The aim of the article is to posit the question whether, or under what conditions ‘instrumentalism’ can be seen as a viable target of the philosophical critique of education. Firstly, I will briefly review and compare three critical conceptions in modern philosophy that interpreted Western civilization as a form of instrumentalism, yet, at the same time, used the concept perhaps too sweepingly: Adorno and Horkheimer (instrumental reason), Heidegger (calculative thinking) and Arendt (means-ends logic in politics). Secondly, I will discuss the exact sweeping moment in those thinkers’ ways of pursuing their critiques of instrumentalism and the way it can, in fact, weaken the pedagogical impact of their analyses. We face a paradox here: if we consistently follow Heidegger and Adorno (Arendt as well, but the situation looks much better with her, as usual), we are prone to ignore the actual perils for freedom in, for example, subsuming education to the global market economy, because it appears to be only a contingent or occasional (ontic) phenomenon that has its ontological roots as early as Homer or Plato. Conversely, if we ignore their analyses, we endanger our critique with inevitable shallowness, i.e. with a tendency to moan about the obvious circumstances without a real understanding of their ontological, historical and cultural backgrounds. This paradox can be translated as a general paradox of the relationship between philosophy and education. To conclude, I will illustrate this by referring to the leading question of this volume: ‘what (is education) for?’, or, to put it differently, to the problem of the purpose of education. If we assume that within the problem itself instrumentalism is inscribed (as all the three philosophers would), we still face the pedagogical and concrete problem of discerning different types of instrumentality. This problem corresponds with the various ways we describe our educational aims and goals.
It seems that the first two decades of the twenty first century demonstrate political mythology to be still functioning in the political life of the West. In this context, it is interesting to view the recent publications of Hans Blumenberg's Nachlass: Präfiguration ("Prefiguration," 2014) and Rigorismus der Wahrheit ("Rigorism of Truth," 2015), as they reveal unpredicted complications for the interpretation of his philosophy of myth as well as of his political stances. They also evoke some more general questions concerning the role of myth in our contemporary political life. The aim of this article is to present the paradoxes connected with the posthumously published Blumenberg critique of Hannah Arendt and to situate it in the wider context of twentieth century political thought, specifically the work of Sorel, Schmitt, Rosenberg and Cassirer. It is also to point to more general ethical and political ambiguities connected with the problem of political mythology in the present.
The aim of this article is to consider the philosophy of Hans Blumenberg as potentially pedagogical thought. Hans Blumenberg's way of questioning can be juxtaposed with the Heideggerian way of questioning (much more popular in the philosophy of education) that starts with the human being as an ontologically distinguished creature. Blumenberg, unlike Heidegger, does not pursue the question of being as such, he consciously limits himself to anthropology, i.e. the humanity of being. Consequently, his anthropology is not fundamentally ontological, but contingent and culture-oriented. Blumenberg's phenomenological description of humanity concentrates on the ways humans deal with different modes of the absolute (not only theological, but also natural and political). It is a consequence of Blumenberg's anthropological statement concerning the human being as an underprivileged creature which compensates its natural shortcomings with culture (i.e. myths, metaphors, science, etc.), being able to make the absolute less predominant or rigorous, mitigating it in a way. This has humanistic and pedagogical import: the greater distance between us and absolute realities, the more space there is for human creativity and self-creativity, foremostly in the field of education.
The purpose of this article is to analyse the changes in the conditions of academic freedom that occurred over the last several decades and to point out the possible ramifications of those changes. Firstly, the author begins by depicting the origins and the meaning of the neohumanistic modern idea of academic freedom and with outlining some of its paradoxes and limitations. Secondly, the classical neohumanistic concept of academic freedom is juxtaposed with new premises of economic neoliberalism, as diagnosed by Michel Foucault. Also the consequences of economic legitimisation of political order for academic freedom are drawn. Ultimately, the author concentrates on the results of economic limitations of freedom for free thinking and its relationship with human moral judgements.
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