Marianna PapastephanouUniversity of CyprusSince Plato’s allegory of the cave two educational-philosophical critical modes have stood out: the descriptive (reality as it is) and the normative (reali...

This paper explores the meaning of existential intelligence by critically engaging with Nick Peim’s critique of “pure education.” Peim’s work challenges the ontotheological status of education as an unquestioned good, exposing its complicity in bureaucratic control, instrumental rationality, and the ecological devastations of the Anthropocene. Drawing on this critique, the paper reflects on the limitations of prevailing ethical and conceptual frameworks, which often prove inadequate in the face of systemic violence and historical crisis. To reimagine education beyond these limits, the (...) paper turns to Tanabe Hajime’s philosophy of metanoetics, engaging his work through the growing body of scholarship on the Kyoto School in philosophy of education. It is argued that Tanabe’s emphasis on radical self-reflection, repentance, and transformation offers an alternative grounded in lived, moral engagement with the world. The paper further considers this through the narrative of Franz Jägerstätter, as portrayed in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, interpreting his path of non-reactive suffering, spiritual integrity, and unyielding love through the lens of Tanabe’s gyō–shin–shō (practice-faith-witness). In doing so, the paper proposes a framework for education that resists the dominant logics of progress, productivity, and control, making room for ethical transformation and communities beyond national egoism. (shrink)

In their defence of the school Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons define it as a source of ‘free time.’ Drawing on Catherine Malabou's compelling reading of Heidegger in her The Heidegger Change, I aim to provide a strong ontological justification for the claims made on behalf of the school concerning free time, common goods, and renewing (changing) the world: the school provides free time; it transforms knowledge and skills into common goods; and it has the potential to give everyone the (...) time and space to renew the world. The paper enquires into what ‘free time as non-productive time,’ ‘common goods,’ and ‘changing the world’ mean on an ontological register, and why therefore the school is so precious and warrants our utmost care in the face of its conservative and progressive critics alike. I discern a single underlying notion, the notion of essence as mutability, constituting the link connecting free time, common goods, and renewal of the world. (shrink)

This book presents an original exploration of philosophical questions pertaining to the ways we grasp the Absolute by bringing together the Buddhist notion of interpermeation of all phenomena into contemporary strains of thought in continental philosophy. This text introduces an ontological concept, granularity, deploying it to probe questions concerning the intersection of ontology, ethics, and education. A wide range of issues in metaphysics are covered—including being, nothingness, unity, plurality, truth, change, transformation, subjectivity, contradiction, coherence, potentiality—from the perspective of thinkers such (...) as Hegel, Heidegger, Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Žižek, and Harman. The text deploys granularity in arguing for an ethics of unconditional hospitality within education. This volume is intended for students and researchers working in the areas of philosophy of education, philosophy of religion, and continental philosophy. (shrink)

We are no longer in a position to attribute a positive essence to humanity and its presumed centrality. What it means to be human cannot be ascertained once and for all or in any a priori fashion....

Many political and economic forces are driven by the desire to eliminate democratic plurality in today’s political juncture. Democratic republicanism itself in its contemporary forms has failed to address many of the daunting moral, political, economic, social, technological, and ecological challenges we face today. It is argued that to fulfill its essence of egalitarian freedom and social justice, democratic republicanism must first decouple from the global neoliberal capitalist regime and secondly embrace some form of postcapitalist and posthumanist orientation guided by (...) a new attractor, a teleological approach anchored in a new telos of superhumanity. Democracy without a telos of superhumanity is a democracy in name only. It is time to lay our teleophobia aside and propose a strong teleological account in the vein of a Buddhist no-self doctrine at the heart of the onto-politico-economy. (shrink)

This study aims to explain Murray Bookchin's understanding of “so-cial ecology”. Following the aim of this study, we will first offer the reader some explanations to give a general insight into ecological problems and the histori-cal development of the ecology movement. Next, we will examine the criti-cisms made by Bookchin to different approaches which constitute the ecology movement, to Marxism and anarchism and the analyses of his dialectical natu-ralism doctrine, hierarchy and capitalism, and communalist ideology. After the-se examinations, we will (...) convey the criticisms directed to social ecology and try to realize the secondary aim of our study. The mentioned secondary aim is to draw attention to the inadequacy of the theoretical basis of Bookchin's analysis of hierarchy. I will argue that Bookchin treated hierarchy as a historical, anth-ropological, economic, social, biological, psychological, and political category, but failed to explain the metaphysical foundations of hierarchy. This means that Bookchin's anti-hierarchy and anti-state position, i.e., his communalist ideology result in questions that need to be answered. I will claim that unless these questions are answered, it would be unmaintainable to fully defend the understanding of social ecology. (shrink)

