The Ethics of the Climate Crisis by Robin Attfield Book cover for Attfield (2024). Taken from the Polity Press catalogue. Polity Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781509559084, Hbk. ISBN: 9781509559091, Pbk. ISBN: 9781509559107, eBook.  RRP: £50.00 / £14.99, 276pp. Recent opinion poll data has revealed that the vast majority of adults in the U.K. believe that climate change is happening, that it is largely caused by human activity and that it is a source of concern (Fisher, Fitzgerald and Poortinga 2018). Indeed, the most recent of these polls published on 14th June 2024 by YouGov revealed that 70% of ..read more

Pedagogies of Taking Care by Dennis Atkinson Bloomsbury, 2022 ISBN: 9781350288324, Hbk. RRP: £85.50, 272pp Book cover for Atkinson (2022). Taken from Bloomsbury catalogue.                   This article is available to download as a PDF here.  ‘Can we design schools whose central purpose is not the production of human capital but as centres and communities that promote and advance the arts of living and flourishing with others alongside or beyond the forces of economisation?’ (26) Questions such as this, that ask us to consider what and who ..read more

Why? The Purpose of the Universe by Philip Goff Oxford University Press, 2023 ISBN: 9780198883760, Hbk. RRP: £14.99, 287pp     Philip Goff’s new book represents an extension of his earlier philosophical explorations into the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. In Galileo’s Error (2019) Goff offered putative solutions to the hard problem of consciousness – how the experiential, non-physical nature of minds can be related to and explained in terms of the material world of physical objects – by making use of versions of panpsychism proposed by, amongst o ..read more

Paperback: £19.99, pp256 ISBN 9780367195410 By Kyrill Potapov University College London, UCL Interaction Centre   This review is also available to download as a PDF here   Vygotsky the Teacher (Barrs, 2021) is far more than the guide “for teachers and other practitioners” promised by the subtitle. It offers the cutting edge in Vygotsky scholarship, superseding other synoptic works like Understanding Vygotsky: A quest for synthesis (Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). The book does not give quick tips derived from Vygotsky’s works; it engages with each of its significant aspects, expl ..read more

  Why did you decide to write Seen and Not Heard? My motivation for writing Seen and Not Heard came from thinking about all I’ve learned from children in 25 years of conversations about their philosophical questions and ideas. Although I believe our homes and schools have become more child-centered than in the past, I’ve observed that nevertheless children’s insights, especially on complex or controversial topics, continue to be discounted and dismissed simply due to age. So often when children make intellectually provocative remarks or ask philosophical questions, adults react by no ..read more

(Oxford University Press, 2022) Hardback: £56   pp320    ISBN: 9780190095437   This review is available to download as a PDF here.     In Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art and Ecology Dalia Nassar (2022) attempts to forge a connection between romanticism and empiricism – acknowledged initially as a “paradox of sorts” (1) – and, in doing so, sets out to convincingly argue that “[romantic empiricism] is a philosophical tradition that deserves renewed attention today” (1).1 For Nassar, the problem that romantic empiricism can provide a response to is that ou ..read more

Essays in the Phenomenology of Learning The Challenge of Proximity (Routledge, 2022; copyright 2023) 202 pp, ISBN: 9781032245744 (HB), 9781003279327 (e-book) £104.00 (HB), £31.19 (e-book)   *** This review can be downloaded as a PDF here. ***   This elegantly-written and probing book pursues an important task of retrieval. It restores to the notion of human learning the richness that it has lost incrementally in recent decades, both through the huge expansion of on-line learning and an international educational policymaking that becomes increasingly led by competitive rankings.  ..read more

This review is available to download as a PDF here.   ***   Book Review: Tim Ingold (ed.), Knowing from the Inside: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments with Matters of Pedagogy (Bloomsbury Alternative|Education, 2022) 268 pp, ISBN: 978-1-350-21714-0 RRP £81.00 (hardback), £64.80 (e-book)   ***       Cross-disciplinary perspectives are baked into this rich and stimulating book. It is inspirational in the sense that it represents a way of actively and energetically taking things in and exploring them from the inside out. It originated from a research project entitled Kno ..read more

A written interview with author Jana Mohr Lone is available here.   What might we learn from children if we genuinely listened to them? How could they benefit if we did? Such are the key questions that Jana Mohr Lone addresses in her recent book, Seen and not heard. In this work, she shares children’s perspectives on fundamental philosophical concepts, from friendship to fairness to death, juxtaposing them with the thoughts of scholars from a range of disciplines. Recognising the depth and originality of children’s thinking, this book not only provides valuable insights into the worlds of ..read more

Richard Pring has made a useful and important contribution to the discussion on the relationship between political policy and philosophical development in relation to education in his new book, Education, Social Reform and Philosophical Development. In terms of structure, the book is divided into two parts. The first part explores the historical trends in educational policy and political reform in England from the nineteenth century to the present, and takes a thematic approach by exploring the different phases of education and other key themes (such as assessment) and how these have been affe ..read more