David Bakhurst

This is a transcription of a debate on the concept of a person conducted in Moscow in 1983. David Bakhurst argues that Evald Ilyenkov's social constructivist conception of personhood, founded on Marx's thesis that the human essence is the ensemble of social relations, is either false or trivially true. F. T. Mikhailov, V. S. Bibler, V. A. Lektorsky and V. V. Davydov critically assess Bakhurst's arguments, elucidate and contextualize Ilyenkov's views, and defend, in contrasting ways, the claim that human individuals are socially constituted beings. Issues discussed include: the concepts of activity (dejatel'nost') and community (obenija) and their relevance to the notions of mind and personhood; self-consciousness and its relation to personal identity; naturalism in Soviet thought. Translated from the Russian.

My subject today is the philosophical significance of the concept of activity. I shall not be talking about philosophical consequences of empirical work done by activity theorists; there are no doubt many such consequences, but they are not my subject. I want to ask whether activity theory incorporates a fundamental philosophical vision. The activity approach obviously represents a certain way of seeing human subjects and their relation to the world. To what extent does this perspective cast light on central questions of philosophy? I shall focus on the work of Eval'd Il'enkov, a philosopher whose ideas are sometimes represented as expressing the distinctive philosophical premises of the activity approach. Il'enkov is not, of course, the only thinker one might cast as a "philosopher of activity," but his association with A.N. Leont'ev makes his work the obvious starting point for an exploration of the philosophical dimensions of activity theory.

Jerome Bruner is one of the grand figures of psychology. From his role as a founder of the cognitive revolution in the 1950s to his recent advocacy of cultural psychology, Bruner's influence has been dramatic and far-reaching. Such is the breadth of his vision that Bruner's work has inspired thinkers in many of the major areas of psychology and has had a powerful impact on adjacent disciplines. His writings on language acquisition, culture and education are of profound and enduring importance. Focusing on the dominant themes of language, culture and self, this volume provides a comprehensive exploration of Bruner's fertile ideas and a considered appraisal of his legacy. With a distinguished list of contributors including Jerome Bruner himself, the result is an outstanding volume of interest to students and scholars in psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, and education. Among the contributors are Judy Dunn, Howard Gardner, Clifford Geertz, Rom Harré, David Olson, Edward Reed, Talbot Taylor, Michael Tomasello, and John Shotter. The volume is framed by an editorial introduction that considers the distinctively philosophical dimensions of Bruner's thought, and a final chapter by Bruner himself in which he re-examines prominent themes in his work in light of issues raised by the contributors. The volume will be invaluable to students and researchers in the fields of psychology, cognitive science, education, and the philosophy of mind.

The philosophy of education is among the least celebrated sub-disciplines of Anglo-American philosophy. Its neglect is hard to reconcile, however, with the fact that human beings owe their distinctive psychological powers to cumulative cultural evolution, the process in which each generation inherits the collective cognitive achievements of previous generations through cultural, rather than biological, transmission. This paper examines the work of Eval’d Il’enkov, who, unlike his Anglo-American counterparts, maintains that education, broadly understood, is central to issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind. I expound Il’enkov’s position and defend it from five objections: (1) that Il’enkov treats education as a vehicle of social engineering; (2) that he is unduly preoccupied with controlling human development; (3) that he implausibly portrays the mind as a tabula rasa; (4) that his position is utopian; and (5) that it is technocratic. Defending Il’enkov illuminates a variety of issues about the objectives and ideals of education, formal and informal. I conclude that Il’enkov’s ideas, if complemented by those of other thinkers, Russian and Western, can help rejuvenate philosophy of education and reinstate the field at the centre of philosophical inquiry.

Some opponents of ethical particularism complain that particularists cannot give a plausible account of moral education. After considering and rejecting a number of arguments to this conclusion, I focus on the following objection: Particularism, at least in Jonathan Dancy's version, has nothing to say about moral education because it lacks a substantial account of moral competence. By Dancy's own admission, particularists can tell us little more than that a competent agent 'gets things right case by case'. I respond by reflecting on how we want our children to turn out, morally speaking. I argue that we can present a compelling story about our aspirations for our children's moral development that is consistent with particularism and that provides the beginnings of a plausible account of the competence we look to moral education to instil.

