Michael Peters

In this paper I investigate ‘the confessional’ as an aspect of Wittgenstein's style both as a mode of philosophising and as a mode of ‘writing the self’, tied explicitly to pedagogical practices. There are strong links between Wittgenstein's confessional mode of philosophising and his life—for him philosophy is a way of life —and interesting theoretical connections between confessional practices and pedagogy, usefully explored in the writings of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. The Investigations provides a basis and springboard for understanding the notion of ‘writing the self’ as a pedagogical practice which encourages a confessional mode compelling us to tell the truth about ourselves and, thus, creating the conditions for ethico-poetical self-constitution.

Dedicated to educators who are not philosophy specialists, this book offers an overview of the connections between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and his own training and practice as an educator. Arguing for the centrality of education to Wittgenstein’s life and works, the authors resist any reduction of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to remarks on pedagogy while addressing the current controversy surrounding the role of training in the enculturation process. Significant events in his education and life are examined as the background for successful interpretation, without lending biographical details explanatory force. The book discusses the importance of Wittgenstein’s training and dismissal as an elementary teacher in light of his later, frequent use of many ‘scenes of instruction’ in his Cambridge lectures and notebooks. These depictions culminated in his now famous Philosophical Investigations -- a counter to his earlier philosophy in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein came to distinguish between empirical inquiries into how education, language or mathematics might ideally work, from grammatical studies of how we learn on the rough ground to normatively go-on as others do – often without explicit rules and with considerable degrees of ambiguity, for instance, in implementing new guidelines during a curriculum reform or in evaluating teachers. The book argues that Wittgenstein’s reflections on education -- spanning from mathematics training to the acquisition of language and cultivation of aesthetic appreciation -- are of central significance to both the man and his pedagogical style of philosophy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a reclusive and enigmatic philosopher, writing his most significant work off campus in remote locations. He also held a chair in the Philosophy Department at Cambridge, and is one of the university’s most recognized even if, as Ray Monk says, ‘reluctant professors’ of philosophy. Paradoxically, although Wittgenstein often showed contempt for the atmosphere at Cambridge and for academic philosophy in particular, it is hard to conceive of him making his significant contributions without considerable support from his academic colleagues, his research fellowship and later teaching career at Cambridge. It is this conflicted relationship we explore, between the revolutionary thinker and his base within an educational institution. Starting from a brief biographical sketch of Wittgenstein’s academic life at Cambridge, including his involvement as a student and faculty member in the Moral Sciences Club, we look at how he reconceived the role of philosophy throughout this...

Recently, Derrida has pointed to the university to come and the future of the professions within a place of resistance, and yet maintained the historical link to two ideas that mediate and condition both the humanities and the performative structure of acts of profession: human rights and crimes against humanity. Derrida maintains that the ‘modern university should be unconditional’, by which he means that it should have the ‘freedom’ to assert, to question, to profess, and to ‘say everything’ in the manner of a literary fiction. This article reviews what Derrida calls ‘the future of the profession or the university without conditions’. Second, it focuses on a series of criticisms raised by Richard Rorty against Derrida’s concept of literature and on Derrida’s status as a ‘private ironist’. Third, the article examines Derrida in relation to the ends of literature and the university, under the impact of globalization and new technologies of communication. Finally, in a postscript the article returns to the concept of the university and its postcolonial possibilities.

In a range of path-breaking publications that shaped his engagement with educational theory Paul Smeyers sympathetically investigated the claims and ‘atmosphere’ of postmodernism. In this chapter I investigate the backlash against postmodernism that holds it responsible for ‘post-truth politics,’ and of promoting a cynical attitude to truth and facts. I argue for an intellectual history of truth in which it is contested, not only in Continental tradition and in what some have called postmodernism, but also in the analytic tradition. I explore these issues through a reading of Wittgenstein’s place and role in the history of analytic philosophy and by investigating how he moves away from a notion of truth grounded in a form foundationalism in the Tractatus to embrace a form of anti-foundationalism in the Investigations and On Certainty.

Our article relocates the debate about creative labour to the terrain of peer-to-peer interneting as the paradigmatic form of nonmarket – social – production. From Yann Moulier Boutang we take the point that creative labour is immaterial; it is expressed through people connected by the internet. Drawing on two social systems thinkers, Francis Heylighen and Wolfgang Hofkirchner, we transpose this connectedness up to a conception of creative labour as a supra-individual collective intelligence. This intelligence, we argue, is one of the internet’s emergent properties. We then present a model of internet development that flags the potential of digitally-evoked collective intelligence to facilitate what the Marxist philosopher George Caffentzis calls ‘postcapitalist commoning’. Yoking together systems theorizing about the internet and socialist envisioning of social transformation, we identify two sets of internet tools for coordination that can assist with the convivial reconstruction of society along the lines of peer-based production.

This paper focusses on our concerns about revelations about sexual harassment in universities and the inadequate responses whereby some universities seem more concerned about their own reputations than the care and protection of their students. Seldom do cases go to criminal court, instead they mostly fall within employment relations policies where the use of non-disclosure agreements are double edged, such that some perpetrators remain nameless even if the person offended against wants details made public. Of course if the staff member does not resign or take retirement prior to potential dismissal, but remains in the institution, the grapevine still works. Universities too often become complicit in cover-ups at the expense of further potential victims of sexual misconduct. It has been with much dismay that we found that despite extensive training and writing about ethics some senior professors in philosophy fields have been accused and found wanting, disabusing us of the virtue assumption. Despite these recent instances where perpetrators have been named and been publicised in the media, we found that this is not in fact new, so not only does the paper look to the past, but also extensively it uses contemporary accounts, reports and documents from USA, UK, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. These seem to be the tip of the iceberg, so our hope is that all students and staff in universities (and in fact all institutions where there are inherent power imbalances) will not only feel safe, but that they will be safe as universities become genuinely ethical institutions.

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold; it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.We live in a social universe in which the formation, circulation, and utilization of knowledge presents a fundamental problem.If the accumulation of capital has been an essential feature of our society, the accumulation of knowledge has not been any less so.Now, the exercise, production, and accumulation of this knowledge cannot be dissociated from the mechanisms of power; complex relations exist which must be analysed.

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold; it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.We live in a social universe in which the formation, circulation, and utilization of knowledge presents a fundamental problem.If the accumulation of capital has been an essential feature of our society, the accumulation of knowledge has not been any less so.Now, the exercise, production, and accumulation of this knowledge cannot be dissociated from the mechanisms of power; complex relations exist which must be analysed

This article reviews claims for creativity in the economy and in education distinguishing two accounts: 'personal anarcho-aesthetics' and 'the design principle'. The first emerges in the psychological literature from sources in the Romantic Movement emphasizing the creative genius and the way in which creativity emerges from deep subconscious processes, involves the imagination, is anchored in the passions, cannot be directed and is beyond the rational control of the individual. This account has a close fit to business as a form of 'brainstorming', 'mind-mapping' or 'strategic planning', and is closely associated with the figure of the risk-taking entrepreneur. By contrast, 'the design principle' is both relational and social and surfaces in related ideas of 'social capital', 'situated learning', and 'P2P' (peer-to-peer) accounts of commons-based peer production. It is seen to be a product of social and networked environments — rich semiotic and intelligent environments in which everything speaks. The article traces the genealogies of these two contrasting accounts of creativity and their significance for educational practice before showing how both notions are strongly connected in accounts of new forms of capitalism that require a rethinking of the notion of creativity and its place in schools and institutions of higher education. The article begins by providing a context in terms of a history of the knowledge economy and the historical tendency toward aesthetic or designer capitalism