Philosophical Fellowship: An Interview with Michael Peters and Nicholas Burbules

Author(s): Jeff Stickney / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Jeff Stickney: Tell us when and how your productive collaboration began. Who else played a part in ushering in a new, post-foundational reading of Wittgenstein within philosophy of education? Michael Peters: First let me express my gratitude to you both but particularly Jeff for organizing this interview. As far as I remember our collaborations began with contributing to Jim Marshall and Paul Smeyers’ Wittgenstein’s Challenge published in 1995. We were contributors to the same collection.

Dancing Wittgenstein (after Foucault)

Author(s): Jeff Stickney / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The publication of Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Postmodernism, Pedagogy (1999) by Michael A. Peters and James D. Marshall was a landmark. I had just started my doctorate (after ten years of teaching secondary school), intent on applying Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to problems in education: as they appeared on the rough ground instead of the crystalline purity of plans drawn up by the Ministry and District School Boards (PI §107). True to form, this book charts the intellectual and cultural legacies on which Wittgenstein drew: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and (with Nicholas Burbules in Chapter 9), currents in 20th c. Viennese society that provided background to his style and aesthetic sensibilities. It also mapped the way forward by drawing connections between Wittgenstein’s manner of “writing the self” with Foucault’s neo-Nietzschean concept of arts and techniques of self-stylization. The effect was to transform my project, exploring joint applications of the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Foucault to teacher inspection and professional development: a trajectory that led me to work with James Tully at University of Toronto, who had long been employing these thinkers in political philosophy (Tully, 1989). Ten years later I appreciated what this turn meant for my own development as a writer and activist in education. At a post-lecture dinner Michael confided that in taking up Lyotard and Foucault, the more political philosophers, he “saved himself from becoming a pithy Wittgensteinian” (Toronto 2010). Anyone fatigued by “over rehearsed” expositions of the compelling rule-following argument will know what this means: even those seeing its wider applications in education. Moving into The Government of the Self and Others, Michael and his collaborators essayed/assayed practice-based approaches to philosophical and policy questions in education: whether initiate training into normative rules (Wittgenstein); or, normalizing, disciplinary and dividing practices (Foucault). His work on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Rorty, Derrida and Foucault makes Michael (along with other contributors to this volume) not only our resident genealogist but, ironically, one of the founders of post-foundational philosophy of education.

Conceiving the University

Author(s): Ronald Barnett / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In his indefatigable endeavours, Michael Peters has opened a large and complex terrain. Conceptually, it offers an horizon against which large ideas have been explored, including those of globalization, postmodernism, postpostmodernism, governmentality, ‘knowledge capitalism’ (Peters’ own term), neoliberalism, education, pedagogy, social policy, economic policy, knowledge, culture and openness. Key theorists and thinkers on whom Peters has drawn have included Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lyotard, Readings, Derrida, Rorty, and Deleuze. An oeuvre with such scope lends itself to an almost infinite interrogations, and interpretations, even when placed in the themes of this volume – those of education, politics and the cosmopolitan. In this chapter, I shall home in on just one matter, that of understanding the university: just what is it to understand the university? And I shall try to address this question in the spirit – as I glean it – of the breadth of perspectives bequeathed to us by Michael Peters.

Professor Michael A. Peters – A Kantian in Spirit

Author(s): Klas Roth / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Professor Michael A. Peters’ impressive list of publications includes numerous books and papers. He also edits international book series such as the Educational Philosophy and Theory Special Issues Monograph Series, and Interventions: Education, Philosophy and Culture as well as international journals, including Educational Philosophy and Theory and Policy Futures in Education; and the Studies in Education, Philosophy and Culture Series. The latter is a journal in China, which I think illustrates Professor Peters’ ambition to make it possible for people throughout the world to contribute to on-going discussions on issues that concern, inter alia, education in different ways.

Michael A. Peters’ Discursive Universalism

Author(s): Marianna Papastephanou / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Attributing to Michael Peters a discursive universalism, and doing so in the very title of an essay in a Festschrift, comes as a surprise. It may even have a shock effect. For, any reader, even slightly familiar with Michael’s prolific and ongoing interventions in philosophy and in educational theory, will immediately feel that there is something odd in associating with universalism a thinker typically understood as a postmodern and poststructuralist philosopher/educator. Among Michael’s inexhaustibly energetic, highly influential, and paradigm-shifting philosophical-educational contributions his thoughtful elaboration on postmodern criticisms of universalist optics surely stands out. Now, if one adds to all this what I would call Michael’s ‘paganism’ in the Lyotardian (1977) sense, and his commitment to pluralism and particularism, declaring Michael a universalist (albeit of a discursive kind) may sound not just odd but even contradictory.

