Conference Agenda

This paper critically explores the contemporary relevance of G. W. F. Hegel’s (1770 – 1831) conception of teaching philosophy in face of the current meta-crisis. Against the background of intersecting ecological, social, political, and epistemic instabilities, and in dialogue with Alain Badiou, Angelica Nuzzo and Slavoj Žižek’s efforts to revitalize Hegel, I ask to what extent Hegel’s thought can still inform contemporary accounts of philosophical praxis, despite the historical, conceptual, and political distance that limits any straightforward appropriation.

Through a close reading of Hegel’s 1818 Inaugural Address and his 1812 report on teaching philosophy in the gymnasium, I reconstruct Hegel’s view of philosophy as an inseparable unity of content and method, in which students “learn philosophy by philosophizing”. Next, I contend that Hegel’s dialectical-speculative logic can be understood as a pedagogy of reconciliation: a mode of teaching that initiates students into a transformative philosophical practice. This practice mediates between subject and world without offering a final resolution, and in doing so reshapes both the individual and the collective “Spirit” (consciousness).

A “pedagogy of reconciliation” here refers to Hegel’s way of conceiving teaching as a practical initiation into a form of philosophical praxis that helps students come to terms with an incommensurable, crisis‑ridden reality and themselves, without promising any well-ordered resolution or harmony. I close my paper by discussing to what degree Hegel’s vision can still orient a pedagogy of reconciliation with the present meta-crisis without promising any neat, teleological narrative of our time.

The paper offers a hermeneutical reading of selected texts by the German philosopher and educationist Johann Friedrich Herbart [1776–1841]. The texts have been chosen because, in them, Herbart argues that teachers as well as educational theorists and researchers need to develop what he, in his Rede bei Eröffnung der Vorlesungen über Pädagogik [Introductory Lecture to Students in Pedagogy], describes as a pädagogische Sinnesart (1880, p. 240), a concept translated as “pedagogic disposition” in the English translation (1896, p. 24). In this paper, I interpret and acknowledge this concept as referring to a specific sense, mood, or sentiment of educational theory and research.

The aim of this interpretation of Herbart’s perspective on the pädagogische Sinnesart is to bring his ideas into conversation with a contemporary dialogue about education as an independent science and discipline, with its own theories, ideas, and concepts concerning education and what makes an issue of education and learning genuinely educational—or, as Herbart and other German scholars would say, pädagogisch.

Today, the question of what constitutes a truly educational theory and issue has become an important question in educational scholarship, particularly within a philosophical and theoretical dialogue between different scholars of education (Biesta, 2015; Masschelein & Simons, 2017; Norris, 2021; Deng, 2025). This contemporary dialogue is sometimes traced back to a seminar organized by Helmut Peukert in Hamburg in 1989 on Wilhelm Flitner’s work and influence in German educational theory and research (Masschelein & Simons, 2017). One of the key questions discussed in that seminar was Flitner’s argument from his 1976 lecture Rückschau auf die Pädagogik in futurischer Absicht [A Retrospective on Pedagogy with a View to the Future] that educational theory and research depend on einen pädagogischen Grundgedanken, which Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (2017) translate as “a basic pedagogical thought” (p. 1). Herbart’s perspective on the pädagogische Sinnesart bears similarities to Flitner’s idea. However, Herbart emphasized not only the importance of grounding educational concepts and ideas within a coherent educational theory; he also insisted that this involves a specific educational mood or manner of sensing—an educational attentiveness or sensitivity to educational problems, issues, and phenomena.