ABSTRACT
The roots of even the most contemporary philosophy and philosophy of education run deep. Philosophers return to the ideas of Habermas and Heidegger, of Wittgenstein and Dewey, of Mill and Kant, of Hume and Locke and, to leap a few centuries, of Plato and Aristotle, not just out of historical curiosity but because of their continuing power to illuminate and reinterpret contemporary experience. This is partly because the substantive preoccupations of philosophy, past, present and (we might expect) future, change in their specific expression, but not in terms of their fundamental concerns. Questions to do with the principles that should govern human conduct, the requirements for human flourishing, the nature of a just society, the meaning and conditions of liberty, the nature of human being and the possibilities for and limits upon human understanding of the natural and social worlds are ones with which successive generations have grappled and ones which continue to occupy us in the contemporary world. These and similar questions of a philosophical nature are also central to every significant debate in the field of educational theory, policy, practice and research. National and international debates about the aims of education and the principles which should govern educational practice, the scope of the curriculum, education for citizenship, faith schools, parents’ and children’s rights, education in a multi-racial/culturally diverse society, the role of the university in a mass higher-education system all rest on essentially philosophical considerations, as well as empirical data. More specifically, in the educational research environment, contest about what forms of enquiry can illuminate and inform educational experience and practice and what kind of evidence can provide a reliable basis for policy, and about the kind of ‘competently produced web of argument’ (Phillips, 2007, p. 328) or practical judgement which can enable one to combine evidence, experience, political understanding and normativity into a sensible decision – all of these, too, rest on philosophical understanding, in this case rooted in theory of knowledge and logic.
