Studies in Philosophy and Education (2025) 44:167–186

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-024-09975-y

Teaching and Philosophy: Three Reunions

Samantha Ha‑DiMuzio1 · Ksenia Filatov2 · Chris Higgins2

Accepted: 18 October 2024 / Published online: 19 November 2024

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024

Abstract
What is the relation of philosophy and teaching? Do we start from philosophy and then
work to close the gap through a process of application? Do we start from teaching, and
work to create a space for philosophical reflection? Is it enough to include philosophical
texts and activities in teacher education? Or perhaps we need to include teachers from the
start as collaborators in the production of philosophical work. Of, in, for, with: it seems that
every preposition has been proposed to join teaching and philosophy–a perennial dilemma
that philosophers of education are far too familiar with. These anxious efforts to close
the gap only reinforce our narrow, lopsided images of each endeavor. The teacher turns
outward; the philosopher inward. Teaching is mired in the quotidian; philosophy prone to
pointless abstraction. Called to act, the teacher works within the constraints of institutions;
called to question, the philosopher practices principled withdrawal. While there is a grain
of truth here, such contrasts obscure a key fact: philosophy and teaching are deeply kin-
dred practices. The contemporary tragedies unfolding in Gaza and Israel serve as an urgent
reminder of the costs of cleaving contemplation from action. Indeed, we will argue that
the alienation of teaching (a practical endeavor if ever there was one) and philosophy (the
contemplative discipline par excellence) damages the integrity of each. In what follows, we
explore three conceptual sites—the posing of questions, the act of walking together, and
the effort to discover what is at stake—which demonstrate a welcome return, or reunion,
between philosophy and teaching.

Keywords Philosophy · Teaching · Teacher education · Praxis · Wisdom · Questioning ·

Walking · Embodiment · High-stakes · Action versus contemplation

* Chris Higgins
christopher.higgins@bc.edu
Samantha Ha‑DiMuzio
hadimuzs@dickinson.edu
Ksenia Filatov
filatovk@bc.edu
1
Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, USA
2
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA

Vol.:(0123456789)
168 S. Ha‑DiMuzio et al.

Many a teacher ‘has no use for theories of education,’ meaning, ‘How will they help
me keep order in the classroom and help my students get good grades? (Schwab
1959, 146)

By and large, the philosophical community expresses no interest in thinking about

education. The educational community does not seem to care about philosophy. The
few books or articles that link problems and concerns in one discipline to those in
the other tend to address only an increasingly marginal and shrinking community of
other philosophers of education. (Arcilla 2002, 1)
Why does philosophy of education rank so low among the courses that philosophy
departments regard as essential to their mission? We pride ourselves on drawing out
and challenging the assumptions underlying other professions’ fundamental activi-
ties: medicine, science, even sports. Yet our own essential activity is education... We
seem strikingly reluctant to apply our own tools to ourselves. (Weston, 2008, 145)
Philosophy’s fall from grace in teacher training has been nothing if not remarkable.
(Colgan & Maxwell 2020, 1)

Introduction

These are just four examples of a longstanding genre: laments about the disconnection
between teaching and philosophy. Teachers typically see little practical value in educa-
tional theory (Schwab). Philosophers seem uninterested in the “essential activity” of their
own profession, teaching (Weston). Philosophy of education connects the two, only to be
ignored by both education schools and philosophy departments (Arcilla). Once a staple of
teacher preparation, philosophy has experienced a “remarkable” “fall from grace” (Col-
gan and Maxwell). In the new teacher education landscape (on the know-nothing “practice
turn,” see Reid 2011), we are in danger of reducing teachers to “unthinking technician[s]”
(Alemánn 2003) or “mere deliverers of content or transmitters of knowledge” (Dunne, this
issue). For Hung (this issue), philosophy of education continues to be “marginalised by
educational researchers in the social sciences and philosophers in the humanities.”
This divide is not merely a problem for philosophers of education. It speaks to an ongo-
ing difficulty to unite action and contemplation, leaving educators at all levels struggling
to know how to respond to emergent social issues (for a fresh look at this perennial issue,
consider Summit and Vermeule 2018). Technicist teacher training leaves K-12 teachers
uncertain how to teach on “days after” traumas and tragedies (Dunn 2021). And in the
university, the traditional home of contemplation, the need to act can be paralyzing, as we
have witnessed in responses (or the lack thereof) to the recent conflict in the Middle East.
As we write this, a doctoral student, administrator, and faculty member situated on the
east coast of the United States, mass protest action is unfolding on university campuses
in our city, across the country, and throughout the globe in response to the violent war
between Hamas and Israel. We find ourselves struggling with fear and paralysis as we
watch some faculty get brutalized and arrested alongside their students, reckoning with the
implications of this contemporary scene for our work as philosophers of education. What
do we do, as individual teachers, but also as a collective of educators, at this moment when
our philosophy and practice is being tested? We argue that this moment offers a valuable,
if painful opportunity to return to more fundamental questions: What is right? What do I
Teaching and Philosophy: Three Reunions 169

