Introduction: Section 4 – New Areas and Developments

Abstract

The section New Areas and Developments presents essays on relatively new topics and concerns that have attracted the interest of philosophers of education in recent years, as well as novel approaches to philosophy of education. To date, emerging issues that have garnered considerable media attention, such as cyberbullying, school shootings, or radicalization, have been addressed predominantly from psychological and sociological perspectives. By contrast, the essays in this section focus on the philosophical questions that emerge from a study of these phenomena. Other topics, such as academic freedom or the question of non-human animals, are not exactly new but appear to be generating new work within philosophy of education. Finally, the increasing interdisciplinarity of academic departments and institutions, and of academic work generally, arguably requires that philosophers of education examine the boundaries of their field. A few of the essays in this section are concerned, explicitly or implicitly, with the need to address these boundaries and the connections with contiguous fields.