What Do Philosophers of Education Do?

Claudia Ruitenberg is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She teaches courses in educational theory, philosophical research methods, and critical thinking. She has published articles in the Philosophy of Education Yearbooks, the Journal of Philosophy of Education, Studies in Philosophy of Education, and Educational Philosophy and Theory. Her research interests include philosophical research methods, discursive performativity and its relation to freedom of speech, hate speech and censorship in education, agonistic political theory and the implications for political education, and queer theory.

Educational research addresses a plethora of questions. And yet many of the most pressing questions that confront education simply cannot be answered with empirical data: they often require a philosophical approach. But what exactly is it that philosophers do? This collection of essays examines a range of philosophical methods in educational research, demonstrating how philosophy of education can be understood methodologically, whilst offering critical consideration of the consequences of methodological analysis.

Preface (Paul Standish). 1. Introduction: The Question of Method in Philosophy of Education (Claudia Ruitenberg). 2. The Strict Analysis and the Open Discussion (Katariina Holma). 3. 'Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better': Dialectical Argument in Philosophy of Education (Daniel Vokey). 4. Education and Selfhood: A Phenomenological Investigation (Michael Bonnett). 5. Examples as Method? My Attempts to Understand Assessment and Fairness (in the Spirit of the Later Wittgenstein) (Andrew Davis). 6. Witnessing Deconstruction in Education: Why Quasi-Transcendentalism Matters (Gert Biesta). 7. Under the Name of Method: On Jacques Ranciere's Presumptive Tautology (Charles Bingham). 8. Distance and Defamiliarisation: Translation as Philosophical Method (Claudia Ruitenberg). 9. Between the Lines: Philosophy, Text and Conversation (Richard Smith). 10. Method, Philosophy of Education and the Sphere of the Practico-Inert (Marianna Papastephanou). Index.