Philosophy Today

The aim of this interview has been to rekindle the debate surrounding the meaning and purpose of education in today’s society. Is a humanistic education still relevant in a world obsessed with scientific proof and driven by a problem-solving mentality, or is it becoming obsolete, as some experts in education seem to suggest? (http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2016/07/26/actualidad/1469530199_692638.html). While recalling, often humorously, his own experience as both a student and an educator, Vattimo stresses the importance of freedom for the emergence of critical thinking—or, better, actual thinking; and since freedom has mainly been the prerogative of humanistic disciplines he warns against the ongoing tendency to subject all spheres of knowledge (including philosophy and literature) to the rigours of a scientific approach.

Simon Critchley discusses his views on education and philosophy, reflecting on his experiences as a student from childhood to the present, his anxieties about teaching, and what philosophical writing he wants from his students. By discussing his relationships with influential teachers in his life, Dr. Critchley explores the problem of teachers as masters; the need to develop philosophy’s approach to tradition while engaging problems posed to it by work on race and gender; his experience conducting online, public philosophy through The Stone; and the politics of student and adjunct labor in higher education.

The memories of the teaching we had during the seventies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona show, forty years later, that this teaching was not a matter of a premeditated learning program. However, the diversity of the teachers we knew, their characters and examples, project a certain shadow of a philosophical experience that has been shared by several generations of contemporary Catalan philosophers.

A memoir of Richard Rorty as a teacher, a philosopher, an intellectual, and a man of letters, by a former student.

In this interview, Judith Butler remembers her teacher, the phenomenologist Maurice Natanson. Natanson observed that learning how to see is central to both teaching and learning, and Professor Butler reflects on Natanson’s views of the relation between perception, pedagogy, and world-making. She discusses the possibilities and limits of phenomenology, and its engagements with intentionality, reason, and faith. Professor Butler also reflects on the influence of phenomenology on her theory of gender performativity as well as her recent work on bodies in alliance.

This essay offers a discussion of how Arthur Danto educated me philosophically both through his personal example and through his work. Along the way, I detail what I take to be his most important lesson: to engage deeply and seriously with the subject of one’s philosophy, in his case predominantly art, and thus always to retain contact with the world outside of philosophy. Danto modeled a truly engaged philosopher of art, attending to history, actual practices and contemporary currents, without sacrificing philosophical clarity and depth.

A homage in the guise of an essay, this is the story of the last course Reiner Schürmann taught. As a text, it attempts to describe, situate, and come to terms with the power of Schürmann’s teaching in the context of his last lectures on Heidegger’s Being and Time. But if it is to be true to the deepest lessons of Schürmann’s thinking, it will also need to be heard as an invitation to interpret together the significance of his reading so that it may be permitted to shape the course of the lives of those who encounter it.

In this essay I examine Derrida’s attempts to transform how philosophy is conceived, specifically as this occurs in his writings on education. In these writings Derrida challenges two understandings of philosophy—in his interventions into debates on lycée education he targets philosophy in France, while in texts related to the founding of the Collège International de Philosophie at stake is philosophy understood as a broader European institution. I argue that in each case key in Derrida’s challenge is his rethinking of philosophy’s relation to other disciplines, and I suggest that this rethinking can aid us in our own attempts to transform education in philosophy.

This essay examines Slavoj Žižek’s radical pedagogy by drawing on his concepts of parallax and his gloss on objet petit a.

It is well known that the American director Terrence Malick studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell and translated the work of Martin Heidegger. He eventually traded Harvard and Oxford for Hollywood, though. This essay traces Malick's evolution from budding academic philosopher to cinematic innovator. It suggests that Malick's cinematic career should be viewed as both a rejection of academic philosophy and a celebration of the examined life.