believe? What am I willing to risk? The locus of education has shifted: our students are
not sitting in classrooms, they are sleeping outside or at police stations, marching, keep-
ing vigil, locking arms, occupying streets. The stakes are higher than ever, as students risk
expulsion and interruption to their formal education, faculty risk losing their jobs, and
civilians in Gaza die.
For Cornel West, situations of this sort represent not a pull away from philosophy but an
imperative at its heart: to struggle for wisdom in relation to “the funk” of life. Philosophy,
West writes, involves.
wrestling with the wounds, the scars, the bruises, as well as the creative responses to
wounds, scars, and bruises—some of them inflicted because of structures and institu-
tions, some of them being tied to our existential condition, in terms of losses of loved
ones, in terms of diseases, in terms of betrayals of friends, and so forth; all of these
are wounds and scars and bruises (West, quoted in Mendieta 2011).

In recent months, it is university students who have taken the lead in attempting to open
their thinking to these wounds and losses. At most institutions, where not moral clarity
but donations and damage control rule the day, the result has been paralysis interrupted by
flashes of punitive overreaction to peaceful encampments, vigils, and demonstrations. Jus-
tice is good in theory, but struggling for justice is rejected in practice.
“Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (Horkheimer and Adorno
1944/1996). Perhaps this fresh encounter with the funk of life will catalyze a new reckon-
ing of the costs of cleaving contemplation from action. In this spirit, we argue that the
alienation of teaching (a practical endeavor if ever there was one) and philosophy (the con-
templative discipline par excellence) damages the integrity of each. In response, we stage
three reunions. That is, we explore three conceptual sites where the two endeavors naturally
find their way back to each other. In the posing of questions, the act of walking together,
and the effort to discover what is at stake, we can rediscover the connection between teach-
ing and philosophy and the integrity of each.1

Just Asking

A Common Center

Debates continue about the proper way to build a bridge between philosophy and teaching.
And yet, it would seem to us that a sturdy bridge already exists in the concept of wisdom.

1
Though three concepts largely draw from Western traditions and are grounded in our cultural context as
teachers and scholars in the United States, we find resonance in other cultures, even if they are not explored
in depth in this article. For example, our commentary on misplaced-stakes in standardized testing in the
Anglo-American context might also resonate with the college entrance exams used widely in East Asia or
the emphasis on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a standard for international
education comparison. Furthermore, one of the reasons walking was selected as a site of reunion is exactly
for its pedestrian quality–an everyday form of movement that is certainly not limited to a singular cultural
context, even if, as Kerri Andrews (2020, 18) has made clear, that those who write about walking are usu-
ally dominated by White men (e.g. Rosseau, Nietzche, Thoreau). Instead, there is a reason that “go-alongs”
are a key ethnographic practice to understanding cultures of all kinds (Kusenbach 2003); walking/moving is
a universal quotidian activity that cannot be “claimed” only by the West. Thus, we hope that these concep-
tual offerings provide ample opportunity to connect cross-culturally.
170 S. Ha‑DiMuzio et al.

Philosophy is just this: the love, the pursuit of wisdom. The connection between education
and wisdom is just as clear, as long as we avoid a reductive view of teaching as mere trans-
mission of discrete knowledge and skills. If we see education as forming and not merely
informing, then teachers aim to foster the capacities and discernment to enable their stu-
dents to live good lives. In other words, teachers seek to cultivate wisdom. The conclusion
seems clear: philosophy and teaching are animated by the question of how to understand
and foster wisdom.
Yet the two endeavours tend to stray from this common center in opposing directions.
Teachers must take daily responsibility for the students in their charge. They must act. As
such teaching tends to move from the question about wisdom to answers. By contrast, in its
restless problematization of weak arguments, hidden value premises, and fuzzy language,
academic philosophy tends to be moving from various answers back to the question itself.
What’s the problem, you might ask? Philosophers will safeguard the question and teachers
can act on the answers: as Harvey Siegel (1981, 15) once wrote, “Philosophy of education,
like all theorizing, must be distanced from and autonomous from the concerns of practice
and practitioners.” We contend that this is not a happy division of labor. Left unchecked,
each tendency proves dangerous. Unless teachers subject their answers to regular examina-
tion in light of our emerging conceptions of wisdom, they risk miseducating their students.
Philosophers run the opposite risk, of turning this examination into an end in itself. Even
as it admonishes hasty, thoughtless conduct, wisdom does not permit the suspension of
moral conduct so that we may dwell in thinking. Thus, we contend that both activities need
to stay connected to wisdom as praxis: pedagogy needs to recover its philosophical essence
by sustaining the openness of its central questions; philosophy needs to recover its peda-
gogical essence by cultivating responsible thinking that is answerable to humanity. Let us
map out each of these recoveries in turn.

