ABSTRACT
Richard Stanley Peters is the founding father of British philosophy of education as practised in the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in 1919 and educated at Clifton College and Oxford University, where he read classics. During the Second World War he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit and engaged in social relief work. At the end of the war he became a schoolmaster at Sidcot School while studying philosophy part-time at Birkbeck College, London. He was appointed to Birkbeck as lecturer in philosophy, then reader in philosophy and psychology, specializing in ethics, philosophy of mind, political philosophy and the history and philosophy of psychology. In many quarters Peters has been seen – and saw himself – as the person who brought the techniques of post-war Oxford's 'analytic' philosophy to bear on concrete educational issues.
