Viktor Johansson

The Weight of Dogmatism: Investigating “Learning” in Dewey’s Pragmatism and Wittgenstein’s Ordinary Language Philosophy

What is it to learn something? This essay is an attempt to give a treatment of our expectations and wants from an answer to that question by placing Dewey’s pragmatism and Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy in conversation with each other. Both Dewey and Wittgenstein introduce philosophical visions and methods that are meant to avoid dogmatic responses to such questions. Dewey presents a vision of learning based on the view of the human organism transacting in its environment and in that way being involved with education without any other end than continual growth. By suggesting possible results of a Wittgensteinian investigation of our use of the word “learning ”, the essay also proposes a twist on Dewey’s theory of learning, which dissolves our need for a theory of learning as an answer to the question. This gives the child a voice in contexts where the word “learn” is used. An investigation of the use of “learn” becomes a method of releasing us from the dogmatic requirements that determine what learning is. Further, Dewey’s terminology comes to comprise examples of possible uses rather than being a statement as to what learning is.

Philosophy for Children and Children for Philosophy: Possibilities and Problems

This chapter begins by illustrating the role of children in philosophy, and how childhood may impact philosophy, by turning to the work of Stanley Cavell. In particular this chapter focuses on his idea of philosophy as a confrontation with our culture’s criteria, but read in the light of Pierre Hadot’s understanding of philosophy as a way of life. It goes on to consider how the philosophy for children movement has developed through three generations of thought and practice. To illustrate how these generations have emerged, the chapter surveys differing views of the use of picture books in children’s philosophizing and philosophy. Going on from the third generation’s criticism of how the philosophy for children movement’s use of picture books has been insufficiently aware of its own assumptions, limits, and borders, the chapter concludes by showing that the critical moves from one generation to another in the field itself can be seen as a philosophical way of life, a way of life that involves philosophy for children confronting its own criteria, by emphasizing and questioning not only the boundaries of the content but also of the places where philosophy with children happens.

Killing the Buddha: Towards a heretical philosophy of learning

Abstract This article explores how different philosophical models and pictures of learning can become dogmatic and disguise other conceptions of learning. With reference to a passage from St. Paul, I give a sense of the dogmatic teleology that underpins philosophical assumptions about learning. The Pauline assumption is exemplified through a variety of models of learning as conceptualised by Israel Scheffler. In order to show how the Paulinian dogmatism can give rise to radically different pictures of learning, the article turns to St. Augustine’s and Robert Brandom’s examples of language learning, and to general strands in scholarship on moral education. Dewey’s view of childhood immaturity and the problem of adult maturity are used as first attempt at a counter picture to the idea that learning must have an end. The article takes Dewey’s idea further by suggesting how the Zen-Buddhist idea of killing the Buddha and Wittgenstein’s method of destroying pictures work on the dogmatic focus on uses of ‘learning’ that assume ends. In conclusion, the article suggests three possible uses of ‘learning’—learning from wonder, intransitive learning and passionate learning—that do not assume that learning has or must have a teleological end.

Unserious but Serious Pilgrimages: What Educational Philosophy Can Learn about Fiction and Reality from Children's Artful Play

What happens if we think of childrens play as a form of great art that we turn to and return to for inspiration, for education? If we can see play as art, then what and how can we learn from child ...

Bildung, self-cultivation, and the challenge of democracy: Ralph Waldo Emerson as a philosopher of education

Bildung, self-cultivation, and the challenge of democracy : Ralph Waldo Emerson as a philosopher of education

Wildly wise in the terrible moment: Kant, Emerson, and improvisatory Bildung in early childhood education

Abstract This paper aims to show how Emerson provides a reworking of Kantian understandings of moral education in young children’s Bildung. The article begins and ends by thinking of Emersonian self-cultivation as a form of improvisatory or wild Bildung. It explores the role of Bildung and self-cultivation in preschools through a philosophy that accounts for children’s ‘Wild wisdom’ by letting Emerson speak to Kant. The paper argues that Kant’s vision of Bildung essentially involves reason’s turn upon itself and that Emerson, particularly in how he is taken up by Cavell, shows that such a turn is already present in the processes of children inheriting, learning, and improvising with language. This improvisatory outlook on moral education is contrasted with common goals of moral education prescribed in early childhood education where the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool Lpfö 98 is used as an example.