Conference Agenda

Philosophy of education occupies an uneasy position within the field of educational studies, as well as (academic) philosophy in general. Unlike empirical educational research, it does not proceed by way of methodological protocols designed to secure verifiable findings, and unlike general philosophy, it cannot rely solely on internal conceptual coherence to justify its claims. Its object—education—is irreducibly practical, situated, and historically contingent. Yet philosophy of education approaches it through conceptual reflection rather than direct intervention. This tension has long accompanied the discipline, often without being thematized explicitly, shaping both how philosophy of education is practiced and how it is received (Biesta, 2014a; 2015).

As a result, philosophy of education finds itself confronted with a question that is as persistent as it is difficult to answer: how do (philosophical) concepts in education genuinely relate to educational reality? On the one hand, philosophical inquiry risks appearing detached, producing concepts that remain abstract and insufficiently responsive to the concrete situations of teaching, learning, and institutional life. On the other hand, attempts to secure relevance by aligning philosophical reflection too closely with practice or policy threaten to dissolve the distinctiveness of philosophical inquiry altogether. Between these poles, philosophy of education struggles to articulate what gives its work consistency as a form of conceptual inquiry that is neither arbitrary nor merely expressive or descriptive.

This difficulty is not simply a matter of disciplinary insecurity, but points to a deeper problem concerning the nature of philosophical speculation itself. If philosophy of education cannot clarify how its speculative activity is constrained, oriented, and rendered answerable to educational situations, it remains vulnerable to the charge of being “mere speculation” in the narrow sense of the term—free-floating thought lacking determinate consequences. What is at stake, therefore, is not whether philosophy of education should speculate, but how it can do so in a way that establishes a meaningful and responsible relation to educational reality.

Building on the speculative philosophy of A.N. Whitehead and Isabelle Stengers, this article reflects on the nature of speculative-educational thinking, both with regards to the way in which its concepts relate to educational reality, as well as what the broader public implications are for its thinking. Isabelle Stengers described speculative philosophy as a disciplined and situated practice of thinking which does not produce abstract systems or universal principles, but treats philosophical concepts as interventions that enter into concrete situations and affect how those situations can be thought. Concepts are thus neither representations of (educational) reality nor norms imposed upon it, but propositions offered to situations in order to open new possibilities of understanding. For philosophy of education, this reconceptualization is decisive. It allows philosophical inquiry to remain speculative without becoming arbitrary, and to relate to educational reality without collapsing into empirical or policy-oriented forms of knowledge. Speculative philosophy grounds philosophical consistency not in foundational claims, but in an obligation to remain answerable to the situations it addresses. In foregrounding responsiveness, hesitation, and revisability, it offers philosophy of education a way of articulating its relevance as a distinct form of conceptual inquiry attuned to the openness and unpredictability of educational practice itself (cf. Biesta, 2014b; cf. Meirieu, 2021).

This paper explores the relation between temporality, ways of knowing, and education by asking how different modes of knowing are sustained by, and in turn enact, distinct temporal orientations. Drawing on Heidegger, Byung-Chul Han, and recent work in philosophy of education, I contrast dominant forms of knowing—such as knowing-that and knowing-how—with a less foregrounded mode: knowing by acquaintance. Whereas propositional and skill-based knowledge align with punctual or progressive temporalities oriented toward presence, accumulation, and improvement, knowing by acquaintance depends on duration, repetition, and return. It is sustained through lingering with singular things, texts, and persons over time.

The paper develops this claim through three educational sites: the school as a space of scholé, post-critical and thing-centred practices, and Derridean deconstruction understood not as negation but as an affirmative practice of repetition. In each case, education is shown to foster forms of knowing that exceed instrumental use and resist closure, inviting direct, singular encounters that transform both the learner and what is learned. By articulating these practices, the paper offers a substantive account of education as autotelic, while opening a path beyond narrow logics of progress without lapsing into anti-critical or anti-progressive positions.