Rick G. Smith

There is a longstanding difficulty in distinguishing philosophy (and philosophy of education) from other kinds of writing. Even the notions of clarity and rigour, sometimes claimed as central and defining characteristics of philosophy at its best, turn out to have ineliminably figurative elements, and accounts of philosophical method often display the very rhetoricity that they describe philosophy as concerned to avoid. It is tempting to wonder how far notions of philosophy as austere and analytic are responsible for ideals of educational research as unnaturally tidy and formal, and even for conceptions of the practice of education in schools and universities as focused on targets, performance indicators and statistics. Perhaps the nature of philosophy is best understood through its history. Then the philosopher must “go to school” not only with the poets, but also with the historians, so that the disciplinary divisions here become ever harder to mark out, to the enrichment of those who practise them.