Education as Love of Open Questions

Elsewhere, Higgins (2022, 2011) characterizes education as an ongoing conversation about

human becoming, one framed by three overarching and deeply interdependent questions:
What is our nature and condition? What does it mean to flourish individually and collec-
tively? What facilitates human growth? Whether we acknowledge it or not, to educate is to
take a stand on each of these questions:
[U]nderneath even seemingly superficial educational choices lie profound normative
questions. Without some idea of what one ought to be developing into, how could
we say whether a given change is for the better? When we strive to help someone
mature, we rely on a vision of maturity. When we instruct, we rely on a vision of
what it is important to learn, and therefore on what constitutes a truly educated per-
son. Such issues open out in turn onto the fundamental questions of ethics: What
makes life meaningful or rich? What are the most important human virtues and what
does excellence in these areas look like? What is the collective good? How ought we
best to live together? (Higgins 2022, 57)
It is difficult to imagine a definitive answer to any of these questions, they are open
by nature, vibrating with the tension of multiple, compelling possibilities. For Gadamer
(2004, 357) an open question is one to which answers are “not settled” and remain “under-
determined.” In other words, while something like wisdom may bring to mind a set of
Teaching and Philosophy: Three Reunions 171

complementary or even competing qualities, it is irreducible to any one description, and

thus remains underdetermined, because it can be infinitely instantiated in human conduct.
The closure of educational questions or the end of the educational conversation would
be the presumption of already knowing what makes us human, how to facilitate human
becoming, or what flourishing means for everyone—the hubris of believing we have a suf-
ficient perspective from which to settle such questions.
This is not to portray teaching as a perpetual great books seminar. The scene of practice
demands practical wisdom.2 One cannot teach without implementing some answer to the
enduring questions about what is worth wanting and what life is worth pursuing; we must
still face the urgent pressures applying our evolving answers to our practices in the class-
room today. Because one “always encounters the good in the form of a particular practical
situation in which,” Gadamer explains:
[T]he task of moral knowledge is to determine what the concrete situation asks of
him—or to put it another way, the person acting must view the concrete situation
in light of what is asked of him in general. But—negatively put—this means that
knowledge that cannot be applied to the concrete situation remains meaningless and
even risks obscuring what the situation calls for. (Gadamer 2004, 311)

But here we encounter a serious problem. With our scripted lesson plans, mandated curric-
ula, and one-size-fits-all assessment practices, the current educational climate is as reduc-
tive as ever about the aims of education and more hostile than ever to the teacher as a pro-
fessional who exercises practical wisdom. Professors, policy makers, politicians, parents:
everyone is invited to weigh in on the ends and means of education, except for teachers
themselves. What is an education? This question is closed if decisions about what happens
in a school day are made on the basis of predetermined teacher-student ratios, face-to-face
teaching hours, and mandated subject hours by a single authority: that of the state bureau-
cratic apparatus serving the market economy.
How can teachers reclaim their rightful place at the center of the educational conversa-
tion? What would teaching look like if animated by the ideal Keats (2002, 41) called “Neg-
ative Capability”? Keats capitalizes the phrase to indicate this is a rare “form… of achieve-
ment” when someone is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason” (41–2). Is this disposition possible in a system that
rewards people for providing answers? Correct answers are the currency of school success
via students’ performance on standardized tests and the pedagogical “methods” of attain-
ing it, just as convincing answers are the currency of academic prestige via publications.
A philosophical disposition to question is disruptive, even dangerous in a system in
which people identify with their answers. When a teacher’s (or a school’s) reputation is

2
In Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (2004) characterizes practical wisdom (phronēsis) as a
virtue that allows one to act in a particular situation in accordance with what is good for the human actor
and for humans in general. Practical wisdom concerns action in the realm of human affairs, particularly
where different actions to bring about the good are possible, and things can be deliberated about (“where
the consequences are unclear, and where things are not definite,” 1112b). Such a virtue requires knowledge
of both the universals (what is good for humans) and of the particulars in a situation. Phronēsis is an always
enacted moral knowledge, the task of which is to determine and act upon the moral demands of a concrete
situation. Gadamer’s reading of Aristotle interprets practical wisdom in hermeneutic terms, he calls moral
knowledge “a kind of experience in itself,” (2004, 319) meaning that my understanding of the good “can-
not be fully determined independently of the situation that requires a right action from me” (315). Martha
Nussbaum thus described moral perception, which is a component of practical wisdom, as “a process of
loving conversation between rules and concrete responses” (1990, 95).
172 S. Ha‑DiMuzio et al.

