Robin Small

University of Melbourne | MSD · Melbourne Graduate School for Education

For Nietzsche, education is faced with the task of reconciling knowledge and life. The problem is that they are deeply at variance, given that living successfully is not made easier by insight into reality. Making life the only measure of value places the concept of scientific knowledge in question, as well as the values that moral education is sup...

A uniquely radical thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche undermines the most basic beliefs and values of Western culture, and challenges his readers to find a new approach to both knowledge and life. He has a lot to say about education, directly and indirectly. Nietzsche’s personal path took him from a university career to the role of unattached public inte...

Nietzsche is a ‘historical’ philosopher, who sees education as a set of practices used for different purposes at different times. On that view, the modern school has no single function or meaning. Rather, various interpretations are imposed on it by competing social forces such as the state, business, social morality and the academic profession, ea...

Nietzsche’s critique of modern schooling is balanced by his vision of an education of the future. Its basic aims are stated succinctly in one of his last books: ‘One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write’. In each case he has radical alternatives to the goals and methods of present-day education in mind. His...

This book offers a succinct guide to Friedrich Nietzsche’s contributions to educational thought, placing them within the context of his overall philosophy and adding biographical background information that sheds light on his thinking. Topics discussed in detail include theories of knowledge and life, concepts of teaching and learning, and practice...

Marx received an academic schooling in his native Rhineland, based on classical studies and strongly influenced by Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant. At Berlin University, he mixed with the radically minded younger Hegelians who followed Ludwig Feuerbach’s call to engage with the world of experience and feeling. Even so, the dominating i...

With the first volume of Capital completed, Marx returns to political activity in the 1860s. As a leading member of the International Working Men’s Association, he prepares the education policy adopted at its 1866 congress. Marx’s plan for the public school combines mental and physical instruction with a polytechnical training designed to promote t...

What can we learn from Marx about today’s education? His analysis of capitalism provides clues for grasping the place of schooling in modern societies. On his view, the school is not simply an ideological institution, but is important in producing labour power. This involves passing on social knowledge, but by distributing it very unequally to diff...

Marx’s major work is Capital. In it, he sets out to uncover the working of the capitalist mode of production, starting with the simplest economic categories but showing that their true meaning is realised only within the fully developed capitalist system. Marx poses a question: how can profit be made from employing wage labour? His eventual solutio...

Marx’s early writings display the change in his direction. The 1844 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts argue that private ownership of the means of production is an expression of estrangement from other human beings and from our own shared human nature. Before long, Marx is attacking philosophical materialism for its failure to engage in active str...

The recent use of expressions such as 'social realism' and 'critical realism' in educational theorising reopens epistemological issues that philosophers of education should be addressing. This discussion examines the current uses of these terms and reviews the philosophical issues they raise. I argue that 'social realism' is a misguided attempt to...

The book approaches Karl Marx’s contributions to educational thought by placing his intellectual career within its historical context. Central chapters deal with Marx’s own school and university education, his early liberal thought and its replacement by a radical alternative during the 1840s, the politically static period during which he undertook...

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was a vastly influential thinker during his lifetime. His primary appeal was to the educated public, leaving the academic world looking on, often with some bemusement. William James said: “He is the philosopher whom those who have no other philosopher can appreciate” – adding that the statement was “great praise” (1978:...

Paulo Freire is an iconic figure for critical pedagogy. Criticism, however, has been sporadic and unimpressive. This discussion takes the task more seriously. I argue that Freire’s epistemology is incapable of providing a coherent model of knowledge, and that his ethics is impaired by the distracting preoccupations of religious humanism. Secondly,...

When Nietzsche invites us to " stamp the image of eternity on our life, " he is deliberately recalling Plato's definition of time as " a moving image of eternity. " That is surprising in view of the sharp opposition between the two thinkers. The aim of this discussion is to find out what Nietzsche can have meant. A closer look at the metaphor of 's...

Inaugural Professorial Lecture

The book introduces Nietzsche as a philosopher of becoming. The first two chapters show how his conception of absolute becoming provides the starting-point for any possible model of time. Themes of conflict, accidentality and necessity, chaos and continuity figure here. An experiment in thinking of time as atomistic, found in an early notebook sket...

