This essay describes what it means to live with existential self-doubt, explores how such doubt emerges in educational encounters, and examines some educational benefits and challenges of uncertainty and doubt. Mordechai Gordon begins his analysis by describing the type of self-doubt that Paul Cézanne embodied, that is, of an artist who painted…

Siegel claimed that teachers are obliged to provide grounds whenever demanded, as a result of which they must be able to subject to scrutiny whatever they teach. In this paper, however, and taking as a reference Wittgenstein's "On Certainty," it is shown that such a demand cannot work for second language teachers because their main task…

Uncertainty is a key feature of philosophising with children. It is central to the theory and methodology of philosophical inquiry and the educational assumptions underlying it. Uncertainty also presents a specific challenge for pupils and teachers undertaking philosophical inquiry in the classroom, because mainstream education is mostly based on…

Understanding how indeterminacy is different from uncertainty is crucial to posthumanism and has major implications for reconfiguring curriculum. Uncertainty has to do with "epistemology," about not knowing whether a state of affairs is or is not; for instance, one would not know whether something is here or there, now or then.…

The field of Kinesiology has grown over the centuries from a discipline primarily focused on sport to one that includes a more scientific focus, leading to an increase in scholarship and research. This study provides an overview of Kinesiology's history, highlighting the connection between African and the Greek Philosophers that paved the way for…

Color has been considered as a special problem in several disciplines, notably art and music, but also philosophy and literature. Given that color is also a central feature of some scientific thought (think of Newton and the color spectrum, for example), the question "What color is the interdisciplinary?" seems to be a golden opportunity…

We present a theoretical review of notions of autonomy to show how they organize discourses within social sciences around the biological reality of ideal self-regulating individuals. First, we reconstruct key meanings of autonomy in biological theory, focusing on theories of autopoietic systems and their connections to constructivist…

Novalis, the Early German Romantic poet and philosopher, had at the core of his work a mysterious depiction of the "absolute." The absolute is Novalis' name for a substance that defies precise knowledge yet calls for a tentative and sensitive speculation. How one asserts a truth, represents an object, and sets about encountering things…

Despite an increasing array of "quality indicators" and substantial investments in educating professionals, there continues to be clear evidence of discordant, or even negligent, practice by accredited professionals. We refer to discordant professional practice as being "out of tune" with what is accepted as good practice. In a…

Douglas Mitchell's introductory remarks on Richard McKeon's "Communication, Truth, and Society" set the theme of communication and McKeon's philosophy in the context of his lifelong friendship with the literary/rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke. McKeon's essay is in two parts: the first is devoted to communication as a means to avoid…

Over the course of the past few decades, scholars and theorists have engaged in a dynamic and concerted effort to interpret, make sense of, and resist a variety of social phenomena often categorized under the concept of "postmodernism." This project has also been taken up by educators of various stripes, especially those who identify…

Inherently concerned with the personal and cultural development of individuals, intercultural competence can be regarded as an inseparable aspect of "Bildung". However, while scholars have acknowledged the affiliation between these two concepts, what remains to be investigated is the extent to which notions of "Bildung" are…

In this essay Tyson Lewis reevaluates Jean-Jacques Rousseau's assessment of the pedagogical value of fables in Emile's education using Giorgio Agamben's theory of poetic production and Thomas Keenan's theory of the inherent ambiguity of the fable. From this perspective, the "unreadable" nature of the fable that Rousseau exposed is not simply the…

In this essay the practical functions of the arts and crafts, in general, have been furnished as empty places into which specific practices can be put. The essay unfolds as two interlocking narratives. The first is the story of epistemological ambiguity inherent in the representation of knowledge. The second is the tale of political exclusion of…