identified with their students’ scores on externally created tests, this not only narrows the
kinds of pedagogical moves a teacher can make, but also leaves no room to question what
sort of curriculum would facilitate the flourishing of those students. We are not suggest-
ing here that questioning ought to simply replace answering, and practitioners ought to be
rewarded for and identify with their questions instead of their answers. Rather, the disposi-
tion to regularly question our assumptions, values, and ends, must accompany the epis-
temic moves we make in our practices. This sort of reflexive orientation is what leads us
to more nuanced and complex answers, pedagogical moves, and solutions, and guards us
against the seduction of certainty.
We’re not so cynical as to presume that a majority of practitioners see their practice
as devoid of formative, ethical, or political properties. Ask anyone about their favorite
teacher, and it becomes clear that there are a huge number of thoughtful educators, who
see their work as facilitating the growth and flourishing of their students, who are dogged
in their inquiry about how education can better serve their students. However, what we
seek to reconcile is the recognition of philosophy at work in pedagogy, despite the dearth
of teacher education programs that formally recognize philosophy as a necessary prereq-
uisite, beyond the ritual of writing a “teaching philosophy.” Teacher education does not
need a philosophical booster shot, but teaching itself is already the ultimate entrée into phi-
losophy. The tasks of re-encountering the world anew alongside each new generation and
meeting the demand of each student’s unique developmental trajectory put teachers directly
in touch with what Higgins (2011, 278) calls “the key questions about our nature, growth,
and flourishing.” Thus, the questions could grow out of the practice itself, if only they were
not foreclosed by the contextual constraints of a culture of knowingness typical of school
systems in the Anglophone West.
We have argued so far that a philosophically oriented practice is sustained by the open-
ness of its central questions and its practitioners’ dispositions to ask such questions. “To
claim that something is educative,” Higgins reminds us, “is to encounter rival claims and
to be propelled into a space of questions” (2022, 55). When it comes to teacher educa-
tion, perhaps a dose of comforting learning science ought to be tempered with the dis-
comforting truth that education is a question-based vocation, and its central questions—on
the nature of us, the meaning of our flourishing, and how to facilitate it—are perpetually
beyond our capacity to answer them. In an age when “bad” teachers or public schooling
serve as scapegoats for most social ills, when the “correction” to teacher education is a
recalibration toward “core practices,” we recognize how precarious this open acknowl-
edgement of uncertainty might feel. Sitting with uncertainty is already challenging, but
to be honest about the limits of teaching seems to place an even clearer target on teachers’
backs. However, we never said that keeping these enduring philosophical questions alive
and open was an easy endeavor; but like most valuable goods, both the stakes and the cost
of sustaining the educational conversation are high. Neil Postman (1996, xi) states it most
dramatically: “without a transcendent and honorable purpose, schooling must reach its fin-
ish, and the sooner we are done with it, the better. With such a purpose, schooling becomes
the central institution through which the young may find reasons for continuing to educate
themselves.”

Philosophy as a Reckoning with Catastrophe

What of philosophy, then, ever aware of the precariousness of certitude, always ready
to question and examine? Why might it need occasionally to be reoriented back to
Teaching and Philosophy: Three Reunions 173

its pedagogical center? Because, we argue, the need to cultivate wisdom is not second-
ary to grappling with what wisdom is. The two endeavors are dialectically related. The
great American living pragmatist, and self-professed Chekhovian-Christian, Cornel West,
reminds us that philosophy is humanity’s response to our existential disposition. West
(2023, 195) refers to philosophy as “a creative and courageous reckoning with catastro-
phe,” a cry for help, an attempt to “find a way out of our trapped predicaments.”3 For West,
the catastrophe, our predicaments, “the wounds, scars, and bruises” (quoted in Mendieta
2011), the “dialogical contestations and clashing narratives over which blood, sweat, and
tears flow,” the “messiness and dirtiness of our foregrounds and the inescapable back-
grounds that shape them” (West 2001, 352), all this is the “funk” of life that philosophy
must wrestle and reckon with. Such a reckoning, for West (West 2023, 195), is “led by a
fallible and fierce practical wisdom.” Philosophy then, by West’s account, has a pedagogi-
cal role to play in humanity’s wrestling with the funk of life. The philosopher attempts to
carve out and point to ways through perennial existential concerns, as did Socrates, or help
us to make sense of unprecedented ones, as did Hannah Arendt.
Dewey (1930, 278) reminds us that any action into which “alternative possibilities
enter” is within the moral realm, thus we cannot relegate morality into a “separate depart-
ment of life.” Questions and answers revolve around such alternative possibilities for con-
duct. If the previous section examined the dangers of getting too hung up on ready-made
answers and forgetting to question, here we acknowledge that even though our answers may
be partial or flawed, we don’t ever get a holiday from having to give them. Thus, philoso-
phy must recall its original animating impulse: to respond to the funk of life with wisdom.
Following West’s lead, we turn to Anton Chekhov, whom West considered “the pre-emi-
nent poet of the funk of life” (2001, 352). At the center of his novella, Ward No. Six, two char-
acters represent the extremes of an unresponsive, withdrawn intellect on the one hand, and an
embodied suffering sentiment on the other: doctor Andrei Yefimych, and a patient in the men-
tal illness ward, Ivan Dmitrich. The doctor, increasingly numb to the corrupt and unhealthy
conditions of his small town hospital, finds comfort in daily reading and drinking, and pro-
fesses a mind-over-matter philosophy. In response to the patient’s complaint that the ward is
“insufferably vile,” something that is masterfully conveyed in Chekhov’s descriptions too,
doctor Andrei Yefimych suggests that “There’s no real difference between a warm, cozy study
and this ward,” and “A man’s peace and content[ment] are not outside but within him” (Chek-
hov 2000, 197). In response, the patient Ivan Dmitrich in a passionate monologue, accuses the
doctor of masking “laziness, fakirism, a dreamy stupor” with “a convenient philosophy” (197)
that absolves him of any responsibility: “You see a peasant beating his wife, for instance. Why
interfere? Let him beat her, they’ll both die sooner or later anyway”; “A peasant woman comes
with a toothache … So what? Pain is the notion of pain, and besides, one cannot live in this
world without sickness, and we’ll all die, so go away, woman, don’t interfere with my thinking
and my vodka drinking” (200).
In the end, through his own passivity coupled with the manipulations of others, the doctor
ends up as a patient in the ward, where he is finally confronted with its violence, stench, and
inhumanity. Thus confronted with physiological stress, perhaps for the first time, he, along-
side his former conversation partner, Ivan Dmitrich, finds himself passionately, but futilely
pounding on the door to demand his freedom. As a doctor, Andrei Yefimych failed to respond