It is often argued that neuroscience can be expected to provide insights of significance for education. Advocates of this view are sometimes committed to 'brainism', the view (a) that an individual's mental life is constituted by states, events and processes in her brain, and (b) that psychological attributes may legitimately be ascribed to the brain. This paper considers the case for rejecting brainism in favour of 'personalism', the view that psychological attributes are appropriately ascribed only to persons and that mental phenomena do not occur 'inside' the person but are aspects of her mode of engagement with the world. The paper explores arguments for personalism from Russian philosopher Evald Ilyenkov and a number of contemporary Western thinkers, including Peter Hacker and John McDowell. It is argued that, since plausible forms of personalism do not deny that brain functioning is a causal precondition of our mental lives, personalism is consistent with the claim that neuroscience is relevant to education, and not just to the explanation of learning disorders. Nevertheless, it is important that fascination with scientific innovation and technological possibility should not distort our conception of what education is or ought to be, leading us to portray education not as a communicative endeavour, but as an exercise in engineering.

In _The Formation of Reason_, philosophy professor David Bakhurst utilizes ideas from philosopher John McDowell to develop and defend a socio-historical account of the human mind. Provides the first detailed examination of the relevance of John McDowell's work to the Philosophy of Education Draws on a wide-range of philosophical sources, including the work of 'analytic' philosophers Donald Davidson, Ian Hacking, Peter Strawson, David Wiggins, and Ludwig Wittgenstein Considers non-traditional ideas from Russian philosophy and psychology, represented by Ilyenkov and Vygotsky Discusses foundational philosophical ideas in a way that reveals their relevance to educational theory and practice.

This paper pays tribute to Felix Trofimovich Mikhajlov (1930-2006), on the occasion of the publication of the third edition of his well-known book, Zagadka čelovečeskogo ja (The Riddle of the Self). Zagadka is a fine expression of the critical humanism that characterized some of the best Russian writing in the Marxist tradition. Moreover, the book provides an ingenious introduction to the philosophical framework of what in the West is called "cultural-historical activity theory." The first part of the paper is a personal reminiscence about Felix, his remarkable gifts, and the friendship we enjoyed for more than 25 years. The second part returns to the themes of Zagadka and considers what resonance they have for us today, nearly half a century after its first publication.

This paper examines Hegel’s place in the philosophy of Eval’d Il’enkov (1924–1979). Hegel’s ideas had a huge impact on Il’enkov’s conception of the nature of philosophy and of the philosopher’s mission, and they formed the core of his distinctive account of thought and its place in nature. At the same time, Il’enkov was victimized for his “Hegelianism” throughout his career, from the time he was sacked from Moscow State University in 1955 to the ideological criticisms that preceded his death in 1979. After considering Hegel’s influence on the history of Russian thought, the paper focuses on Hegelian themes in Il’enkov’s 1974 book, Dialektičeskaja logika and evaluates their philosophical significance. Finally, parallels are explored between Il’enkov’s situation at the end of his life and the plight of Nikolaj Bukharin, incarcerated in the Lubjanka prison in 1936 and at work on Philosophical arabesques. Both thinkers confronted the contradiction between their confidence in the rationality of history and the tragic absurdity of Soviet reality, and both responded by affirming their fidelity to Lenin and his vision of Marxism. In this way, they sought to make sense of their respective situations in the face of extreme adversity. That they so much as thought it worth trying owed much to Hegel’s influence.

John McDowell begins his essay ‘Knowledge by Hearsay’ (1993) by describing two ways language matters to epistemology. The first is that, by understanding and accepting someone else's utterance, a person can acquire knowledge. This is what philosophers call ‘knowledge by testimony’. The second is that children acquire knowledge in the course of learning their first language—in acquiring language, a child inherits a conception of the world. In The Formation of Reason (2011), and my writings on Russian socio-historical philosophy and psychology, I address issues bearing on the second of these topics, questions about the child's development through initiation into language and other forms of social being. In this article, I focus on the first: the epistemology of testimony. After expounding a view of testimony inspired by McDowell, and supplemented by ideas from Sebastian Rödl, I consider how such an account illuminates two issues in philosophy of education: the extent of an individual's epistemic dependence upon others, and the nature of teaching.

In Mind and World, John McDowell concludes that human beings and, principally by their initiation into language. Such of human development typically represent first-language learning as a movement from a non-rationally secured conformity with correct practice, through increasing understanding, to a state of rational mastery of correct practice. Accordingly, they tend to invoke something like Wittgenstein's concept of training to explain the first stage of this process. This essay considers the cogency of this view of learning and development. I agree with Sebastian Rdl believes. I conclude by considering the relevance of McDowell's view of second nature to two striking ideas: Ian Hacking's suggestion that the development of autistic children is and Derek Parfit's claim that persons are not human beings.