Cosmopolitan Outlook: Opening Doors and Letting Learn

Author(s): A. Chr. (Tina) Engels-Schwarzpaul / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In 1996, I simply could not find a PhD supervisor in my field of architecture and design at the University of Auckland. Nobody seemed able or willing to supervise a trans-disciplinary thesis located outside the then current disciplinary expertise, habits and fashions. My way of thinking, too, was that of an outsider (German/European, shot through with Māori perspectives adopted over a decade of marriage into Ngāti Porou). Eventually, someone referred me to Michael Peters, because he was well connected and perhaps able to suggest a potential supervisor. Following a series of meetings, Michael suggested that some of my core concerns fitted with those in education and philosophy and offered me supervision. We were both aware that our disciplinary backgrounds were very different: I knew I could not expect an understanding of what matters to designers from Michael. He, in turn, did not expect me to be a philosopher.

Endword Michael Peters: Gentle Polymath and Commanding Intellectual

Author(s): Peter McLaren / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

It may strike the genteel reader as odd that a revolutionary Marxist humanist educator is penning the endword to a volume dedicated to the storied postmodernist/poststructuralist philosopher from Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud. And whilst some might view ending a book about the person and work of Mike Peters with a Postface by an author whose own work has been largely and on occasion virulently inhospitable to post-structuralism over the past several decades as a risky preemptory wager, it wouldn’t seem odd to Mike Peters. He would no doubt be pleased if I were to instantiate an ambiguous Marxist co-presence into a volume celebrating his work, not because he has any particular affinity with the well-trodden path and contradictory history of Marxism, but because of his indefatigable commitment to including diverse systems of intelligibility in examining the nature of our contentious present with its seemingly intractable social and political disjunctions. Mike is a warrior for diversity, it’s part of his ontological clarity and is what makes him such a commanding intellectual and a man of both the future and present. Mike writes in a white heat, spinning his ideas into the eschatological future where is he able to announce a state of affairs that both is and is to come.

Postscript on Marxism

Author(s): Michael A. Peters / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Peter McLaren wrote this piece last and so I come to it last and have recast it as an endword rather than a foreword because I think this will become the basis for an ongoing dialogue of which this exchange is only the first stage. It is so different from the other articles that I decided to engage with it as a postscript or endnote. Peter is a great friend. He is a “mate” as we say in New Zealand and I regard him as a brother and it is with affection that I engage with his ideas here. Where a number of the other contributors attempted to define me in their terms—I am a secret Kantian, universalist or cosmopolitan even if I don’t already know it—Peter seeks to define me by what I’m not and especially by contrast to what he is—a revolutionary Marxist. And he takes up the cudgels on behalf of revolutionary Marxism against postmodernism and poststructuralism which are movements that allegedly define me. This is a tricky assignment for Peter as a revolutionary Marxist because he is on record as being against both postmodernism and poststructuralism and yet at the same time he is my friend and wants to be able to be respectful and to say some nice things. He manages to achieve this very well and with eloquence. I am both flattered and relieved frankly— that we can remain good friends. But I like him and treat him as a brother (even though I have qualms about “brotherhoods”) not because he is a revolutionary Marxist but despite it. He could have been a Mormon.

Only a Poet Never Lies… Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski’s Thoughts on the Privilege of Poets

Author(s): Maria Łukaszewicz-Chantry / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In his treatise De perfecta poesi, sive Vergilius et Homerus, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski presents his reflections on poetic art and states that poets never lie. This privilege results from the conviction that a poet creates in the same way as God, bringing his characters to life. That is why “he can speak about what is not, as if it really existed.” Poetic fictions are also often a veil behind which a precious truth is hidden. This truth can be reached by using an appropriate allegorical interpretation.

Illusion and Truth in Theater from the Baroque to Romanticism

Author(s): Izabella Zatorska / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

What does theater, as a metonymy for literature and art, represent in the centuries of transition? French classical theater was aware of difficulties in using the Aristotelian rule of mimesis. The problem of the impossibility of capturing the essence of things, when post-truths were not yet known, was acknowledged, in theory and in practice, by Baroque theater: From the perspective of theatrum mundi, with the use of “theater within the theater” (Shakespeare, Pierre Corneille, Molière), it showed the hidden, disturbing depth of “the norm of the day.” The problem of appearances (Lesage, Marivaux) resulted in the aesthetic and moral reform of Diderot, theoretician and practitioner of drama. Radical in their revolt, the protagonists of Schiller and Musset rejected both any compromise with illusion and the possibility of reforms. At the same time, they longed for the incarnation of the ideal of pure love, and were prepared to destroy others and even themselves if this ideal was to turn out to be a lie. Goodness and responsibility, as the basis for a play, are the values which – according to Father Józef Tischner – promise that Abel’s choice will prevail over Cain’s.