3
There are diverse wisdom traditions across the world, and thus “human catastrophe” and “philosophy”
may look different in different parts of the world and across cultures. Nevertheless we contend that West’s
claim is a universal one: all cultures have grappled with human finitude and attempted to make sense of it
through their distinct philosophies.
174 S. Ha‑DiMuzio et al.

with any agency to his context, retreating into a drunken pseudo-Stoicism. When this context
finally catches up with him—‘Here is reality!’ thought Andrei Yefimych, and he felt fright-
ened,—and he is overwhelmed by despair, Ivan Dmitrich wrily suggests that he “Try philoso-
phizing” (217). In response, the doctor admits “I used to be indifferent, I reasoned cheerfully
and sensibly, but life had only to touch me rudely and I lost heart… prostration… We’re weak,
we’re trash…” (218). For Andrei Yefymich the time to respond adequately to his situation has
run out.
Ward No. 6 is not only a story about how the tables can be turned on an unempathetic char-
acter, but one that conveys the primacy of embodied experience for understanding. “I respond
to pain with cries and tears, to meanness with indignation, to vileness with disgust,” asserts
Ivan Dmitrich, pointing out that the higher the organism, “the more susceptible it is and the
more energetically it reacts to reality” (198). Ivan Dmitrich thought that Andrei Yefimych’s
reading of Stoicism was flawed, because he forgot the part about the need to cultivate vir-
tue, which is always in relation to others. Yet Chekhov helps us to cast doubt on one of Stoi-
cism’s core tenets that the feelings borne of suffering are something to be overcome. Feelings,
the human reactions to reality, should instead be taken as a crucial vehicle for the cultivation
of wisdom. We cannot truly understand reality, unless we are in touch with our embodied
experience.
Academic philosophy’s problematic tendency to withdraw from the messiness of the
human condition and dwell in abstractions bears some resemblance to the doctor in Chek-
hov’s story. This withdrawal is antithetical to wisdom. How to react to reality is perhaps the
fundamental problem for wisdom, an endeavor shared by education and philosophy, one that
requires some grasp of reality, and some notions of our capacities, possibilities, and methods
of responding. “Taking philosophy seriously immerses us into the funk of life and bids us to
find our distinctive voice and share our unique vision,” urges West. This vision and voice is
the living praxis of wisdom—philosophy’s response to life. Lani Watson, in her study of the
intellectual virtue of inquisitiveness, reminds us that asking questions must ultimately aim at
bringing us into “contact with reality” (2015, 276).
Keeping the questions in the educational conversation open, we contended, is an uncom-
fortable challenge for educators. West’s challenge to philosophers, to stay immersed in the
funk of life is equally, perhaps more, uncomfortable. Discomfort then might be one of the keys
to helping education and philosophy remain closer to their common center. Among acting
wisely, cultivating wisdom, and seeking to understand what wisdom is, none is prior to any of
the others: wisdom is constituted through praxis. This praxis is the shared purpose of philoso-
phy and education.

First‑Foot Knowledge

On Your Feet!

Discussions of the role of philosophy in teacher education usually presume an incongru-

ity between philosophy and pedagogy. Then arguments are advanced to show the practi-
cality of philosophical reflection for this incongruous world of the classroom. In staging
our second reunion, we want to begin by observing a striking resemblance between these
activities, a common posture, if you will. If we close our eyes and picture first an aver-
age classroom and then a philosopher thinking, what images come to mind? In the first
place, we see rows of students at their desks; in the second, we see something like Rodin’s
Teaching and Philosophy: Three Reunions 175

