Teaching,Telling and Technology

This Introduction to the Special Issue, Teaching and Learning: Epistemic, Metaphysical and Ethical Dimensions, ponders the truism that education is of fundamental importance in human life—and its relation to philosophy. No credible natural-historic description of what a human being is could fail to give education a central place. Yet the concept of education has often been neglected by philosophers, especially those working in the Anglo-American mainstream.  It seems, however, that the prejudices at the root of this neglect are on the wane, and more and more philosophers are beginning to recognise that education is of profound philosophical significance, entering into questions of the nature of knowledge, theoretical and practical reason, the formation of mind and its relation to the world, and the cultivation of moral vision.  The time is ripe then for a renewed dialogue between philosophers of education and those in the ‘mainstream’ who have come to perceive the philosophical significance of education.  The papers in this Special Issue aim to foster such a dialogue.  To place them in context, this Introduction considers: the prospects for a robust epistemology of pedagogy that will escape the familiar frustrations of traditional epistemology; the relevance of the epistemology of testimony for illuminating teaching and learning; the teacher as the voice of the discipline; the cultivation of practical and moral knowledge, skills and habits; the scope and limits of new learning technologies; and the place of education in characterising the human life-form. The moral is that it is hard to see how we can do epistemology, metaphysics and ethics—this is to say, do philosophy—without having education in view.