Eduardo Duarte

This book provides an account, both theoretical and phenomenological, of the education offered by philosophy. Specifically, it examines the three distinct moments that make up the practice of philosophy: reading, writing, and discussion. By considering each moment in turn, the author explores how philosophical learning creates opportunities for what Hannah Arendt described as "the gift of thinking poetically" and suggests that the dynamic and nonlinear relationship between these moments is what constitutes the dialectic of a philosophical education. Grounded in years of practice and offering scholarly commentary throughout, this shortform book will appeal to students and philosophers of education, as well as those with interests in teaching and learning more broadly"-- Provided by publisher.

This paper will explore the aesthetic experience that can occur with music, and the potentially transformative existential education that can unfold from that experience. First and foremost, the paper explores the ways W.E.B Du Bois engages with music in _The Souls of Black Folk_. Drawing on the African-American tradition of the spirituals, but also European symphonic music, Du Bois shows the different ways music can captivate a listener. But Du Bois also complicates what is meant by “listening” to music. This can happen when music is used as a literary device, symbolically as a way of setting the mood for the reader, but also when it is “heard” as arriving from the future. Secondly, this paper turns to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose writing on listening, music and philosophy has captured the attention of musicologists, literary theorists, educators, and, of course, philosophers. For Nancy, listening includes both the embodied experience of hearing and processing sound, as well as the hermeneutics of listening to the sound of ideas. Thinking is musical, music is philosophical, and the distinction between the two is not always entirely clear. Together, Du Bois and Nancy help us to gain a deeper appreciation and understanding for the diverse ways that “music” and “listening” can be experienced.

Freire’s project of critical literacy, which he initiated in 1946 when he was appointed director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the state of Penambuco, Brazil, was an immediate overturning of the traditional classroom that, along with other vestiges of colonialism, has its roots in European authoritarian pedagogies that accentuate the dichotomy between the expertise of the master and the ignorance of the novice. “By giving the student formulas to receive and store, we have not offered him the means for authentic thought”. In sum, Freire’s is a decolonial project intent on dismantling antidemocratic, anti-dialogic, and authoritarian schooling by initiating an entirely new project of liberation education within agricultural campesino communities and beyond.

This article is one in a series of attempts to clear discursive space for speculative thinking in education. The impulse to move toward another form of ‘philosophy of education’ is inspired by ongoing conversation with Heidegger, whose later work, in particular, indicated the possibility of a poetic thinking that could express the state of wonder from whence learning arises. Philosophers of education may be interested in the organized manner in which learning is organized at the level of culture, politics, and society. Speculative thinking in education, however, makes a horizontal transcendence, into an imagined future beyond the apparent present. In what follows, I will explore what I am calling Heidegger’s prognostic in order to make further articulation of the project of originary thinking. A brief recollection of this project will precede the presentation of Heidegger’s prognostic. After that presentation, I will attempt to show how the future predicated by Heidegger’s prognostication may be seen to come forward through the poetics of originary thinking. Here, I will revisit some recent work I have done on originary thinking as poiein, or the making of more poetry, less prose in educational theory.

This paper contributes to those analyses that have discussed Hegel'sinfluence on Freire, and Freire's rethinking of Hegel. Yet, my narrative of the dialectic of conscientizacion, which I presenthere, is a novel attempt to read both thinkers simultaneously.Thus, in this paper I am exploring, and not didactically proving Gadotti's (1994) important, yet unqualified,claim that Hegel's dialectic ``can be considered the principaltheoretical framework of (Freire's) Pedagogy of the Oppressed.It could be said that the whole of his theory of conscientization has its roots in Hegel'' (p. 74). And in thisexploration, I am not demonstrating Freire's ``expansion'' ofHegel's dialectic (Schutte, 1990), nor taking a positionon whether or not the dialectic of Freire's Pedagogy of theOppressed supersedes the Hegelian dialectic (Torres, 1976). Nor am I offering a ``comparison'' of the two dialectics(Torres, 1994). (Of course, having made these claims,I am, as it were, taunting the reader to deconstruct mypiece.) My aim here is to immerse, or insert, myself intothe Freirean/Hegelian dialectic itself. I attempt to situatemyself within that peculiar position of the dialecticianwho ``braids'' ideas through synthetic textual analysis.I use a third person descriptive perspective thatincorporates the ``voices'' of Freire and Hegel, and, thereby, weave a ``new'' synthesized account of theemergence of critical consciousness within the formaleducational setting.

This essay is a review of Peter McLaren's most recent work, Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire. The essay situates McLaren's work in the philosophical tradition of Marxist Humanism, with reference specifically to Raya Dunayevskaya and Paulo Freire. Despite invoking the work of Dunayevskaya as a foundation for his own project, McLaren does not offer a robust explication of this important thinker, nor of the Hegelian‐Marxist discourse she embraced. Here, as in much of McLaren's work, the reader is not offered rigorous analysis of his philosophical assumptions. The dearth of such analysis, this essay argues, compromises the critical thrust of McLaren's work. In turn, the essay sketches a framework for unpacking the Marxist Humanist paradigm, and, thereby, rethinking the philosophical foundations of contemporary critical pedagogy.