Thinker. When we place these two images side-by-side we observe a striking resemblance:
the sedentary nature of both activities. In this section, we humbly suggest that both phi-
losophy and pedagogy need to get up off their tochus.4 To be clear, we know that teachers
are rarely sitting at their desks. The onus, howver, is not necessarily for teachers to get up
on their feet, but for educators to be given the creativity and agency to mobilize students
and reinvigorate learning as an immersive, dynamic experience. In the quotidian practice
of walking, pedagogy and philosophy may reconnect with shared values of embodiment,
mobility, and copresence, demonstrating not only essential aspects of each activity but a
deep affiliation between them.
Though our experience is fundamentally an embodied one (see, e.g., Merleau-Ponty
1990), we spend most of our time in disembodied states. One such debilitating posture is
being seated in a chair, whether in your study or in a classroom, a device that creates an
experience of suspension. One could literally be suspended, with one’s feet hovering in
midair, or more likely, figuratively suspended, when one’s mind is able to transcend the
body and when thought is able to supersede sensation.
Tim Ingold compares the invention and modern prominence of the chair to that of the
boot. The boot constrained the intelligent and tactile activity of the feet to serve the pri-
mary purpose of freeing the hands for “greater” cognitive activity, such as the crafting of
tools or the wielding of technology. In this way, the European proliferation of the boot dis-
tinguishes between “primitive” and “civilized” activity, insinuating that advanced thought
occurs best when divorced from the feet and detached from the body. Similarly, the wide-
spread development and implementation of the chair reinforces this separation between
thought and action:
Where the boot, in reducing the activity of walking to the activity of a stepping
machine, deprives wearers of the possibility of thinking with their feet, the chair ena-
bles sitters to think without involving the feet at all… It is as though, for inhabit-
ants of the metropolis, the world of their thoughts, their dreams and their relations
with others floats like a mirage above the road they tread in their actual material life.
(Ingold 2011, 39)

The chair, like the boot, has reinforced the false notion that thinking can and should occur
in suspension—without a sense of groundedness to the earth and world, without being fun-
damentally tethered to the bodily experience.
In order for learning to begin, we think, students must first take their seats. But this is a
fateful assumption (and an ironic one, since the word foot is hidden in the word pedagogy;
cf. Holland 2018). Suspended, we ask students to divorce learning from their embodied
experience. The classroom becomes a theater, screening representations of the world. As
it did for Plato’s famous cave dwellers, these sanctioned representations come to stand for

4
A critic might claim that certainly, there is much about teaching if not philosophy that is inherently
mobile. Teachers are rarely sitting, but rather, so often occupied with moving between students that they
rarely even have time to use the restroom. Children are also often in motion, even if it is simply squirming
in their seat. Furthermore, as Rebecca Solnit suggests, the practice of walks as an essential form of thinking
can be traced back to ancient Greece, where the “Peripatetic philosophers,” including Aristotle, would often
teach while walking up and down a covered colonnade (2000, 16). Though we recognize that movement is
often inescapable for teachers and concede that it has played a significant role historically in philosophy,
we claim that there is still a static ethos or attitude that imbues both practices, which sometimes manifests
in the symbolism of the chair in both the classroom and in the study. This detached stillness, even if only
metaphorical, is the phenomenon we seek to address through this section.
176 S. Ha‑DiMuzio et al.

knowledge, distancing students from what they can perceive for themselves. As Dewey
(1990, 31–2) once quipped about his difficulty in finding decent chairs for the Lab School:
We had a great deal of difficulty in finding what we needed, and finally one dealer,
more intelligent than the rest, made this remark: ‘I am afraid we have not what you
want. You want something at which the children may work; these are all for listen-
ing.’

In their chairs, children are rendered passive listeners, rather than engaged, worldly par-
ticipants. When students are encouraged to walk, the rise from their chair signals a recon-
nection of their feet with the world. It is a pedagogical move that seeks to shift from sus-
pended, disembodied thought to tactile engagement with the body and world.
In the case of the philosopher, too often, he or she is pressed to engage in hard thought
and deep contemplation, which promotes a kind of lofty abstraction. Instead, a peripatetic
philosophy necessitates a return to tethering abstract dilemmas—like political responsibil-
ity or moral quandaries about a life worth living—to our embodied experiences. Philoso-
phy is most itself when thickly engaged with the problems, joys, frustrations, and crises
of the world: what Cornel West (2023) has described as the “funk” of life. And of course
walking has a long history in philosophy from Aristotle and the Stoics to Rousseau and
Thoreau (see, e.g., Solnit 2000, Part I; and Gros 2014). But times have changed, and phi-
losophy has largely taken a seat in the lecture hall and the seminar room (not to mention
the even more suspended space of the journal article). It is time to reclaim the peripatetic
tradition in philosophy and pedagogy. Our claim is that once we get each activity moving,
their resemblances come to the surface.

Get Moving!