The core idea explored in this chapter is whether we can live without psychological conflict, discontent, and anxiety. In other words, is it possible to eliminate psychological trauma, the state of self being divided against itself, completely? Positively put, is it possible to live immersed in a state of consciousness of wholeness, unification, and undividedness? To address this question, Žižek’s interpretation of the second draft of Schelling’s Die Weltalter (Ages of the World) in his The Abyss of Freedom is engaged (...) vis-à-vis Sean McGrath’s work on Schelling. Employing the notion of interpervasiveness of forms, that is, granularity, the reader is invited to enter an intricate labyrinthine matrix of Schelling-Žižek-Hegel-Lacan-McGrath interminably interpreting and reinterpreting each other. Whosoever we start with—Žižek’s Schelling, McGrath’s Schelling, Hegel’s Schelling, Lacan’s Hegel, Schelling’s Hegel, Žižek’s Hegel, Žižek’s Lacan, Žižek’s Lacan’s Hegel, McGrath’s Lacan, Žižek’s Lacanian reading of Schelling against Schelling (!) and so forth—the others are immediately within reach: any one starting point leads to all and more since any one starting point is granular containing all and more. Here, only a few threads of this interminable labyrinth are rehearsed. (shrink)

The pedagogical core of the overall argument is delineated in reference to the notion of hyperholistic education. The latter embodies the therapeutic principle of revealing and bringing into action the unconditioned in any thought pattern. Any philosophical position, by virtue of the interpermeation of all philosophical positions, is the embodiment of the unconditioned. Therefore, hyperholistic education can deploy any conceptual perspective as a therapeutic device to shake the self out of its hypnotic stupor. Accordingly, the question of self is analyzed (...) in its ontological, phenomenological and psychological registers with the goal of situating this analysis within the spectrum of consciousness development that spans the entire psyche of a human being. A spectrum of consciousness model employed by Ken Wilber is brought into play in this context. According to the latter, the human psyche has three basic unfolding structures: prerational, rational, and transrational. Hyperholistic education follows the path of transformation from prerational to rational to transrational levels of psychic development in the face of ontological ambiguity. To illustrate the issue of overcoming the limitations of rational mental-egoic consciousness, Bergson and Levinas’ thought as well as the analysis of various contemporary Promethean projects are utilized. In contradistinction to contemporary teleophobia, a Buddhist Prometheanism in the form of the ethics of the Bodhisattva ideal is formulated. (shrink)

As far as hyperholistic education is concerned, ontology, epistemology, ethics, psychology, and politics are inextricably intertwined. Neo-Tiantai ontology, the Buddhist Promethean project in the form of the ethics of the Bodhisattva ideal, transformations of consciousness from pre-egoic state to egoity to granularity are all intimately interwoven, for, at bottom, they all point, as the natural consequence of the notion of granularity, to non-hierarchical equality as the immanent source of action in the world. Another word that can be employed to refer (...) to this complex is ecology: the intuitive, immanent, self-developing, self-organizing unitary whole encompassing all its contradictions within which human life is constituted. The German tradition of Bildung in its contemporary forms is analyzed in relation to the ecological aspect of hyperholistic education to support the claim that Bildung is still a relevant concept for education in late modern societies. Levinas, Biesta, and Žižek feature as conversation partners in the discussion of the granularity of subjectification as the tension between egological and nonegological modes of existence. (shrink)

Catherine Malabou’s groundbreaking interpretation of Heidegger in her book The Heidegger Change provides an occasion to suggest strong parallels between Heideggerian and Daoist/Buddhist ontologies. In her imaginative reading of Heidegger, Malabou comes close to a Buddhist/Daoist conception of change: the metamorphosed Dasein is a daoist Dasein. Here an attempt is made to think together presence, in its Buddhist sense revealed by way of satori, and presencing, in its Heideggerian sense, that is, the sense that there is no foundation beyond the (...) epochal play of the concealing and revealing of being. Presence and presencing refer to granularity in the mode of eternity and temporality, respectively. These two modes, which are not-two, interpervade. The self-givenness of being oscillates between these two modes, hence its ambiguity since by nature this oscillation is a transparent-non-transparent process. There is really no oscillation between two distinct and separate modes or poles. The poles are always-already intertwined. Given this, within the context of Malabou’s reading of Heidegger, the originary mutability, or oscillation, of there is/it gives is analysed and the implications of such an analysis for the meaning of schooling are explored. (shrink)

A conclusion in the form of a tapestry is no conclusion for granularity is not about tying up the loose ends. It is rather about not being able to tie up the loose ends ever. Therefore, this conclusion is nothing but beginning anew, or simply the continuation of introduction by other means. In this spirit, some further attempts to think the Absolute anew are presented. Peirce’s categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness are offered to facilitate the articulation of the notion (...) of absolute justice in relation to the critique of Žižek’s work to drive home the message that transrational satori experience is far from pathological. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, and in particular, his concept of consummatory experience, should be engaged anew to rethink the merits of the Philosophy for Children programme, which arose in the 1970s in the US as an innovative educational programme that aims to use philosophy to help school children improve their ability to become more conscious of and make judgments about the aspects of their experience that have ethical, aesthetic, political, logical, or even metaphysical meaning. Although (...) an international success, the PFC programme has attracted many criticisms from a variety of directions. I claim that Deweyan concept of consummatory aesthetic experience is broad and flexible enough to provide a robust framework to make sense of the pedagogical horizon of PFC and therefore fruitfully engage the various critics of the movement coming from religious and social conservatives, educational psychologists, critical theorists, postmodernists/posthumanists, and professional philosophers themselves. The goal of this paper is to offer in a preliminary fashion the basic elements of Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which was principally elucidated in his Art as Experience, to defend PFC as a viable pedagogy. (shrink)

