The aim of this article is to examine ways in which localized research runs the risk of becoming a boundary discourse in a negative sense. The exaggerated emphasis on immanent critique, contextualization and incommensurability may lead discourse and disciplines to an isolationist self-understanding that leaves unchallenged or even entrenches existing discursive hegemonies. Or, it may side with the kind of facile and hasty fusion of discourses and disciplines that ignores epistemic demands and concerns for validity and semantic accuracy. That is, (...) it may overlook the necessity for positively understood discursive boundaries. Clearly demarcated, a-porous boundaries block osmosis and fruitful exchange and facilitate what is called here ?stronghold fortification?. And they make common cause with a disregard for all boundaries, i.e. with what is called here ?frame demolition?. Discourses of educational research, and particularly of ?special? versus ?inclusive? education, supply examples that are all the more telling since the very possibility of pedagogy reminds us that relativism is not an option here. To discuss interdisciplinarity and discursivity with an eye to such risks, I refer to Habermas? outlook on the position of philosophy after Kant alongside Derrida's rethinking of the right to philosophy ? a rethinking that is grounded in a reading of Kant's cosmopolitical point of view. (shrink)

Emotion education is enjoying new-found popularity. This paper explores the ‘cosy consensus’ that seems to have developed in education circles, according to which approaches to emotion education are immune from metaethical considerations such as contrasting rationalist and sentimentalist views about the moral ontology of emotions. I spell out five common assumptions of recent approaches to emotion education and explore their potential compatibility with four paradigmatic moral ontologies. I argue that three of these ontologies fail to harmonise with the common assumptions. (...) Either those three must therefore be rejected or, if we want to retain one or more of them, we need to revise our assumptions about the practice of emotion education in ways that are both radical and, I argue, ultimately unacceptable. (shrink)

Over the past decades, there has been an ongoing debate about whether education should aim at the cultivation of emotional wellbeing of self-esteeming personalities or whether it should prioritise literacy and the cognitive development of students. However, it might be the case that the two are not easily distinguished in educational contexts. In this paper I use J.L. Austin's original work on speech acts to emphasise the interconnection between the cognitive and emotional aspects of our utterances, and illustrate how emotional (...) force affects communication in the classroom. (shrink)