So how might walking reveal the philosophicality of pedagogy? Jan Masschelein’s (2009,
2010) “poor pedagogy” can serve as a generative illustration. Masschelein teaches interna-
tional courses which involve traveling to several post-conflict cities. Upon entering a new
place, he tasks his students with walking the city along arbitrary lines drawn on a map
and holds them accountable to observational questions: “What have you seen? What have
you heard? What do you think about it? What do you make of it?” (Masschelein 2009).
These seemingly simple questions serve a complex purpose of imprinting upon students
the necessity of vigilant perception, gesturing toward deeper pedagogical questions that
undergird this call to walk: What did your gaze or senses linger on via your locomotive
activity in this place? What did you notice that is worthy of investigating together as a
learning community? This practice of walking binds students to their embodied experi-
ence of the world as fundamental content for teaching and learning. It’s as if we are telling
our students: Don’t take our word for what is important to learn! See it for yourself! Allow
your movement in the world to heighten your awareness, spark your curiosity, and serve
as fertile soil for education. In this sense, the practice of walking holds rich pedagogical
promise that can imbue our static classrooms with worldly perceptions from the students
themselves.
Now the essential element of this illustration is not the novelty of place, as the percep-
tion-refining capacity of walking can also encourage walkers to “come into new relations
with the familiar,” like one’s own campus or neighborhood (Marin 2020, 10). Indeed, this
“learning on the move” framework (see Marin et al. 2020, 2) is inspired by indigenous
Teaching and Philosophy: Three Reunions 177

knowledge systems that uplift the role of everyday ambulation as a crucial means of devel-
oping kinship with place, with recognition not only the relations between human inhabit-
ants and place, but also of the histories and presence of the more-than-human, such as
the living lands and waters.5 Walking—or other kinds of quotidian movement, like wheel-
chair locomotion or biking—holds the potential to elicit a “wandering” mindset, where one
becomes open to seeing one’s surroundings with curiosity and renewed vision, as opposed
to succumbing to instrumentality.6 For example, in one study about walking, a longtime
resident of Aberdeen commented on the ways that aimless walking reattunes him to the
novelty of his own town:
I mean, certainly, you see a lot more when you’re walking. Driving, you look at the
road ahead, or should be… [but] being from a construction background, I tend to
look up, wherever I go. Whether it’s New York or Sydney, the only way to see is from
the ground level: on your feet, wandering around ... finding little lanes and places,
and things that people who live there won’t even see. (Lee and Ingold 2006, 70)
“Wandering around” is a kind of intentional movement that resists defining the path as
simply an instrumental means toward a particular destination, as is often the case when
you drive with a destination in mind and your eye on the clock. In these cases, the journey
becomes defined by efficiency and narrowed by tunnel vision: how quickly and directly can
I arrive? Instead, walking “from the ground level” of a given place, whether it is one worn
by repetition or completely foreign, redirects your attention to being alive to the present
moment and responding to the stimuli around you. In the excerpt above, the walker “find[s]
little lanes and places” that even those who live in direct proximity might not notice.
Ambulating also holds promise for rediscovering the pedagogicality of philosophy.
Peripatetic movement can help cultivate a heightened perceptive orientation to the world,
something that encourages theorists to thicken the threads tethering their thoughts to the
material conditions of everyday reality. Despite clarion calls (e.g., hooks 1994) to democ-
ratize philosophy and re-establish it as a more quotidian activity, we don’t think it is too
much of a stretch to say that philosophy is intimately involved with abstraction, “rising
to the universal” via transcendent concepts like freedom, justice, virtue, and truth (Gad-
amer 2004, 73). We don’t deny the importance of stepping back to see the proverbial forest
(indeed, we will stress just this in the third section of this paper). However, theorizing must
avoid what Beyer and Liston (1992, 150) call “circular narcissism,” which occurs when
theoretical concepts become dissociated from material reality. Consider, for example, when
fierce rifts over the nature of how to define “social justice” are divorced from local com-
munity organizing efforts to resist arming school teachers with guns, or when efforts to
“de-colonialize” a curriculum make no connection to indigenous efforts to maintain sover-
eignty over the land where they now live.
Recognition of the lived reality that informs philosophical inquiry and ideally benefits
from theoretical investigation requires heightened perception. It requires the ability to tap

5
Other excellent sources that speak to the relationship between walking and indigenous place-based
knowledge are Springgay and Truman (2019), Tuck and McKenzie (2014), and Bang et al. (2014). See
Marin (2020, 6) on the importance of “ambulatory turns” during nature walks between kin.
6
This emphasis on the intentional, perceptive orientation that is unlocked reinforces the notion that it is
not only literal walking, on two feet, that is worth pursuing, especially given its ableist assumptions. What’s
prioritized is a kind of movement, not limited only to able-bodied walkers, that elicits heightened percep-
tion and attentive observation. Therefore, we could apply the same comparison between “a walk” taken by
a person in a wheelchair, which encourages wandering and intensified observation, or a more instrumental
manner of moving, as in the case when that person might wheel quickly to their desired destination.
178 S. Ha‑DiMuzio et al.

into intimate observation of and engagement with the conditions around us. As bell hooks
(2009, 2) describes, in order to truly notice the happenings of a given neighborhood, to be
held accountable to her work making a material impact, it requires the ability to walk and
wander: “I need to live where I can walk. I need to be able to walk to work, to the store,
to a place where I can sit and drink tea and fellowship.” It is only in establishing this com-
munion with others, in some corner of the earth, that philosophers restore the pedagogical
facets of their philosophy. Walking offers one fruitful conduit to this re-entwining of phi-
losophy and pedagogy via the nurturing of heightened perception.

