Ivan Zamotkin

The aim of the article is to philosophically address and expand the contemporary discourse of the increasingly digitalized education by examining the problem of matter of education and its conceptualizations in this context. With the digital transformation of education a significant change occurs not only in terms of what is considered to be a matter of education, but also in the very principles of interaction between the subjects of education. In order to do this, in the first section several examples of conceptual justifications of applying digital technologies in education are examined with the task of demonstrating how in such justifications the activity of education is reduced to the process of learning and what risks such instrumental interpretation engenders. Then, these issues are analyzed and contextualized utilizing the material of the philosophical discussion of the 20th century - the critique of the progressive education in the analytic philosophy of education. By outlining the relevance of the arguments of discussion on manner/matter to realities of digital education, the issue of the dominance of the logic of learning in current education is analyzed. In the last section several adjustments to the contemporary discourse on digitalization of education are proposed, aimed at finding a balance between individual and social dimensions of the problem of matter of education, given the current tendency of mass personalization in education. Particularly, the importance of the idea of education as a common good in the contemporary educational discourse is claimed.

In this paper, we examine the political and educational relevance of Hannah Arendt’s account of friendship. Drawing from Arendt’s central works on friendship, we offer a novel interpretation of the concept by connecting the notion with the idea of educational ‘love for the world’, amor mundi. With this interpretation, we seek to demonstrate that the concept of friendship has both direct educational and indirect political significance. Thereby, we distinguish our interpretation from two previous understandings of the educational relevance of the Arendtian notion of friendship—those by (1) Aaron Schutz and Marie G. Sandy, and (2) Morten T. Korsgaard—in which friendship is either assigned a specifically political role (as in (1)) or its significance to education is narrowly understood (as in (2)). We argue our interpretation of friendship offers both a new contribution to the understanding of the relationship between education and politics in the context of Arendt scholarship, and a novel way of thinking about the educational significance of friendship in the context of contemporary democratic politics, especially the prevailing political polarization.