Session Information
13 SES 11 A, Vocabularies of Hope in Place of Vocabularies of Critique (can Rorty help us to redescribe Philosophy of Education?)
Symposium
Contribution
For Rorty, any attempt to articulate a theory of truth as such is said to be of no interest. To his understanding, “‘truth’ is just the name of a property which all true statements share” (Rorty, 1982, xiii). This implies that it is meaningful to differentiate the truths from the falsehoods, but pointless to say what the property of goodness is in the things we believe are good to do. Rorty points out that not understanding anymore Philosophy –with the capital ‘P’– as the framing of normative notions, would make room for a post-philosophical culture where the philosophers’ activity would be closer to the practices of cultural critique with the self-imposed limitation of devoting themselves exclusively to advancing descriptions of how things relate to each other. As Koopman very well stated some years ago, “Was Rorty writing the death of philosophy itself on its own walls? Or was Rorty offering an internal critical challenge to philosophy, meant as a provocation toward a transformation of philosophy itself?” (2013, 75). Well, this paper wants to explore what would happen if this provocation was brought to the field of Pedagogy. Taking on this Rortyan theme, keeping hope on the potentially liberating and transformative power of education cannot be based on any foundations or, as we more often read about ‘evidences’. It is rather an attitude by which individuals involved in education processes express their love for the world as a commitment with a better future, as well as their belief in its possibility. Pedagogical deliberation presupposes hope: an educator that seeks to fulfil the potentially transformative and liberating power of education needs to approach others with a hospitable hope for their amelioration. The practice of education is better defined by logic of fragility, risk and uncertainty, than by logic of evidence-based production. Embracing the weakness of educational knowledge should not be confused with paralysis. It is, rather, quite the opposite: the fear of not interpreting the situation, or not risking it, would undoubtedly be worse than doing nothing. In education, hope and that which is unlikely can be possible. Hope is part of the domain of educational knowledge. Hope instead of (just) proofs and evidences to give foundations to pedagogical knowledge. Hope as a path to develop a post-critical pedagogy understood as a way of dealing with education beyond critique (Hodgson, Vlieghe, & Zamojski, 2017).
References
Biesta, G. (2017). The Rediscovery of Teaching. London: Routledge. Castillo, R. del (2015). Rorty y el giro pragmático [Rorty and the pragmatic turn]. Barcelona: Bonalletra Alcompas. Koopman, C. (2013). Challenging Philosophy Rorty’s Positive Conception of Philosophy as Cultural Criticism. In, A. Groeschner, C. Koopman, & M. Sandbothe (Eds.) Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics (pp. 75-106). London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Hodgson, N., Vlieghe, J., & Zamojski, P. (2017). Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy. London: Punctum Books. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1998). Truth and Progress (Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1999). Philosophy and Social Hope. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Standish, P. (2015). Teaching Exposed: Education in Denial. Revista de Educación, 373, 103-120. doi: 10.4438/1988-592X-RE-2016-373-323. Standish, P., & Thoilliez, B. (2018). Critical Thinking in Crisis. A Pedagogical Reconsideration in Three Movements. Teoría de la Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria, 30(2), 7-22. doi: 10.14201/teoredu302722.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.