Wittgenstein and post‐analytic philosophy of education: Rorty or Lyotard?

Abstract

I was thinking about my philosophical work and saying to myself: ‘I destroy, I destroy, I destroy…’ Context: The ‘linguistic turn’ of Western philosophy (Heidegger's later works, the penetration of Anglo‐American philosophies into European thought, the development of language technologies); and correlatively, the decline of universalist discourses (the metaphysical doctrines of modern times: narratives of progress, of socialism, of abundance, of knowledge). The weariness with regard to ‘theory’, and the miserable slackening that goes along with it (new this, new that, post‐this, post‐that, etc.). The time has come to philosophize. …there is no danger of philosophy's ‘coming to an end’. Religion did not come to an end in the Enlightenment, nor painting in Impressionism. Even if the period from Plato to Nietzsche is encapsulated and ‘distanced’ in the way Heidegger suggests, and even if twentieth‐century philosophy comes to seem a stage of awkward transitional backing and filling (as sixteenth‐century philosophy now seems to us), there will be something called ‘philosophy’ on the other side of the transition.

Performativity, Big Data and Higher Education: The Death of the Professor?

“…Over the years, The Postmodern Condition has attracted a good deal of attention from educationists (see, for example, Gietzen, 2010;Irwin, 2018;Koller, 2003;Lange, 2015;Locke, 2015;Marshall, 1999;Nuyen, 1992;Peters, 1989Peters, , 1995Peters, , 1997Peters, , 2006Roberts, 1998;Usher, 2006;Zembylas, 2000), and key questions addressed in the book remain as relevant in our present age as they were in Lyotard's time. Two decades ago, in reflecting on Lyotard's work, it was possible to claim: "In one sense, the full impact of computerisation has yet to be felt in the tertiary sector: academics have not yet been replaced (at least not in large numbers) by machines.…”