Volume 28, Number 3, 2021

EN:

In this paper, we discuss the historical relationship between empathy and reasoning from a historical and philosophical (continental and Western philosophy) point of view. We explain how empathy has lost its original aesthetic connotations through its journey from one language and culture to another. Nowadays, we often find a quite reduced understanding of empathy in psychology or education. Following this historical overview and opening up the notion of empathy to its aesthetic origins, we then apply a phenomenological lens and argue that reasoning and perspective-taking are interrelated with empathy, if we understand the importance of human embodiment: We argue that any reasonable argument relies on the fact that we indwell the world through a similar body. It is within this nexus of similarity and difference of embodiment and perceptions that our experiences can interlace. With this argument, we are hoping to address the distrust towards empathy as well as break open simplified conceptualizations of empathy in education towards a more complex understanding of this phenomenon.

EN:

Although John Dewey continues to be a source to which scholars look in order to address contemporary social and educational issues, others have suggested that Dewey may be too implicated in the project of modernity to be acceptable in educational theory and practice today. To what extent Dewey was modern, and what we make of the question of his modernity, depends on our reading of Dewey and on our understanding of modernity more generally. I will argue that a broad reading of both Dewey and modernity helps us avoid treating Dewey either as education’s saviour or as inimical to our present purposes. First, I examine Dewey’s own conception of modernity and then broaden its scope by bringing into view four aspects of Western modernity: economic modernization, the struggle for justice, individualism, and naturalism. Second, I show how Dewey can and has been read as representing one or more of these aspects, but also from the perspective of one or more of these aspects. This generates what I will call Dewey’s four “faces”: Dewey as engineer, Dewey as activist, Dewey as Romantic, and Dewey as naturalist. This mapping offers a way of making more sense of the diverse readings of Dewey that exist in the secondary literature. Finally, I make a case for Dewey’s ongoing relevance because of his capacious view of the goods of modernity and his distinctively educational philosophy.

EN:

This article focuses on ancient Daoist wisdom, together with its associated principle of yin-yang, and their contemporary significance in terms of how they might be applied within today’s classrooms as foundations for a harmonious world. It does so by illustrating the significance of Daoism and yin-yang from both historical and philosophical perspectives, as well as highlighting their spread to the West in relatively recent years in which growing numbers of classroom teachers are applying Daoist wisdom in their classrooms. It then suggests further approaches through which teachers might continue applying Daoist wisdom towards a harmonious yin-yang balance based on the associated Daoist principles of the virtue-less virtue of de and the naturalness of ziran, as well as the effortlessness of wuwei and the universal abundance of qi energy.

EN:

This piece argues that contemporary neoliberal UK universities are necessarily unable to enact decolonization owing to a contradiction between their business needs and a genuine commitment to the decolonial, which involves the complete dismantling of existing colonial discourse. Using the process of immanent critique modelled by Adorno, it is argued that the neoliberal university presents inherent contradictions that demand measurable knowledge, preordained by existing colonial epistemological boundaries. A scholar engaged in immanent critique may facilitate the potential for decolonial practices within, and against, the university apparatus.