This paper examines the relationship between Heidegger’s critique of educational comportment and his analysis of space in Being and Time. It posits that providing an educational corrective to the practice of tacit rational, described as ‘circumspection’ in Being and Time, would provide an opportunity to reorient Dasein toward clearer awareness of the spatial context. A phenomenological approach to education might be framed as a process that reorganizes how changes are anticipated by comported expectations. Addressing conditions of spatial comportment in education (...) reveals that while models of learning illusorily claim to provide infinite opportunities, contingent upon mastery of delimited knowledge, a phenomenological approach to education begins by first delimiting illusions of possibility. (shrink)

Science teaching always engages a philosophy of science. This article introduces a modern philosophy of science and indicates its implications for science education. The hermeneutic philosophy of science is the tradition of Kant, Heidegger, and Heelan. Essential to this tradition are two concepts of truth, truth as correspondence and truth as disclosure. It is these concepts that enable access to science in and of itself. Modern science forces aspects of reality to reveal themselves to human beings in events of disclosure. (...) The achievement of each event of disclosure requires the precise manipulation of equipment, which is an activity that depends on truth as correspondence. The implications of the hermeneutic philosophy of science for science education are profound. The article refers to Newton’s early work on optics to explore what the theory implies for teaching. Modern science—as the event of truth—is a relationship between an individual student, equipment, and reality. Science teachers provide for their students’ access to truth and they may show how their discipline holds a special relationship to reality. If the aim of science teaching is to enable students to disclose reality, the science curriculum will challenge some of the current practices of schooling. If teachers base science teaching upon the hermeneutic philosophy of science, science will assert itself as the intellectual discipline that derives from nature, and not from the inclinations of human beings. Science teachers teach nature’s own science. (shrink)

Many philosophers of science and technology who see themselves as coming “after” Husserl also claim that their phenomenology is hermeneutical. Yet they neither practice the same sort of phenomenology, nor do they all have the same understanding of hermeneutics. Moreover, their differences often seem to be more a function of different pre-selected substantive commitments—say, to take a “material” turn or to be resolutely “empirical”—than the product of any serious effort to clarify what it is be hermeneutical. In this essay, after (...) some discussion of Dilthey’s reception among post-Husserlians (especially Patrick Heelan and Don Ihde), I consider how aspiring hermeneuts might make their own pre-possession of substantive and methodological commitments a hermeneutical topic. This is, of course, is not just a scholarly question of how post-Husserlian phenomenologists might make themselves more phenomenological. Without thoughtful self-awareness of these commitments, one’s assumptions about the use of technology, design, the place of science in the larger culture and in relation to conceptions of human flourishing—all of these assumptions are likely to pass through into technoscientific practice with insufficient critical consideration. (shrink)

Phenomenologists usually insist that their approach involves going “back” to and “starting” with technoscientific experience—that is, returning to the actual existing or living through of technoscientific life—after centuries of privileging the analysis of how things are “objectively” known and denigrating accounts of how they are “subjectively” lived with. But then who says this and how is this understood? “Who” is really a phenomenologist, when so many diverse thinkers claim the title? This paper considers some of the reasons why this is (...) such a difficult question and argues that it is wrong to look for The Answer to it. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been with us for many years, and yet grasping phenomenology remains a difficult task. Heidegger, too, experienced this difficulty and devoted much of his teaching to the challenge of working phenomenologically. This article draws on aspects of Heidegger’s commentary in progressing the teaching and learning of phenomenology, especially as this pertains to research in fields such as education. Central to this task is elucidation of what I believe to be the most important feature of phenomenology—what Heidegger referred to (...) as the ‘starting point’ of phenomenology. I have written this article in the manner of a phenomenological workshop with the intention of inviting the reader to engage experientially with this starting point. (shrink)

Book review of Michael Ehrmantraut's (2010) Heidegger's Philosophic Pedagogy published by Continuum.

In this article I will consider John D. Caputo’s ‘radical hermeneutics’, with ‘undecidability’ as its major theme, in conversation with Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’. Through an examination of the positions of Caputo and Heidegger I argue that Heidegger’s notion of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ reaches far beyond the claims of ‘radical hermeneutics’, and that it assumes a reconstructive process which carries within its scope the overtones of deconstruction, the experience of repetition and authenticity and also the implications of Gelassenheit. Further, (...) I am arguing that Caputo’s ‘radical hermeneutics’ is problematic and even erroneous when it comes to criticize Heidegger’s thought portraying it as being founded on ‘the myth of the early Greeks’. (shrink)