Intellectual Slavery

This chapter analyzes the role that labor plays within the university sphere through a multitude of lenses that include Du Boisian, Fanonian, Gramscian, and Marxian theories. Through these lenses, a relationship between the process of planting and harvesting intellectual labor will be identified and explored through a selective comparison to US enslavement for the purpose of raising the consciousness of intellectuals who are within, who desire to enter, and who look for alternate intellectual and educational spaces to inhabit. This analysis further looks to label the university system as a colonial space that through (its own version of) corporate and intellectual1 capitalism looks to sustain, expand, and promote its own interests in the guise of pursuing and cultivating knowledge.

Frankfurt a/Main and New York: Peter Lang, 2004

It is interesting to try to see the relationship between the concept of postmodernity (as used in the philosophy of culture) and that of globalization or the global age (as used in many non-philosophical areas, but also in the philosophy of education). "Postmodernity" was certainly the catchword at the beginning of the nineties, just as "globalization" was the catchword at the the end of the decade and continues to be until today. To see how the relationship between power and knowledge changes, it is interesting to look at the two magisterial products of modernity discussed in the present volume: the modern (and usually leftist) intellectual engaged in changing the world (Part 1), and the modern nation-state focused, and welfare-state supported, institution of the university (Part 2). The national education system as a universal and public institution first emerged in post-revolutionary Europe as an instrument of state formation. It provided a powerful vehicle for the construction and integration of the new nation-state and became one of its chief institutional supports. Since then, few nations have embarked on independent statehood without recourse to its ideological potential; even the older states, at least in periods of war and crisis, have continued to view education as a valuable source of national cohesion and a key tool for economic development. However, the role of the nation-state is now changing, and with it the place of education". The place of higher education especially, let us add, is changing; which is of greatest interest to us in the second part of the present volume. Two modern achievements, the modem figure of the intellectual and the modern institution of the university, have been undergoing a radical crisis of identity. As we develop this theme in Chapter 12, the decline of the philosophical project of modernity is turning out to be a painful process for modern culture: once again it has to reformulate the aims of its social institutions (for us here, the aims of the university) and the tasks of its cultural heroes (for us here, the tasks of the intellectual). If it is successful, the institutions and cultural heroes in question will regain their cultural vitality; if it is not, they will fall into cultural sterility. The traditional modern figure of the intellectual seems untenable in a more and more postmodern cultural surrounding. The modern institution of the university may face a similar fate in a more and more globalized surrounding: either it is going to accept the rules of bureaucratic, consumer-oriented corporations, or it will have to try once again to find a new regulative idea which would have to be as transformative as the role suggested for the university two hundred years ago by German Idealists and Romantics. The breakthrough in the conception of the university two hundred years ago was an event equal in importance to the vast social and cultural transformations of that time. It is hard to tell whether there will appear new ideas about the university comparable in significance.

2001

The Enlightenment is no doubt among the greatest landmarks of history. Whatever we today characterize the modern world with; (such as freedom, independence, private property, human and women right) is the heritage of this landmark. The Enlightenment was not only a landmark itself but paved the way for following landmarks in the fields of politics, society and philosophy. Because of these reasons it has been subject to praises as if it a monolithic structure or ontic entity. This article aims to cast a light upon the entangled relationship between slavery and the intellectual background of the Enlightenment and touch upon the fact that afore mentioned ideals are not as innocent as they seem. Aydınlanma, kuşkusuz düşünce tarihinin en önemli dönüm noktalarından biridir. Biz bugün modern dünyayı, hangi kelimelerle tavsif ediyorsak, (özgürlük, bağımsızlık, mülkiyet, insan hakları, kadın hakları, vb.) Aydınlanma düşüncesinin mirasıdır. Bu düşünce kendisi bir dönüm noktası olmasının yanı sıra, siyaset, toplum ve felsefe gibi pek çok artçı dönüm noktasına da zemin sağlamıştır. Bu sebeplerden dolayı Aydınlanma, monolitik bir yapı veya ontik bir varlıkmışçasına pek çok övgüye konu olmuştur. Biz bu makalemizde Aydınlanmayı ortaya çıkaran zihniyet ile onu önceleyen kölelik müessesinin girift ilişkisine değinerek, aslında idealize ettiğimiz bazı düşüncelerin sanıldığı kadar da masum olmadığını göstermeye çalışacağız.

1974

La ora,,ory, cie41k and Learning:

2006

How do we develop an anthropological gaze that avoids the fallacies of the superior position? How do we decolonize intellectuality when translating other people's knowledges and ways of thinking? To answer such questions is first and foremost a political endeavor, but it is also crucial to the future intellectual and academic success of the discipline. The present culture of audit and accountability attached to governmental and university managerial strategies works against the task of creatively rethinking knowledges other than our own. This article begins with these crucial questions and turns to Amazonian ethnography as a case for consideration of such issues.

Educational Studies in Mathematics, 2012

In this article, I deal with the question of emancipation in education. In the first part of the article, I argue that contemporary concepts of emancipation are explicitly or implicitly related to the idea of the sovereign subject articulated by Kant and other philosophers of the Enlightenment. I contend that our modern enlightened concepts of emancipation rest on a dichotomy between an autonomous and self-sufficient subject and its sociocultural world. Referring to current research in mathematics education, I show how this dichotomy leads to intrinsic contradictions that haunt ongoing educational practices. These contradictions, I contend, are manifested in the hopeless efforts to bridge the gap between the deeds and thoughts of an autonomous individual and the regimes of reason and truth in which the individual finds itself subsumed. In particular, I argue that emancipation as understood in the enlightened modern sense remains a chimeric and unfulfillable dream. In the second part of the article, I suggest that emancipation can still be an orienting vector of educational practice and research, but it needs to be conceptualized differently: emancipation needs not be predicated in terms of individuals’ freedom and individualist autonomy, but in critical–ethical terms.

Philosophy of Education 2014, 2014

Focaal, 2019