Introduction

Abstract

In 1973, a high-water mark in the recent history of philosophy of education, Richard Peters, whose herculean efforts over the past twenty years have done more than any other person to put the subject on the map, edited The Philosophy of Education in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series — a clear sign that philosophy of education had finally become respectable in the eyes of pure or proper philosophers. In the introduction to that volume he advocated that philosophy of education should be seen as a branch of philosophy proper and should be in close touch with developments within it, and went on to observe that philosophy of education was at that time suffering from too little fundamental divergence in points of view.¹ A decade later, in a retrospective review of philosophy of education since the 1960s, he concludes by listing what he considers is now needed for the subject’s future development: one of the first items to be mentioned is the need for more philosophical depth.²