Anti-Conceptualism and the Objects of Knowledge and Belief

Michael Ayers’s Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a New Empiricism is a rich and detailed development of two ideas. The first is that perception presents reality to us directly in a perspicuous way. We thus acquire primary knowledge of the world: “knowledge gained by being evidently, self-consciously, in direct cognitive contact with the object of the knowledge.” (Ayers 2019, 63) The second idea is that concepts are not needed in perception. In this article, the author examines Ayers’s view. The author proceeds as follows: In the first section, he identifies the target of Ayers’s attacks, conceptualism. He then describes why many philosophers have felt this conceptualist view to be attractive. In the next section, he discusses Ayers’s criticisms of conceptualism in an attempt to disentangle these criticisms from the statement of his positive view, which the author discusses in the following section. He ends by describing some problems for Ayers’s positive position that are, so he argues, the result of his vehement opposition to conceptualism.

On Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a New Empiricism

This is a discussion note on Michael Ayers’ Knowing and Seeing. Groundwork for a New Empiricism.

Response to Comments and Criticisms

These responses are replies to the contributions to a book symposium devoted to my book Knowing and Seeing. Groundwork for a New Empiricism (2019), held at the University of Vienna in February 2020.

Following lines in the landscape: Playing with a posthuman pedagogy in outdoor environmental education

Situated within a series of river journeys, this inquiry considers the role of material landscape in shaping learning possibilities and explores practices of reading landscapes diffractively. We consider ways we might pay attention to the ever-changing flux of places while experimenting with posthuman pedagogical praxis. Methodologically, we embrace the post-qualitative provocation to do research differently by enacting a new empiricism that does not ground the inquiry in a paradigmatic structure. In doing so, we rethink conventional notions of method and data as we create a series of short videos from footage recorded during canoeing journeys with tertiary outdoor environmental education students. These videos, along with a student poem, form the empirical materials in this project. Video allows us to closely analyse more-than-human entanglements, contemplating the diverse ways we can participate with and read landscapes in these contexts. We aim to provoke diffractive thought and elicit affective dimensions of material encounters, rather than offer representational findings. This project intends to open possibilities for post-qualitative research, inspired by posthuman and new materialist orientations.

Michael Ayers: Knowing and Seeing

Rezension von Michael Ayers: Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a new empiricism. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019.

“Philosophy as a Method”: Tracing the Histories of Intersections of “Philosophy,” “Methodology,” and “Education”

This article asks the questions, what is “philosophy as a method?” how can it be conceptualized and what are its genealogies? and what role might it play in the liminal spaces of the intersections of philosophy, methodology, and education? It further aims to perform philosophy as a method through a rereading of the histories of the intersections of philosophy, education, and methodology. In doing so, it also utilizes philosophy as method as a means for undertaking a much-needed critique of the current turns to new ontologies, posthumanism, and new empiricism.