Michael Peters

This paper explores the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), knowledge socialism, and education, focusing on how AI reshapes knowledge production, educational governance, and pedagogical labor. Drawing on Marxist political economy and critical scholarship on AI in education, the paper situates knowledge socialism as a normative framework that challenges the commodification and enclosure of educational knowledge under contemporary digital capitalism.The concept of the AI Educational Mode of Development is introduced as an analytical lens to examine emerging configurations of public AI infrastructures, open educational systems, and human–machine collaboration. While such developments are frequently associated with claims of democratization and educational equity, the paper highlights the structural tensions that accompany AI-mediated education, including those between public provision and democratic governance, openness and centralization, cultural diversity and epistemic standardization, and automation and educational labor.Selected policy and institutional initiatives are discussed as illustrative cases that reveal both the possibilities and the limits of aligning AI with the normative aspirations of knowledge socialism. Rather than presenting these initiatives as definitive models, the paper treats them as contested governance experiments situated within specific political and institutional contexts. The paper concludes by arguing that AI can contribute to more collective and equitable forms of educational development only under carefully defined social, political, and pedagogical conditions.

The infiltration of intelligent reasoning systems into human cognition necessitates a paradigm shift in education away from cultivating individual minds and towards constructing ‘distributed ecointelligence’. Grounded in the Extended Mind Theory and evolutionary epistemology, this article develops a primarily epistemological framework for understanding technology-mediated cognition and its implications for education. It introduces ‘ecointelligence’ as a conceptual model that captures the co-evolution of human cognition, technological mediation, and contextual environments. While the analysis is fundamentally theoretical, it outlines certain pedagogical implications for rethinking learning, teaching, and assessment in artificial intelligence (AI)-mediated environments. By examining the philosophical evolution of cognitive tools, the dilemmas of technological mediation, and pathways for educational transformation, this article argues that future education must prioritize a dynamic balance between mental subjectivity and technological empowerment. This framework redefines the essence of thinking, teaching, and learning, offering a new epistemological lens for educational philosophy in the technological age.

This collective essay, contributed to a special issue on East Asian engagements with philosophy of education, situates educational posthumanism where modern humanism meets its limits. Modern educational and social institutions have been constructed on logos—reason, technical rationality, predictability, calculability, and controllability—to secure safe and stable human lives. Through shared norms, rational procedures, and standardized judgment, they have pursued universality, equality, and fairness. The resulting impasse is here framed as a tension between logos and pathos that exceeds it—vulnerability, dependency, finitude, the excess of the gift, and contingency. Seven short essays engage two interrelated educational problems. First, as human-made technologies expand beyond human control, how can we take ethical responsibility for these technologies and their consequences? The first three essays by Chia-Ling Wang, Kuan-hsun Wu, and Seung-woo Cho & Jin Choi treat AI and digital infrastructures as unavoidable conditions and ask how humanist ethical and critical orientations can be sustained through attention to concrete situations of learning and teaching. Second, the latter four essays ask how education might respond to marginalized human and nonhuman others without demanding complete assimilation. Ami Ogasawara and Akane Takasu seek possibilities that modern humanist education could not recognize under posthuman conditions. Kazuaki Yoda and Michelle Ocriciano ask what may have been left behind before, or within, modernity, and pursue a dialogue and a sense of circulation between humanism and posthumanism. This collective essay was further enriched by the open reviews of the distinguished scholars Petar Jandrić and Michael A. Peters.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the global knowledge economy, creating unprecedented opportunities for innovation while simultaneously reproducing structural inequalities between the Global North and South. AI development is deeply intertwined with historical patterns of resource extraction, epistemic domination, and technological dependency, which perpetuate economic and cognitive asymmetries. This article examines how AI reinforces structural disadvantages in the Global South, focusing on three interrelated challenges: economic dependence and technological subordination, digital and infrastructural disparities, and inequitable access to knowledge resources. Drawing on decolonial theory and Michael A. Peters’ framework of knowledge socialism, the study argues for reconceptualizing knowledge as a public good, emphasizing collaborative production, capacity building, and inclusive governance mechanisms. By foregrounding systemic inequities and articulating practical strategies, this paper offers a normative and operational framework to promote equitable participation in the AI-driven global knowledge economy.

‘Civilisation as a thin membrane stretched over chaos’ is Mark O’Donnell’s first impression of the neatly manicured lawn on an Auckland volcano, during his visit to discover why so many billionaires are prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand (O’Donnell, 2018). Nobody should approach the apocalyptic end of civilisation without a sense of humour because it is so full of contradictions and paradox. The apocalyptic imaginary that suffuses Silicon valley and its tech start ups is concerning. There is an irreverent juxtaposition of gigantic Promethean optimism and pessimistic acknowledgement of the Anthropocene, from which emerges a supercharged libertarian viscera where the super rich manage to keep extracting coin from the collapse of civilisation as we know it.

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.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal, this book brings together the work of over two-hundred international scholars, who seek to address the question, 'What happened to postmodernism in educational theory after its alleged demise?'. Declarations of the death knell of postmodernism are now quite commonplace. Scholars in various disciples have suggested that, if anything, postmodernism is at an end and has been dead and buried for some time. An age dominated by playfulness, hybridity, relativism, and the fragmentary self has given way to something else --as yet undefined. The lifecycle of postmodernism started with Derrida's 1966 seminal paper 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'; its peak years were 1973-1989; followed by uncertainty and reorientation in the 1990s; and the aftermath and beyond. What happened after 2001? This collection provides responses by over 200 scholars to this question who also focus on what comes after postmodernism in educational theory. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper is the result of a collective writing process.