Honesty as a Trait of Non-Civilized Man in the French Image of Southern Slavs at the Turn of the 18th and 19th Centuries

Author(s): Wojciech Sajkowski / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The paper deals with the French view on the morality of peoples considered uncivilized, specifically Southern Slavs inhabiting the territories of today’s Croatia and Montenegro. The problem of morality is analyzed first of all in the context of natural honesty, which was attributed to peoples considered uncivilized. The analysis uses not only the testimonies of French authors, but also French-language descriptions that were popular in France during the Enlightenment, especially the works of Alberto Fortis and Stefano Zannowich. These sources shaping the image of the Morlachs (Slavic shepherds living in provincial Dalmatia) or Montenegrins, which were popular in the second half of the 18th century, are compared with documents related to French rule in Dalmatia (1806–1813). The analysis has allowed to show what place the Slavic communities living in the peripheries of Europe at the time had in the Enlightenment’s discussions on the morality of civilized and savage people.

The Validity of Aesthetic Judgments: George Santayana’s Polemics with Tradition

Author(s): Adam Grzeliński / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The paper discusses issues of the validity of aesthetic judgements in the concept of George Santayana, the author of The Sense of Beauty and Reason in Art. Although Santayana places aesthetic experience as well as experience as such at the center of his analyses, and explicitly opposes the view that aesthetic judgements are supra-individual, I endeavor to demonstrate that his concept is not necessarily contrary to the achievements of 18th-century aesthetics proclaiming the validity of judgements of taste (Shaftesbury, D. Hume, E. Burke or I. Kant). It is true that Santayana’s multifaceted understanding of beauty reveals the limitations of Kant’s aesthetics, but nevertheless, it does not contradict its achievements. The differentiation he made between the beauty of matter, form, and expression suggests a dual meaning of the validity of aesthetic judgements, on the one hand pointing to their universality while on the other referring to the ideals of reason whose sensual representation is available in works of art.

Not Naked but Wearing “Dress upon Dress”: Johann Georg Hamann on Truth

Author(s): Anna Żymełka-Pietrzak / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The chapter presents a detailed analysis and interpretation of Johann Georg Hamann’s metaphor of truth clothed in dress upon dress, which was introduced in Hamann’s letter to Kant of July 27, 1759. Truth is displayed as a woman in many layers of dresses, but removing the clothing reveals a fearful ghost. This metaphor is in the chapter regarded as emblematic for Hamann’s reflection on truth and has been interpreted in the light of the author’s theologico-ethical model in which God’s truth becomes accessible to humans in communicational acts of condescension. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is the most important act of this kind, and comprises a theological matrix for human authorship. The incarnation of truth is an imitation of God’s kenotical act and is understood as service to the truth.

MATHEMATICS AND NARRATOLOGY: EXPLORING THE STRUCTURE OF PIRANDELLO’S NOVELS ACCORDING TO THE MÖBIUS RING

Author(s): Dimitra Giannara / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In this paper firstly I give a descriptive overview of the structure of Luigi Pirandello’s (1867–1936) novels in a ringkomposition. I subsequently replace the common knowledge of the ring with the one proposed by August Ferdinand Möbius (1790–1868). Finally and, as a result, we arrive to some seditious conclusions concerning what we thought to know about Pirandello’s heroes. Particularly I will show that they were directing away from self–reference or formal rules by rambling inside and outside the ordinary social topology. The interactions studied by physics are in the present paper fabricated in the five–dimensional space of literature which revaluates the modern conceptions of time, space and causality.

GERALD JAMES WHITROW’S PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH TO THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE

Author(s): Giovanni Macchia / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

One of the few authors to have explicitly connected the cosmological issue of the universe’s expansion with the philosophy of space is Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000). A man of extraordinary erudition, he was a British physical mathematician, cosmologist and historian of science. His main contributions were in cosmology and astrophysics, but he also wrote noteworthy essays in history and philosophy of science, above all on the concept of time. His masterpiece is The Natural Philosophy of Time, a monumental book published in 1961 and 1980. My analysis will be focused on it, specifically upon his position on the philosophical implications regarding space as they emerge from modern cosmology.

THE MODERN THERMODYNAMICS AS BASED ON THE PRINCIPLE OF VIRTUAL WORK

Author(s): Raffaele Pisano,Antonino Drago / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The principle of virtual work governs some formulations of mechanins which are alternative to Newtonian mechanics. Lazare Carnot explicitly claimed to have founded his formulation on principle of virtual velocities, which for the first time obtained in a theoretical way the characteristic laws of mechanical machines. An analysis of Sadi Carnot’s thermodynamics’ theoretical premises reveals that most of them represent characteristic features of the principle of virtual work, so it is possible to suggest a formal link between Lazare Carnot’s mechanics and modern thermodynamics: two basic principles of the latter one,included the correct formula for the efficiency of a heat engine.

Myśl Gastona Bachelarda: interpretacje francuskiej krytyki i próba antropologicznej syntezy

Author(s): Kamila Morawska / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

Problem jedności

Author(s): François Dagognet / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

O nieco zapomnianej książce Bachelarda

Author(s): Henryk Chudak / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

Wertykalność marzenia

Author(s): Marta Ples-Bęben / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0