For two reasons, we are particularly proud to include Wolfgang Brezinka's Philosophy of Educational Knowledge in this series of books on Philosophy of Education. Thefirst is the philosophicalinterestoftheworkitself-its remarkablescholarship and the importance ofthe philosophical positionswill beobvious to allreaders. The secondisthat it brings to the English-speaking world a wonderful example ofeducational philosophy as now being practiced in the German-speaking world. All too often philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition have not seen the sort of perspective on educational thinking that...

Many books have been written about Wittgenstein's philosophy, but this collection of articles on Wittgenstein and education is the first study in book form in this area. There have been several articles in scholarly education journals, but the special cachet of this collection is that the contributors come from six countries. The collection has been edited by Paul Smeyers and Jim Marshall, philosophers of education who live in Belgium and New Zealand, respectively. Each of the chapters represents an original study of Wittgenstein, commissioned by the editors from colleagues they know to have...

This book is designed to serve two purposes. First it provides an introduction to the ideas and works of Michel Foucault. It should be particularly appropriate for education students for whom, in general, Foucault is a shadowy presence. Second, it provides a Foucault based critique of a central plank of Western liberal education, the notion of the autonomous individual or personal autonomy. There are several introductions to Foucault but they tend to be written from a particular theoretical position, or with a particular interest in Foucault's ideas and works. For example Smart (1986) and...

Philosophy of development is a fascinating area of research at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and education. This book is unique in that it combines a broad sketch of contemporary developmental theory with detailed discussions of its central issues, in order to construct a general framework for understanding and analyzing theories of individual and collective development in various domains ranging from cognitive and moral development to developments in art. Special attention is also given to the rich relations between conceptual development and education.

In Jean PaulSartre's Nausea, Roquentin feels bound to listen to the sentimental ramblings about humanism and humanity by the Self Taught Man. "Is it my fault," muses Roquentin, "in all he tells me, I recognize the lack of the genuine article? Is it my fault if, as he speaks, I see all the humanists I have known rise up? I have known so many ofthem " And then he lists the radical humanist, the so called"left" humanist, and Communist Humanist, the Catholic humanist, all claiming a passion for their fellow men. "But there are others, a swarm of others: the humanist philosopher who bends over his...

The measured and passionate essays in this volume bring to contemporary debates about educational research both a first-hand familiarity with the practices and arguments of the educational research community and a clear grasp of the ways in which philosophical sources and analysis can inform them. It will be essential reading for researchers, masters and doctoral students who are coming to terms with educational research.

The issues I treat in this book qualitative versus quantitative methods, facts versus values, science versus politics, subjectivity versus objectivity, postm- ernism versus pragmatism, to name a few are at the core of a lively, sometimes divisive, conversation that has been unfolding in the theory and practice of e- cational research for some time. These issues fall squarely within the province of philosophy, and thus philosophical investigation has an especially useful contribution to make. But these issues are by no means the exclusive province of philosophy; they are ones in which a...

This book has been quite long in the making. In its original format, but with some different chapters, and with the then publisher, it foundered (as did other volumes in the planned series). At the in press stage, when we obviously thought it was going ahead, it was suddenly canned. Quite distraught I closed it away in a desk drawer for a year or so. But then Joy Carp of Kluwer Academic Publishers expressed an interest in it, and we were in business again. Most of the contributors to the original volume have stayed with it, only to be delayed by myself, for a variety of reasons (but see the...

happens, how it happens, and why it happens. Our assumption ought to be that this is as true in education as it is in atomic physics. But this leaves many other questions to answer. The crucial ones: What kind of science is proper or appropriate to education? How does it differ from physics? What is wrong with the prevai1 ing, virtually unopposed research tradition in education? What could or should be done to replace it with a more adequate tradi- tion? What concepts are necessary to describe and explain what we find there? It is in this realm that we find ourselves. Where to start? One...