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6‘Declinism’ and discourses of decline - the end of the war in Afghanistan and the limits of American powerEducational Philosophy and Theory 55 (14): 1591-1598. 2023.Taliban forces of 75,000 overran the well-equipped 300,000+ strong Afghan army, trained and supported by US-NATO military, in a world-shattering week that toppled the US Afghan client regime and bo...
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3Western civilization 101Educational Philosophy and Theory 55 (14): 1582-1590. 2023.The concept of civilization in the West recognizes the origins of the term in civitas and civilité as the development of civil society and, in particular, the expression of the history of sympathy,...
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2Civilizational collapse, eschatological narratives and apocalyptic philosophyEducational Philosophy and Theory 55 (14): 1599-1607. 2023.COVV: I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit. (Pause.) It’s easy going. (Pause.) When I fall I’ll weep for happiness. (Pause. He goes towards door.)HAMM: Clov! (C...
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5The early origins of neoliberalism: Colloque Walter Lippman (1938) and the Mt Perelin Society (1947)Educational Philosophy and Theory 55 (14): 1574-1581. 2023.The term ‘neoliberalism’ passed into popular usage among left-wing commentators in the late 1970s as an essentially pejorative short-hand description for free market policies that were developed an...
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33Philosophy of education in a new key: Snapshot 2020 from the United States and CanadaEducational Philosophy and Theory 54 (8): 1130-1146. 2022.This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...
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511 Humanism, Derrida, and the new humanitiesIn Gert Biesta & Denise Egéa-Kuehne (eds.), Derrida & Education, Routledge. pp. 10--209. 2001.
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18Historizing Subjectivity in Childhood StudiesLinguistic and Philosophical Investigations 11 42-61. 2012.Historizing Subjectivity in Childhood Studies
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Introduction: Fragments of thinking, thinking in systemsIn Academic Writing, Philosophy, and Genre, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.
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14Introduction: education, philosophy and politics -- Writing the self: Wittgenstein, confession and pedagogy -- Nietzsche, nihilism and the critique of modernity: post-Nietzschean philosophy of education -- Heidegger, education and modernity -- Truth-telling as an educational practice of the self: Foucault and the ethics of subjectivity -- Neoliberal governmentality: Foucault on the birth of biopolitics -- Lyotard, nihilism and education -- Gilles Deleuze's 'societies of control': from disciplina…Read more
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27Philosophy of education in a new key: A collective project of the PESA executiveEducational Philosophy and Theory 54 (8): 1061-1082. 2022.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...
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1Kinds of Thinking, Styles of ReasoningIn Mark Mason (ed.), Critical Thinking and Learning, Blackwell. 2008.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Why the Present Emphasis on Thinking? Kinds of Thinking: Heidegger on What is Called Thinking? Wittgenstein on Thinking Styles of Reasoning Notes References.
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5Global Britain’: The China challenge and Post-Brexit Britain as a ‘science superpowerEducational Philosophy and Theory 55 (8): 871-876. 2023.The British PM Boris Johnson is impressed with the way British science ‘liberated’ the public from Covid-19. He is reported as indicating that never before has the British people owed so much to sc...
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111AI and the future of humanity: ChatGPT-4, philosophy and education – Critical responsesEducational Philosophy and Theory. forthcoming.Michael A PetersBeijing Normal UniversityChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 and a ‘stable release’ on February 13, 2023. It belongs to OpenAI’s GPT-3 family (generativ...
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19Contemporary Chinese Marxism: Basic research orientationsEducational Philosophy and Theory 54 (11): 1740-1753. 2022.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...
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28Writing the self: Wittgenstein, confession and pedagogyJournal of Philosophy of Education 34 (2). 2000.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 Inves…Read more
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2Wittgenstein’s Education: 'A Picture Held Us Captive’Springer Singapore. 2018.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 …Read more
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30Wittgenstein at Cambridge: Philosophy as a way of lifeEducational Philosophy and Theory 51 (8): 767-778. 2018.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 contribu…Read more
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4The WHO, the global governance of health and pandemic politicsEducational Philosophy and Theory 54 (6): 707-716. 2022.The World Health Organization has been subjected to serious criticism for its handling of the COVID-19 virus, specifically that it failed to act decisively to stop the global outbreak and tha...
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18The University and the New HumanitiesArts and Humanities in Higher Education 3 (1): 41-57. 2004.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’ i…Read more
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9‘The fascism in our heads’: Reich, Fromm, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari – the social pathology of fascism in the 21st centuryEducational Philosophy and Theory 54 (9): 1276-1284. 2022.
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3The end of the decade: Reflecting on 2019 and looking forward to the next decadeEducational Philosophy and Theory 54 (9): 1271-1275. 2022.
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16The disorder of things: Quarantine unemployment, the decline of neoliberalism, and the Covid-19 lockdown crashEducational Philosophy and Theory 53 (12): 1195-1198. 2021.Rarely in economics does the field see such unambiguous causation as in the case of the Covid-19 shut down of the global economy. Pretty well every economist would agree to this proposition and whi...
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3Truth “After Postmodernism”: Wittgenstein and Postfoundationalism in Philosophy of EducationIn Stefan Ramaekers & Naomi Hodgson (eds.), Past, Present, and Future Possibilities for Philosophy and History of Education: Finding Space and Time for Research, Springer Verlag. pp. 89-100. 2018.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 postmodernis…Read more
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42Reading Wittgenstein: The Rehersal of Prejudice A response to Dr. McCartyStudies in Philosophy and Education 21 (3): 263-271. 2002.No abstract available
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9Postmodernism in the afterlifeEducational Philosophy and Theory 54 (4): 325-327. 2022.[This editorial is part of the 50th celebration issue that explored ‘what comes after postmodernism in educational theory. The special issue is being published as a monograph and this is our group...
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26On the epistemology of conspiracyEducational Philosophy and Theory 53 (14): 1413-1417. 2021.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. Thus, the story that Obama’s...
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30Noosphere rising: Internet-based collective intelligence, creative labour, and social productionThesis Eleven 130 (1): 3-21. 2015.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. Th…Read more
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41Nietzsche, poststructuralism and education: After the subject?Educational Philosophy and Theory 29 (1): 1-19. 1997.