In this paper, I intend to discuss what I would like to call “the ideal of teaching as consummatory experience” in relation to John Dewey’s concept of “experience,” as the latter was elucidated in his later works, especially Art as Experience. What I have in mind with the phrase “the ideal of teaching as consummatory experience” basically points to what it means to be fully alive as a teacher and what happens when teaching is experienced in such a manner. In (...) other words, what is the relationship between teaching that is truly fulfilling for the teacher and experience that is truly educative for the student(s)? There is no doubt in my mind that the two are intimately connected. Truly fulfilling teaching and truly .. (shrink)

An intriguing interresonance plays out between various forms of Mahayana Buddhist ontology and Žižek’s dialectical materialism. His disdainful critique of Buddhism is well-known. As a cultural critic, Žižek might be onto something in his contention that Western Buddhism functions as the perfect ideology for late capitalism. As an ontologist, however, he seems to be ambivalent regarding the parallels between the Buddhist Void, to which the Western Buddhists supposedly withdraw, and his elaboration of a new foundation of dialectical materialism. Žižek is (...) one of the few contemporary continental philosophers who do not hesitate to engage Buddhism. My claim is that, notwithstanding his criticism, Žižek is much closer to Mahayana than he thinks. My aim therefore is to demonstrate how this is so. To do this, I will mainly focus on the following forms of Mahayana thought: śūnyatā in the context of Nāgārjuna's the Two-Truth doctrine, Tiantai School of Chinese Buddhist concept of li, and Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy of basho, which was heavily influenced by the Japanese Zen/Pure Land Buddhism. After going through some of the preliminary affinities among Mahayana forms and Žižek in its absolute contradiction, and materialism as the contradictory/paradoxical field conceived as an atheistic religious field, and so on), I will analyse each school of Mahayana mentioned above and point out the parallels between these and Žižek’s own thought. (shrink)

In this paper, an account of two novel ontologies is given to point to the need to revise the status of facts in school curriculum. It is argued that schooling is in dire need of re-enchantment. The way to re-enchant schooling is to re-enliven the world we inhabit. We need to fall head over heels in love with the world again. In order to do that, we need to shake up our conception of “the hard and cold facts of the (...) world” to make the latter come alive radiating vibrancy and luminosity out into the world. Facts have to be liberated from their “cold and hard” status and become things that captivate us with their uniqueness and dynamism. To the extent that facts enchant (instead of merely re/present the world), working with them leads to educative experience. To work out how to let the facts do that, two thinkers and two ways to reconceptualize ‘facts’ are discussed: Graham Harman and his objects, and Ken Wilber and his holons. (shrink)

This article is about a pedagogical movement I discern in Quentin Meillassoux’s ontology. The goal of the essay is to introduce his approach to reality in outline form and offer it as a possible route to conceptualize education as the practice of keeping the bodymind attentive and agile against its unsound ossification by way of providing a unified heightened sense of meaning, that is, consummatory experience, in a radically open and contingent world. Meillassoux offers a new conception of necessity and (...) contingency based on the Badioun principle that ‘nothing is inaccessible to reason.’ This move helps Meillassoux to claim that reason can access the absolute for there is no inaccessible necessary transcendence by providing an intriguing critique of the principle of sufficient reason. As a result, Meillassoux’s argument leads to the conclusion that the only necessity is contingency itself. By excluding any necessary being, but also maintaining the absolute necessity of contingency itself, Meillassoux establishes what he calls the “factial.” Meillassoux’s factiality induce pedagogical interventions that lead to acquiring a new point of view whereby ossification of bodymind is staved off and a state of mind that is endlessly fascinated by the immanence, or the most radical becoming, of the world is achieved. (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that the inordinate amount of time and attention given to the use of textbooks in education inadvertently leads to deadening miseducative experiences and creates a learning environment where what Dewey calls ‘consummatory experience’ is thwarted. In order to unpack this thesis, Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics is engaged, and in particular, his concept of consummatory experience is defined and its temporal nature is elucidated by referring to two modes of time: chronological and phenomenological. Subsequently, the relation (...) between teaching and consummatory experience is elucidated to uncover the reason why using textbooks is counterproductive. (shrink)

This paper discusses the repercussions of a new metaphysics—speculative/weird realism—for education and pedagogy. A historic shift is taking place in present-day continental philosophy, which involves an explicit and renewed call for realism. One of the most salient features of this development is a revitalised interest in ontological questions. As part of this overall trend towards realist and materialist ontologies in current continental thinking, the paper particularly focuses on Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, which claims that aesthetics is first philosophy. Harman’s object-oriented (...) philosophy is an approach to metaphysics and ontology that is enamored by the experience of the vibrant yet inscrutable autonomous reality of objects. In order to come to terms with this new approach to reality, I suggest education be conceived as the cultivation of an aesthetic attitude understood as the ability to uphold the tension between relational and non-relational aspects of objects understood in the Harmanian idiom. (shrink)