PHASED - Philosophy as Education
Welcome
Welcome to PHASED: Philosophy as Education. This is my fledgling digital garden, or in other words, my public thinking space in which I develop and publish my notes (or seedlings). So, all you read in this garden is dynamic thought in process - an open and evolving conversation which will someday serve as the fruits for my publications, either here in this digital sphere, and/or in the academic and public space.
About the Garden
My general area of interest is higher education but more specifically a deeper appreciation of Education Studies, i.e., the study of education as the relation between philosophy of education, educational science, and pedagogy.
Four prominent areas are worth mentioning:
- The academic experience of higher education: A (post-)critical take on the university lifeworld and the student experience. I am particularly interested in depicting the development of students' hermeneutic experiences of understanding.
- Social efficiency and instrumentalism in (higher) education: A (post-)critical perspective (ontology, phenomenology, and philosophical hermeneutics).
- Liberal education and the curriculum: What is the desired/required form of a liberal education for our times? What is powerful knowledge within the curriculum?
- The human-technology relation: One can speak of technology in a twofold manner: 1. The metaphysical condition which evidences human technological consciousness of the everyday; and 2. The condition of the interface between human actors and the products of digital technology/culture -- in other words, what things do as humans co-evolve with technological artefacts.
Contact
Working in the Open
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About the logo
The logo was designed and created by Mairead McKay (website to appear soon). It is an abstract design centred on the idea of the butterfly within the following poem1:
I appreciate this poem as the centrepiece to my thought and as one of the ways around which my understanding develops. As per the beauty of poetry, I always see something new in this text. This is education as poetic dwelling, or as Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it, a living in poetry:
Living in poetry is rather one of the ways through which we experience being moved within ourselves. In this only are humans able to find their self-fulfillment. Our education will again have to return to and acknowledge what inner value is and what living in poetry means, and certainly also what for the devout living in prayer means and what for all of us living in the unutterable word means. It is the rediscovery of the abundance which memoria is able to grant to human life. Memoria is preserving [Bewahren] — not external orders or institutions, but all of what we are. Preserving is not an unquestioning clinging to what is. In the end, we have to learn from Plato that we must continually renew what we hold to be true. The poem of a poet does not permit us a superior-critical judgement. Critique means, in reference to a poem, to acknowledge it as such and to allow it to be true. It depends on us to preserve it. Preservation is certainly always and finally the authentic manner in which the true can be for us humans. (The Verse and the Whole, Gadamer, 1992, p.91)
So, rather than what is the typical consciousness of a modern education, i.e., as something which remains within our grasp and control, I understand education as given, or in other words, as a gift. The beauty of education is as an unforeseen event which happens to us, often in surprising ways. As Gadamer would say, it is the experience which pulls us up short.
Children
Footnotes
This poem, erroneously attributed to both Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne, was written by the social worker, author and speaker, J. Richard Lessor. Although it doesn't appear in any of Lessor's books, it was published on motivational posters in the 1970s produced by Argus Communications. ˄