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Michael A. PetersSchool of Philosophy,Beijing Normal University, Beijing, ChinaChengbing Wang,Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China,When I spoke to my colleague and very good friend of many years Wang ...

Chengbing WangShanxi University, Taiyuan, ChinaMichael A. PetersBeijing Normal University, Beijing, ChinaContemporary Chinese Marxism is not only an important theory in the humanities and social sc...

Within the rough ground that is the field of education there is a complex web of ethical obligations: to prepare our students for their future work; to be ethical as educators in our conduct and teaching; to the ethical principles embedded in the contexts in which we work; and given the Southern context of this work, the ethical obligations we have to this land and its First Peoples. We put out a call to colleagues whose work has been concerned with the pedagogies of professional ethics, the ethical burdens of institutional injustice, and the application of ethical theory to education’s applied fields. In the responses we received it can be seen that ethical concerns in education are broad ranging, covering terrain varying from the preparation of preservice teachers, ethics in higher education, early childhood and care, educational leadership, relational and communicative ethics. Perhaps it could also be argued that this paper demonstrates Gibbon’s observation that ‘Assumptions about the particularity of this time as new and ripe with opportunity to make a difference through philosophy of education are not new and there’s much to learn from the persistence of wanting to imagine that they are’ (in Peters et al., 2020, p. 17). However, while the field of ethics is perennially concerned with human relations and pedagogical interventions to improve these, the responses collected here show that educational ethics is far from static. Educational ethics is a field that continues to develop in response to changing contexts.

Infanticides is the third article in a collective writing project that includes ‘Infantologies’ and ‘Infantasies’. It is designed to develop a philosophy of the infant, which is not tied to either ...

The edited collection is a standard publishing vehicle that stands alone among other collections as an academic form of writing that since its beginnings in the nineteenth century has been taken for granted and has remained unchanged in terms of its conventions. The edited collection is a collection of original scholarly chapters written by different authors and arranged or organized by the editors of the collection to reflect different perspectives on a theme, generally chosen by the editors and developed in a ‘call for chapters’ that summarizes the main ideas and indicates the sub-themes. It is different from anthologies which republish important articles, normally chronologically, or the edited book series, both of which are forms of academic publications that involve editing contributions from different authors. Much of the responsibility for the edited collection rests with the editor or editors who craft the volume’s purpose and structure and generally provide an introduction to the major themes of the work and mention each chapter and its contribution to the work as a whole.

This is a collective writing project that is part of the larger design of Infantologies, Infanticides and Infantilizations ; a quartet that explores the philosophy of infants from thematic perspectives, that puts infants at the centre of our reflections, and that encourages a different academic style of thinking.

We are about to publish in the Routledge Editor’s Choice series a collection called The Philosophy, Methodology and Pedagogy of Collective Writing. This collection of collections represents the dev...

Open Peer Review: Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT) Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University, PR China In 2016 EPAT started experimenting with open peer review for articles that were par...

Human beings as imperfect rational beings face continuous challenges, one of them has to do with the lack of recognizing and respecting our inner dignity in present times. In this collective paper, we address the overall theme—Philosophy of Education in a New Key (see Peters et al., 2020) from various perspectives related to dignity. We address in particular some of the constraints and possibilities with regard to this issue in various settings such as education and society at large. Klas Roth discusses, for example, that it is not uncommon that the value of human beings has to do with their price in, inter alia, their social, cultural, political and economic settings throughout the world. He argues that such a focus does not necessarily draw attention to the inner dignity of human beings, but that human beings ought to do so in education and society at large. Lia Mollvik discusses views of inner and outer dignity, and argues that there needs to be a balance in between them, and that the balance ought to be acknowledged in education. Rama Alshoufani discusses the classification of human beings in terms of various diagnoses related to the asserted dysfunction of the brain, and she argues that such classification does paradoxically not necessarily respect people with such diagnoses as ends in themselves. On the contrary, she argues that their inner dignity is not respected, but that it should be. Other such failures are due to the lack of inner dignity when it comes to Children’s rights as discussed by Rebecca Adami, and to the lack of recognition of human beings’ vulnerability as discussed by Katy Dineen. Fariba Majlesi criticizes a too strong emphasis on substantive notions of humanist education, which seem to hinder new ways of thinking; she argues that it is necessary to acknowledge the latter in and through education in order to preserve the dignity of human beings. Dignity, it is argued throughout the paper, has an inner moral worth, and is beyond price.

Marx developed a sophisticated theory of labour under capitalism’s expanding reproduction but wrote little specifically on immaterial labour. This paper reflects on how to build from Marx’s writing...

Infantologies is a collective writing project designed to express and summarise important ideas, approaches and forms of advocacy in a short and condensed method, in order to present a network of d...

Sonja Arndt, Michael Peters, Marek Tesar Introspection is a key concept in epistemology, since introspective knowledge is often thought to be particularly secure, maybe even immune to skeptical dou...

Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within language games. Imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play. Then, exemplified by people such as Plato and Newton, it keeps mod...

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosop...

Educational philosophies of self-cultivation as the foundation and cultural ethos for education have a strong and historically effective tradition stretching back to antiquity in the classical ‘cra...

Marianna Papastephanou University of Cyprus Since Plato’s allegory of the cave two educational-philosophical critical modes have stood out: the descriptive (reality as it is) and the normative (rea...

In this conversational article, we consider cultivating decoloniality in university education by drawing upon Jacques Ranciere’s (2010) notion of a living philosophy. Ranciere’s (2010) living philo...

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

A number of scholars have noted parallels and covergences between Wittgenstein and Foucault.1 Both thinkers focused on accounts of language and discourse as a means for understanding the social wor...

One way of looking at conspiracy is to consider it a deliberately enhanced political weapon cultivated by those who push 'fake news' in a post-truth media environment. In some cases of 'true conspiracies' and theories, it is clear that the pejorative view of conspiracy must be abandoned. They comment: The psychological literature on predictors of conspiracy beliefs can be divided in approaches either with a pathological or socio-political focus. As Raikka points out, It is often claimed that political conspiracy theories are of limited falsifiability. At the same time, he adds, 'it would be a mistake to conclude from the defence of conspiracy theorising offered here that belief in conspiracy theories is on an epistemic par with belief in other theories'. In the age of Trump, it may be permissible to talk of 'government by conspiracy'.

This paper is an experiment in collective writing conducted in Autumn 2019 at the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. The experiment involves 12 international masters' students readi...

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in securing the common good. The common good is never what individuals or particular groups want or desire, but always reaches beyond such particular desires towards that which societies as a whole should consider as desirable. This does, of course, put the common good in tension with the desires of individuals and groups. Neo-liberal modes of governance have, over the past decades, put this particular educational set up under pressure and have, according to some, eroded the very idea of the common good. This set of contributions reflects on this state of affairs, partly through an exploration of the idea of publicness itself – how it can be rearticulated and regained – and partly through reflections on the current state of education in the ‘north’ and the ‘south.’ Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching.

Marxism, we are told by politicians and the popular press, is dead. The Left, as a historical movement tied to the labor movement, is frozen over, caught between the collapse of actually existing communism in Eastern Europe and the triumph of global market forces. Union membership in the traditional industrial economy in the UK is dwindling as multinationals relocate offshore; even insurance, information, banking, and call-center jobs of the “new economy” are increasingly outsourced to India and other emergent economies literate in information and computing technology and English. China has joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) and committed itself to a postsocialist market economy. At a time of an intensification of inequalities between regions and, perhaps more significantly, between North and South—between the developed world and the developing world—the Left in Britain, the United States, and most of Europe seems ideologically gutted by the Third Way preoccupation with the social market and with citizenship “responsibilities” rather than with traditional concerns of equality and advancing rights. The best offer on hand seems to be a socialization of the market and an acknowledgment of its moral limits. Neoliberalism, in the age of privatization, reduces the state’s role more and more to one of regulation, rather than provision or funding of public services.

This interview took place through email during October-November, 2019.Michael: It’s a real pleasure to engage you in conversation. You were a foundation member of PESA and someone who in the pre-In...

The idea of well-being seems to be part of the zeitgeist. From multiple research projects to organisations and individuals offering the promise of a good life and fulfilling life and positive outco...

Teaching, born of the period of the ancient sages, developed as the moral art of living that introduced humanity to teaching as a moral pursuit, to the formation of value, to a moral and religious mode of being, and to a set of moral principles that have survived into the modern day. The idea that the ‘future of teaching’ represents a technological disruption of moral traditions of teaching and what teaching might become has become a serious concern for the current generation of philosophers in both China and the West. This editorial examines these issues and introduces this special issue.

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with th...

The question of how scientific theories, concepts and methods change over time is an enduring issue. Science, like all forms of intellectual activity, can undergo rapid and dramatic periods of chan...

This chapter is a discussion of neoliberalism as a form of political discourse – ‘the political arithmetic of Homo Oeconomicus’. In the first half, the chapter begins with a genealogy of political discourse with an etymology from late Middle English and medieval Latin to denote a process of reasoning and a means to order our thoughts on a topic. Although the term can be traced to the early Greeks concerned with the problem of truth and rhetoric in democracy, it gains foothold in the seventeenth century with Bockel (1677) and a determinate reading in the twentieth century with Foucault (1970). In the second half, the chapter traces the emergence of the figure of homo oeconomicus and the rise of rational choice theory by focusing on its application to education as a commodity. In this context, the chapter discusses the twin discourses of Individualism and Community with associated concepts of Freedom and Equality. Finally, the chapter turns to a discussion of Foucault’s understanding of neoliberalism.

