A Situated Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education today is broadly divided between two fundamentally different views about the nature of philosophy itself.This meta-debate is almost never engaged directly, and yet it is exemplified in one way or another in many of the paradigmatic disagreements we have with one another.One view is typified by Thomas Nagel's phrase, "the view from nowhere": on this account, philosophy's virtue as a mode of inquiry is its distanced objectivity, its commitment to timeless standards of argument and reason, and its recurring attention to fundamental questions of truth, value, and meaning that establish continuity across philosophers from before Socrates to the present day. 1 The other view is a radically historicized account of philosophy as the expression of worldviews within a particular cultural and historical context, always partisan and implicated in social dynamics of power, and merely contingent in its ability to persuade or compel assent -there is nothing "timeless" about it.Few espouse these views in such extreme forms, but we believe they will be basically familiar to all.Our project here is to sketch a broadly pragmatist alternative to this dichotomy, as other pragmatists, like John Dewey, have tried to do.But our view is not Deweyan in character, although it is beholden to him, Richard Rorty, and other scholars in that tradition.