of Harry Potter, the attempt to establish a language that allows inclusion of the non-human world in human communication, the evolution of the concept of the autonomous individual in representative democracies, and the search for the mythic, the magical, and the transcendent in educational systems. Discussions of the role of freedom and entertainment in education also come to the fore. Representations and misrepresentations and the political positions that underlie them are featured. These articles, then, explore a range of subjects, moving from the Age of Reason to concepts and beliefs of the New Age. If the mix seems eclectic, it is; yet throughout these essays the power of education to "educe," in the sense both of bringing out the latent and of inferring, recurs. As a guide, the educator does not provide information, but assists the student in finding his or her own knowledge and insight. Communication is key, no matter what the discipline. The educator, our writers continually stress, must lead students to discovery, to finding their own meanings, be it through the authority of the voice (as, Babich contends, is the case for the character Severus Snape of the Harry Potter movies, played by Alan Rickman), or through attention to the boundaries of freedom in the classroom, as viii the papers by Wenneborg and by Miller and Bourgeois suggest. Or perhaps discovery occurs in the structural formation of the child in ways that encourages integration or integrality through the inclusion of the mythic and the magical as valid realms of experience, areas that are explored in the studies by Mitchell, Falk, and A. Johnston. Approaches that surpass direct focus on the anthropocentric are central to the critique of Humanism in the paper by Börebäck and Schwieler, while the papers by Bulle and G. Johnston look to the Enlightenment either to trace the evolution of the concept of the individual (Bulle) or to explore how the writings of one of the key figures of the Age of Reason, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, are understood, and too often misunderstood, in the context of a cultural matrix that tries to assert its dominant, politicized worldview. Thus in the movement from New Age or magical to hegemonic cultural forces, questions arise such as, 'What role does the character of the teacher play in the child's education?' 'What degree of educational freedom should be granted to the pupil?' 'How can we interact with the world in ways that do not automatically implicate us in anthropomorphism or focus exclusively on rationalism, excluding both nature and the underlying processes that define the realms of myth and magic?' 'Should these realms be re-examined?' Such questions circulate in these works, and give us a "handle" on ways to approach education. We hope that considering today's extraverted, goal-oriented world, the essays presented here will lead you to reflect even more on the purpose, fate, and future of education, and on its need to foster in both the student and the educator a universal recognition of the basic skills that encourage communication and accuracy in learning and understanding, not solely as a means to or a goal of production, but as a way of encouraging constant discovery and recognition of the state of being of the individual and of the collective self as both work to enhance and inform each other. The variety of topics addressed in the essays included in this issue of JPSE reflects the quality and diversity of the approaches we would like to consider in future volumes. Should you have any questions or be
PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, 2018
As we hear nowadays so much about ongoing discrimination, whether based on sexual or racial stereotypes, I have decided to devote this paper to show how education as formation-or Bildung-can and should constantly serve as a reminder that all human beings, even in all their differences, are equal. While I truly believe that there should be no need to have to present an argument for this, I will do so, based on my understanding of Bildung in accordance with Heidegger and Buber as well as Jewish Thought.
Autonomy, Agency and Education: He tangata, he tangata, he tangata
Postfoundationalist themes in the philosophy of education : festschrift for james d marshall, 2013
In this paper the authors take up James Marshall's work on the individual and autonomy. Their suggestion is that although the liberal notion of the autonomous individual might give us a standard of reference for the freedom of persons, the liberal tradition also circumscribes that freedom by prescribing it both as an attribute of persons and as a necessity for persons to exercise, in the form of choice, even though the range of choice is in fact limited. Starting from an account of James Marshall and Colin Lankshear's respective work on the nature of the individual, and using Heidegger, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and others, they reintegrate the individual into society as it were, and finally, search for means of escape from the determinism of ‘governmentality’. Drawing on notions such as ‘technologies of the self’, hysteria and excess, integration of body and mind, individual and environment, subject and object, they describe the difficult, hesitant work of bringing existing parameters of thought and behaviour into consciousness. Some consequences for the relations of teachers and students within the school context are suggested.
Education, Freedom, and Emancipation from the Standpoint of the Recognition Theory
2020
In this interview, Axel Honneth discusses his views on education that leads to social freedom as the opposite of the currrently predominatly understanding of education as training for employability. He explains, in which sence social freedom as goal of education differs from autonomy and emancipation. Honneth also emphasises the significance of childrens' imaginative powers for a democratic society.