A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Modern Era (vol. 4), ed. Andrea English, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

Volume 4 of A History of Western Philosophy of Education (henceforth HWPE) focuses on “the modern era,” which is understood as the period that spans the years from 1850 to 1914. There is a sense in which this is a fairly typical periodization – starting with the inception of the positivist age and finishing with the great conflagration of the First World War. To adopt an insight of Roberto Calasso (2019), this is the last period in Western civilization bearing distinctive and identifiable traits before what he calls “the unnamed present” emerged as our historical condition. The volume is structured in nine chapters, which address the most important philosophical trends of the period under consideration: from Dewey and pragmatism (chapters 1 and 5, respectively by Leonard Waks and James Scott Johnston) to the continental traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics (chapter 2, by Deborah Kerdeman), the philosophies of dialogue (chapter 3, by Mordechai Gordon), psychoanalysis (chapter 4, by Deborah Britzman), critical theory (chapter 8, by Christiane Thompson), and the linguistic turn (chapter 9, by Paul Standish). Moreover – and I will come back to this later in this review – two chapters are dedicated, respectively, to philosophy and early childhood (chapter 6, by Stephanie Burdick-Shepherd) and to philosophy of race and the traditions of embodied knowledge (chapter 7, by Kal Alston). In her introduction, the volume editor, Andrea English, suggests that a thread connecting all the chapters is a reflection revolving around “the question of what it means to be human” (p. 1). One of the philosophical-educational achievements of the philosophers and philosophical schools of the modern era was that of divesting this kind of question of any metaphysical tone and of recognizing “the difference and uniqueness of every human being” (p. 4). In this sense, this age of Western philosophy “gives us a toolkit for beginning to define a contrasting meaning of otherness” (p. 4). Accordingly, the three main concepts inherited from the Enlightenment era (see volume 3 of the series) – those of perfectibilité, Bildung, and relationality – also receive a specific spin in the modern era that takes seriously otherness and takes leave of the reference to an alleged eternal essence, which might have been still present in some interpretations of those concepts. The way in which the authors of volume 4 engage with the period 1850 to 1914 is most interesting. I will confine myself to highlighting two points. First, with the possible exception of chapters 1 and 5, all the chapters also include figures clearly exceeding this chronological frame and, indeed, in many cases they include contemporary authors. The volume thereby insinuates something more than the fact that the philosophical schools and intellectual trends which it addresses have had a long-standing impact. In my reading, this stretching of the modern era up to more recent times indicates that – despite many undeniable differences – the questions we have to cope with today may find their roots therein, and, thus, the way in which the philosophies of the modern era held them in thought still appeals to us. To pick up only several instances, one may refer to how chapter 3 engages with relational ethics not only in reference to Buber and Levinas, but also by establishing a most interesting bridge to Nel Noddings’s educational thought; or, again, to the focus on Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, and Donald Winnicott in chapter 4, dedicated to psychoanalysis and education; or, finally, to the way in which, starting with Marx, the discussion in chapter 8 about critique as “the mark of educational experience, or Bildung” …