Showing posts with label meta comments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meta comments. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Meta note: Noddings on and doing philosophy

Last week I mentioned that, while Noddings is writing about philosophy, she also drops these little clues every so often that the way she is writing about philosophy is itself a philosophical argument.  I'll share the couple of notes I made -- as you discover ones yourselves, feel free to share them in the comments.

p. 21: This comment of Dewey's reveals something of the flavor of criticism philosophers of education sometimes direct at one another's work.  We have seen that Dewey expressed admiration for something in the work of Rousseah, Pestalozzi, Herbart, and Froebel, but he also found difficulties -- recommendations not fully grounded, inconsistencies, and ideas incompatible with Dewey's own underlying beliefs concerning the nature of the child, the meaning of education, the role of teaching, and the nature of lessons.

p. 55
Philosophers often do what we have done together in the last few pages.  Starting with a scheme such as Scheffler's they raise objections or reject certain points.  They may argue for new or revised criteria, predict consequences that the original author failed to foresee, probe for suppressed premises, or reject the entire scheme as wrongheaded.  Often a particular line of argumentation leads quite naturally into another domain for analysis.

What else does Noddings share about the nature of philosophical argumentation?