Methodological Reflection and New Creative Moments in Educational Philosophy

Abstract

David Meens offers an insightful and provocative discussion about metaphilosophy, method, and methodological reflection. After advancing the argument that philosophy has always been interdisciplinary, Meens provides a concise and helpful overview that highlights both the construction of disciplinary demarcations in academic philosophy and their obstinate and enduring legacies. In his appeal for philosophy of education to move beyond the “Great Partition” that has divided empirical and conceptual pursuits, Meens summons the language of John Dewey and his call for a recovery of philosophy. For Meens, as was the case with Dewey, such a recovery is not so much a dwelling in or yearning for the past. Rather, it is what Dewey called an “imaginative recovery” — an indispensable instrument for proceeding forward. As such, an “imaginative recovery” is more about a critical appropriation of particular operations, orientations, modes of thinking, ways of knowing, and tools of construction as opposed to an attempt to transcend a temporal distance. It is here where I share Meens’s enthusiasm for an “imaginative recovery,” one that can foster new interdisciplinarities and as-yet-unexplored hybridizations and possibilities that await educational philosophy.