Foucault begins by asking ‘In what historical form do the relations between the ‘subject’ and ‘truth,’ … take shape in the West?’ (p. 2). He responds to his own question by suggesting there is a distinction between a ‘philosophical analytics of truth in general’—a ‘formal ontology of truth’—which poses the question of the conditions under which true knowledge is possible that creates a ‘historical ontology of ourselves,’ or in other words, the complex ways we have constituted ourselves as subjects of knowledge and truth.

In this article we take up the concept of ‘the orders of discourse’ from the Foucault philosophical archive to identify, open up and examine discourses of teacher quality. Our aim is to identity major strands of discourse in the discursive formation of ‘teacher quality’ and to problematize them in line with Foucault’s approach to problematization which functions as a critical philosophy of tracking and analysis of the characteristics of the genealogy and family of concepts.

This collectively written article explores postdigital relationships between science, philosophy, and religion within the continuum of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment. Contributions are broadly classified within four sections related to academic fields of philosophy, theology, critical theory, and postdigital studies. The article reveals complex and nuanced relationships between various disciplinary perspectives, religions, and political positions, and points towards lot of commonalities between their views to the enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment continuum. Some commonly discussed questions include: Where do the mythical, mystical and spiritual end and the rational, objective and empirical begin? How do we find our bearings in the midst of this complexity and where do we search for resources that are trustworthy and reliable? While the article inevitably offers more questions than answers, a common thread between all contributions is the need for an open postdigital dialogue conducted in the spirit of mutual understanding and respect. It is with this conclusion that the article offers a possible route for further development of such dialogue in the future.

This article presents 15 autoethnographical texts detailing student experiences at Beijing Normal University in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Contributions have been collected over 6 weeks between 15 February and 1 April 2020, edited by Hejia Wang (assisted by Moses Oladele Ogunniran and Yingying Huang), and supervised by Michael Peters. Through shared in-depth empirical feelings and representations from a wide variety of cultural, historical, and social contexts, the article outlines an answer to the question: How do students, connected virtually but separated physically in an internationalized university, deal with disruption brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic? Student testimonies offer reflections on Covid-19 and Chinese international education, experiences of online teaching and learning, reflections on university coping mechanisms, an account of realities and feelings related to changes in academic life, and discussions on coping strategies in Chinese international higher education. Contributors expose their individual feelings, effects, benefits, challenges, and risk management strategies. Collected at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, these testimonies are unable to offer systemic answers to challenges facing the whole world. However, these experiences and feelings will provide important inputs to global discussions about the future of the world, after Covid-19.

This paper analyses and examines Deleuze’s Foucault as a means of investigating intellectual resources for a new sociology – one that, in Foucault’s name, is neither foundationalist nor rep...

The university is a European institution; indeed, it is the European institution par excellence. There are various reasons for this assertion. As a community of teachers and taught, accorded certai...

Following involvement in several academic collectively written articles, the authors question traditional notions of the ‘lone’ individualist author model as the expected standard in the humanities as opposed to large research teams in physical sciences. They use Barthes and Foucault to question the function and the concept of the author and assumed notions of subjectivity. Recent collective writing as a form of peer production and publishing is an attempt to reinvent the concepts of authorship, the author subject and author subjectivity. These bring to the fore the processes of peer review, questions of ownership (for example, of what remains in a revision, whose contribution becomes revised and by whom), and blurr the boundaries around author/collective voice and are discussed in this paper. Its transversality is proving as complex as the term suggests, in terms of developing new ways of connecting, thinking, examining and working, in ways that have not been the norm at least in the field of philosophy of education. Contemporary questions of the potential social, philosophical, legal, epistemological and ethical implications for and of authorship and subjectivity have barely been touched on to date, but this article begins to broach this gap.

In this chapter, the author maintains that Wittgenstein’s work may be given, broadly speaking, a cultural and literary reading which focuses upon his styles. Such a reading legitimates both the importance of Wittgenstein – the person – and the significance of his (auto)biography in a way that analytic philosophers might find hard to accept. There are, at least, three ways, which might demonstrate more robustly the pedagogical styles of his thinking. First, one may seek to investigate historically and (auto)biographically the connections between Wittgenstein’s styles of teaching philosophy, relying on accounts and reminiscences of his former students, and his styles of thinking. Second, one can also investigate historically accounts of his experiences as a primary and secondary school teacher in Austria during the crucial period of 1919 to 1929, and the influences upon his thinking during this period. Third, one can look directly at his writings to observe and document these effects on style.

Declarations of the death knell of postmodernism are now quite commonplace. Indeed, various publications such as those that we utilise below suggest that, if anything, postmodernism is at an end an...

The archive is a cultural institution that creates a framework for the social and collective memory and as such is one of the collection of knowledge institutions that not only preserves and classi...

This speculative paper enquires into the discourse of the ‘end of labour’ or ‘disappearance of labour’ as a result of the development of ‘intelligent capitalism’ clearly seen in ‘intelligent manufa...

Fascism is hostile to egalitarianism and loathes liberalism. It champions ‘might is right’, a Darwinian survival of the nastiest, and detests vulnerability: the sight of weakness brings out the jac...