As commentaries on Thus Spoke Zarathustra have become common, their standard has become steadily higher. The influence of the major works of Stanley Rosen, Laurence Lampert, Robert Gooding Williams, and other writers will be felt in Nietzsche scholarship for many years to come. One consequence is that a tour guide is no longer enough: readers will...

Thomas Brobjer is a prominent figure in Nietzsche scholarship, best known for his work on Nietzsche’s relation to other authors. His new book provides a general introduction to this subject. Nobody could be better qualified to take on such a task. Brobjer is in many ways an exemplary scholar: thorough, comprehensive, and never less than completely...

Time, Space, and FinitudeFrom a Final State to Eternal RecurrencePossibility and TimeA Dionysian World

Nietzsche's expressed views on education are hard to reconcile with his image as the most radical of thinkers, whose aim (congenial to many recent commentators) is the destruction of all stable categories and identities. Can his assertion that " The schools have no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, cautious judgment, and consiste...

The name Peter Gast is a familiar one in the literature on Friedrich Nietzsche's life and thought. As everyone knows, it is the pseudonym used by his younger friend and assistant, Heinrich Köselitz. It is often noted that the suggestion came from Nietzsche. Yet, surprisingly, generations of scholars have failed to read the name. What that involves...

This book is about the relationship of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Paul Rée (1849-1901). During a close friendship lasting for seven years, the two shared ideas and developed a new and original approach to philosophy and ethics. There followed a dramatic break, brought about in part by personal factors but also by a divergence in their dire...

This book is the first assessment of the educational thought of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and its later influence in the light of developments at the close of the twentieth century. It provides a new perspective, in which many aspects of Marx’s ideas are seen clearly for the first time, freed from misleading associations and outdated prejudices. Educa...

Competition between Germany and England in natural science during the nineteenth century was reflected in disputes on a theoretical and ideological level, e.g. over the implications of the law of entropy and Darwin’s theory of natural selection. I argue that Nietzsche’s position in these debates often uncovers the deeper issues, even if this was no...

Constructivism comes in a number of forms. Some are models of learning which involve few, if any, startling epistemological claims. On the other hand, what has been promoted as ‘radical constructivism’ holds that our concepts cannot be related directly to an external reality, and that claims for the objectivity of knowledge are therefore unjustifie...

The notion of ‘praxis’ came into educational thought in the 1970s, largely owing to Paulo Freire’s widely-read books, as a model of human development with wide applicability in education and elsewhere. Since then we have seen important political and philosophical changes – including an absorption of Freire’s ideas into academic discourse. His exist...

Some ethical dilemmas in health care, such as over the use of age as a criterion of patient selection, appeal to the notion of life expectancy. However, some features of this concept have not been discussed. Here I look in turn at two aspects: one positive--our expectation of further life--and the other negative--the loss of potential life brought...

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra we find four variations on a basic metaphor which presents time as a kind of ‘way’ on which travellers may be located. Each involves a situation in which particular forces enter into relations, sometimes of tension and conflict. Further, to the ‘ways’ correspond kinds of movement, such as walking, run...

Formal codes of ethics are not the best way of addressing ethical issues arising in educational research. Philosophers have often exaggerated the importance of such codes, although philosophy has little to contribute to them. What we need rather is a closer attention to the ways in which ethical decisions about research are actually made. Moral the...

Nietzsche in Context is the first serious attempt to place Nietzsche in the context of the philosophers of his own time. It does this by a survey of important philosophical themes, in each case identifying the writer or writers with whom Nietzsche most felt himself to be engaging in dialogue. This historical dimension is complemented by original an...

Nietzsche argues that because of modern science “the world has become more and more indifferent”. Traditional beliefs are obsolete because the concerns expressed in them are no longer felt. The scientific method is itself a practice of indifference, with links to themes of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy. Nietzsche’s philosophy of life takes these u...

The case for special programs for children with exceptional abilities can only benefit from separating good arguments from bad ones. I attempt here to distinguish what is valuable in Miraca Gross's case for gifted education from what fails to stand up to closer examination. In particular, I argue that talent is not a ‘national resource’, and that e...

“Today all of us are sensualists,” Nietzsche writes in Book Five of The Gay Science.1 This striking assertion provides a signal for a set of problems concerning knowledge or, more particularly, the relation between knowledge and life. Nietzsche had been concerned with these questions for a long time, but only after Thus Spake Zarathustra did he def...

Comparisons between eternal recurrence and more traditional doctrines concerning the fate of the individual suggest themselves. Nietzsche himself makes the link with eternal punishment in several texts, and even constructs quite elaborate parallels of meaning and imagery. My discussion brings out the closeness of this implication and, with such dis...

This article provides a brief survey of the traditions of phenomenology and existentialism, and a discussion of their relevance to education. The influence of existential thinking is seen not in any systematic theory, but in an insistence on respect for the individuality of the student, and a warning against the absorption of both teachers and stud...

Continuing a dialogue with Nicholas Burbules on the ethics of educational research, I suggest that the procedures followed by individual researchers within their institutional context may fulfil the functions of a code of ethics without presuming the status of the ethical principles that such codes are supposed to represent.

What can educational researchers do to make sure their research is ethical? And how are these ways of making decisions justified? I argue for an problem-solving rather than a `top-down' strategy, and claim that institutional ethics committees provide better means for making good ethical decisions than formal codes of ethics. When an ethics committe...

Focusing on a particular text of Nietzsche, the chapter of Thus Spake Zarathustra entitled "On the Vision and the Riddle", I argue that his metaphorical presentation lends itself, in surprising detail, to the exploration of puzzles about past, present and future, and about the nature of temporal becoming, which have concerned thinkers from Aristotl...

Nietzsche's thinking on justice and punishment explores the motives and forces which lie behind moral concepts and social institutions. His dialogue with several writers of his time is discussed here. Eugen D historical approach to moral concepts from Paul Ree, who suggested that the utilitarian function of punishment had been obscured by its pract...

uniting naturalism with a priori principles, such as a `law of definite number' which asserts that everything countable must be finite; hence, the natural world must be limited, and past time must have a beginning. Value judgments are based on natural drives and feelings: in particular, the concept of injustice arises from the resentment produced b...

Several scholars have remarked on a possible influence of the astrophysicist Friedrich Zöllner on Nietzsche's thinking about natural science, and in particular on his notion of space. In fact, the full story is far more complex and interesting. This article traces the career of a controversial though now seldom mentioned figure, and points out some...

Nietzsche's commitment to a doctrine of becoming is expressed in many places in his writings. He acknowledges Heraclitus as a precursor, but a closer influence is the Russian-born philosopher African Spir (1837-1890). Spir's metaphysical standpoint is uncompromisingly Parmenidean: starting from the absolute status of logical truth, he argues that r...

A general survey of the writings and ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, covering in turn his life and personality, the major influences on his thinking, his major works and styles of writing, and such important ideas such as the revaluation of values, the will to power and the eternal recurrence. Finally, some interpretations and misinterpretations of N...

Georg Cantor introduced a new branch of mathematics with his theory of transfinite numbers. At the same time, his concept of the infinite suggested a solution to some old philosophical problems. Cantor's own position, however, is not always what one might expect from a champion of the actual infinite. For instance, he firmly rejects the idea of an...

This article throws new light on an argument of Georg Simmel concerning Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence. Simmel's objection takes the form of a particular counter-example: he describes a system of three wheels which move in such a way that their initial position will never again be reached, even in an infinite time. I point out that this...

Nietzsche was drawn to assert an infinity of past time, not only by his rejection of any notion of divine creation, but also by his own doctrine of eternal recurrence. In defending the adequacy of understanding a past infinity in terms of an infinite regress from the present moment, he attempted to rebut the opposing arguments of several contempora...

Absolute becoming and absolute necessity play a crucial role in Nietzsche's thinking. He holds that these concepts are a valid characterisation of reality in general, but he also asserts that they are not useable in our attempts to gain knowledge of the world. In fact, our everyday thinking is constituted by a denial or rejection of these absolute...

It is often claimed that if fatalism is true, any deliberation over one's future actions is pointless. I think the claim is wholly false. In this article I consider various arguments intended to establish an incompatibility between fatalism and deliberation, and show that each involves some fallacy. If I am deliberating over whether to bring about...

The relation between Franz Kafka and A.S. Neill is indirect, but based on a number of real events. This article reveals Kafka's long interest in the Dalcroze School which was the forerunner of Summerhill. A comparison between Kafka's ideas on childhood and schooling and those of Neill leads to an unexpected view of a certain moment in modern educat...

This note criticises an argument used by W. L. Craig against an actual infinity of past events. He argues that if Russell's use of the story of Tristram Shandy, who took a year to recount each day of his life, is extended into an infinite past, then Cantor's principle of correspondence leads to the absurd conclusion that Tristram Shandy has already...

Commentators have noted the influence of the natural philosophy of Boscovich on Nietzsche's thought, but not an important conflict between their ideas. Boscovich describes a theory of eternal recurrence, and offers an intended refutation of it which anticipates some later criticisms of Nietzsche. This article provides a detailed analysis and assess...

This article examines two arguments of Nietzsche: one for the impossibility of a final state, the other for the necessity of an eternal recurrence of the same states. Both assume that whatever is possible must also be actual in the course of infinite time. I show that an interpretation of this claim in terms of the concept of probability is plausib...

Fatalism is the doctrine that everything that happens does so by necessity. Some common objections raised against this claim turn out to involve arguments which are fallacious. Fatalism does, however, challenge a certain conception of responsibility, so that we are faced with a choice: either to give up all our moral concepts, or to reinterpret the...

Polytechnical education is a training in which theory and practice combine to produce an understanding of modern production in its various forms. Within the Marxian tradition, this idea signals a concern with the failure of modern society, with its advanced division of labour, to allow the full development of the individual, and with the inability...

Recent attempts to approach educational theory from the direction of Marxism have rested on an epistemology which rejects both realism and materialism. Yet on that view the distinction between ideology and knowledge cannot be maintained. Ideology is not simply located in the individual subject: it arises when social reality presents a misleading ap...

Deductive reasoning is criticised by Hegel for its failure to show the purpose and necessity of its thinking. It may be acceptable in other sciences and in everyday life, but not in philosophy. Dialectical reasoning, in contrast, is not an instrument for attaining truth but is inseparable from the development of truth itself. This argument is not a...

It is commonly agreed that Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence is hard to understand. The difficulty lies not so much in any great complexity or highly technical character as in uncertainty over what kind of doctrine it is intended to be. Without knowing this we are in no position to agree upon the guidelines for assessing its validity or in...

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche describes the world as a sphere whose “centre is everywhere”. The formula sphaera cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam beings to a Platonist tradition within Western thought which can be traced back to the twelfth century. This relation throws light on several aspects of Nietzsche's thought - for example...

The doctrine of eternal recurrence, the claim that everytning that occurs does so not only once but infinitely many times, figures in the writings of Nietzsche in several forms, and it can be understood in different ways. Here I shall show that one of these approaches allows us to see the doctrine as a philosophical theory about the nature of reali...

Just as the idea of the state is one of the more controversial areas in Marx's political theory, so too the idea of state education is the aspect of his educational thought which presents us with most ambiguities and unresolved problems. At times a seeming defender of state control, he at other times shifts to an almost anarchist attitude. One reas...

A prominent feature of Marx's programme for education is the combination of schooling with work for the child. The reasons for his plan are both theoretical and practical. Marx regards labour as essential to human development, and rejects the claim of progressive education that `play is the work of the child'. On the practical side, Marx uses the f...

Although an opponent of traditional religion, Nietzsche makes use of a redefined concept of God in presenting his own thoughts. It stands as a symbol for the highest will to power, which creates the order of the world as a whole. However, this is not a will that acts as a driving force. Rather, it determines the course of events through its authori...

This article discusses Gilbert Ryle's links with the phenomenological movement. Ryle was one of the first British philosophers to take an informed interest in philosophy. On various occasions he attempted to explain its themes to an English audience. Later his attitude became less sympathetic. Yet in The Concept of Mind we can identify elements clo...

‘Educational praxis’ is a concept drawn out of Marx's attempt (in his Third Thesis on Feuerbach) to rebut what he terms `the materialist theory of education'. Implicit in his critique of social determinism is a new theory of human development. It tries to take into account not just the influence of circumstances upon the individual but also the act...