Philosophy of the Teacher

"This is a book of great persuasive power, iridescent intellectual beauty, profound integrity; a book of brave and passionate scholarship. It is the kind of book one encounters once or twice in a decade, one that has the power to engage and challenge leaders in the field as well as to entice those who come to philosophy of education for the first time to remain engaged with a philosophy of the teacher throughout their lives."

Michael Fielding, University of Sussex

"George Steiner has attributed the besetting weakness of English intellectual life to its failure to engage with Hegel. The fact that English philosophy of education has strikingly borne out that diagnosis makes this an especially welcome book. For Tubbs, only Hegel’s speculative thinking – masterfully reenacted in these pages – can enable us to live and think through the constitutive contradictions of teaching in conditions of advanced modernity. He argues for a deeply internal relationship between education and philosophy, a relationship that is to be realised in the experience of teachers though it remains uncomprehended in the texts of various critical and poststructuralist theorists. Spirited, serious, richly allusive, unabashedly polemical – and addressed as much to teachers as to philosophers - Philosophy of the Teacher will inspire and provoke."

Joseph Dunne, Dublin City University

"In Philosophy of the Teacher Tubbs makes a compelling case for the centrality of education in the practice of philosophy and for philosophy in the practice of teaching. He provides a sustained philosophical justification of the emancipatory vocation of teaching as well as a serene but realistic assessment of the pressure on the teacher committed to this vocation but having to work within institutional constraints that would seem to betray it. The book opens with a subtle critique of the concept of ‘education’ and the aporias of even its radical critique, moving through a meditation on the experience of the teacher to some exemplary closing lessons on leading modern philosopher-teachers. The combination of concrete critique and speculative philosophy makes this a book that will re-orient the field of the philosophy of education. It is essential reading for philosophers interested in the aporias of freedom and education, but above all for aspiring teachers and for working teachers looking to renew their sense of vocation."

Howard Caygill, Goldsmiths College, University of London