From Disembodied Intellect to Cultivated Rationality
From Disembodied Intellect to Cultivated Rationality
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11951949 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jan Derry (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 117-122 |
| Publication date | 2016-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Philosophy of Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0309-8249 • E-ISSN: 1467-9752 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9752.12177 |
| OpenAlex | W2742993789 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 10 |
The issues that Paul Standish alerts us to are significant since they situate McDowell's argument in reference to works lying outside the mainstream tradition of philosophy, works that reject epistemology and its bedfellow scepticism. Standish brings to the fore a way of thinking that is relevant to contemporary educational practice. Those who work in the field of education cannot help but be struck by the mismatch between the pervasive managerialism, obsessed by targets and objectives, and the hankering after ‘something more’ amongst those who believe it possible to subscribe pragmatically to the demands of such an approach yet claim to reject them in principle. Responses to the failures of utilitarian approaches in education, rather than seeking a richer account of rationality, have turned instead to affectivity and to embracing ways of being in the world that avoid what they take to be the excesses of abstract reason. In Back to the Rough Ground (1993), Joseph Dunne addresses precisely this issue through the practice of teaching. Specifically, he asks how administratively set targets and objectives can achieve the professional development of teachers; how an artistic and expressive endeavour such as educating can be administered and, by implication, instrumentalised. He argues that when education is conceived instrumentally there is ‘no sense of the pedagogic relationship setting a field of psychic tension’, or of the possibility that, ‘something might be at work in the pedagogic situation which cannot simply be made the object of analysis but must rather be lived through’. He writes of ‘a kind of subsoil which nourishes the fruit of explicit purpose but which is not itself the fruit’. Referring to Wittgenstein, he makes the point with which McDowell is also concerned—that we want constraint on our freedom to deploy concepts. Concepts are not detached from what they conceptualise or indeed from the ground in which they arise, and so, Dunne concludes, ‘... one might teach by this model on ice but hardly on the rough ground of the classroom’ (1993, p. 5)
Argument (complex analysis · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Higher education · Intellect · Mainstream · Object (grammar · Philosophy of education · Rationality · Skepticism · Sociology · Education and Critical Thinking Development · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2026 (10) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |