Conference Agenda

This study aims to examine Kant’s cosmopolitan education by considering his stance on thinking about the world and love for it. It also demonstrates that his cosmopolitan education was not merely based on modern moral universalism but rather fundamentally on love for the whole—actual and ideal—world. Cosmopolitanism is a conceptual survivor stemming from Western European philosophical traditions. Conceptualised by ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, cosmopolitanism has been debated through subsequent philosophical discussions up to the present day (Vertovec and Cohen 2002; Held 2010). One robust criticism of cosmopolitanism is that it tends to reproduce Western universalism, especially grounded in Kantian philosophy (Mignolo 2000; Werbner 2008; Vinokur 2018). To overcome this normatively constrained modern cosmopolitanism, “new” cosmopolitanisms have been proposed from the perspectives of critical thinking and dialogical relationships (Delanty and Harris 2012), as well as vernacular commitment (Appiah 2006; Kymlicka and Walker 2012). Moreover, cosmopolitanism is increasingly understood to be ‘more attentive to the material reality of our social and political situation’ (Braidotti et al. 2013, 3). As a result, however, while the concept has been renewed, it has simultaneously lost the primal substance of wholeness. Philosophically and etymologically, cosmopolitanism contains the cosmos, that is, the world as a whole; yet, the new cosmopolitanism does not carefully consider the nature of the world in its wholeness. Confronted with this ramified understanding of cosmopolitanism, I reconstruct cosmopolitanism by inspecting Kant’s notion of the concept, especially in his anthropology, physical geography and religious thoughts, and argue that cosmopolitanism originally oriented itself towards whole world, rather than towards moral formal universalism alone. Consequently, I clarify that Kant’s cosmopolitanism stresses not universalism per se, but the existence of a world that human beings love and have an interest in; therefore, Kant’s cosmopolitan education should be formulated as one that urges children to love and live in this whole, actual world. Through this consideration, I attempt to overcome the problem of “new” cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan education. Therefore, the research question of this study is formulated as follows: What is the substantial meaning of Kant’s cosmopolitanism, and what does Kant’s cosmopolitan education signify when interpreted on the basis of this understanding of cosmopolitanism?

This study focuses on Kant’s account of cosmopolitanism and I primarily follow Kant’s theoretical framework of critical philosophy. At the same time, I argue that his critical philosophy is strongly supplemented by his anthropology, physical geography, and historical and religious thoughts (cf. Louden 2011). Within this theoretical framework, I delve into his characterisation of cosmopolitanism, although he does not explicitly define what cosmopolitanism might mean in his critical philosophy. Kant writes “We can have two positions when it comes to taking an interest in what is happening in the world; the position of a son of the earth, and of a citizen of the world. In the first position, we have no interests except for our personal business and matters that affect our well-being. In the second position, we are interested in humankind, the entire world, the origin and inner values of things, and the ultimate end, at least insofar as we are keen to judge them” (Kant 1923: 517–18, my translation). These interests in the world—its origin, values, and ultimate end—are not merely sensual or empirical, but more robust and essential. I describe these interests as an orientation towards love, since Kant understands love as comprising multiple interrelated forms, including love of God, love in friendship and self-love (Rinne 2020). I demonstrate that Kant’s cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan education are fundamentally based on the love for the whole world.

This presentation offers a critical reappraisal of the role that freedom plays in contemporary educational thought, focusing particularly on how its dominant philosophical formulation is inseparable from racialized ontologies of the human. Drawing on Biesta’s World‑Centred Education (2021), I examine how the text situates freedom as the highest aim of education—an existential capacity of the learner who learns to live “in the world” without centering the self. Yet, I argue that this depiction of freedom remains tethered to its historical antithesis: subjugation, dependency, and the ongoing denial of self‑determination. While freedom is presented as a universal human attribute, it is simultaneously deployed as a boundary marker that distinguishes between those deemed capable of self‑governance and those figured as inherently affectable, malleable, or in need of governance. I refer to this foundational separation as raciality: the structuring division that produces different kinds of subjects and organizes the racial capitalist world order.

Taking raciality as the unspoken metaphysical condition of educational theory, I show how educational philosophy often dismisses this divide, thereby naturalizing an account of “the human” that is implicitly exclusionary. Such dismissal sustains what I call a philosophical agenda of transparency—an expectation that educational theory can speak of a universal human condition without engaging the violent histories that shape who is considered fully human. This universalizing gesture not only obscures the racialized limits of freedom but also allows the field to reproduce ideals of self‑cultivation and autonomy without interrogating who these capacities are presumed to belong to.

Against such assumptions, I foreground Black Feminist thought (da Silva, 2007; Hartman, 1997), which has long challenged the terms through which Western philosophy has conceptualized freedom. Black feminist scholars have shown that freedom has historically depended on the subjugation of others and on the carving out of zones where freedom can be expressed for some while systematically denied to others. Through this lens, Biesta’s distinction between existential education and mere training appears less as a neutral pedagogical claim and more as a reproduction of a world‑ordering logic in which only certain subjects are positioned as capable of existential self‑making.

A central point of analysis concerns Biesta’s notion of “the world.” Though described as material, natural, and social, Biesta ultimately proposes the world as a subjectifying event—as a generative but constraining sphere in which individuals meet the limits of their desires. Nonetheless, this calls for subjec-ness as it is through encounters with external resistance that it is suppose to be developed. Education seems to be, in turn, imagined this world's prism, by providing structured opportunities for students to test their subject‑ness, to refrain from desire, and to cultivate freedom as abdication or restraint. Subjectification, in this account, hinges on the individual learning to choose “who” they will become by distancing themselves from personal impulses and external norms alike.

The presentation interrogates how this framing becomes entangled with Biesta’s alignment of subjectification and democracy. Because Biesta situates democratic subject‑formation as a bulwark against atrocities such as Auschwitz, he associates democracy as the political order apt to balance individual and collective desires. Yet this view presumes a democratic subject whose freedom and moral agency are already secured—a presumption historically denied to racialized subjects. Through examining Biesta’s contrasting examples of Rosa Parks and Adolf Eichmann, I argue that his model risks conflating subjectification with conformity to an idealized democratic self, thereby reinscribing the very racialized logics that delimit who can appear as a legitimate subject of freedom.

Overall, the paper proposes that rethinking freedom through raciality not only reframes educational aims but also challenges education’s long‑standing investment in cultivating a universal—but racially bounded—figure of the human.

Across Europe, philosophy of education increasingly operates within research and policy environments shaped by competence frameworks, audit cultures, and hierarchies of evidence that privilege measurable outcomes and demonstrable impact (Biesta, 2015; Depaepe & Smeyers, 2008; Bridges, 2006). Within such contexts, disciplines such as philosophy of education whose contributions resist straightforward quantification frequently face demands to justify their place in instrumental terms (Fendler, 2018; Biesta, 2012).

One type of defense of philosophy of education in response to these pressures is to claim its necessity for, or inherentness or indispensability to, education. Because education is irreducibly normative, it is argued, teacher education and educational research require a distinct theoretical or philosophical space capable of safeguarding ethical reflection, democratic deliberation, and critical interrogation of purposes (Biesta, 2015; Depaepe & Smeyers 2008). This paper seeks to challenge that justificatory strategy.

It advances a metaphilosophical thesis with two connected claims. First, philosophy of education is continuous with education in a sense analogous to anti-exceptionalist arguments in metaphilosophy (Williamson, 2007). Philosophical reasoning as an extension of ordinary everyday human capacities and common to all sciences, rather than grounded in a methodologically privileged a priori domain (Williamson, 2007; Williamson, 2013; Hjortland, 2017). Philosophy of education does not operate by a method fundamentally distinct from other forms of scientific or educational inquiry.

Secondly, this continuity does not entail a necessity to do philosophy of education, nor does it prescribe that philosophy of education must remain tethered to, or normatively oriented toward, the ordinary and everyday. Some discussions in philosophy of education locate the discipline's legitimacy and vitality precisely in its rootedness in everyday educational life and practice, often as part of a post-critical emphasis on proximity, care, and affirmation (Hodgson et al., 2017; Schildermans et al., 2024). However, such approaches may advance a normative conception of what philosophy of education should look like as non-abstract, embedded in concrete cultural and relational contexts. While acknowledging that philosophy of education originates in the everyday this paper argues that it need not remain confined there. Attempts to justify the indispensability of philosophy of education to education, either as critical or post-critical (Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2019), can risk reproducing precisely a prescriptive conception. On the contrary, a continuity thesis may better support methodological pluralism rather than a necessitation of any particular type of philosophy of education.

If this is so, then philosophy of education cannot justify itself by claiming that education depends upon it. Nor can it claim epistemic priority or adjudication over educational practice. Instead, the discipline is reconceived simply as an extension of that which is already operative in educational life. It participates in educational inquiry rather than grounding it, allowing critical suspicion, post-critical affirmation, and abstract speculation to coexist as contingent options within a shared continuum.

Two objections sharpen this proposal. First, critics of what works cultures argue that evidence regimes can displace what is educationally distinctive about education and marginalise normative depth (Depaepe & Smeyers, 2008; Biesta, 2015). If philosophy of education renounces claims of indispensability and refuses to prescribe an everyday-bound normative ideal for itself, does it not risk further marginalisation or irrelevance within performative research cultures? The response offered here is that such a rejection does not entail a rejection of value. Second, debates about continuity theses in logic and metaphilosophy warn that appeals to continuity can obscure domain specific standards and produce conceptual vagueness (Martin & Hjortland, 2022; 2024). The paper therefore defends a restricted continuity claim. Philosophy of education shares general epistemic methods and virtues with other forms of inquiry, while retaining criteria shaped by the distinctive subject matter of education.