FROM THE EDITOR: EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AS VANGUARD OF THE PUBLIC HUMANITIES

摘要

Up to a certain point, soul-searching should be seen as a sign of disciplinary health. Indeed, I subscribe to Alasdair MacIntyre's view that this is a defining feature of all practices. Communities of practice are defined not by uniformities of agreement, but by "continuities of conflict." Enough agreement exists to make disagreements meaningful and productive. On this view, practices are living traditions, constituted in large part by their ongoing arguments over their ends and means. While intellectual practices such as educational theory like to stage their arguments explicitly and loquaciously, all practices embody such arguments. Waxing etymological, MacIntyre observes that "to excel" means not simply meeting existing standards of excellence, but helping the community grow out of standards that now seem arbitrary, pinched, or wrong-headed. Great practical performances command our respect precisely because they redefine our sense of what can be achieved. For verbal gymnasts, the breakthrough may arrive in the form of a state-of-the-field essay, for regular gymnasts, it tumbles in as a double back salto piked. However, we should not overstate the difference between loquacious and laconic practices. In the former, showing remains more powerful than telling; and surrounding the latter, we will tend to find talkative para-practitioners in the form of critics, commentators, docents, documentarians, historians, and all manner of superfan bloggers and talk-radio hermeneuts. Consider the example of Piet Oudolf, who primarily lets perennials and grasses do his talking. At the same time, achievements such as the Lurie Garden in Chicago and Oudolf's planting on the High Line in New York City invite explication, criticism, and appreciation. For those of us still learning to think in four dimensions (time being the crucial factor for plantspersons such as Oudolf) or to appreciate the sublimity of dying seedheads, we are grateful for para-practitioners such as Thomas Piper, whose documentary film helps us encounter Oudolf's plantings visually and philosophically. When it comes to flowers or philosophy, then, flourishing involves a constant reenvision-ing of ends. "Each way of doing," J. J. Chambliss writes, "requires an account of what we aim to do."