Abstract
This article addresses the question how educational theory can overcome the assumptions of the tradition of the philosophy of consciousness, a tradition which can be seen as the foundation of the modern project of education. While twentieth century philosophy has seen several attempts to make a shift from consciousness to intersubjectivity (Dewey, Wittgenstein, Habermas) it is argued that this shift still remains within the humanistic tradition of modern thought in that it still tries to define, still tries to develop a theory about the human subject. Foucault's thesis of the end of man is interpreted as an attempt to move beyond humanism, an attempt motivated by a sincere concern for the humanity of the subject. Starting from the question as to who comes “after” the subject, several answers to this question, which all share an interest in the question as to where the subject comes into presence, are discussed (referring to the writings of Tschumi, Arendt and Levinas). In the concluding section it is argued that one way to move beyond the humanistic tradition of modern thought is to conceive of the subject in terms of responsibility and ethics (Levinas) and to conceive of the very task of theory in terms of justice, and not in terms of truth. This, so it is argued, should be the final concern for educational theory and curriculum theory.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aho, A., Hopcroft, J., and Ullman, J. 1983. Data Structures and Algorithms. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Blelloch, G. E., Leiserson, C. E., Maggs, B. M., Plaxton, C. G., Smith, S. J., and Zagha, M. 1991. A comparison of sorting algorithms for the connection machine cm-2. Proceedings of the Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, pp. 3-16.
Cormen, T. H., Leiserson, C. E., and Rivest, R. L. 1990. Introduction to Algorithms. MIT Press and McGraw Hill.
DeGroot, M. H. 1986. Probability and Statistics. Reading, MA: Addision-Wesley.
Harmon, M. G., Baker, T. P., and Whalley, D. B. Dec. 1992. A retargetable technique for predicting execution time. Proc. 13th Real-Time Systems Symposium, Phoenix, AZ, USA, pp. 68-77.
Karp, R. M. 1988. A survey of parallel algorithms for shared-memory machines. Technical Report CSD-88-408, University of California Berkeley.
Knuth, D. E. 1973. The Art of Computer Programming, volume 3. Reading, MA, USA: Addison-Wesley.
Li, Y. S., Malik, S., and Wolfe, A. Dec. 1995. Efficient microarchitecture modeling and path analysis for real-time software. Proc. 16th Real-Time Systems Symposium, pp. 298-307.
Mehlhorn, K. 1984. Data Structures and Efficient Algorithms, volume 1. Springer, EATCS Monographs.
Park, C. Y. 1993. Predicting program execution times by analyzing static and dynamic program paths. Real-Time Systems 5(1): 31-62.
Park, C. Y. and Shaw, A. C. May 1991. Experiments with a program timing tool based on source-level timing schema. IEEE Computer 24(5): 48-57.
Puschner, P. and Schedl, A. July 1997. Computing maximum task execution times-a graph-based approach. Real-Time Systems 13(1): 67-91
Sedgewick, R. 1989. Algorithms. Reading, MA, USA: Addison-Wesley.
Sedgewick, R., and Fajolet, P. 1996. An Introduction to the Analysis of Algorithms. Reading, MA, USA: Addison-Wesley
Wolfram Research Inc. 1992. Mathematica. Wolfram Research, Inc., Champaign, Illinois, Version 2.1 edition.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Biesta, G.J. Radical Intersubjectivity: Reflections on the “Different” Foundation of Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education 18, 203–220 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005241611742
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005241611742