Walking Side‑by‑Side

Our peripatetic approach not only mobilizes learners and thinkers to abandon the chair and
walk, it also prioritizes the necessity of walking with. As such, ambulation nurtures a sense
of “shared co-presence” that disrupts the individualistic nature of schooling and the soli-
tary tendencies of philosophy (Lee and Ingold 2006, 69).
Let’s return to our dominant configuration of the classroom, where students sit in rows
facing the “focal” subject/object, often the teacher or the blackboard. This creates an inter-
action between the two that might be represented by the diagram below:

This “face-to-face” orientation trains students to fix their attention on their teacher and the
presented class content. The teacher is also angled to face her students, yet the attention is
not symmetrical. Despite criticism of the banking model, Freire’s (2000, 73) famous litany
of contradictions still apply in too many classrooms:

• The teacher teaches and the students are taught;

• The teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
• The teacher talks and the students listen—meekly;
• The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action
of the teacher;
• The teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere
objects.7

What if we imagine that the relationship between teacher and student was more equal-
ized, such that their orientation is not one of rapt one-way attention, but instead a side-
by-side coordination? What if, rather than talking at one another, teachers and students
talk with one another about their shared concerns about their common world? That would
re-position teachers and students to take an orientation better represented by this diagram:

7
We have selected items (a), (c), (d), (g), and (j) from Freire’s list and added bullets.
Teaching and Philosophy: Three Reunions 179

We argue this re-orientation best characterizes the relationship cultivated by shared walks.
Talking while walking with another person directs the subjects’ attention “at and within
the world through which they move” (Myers 2011, 188). Committing to a conversant walk
helps to establish equality—when each walker must adjust to the gait and cadence of the
other, when they negotiate their path and direction of the walk, and when they collec-
tively choose what parts of their shared grounds to see or retreat from. The criss-crossing
lines are meant to signal that the attention of each walker is shaped by that of the other.
They began to encounter the world as triangulated by their overlapping horizons, a shared
world.
Consider then, how our observations can be thickened with the companionship of
another person. What more can one notice when there are two subjectivities sharing the
same vista, each bringing their own history, understandings, and experience to the fore?
Each of us, as our own distinctive bundle of contingencies and choices, is bound to notice
different facets of the same, though infinite world. Walking through a familiar neighbor-
hood with another person—say someone with a disability, a different gender, or someone
who has grown up there—can help attune us to see the same surroundings differently and
sharpen what we notice in the future. In this way, shared walks expand the pedagogical
and philosophical capacity of solitary ambulation by broadening what we can learn and
contemplate together.
Paradoxically, one could argue that students in our classroom caricature already sit in
this orientation. Indeed, don’t they too sit side-by-side, facing the representation of the
world projected up upon the screen? Though the configuration is similar, the experience
is not necessarily one that is shared in the same way as on a walk. Instead, though students
are seated side-by-side, they are often encouraged to follow individual, rather than col-
lective paths. Our standards of academic success, such as high GPAs, prestigious college
admissions, and high-earning employment, are constrained to the individual as the primary
unit of measurement, despite the proliferation of group projects and class dialogue. Perhaps
the possibility for a more collaborative orientation is there, but perhaps not nurtured in the
same way that a walk might allow.
We argue that philosophers are also oriented in the same way as students. Certainly,
scholars share research interests and discuss ideas with one another, edit each other’s work,
even co-author. Indeed the practice of writing should resemble an entry into an existing
conversation. However, the academy, much like the schooling enterprise, rewards individ-
ual productivity rather than collective creations. Tenure at research universities, for exam-
ple, is an advancement system that relies on the quantity of lead author or solo publications
or one’s demonstrated ability to secure grants as a primary investigator. The very practice
of citations often becomes more about racking up scholarly prestige rather than a true will-
ingness to engage substantively with another thinker. Therefore, like education, the prac-
tice of philosophy also endorses individual efforts despite its mirage of a more collectivist
orientation. In this sense, peripatetic practices offer the possibility of restoring both peda-
gogy and philosophy to their communal essence.
Therefore, a distinctive feature of our peripatetic school might be the pairing of each
student with a mentor teacher to periodically walk together, without an agenda. The walk
might again become a prominent feature, as it was in ancient Greece, of philosophical
inquiry, where thinkers are encouraged to ambulate together regularly to work through
ideas together. Or, rather than traditional systems of punishment, like demerits or deten-
tions, disciplinary actions at our school involve giving students the option to “walk it off”
with another peer. These shared walks emphasize not only the “walk,” but the opportunity
to “walk with—where ‘with’ implies not a face-to-face confrontation, but heading the same
180 S. Ha‑DiMuzio et al.

way, sharing the same vistas, and perhaps retreating from the same threats behind” (Lee
and Ingold 2006, 57). The “with” taps into the collective possibilities of walking as a peda-
gogical and philosophical practice.
The pedestrian movement of shared wandering offers one avenue toward restoring the
heart of both the pedagogical and philosophical enterprise. Meditations on ambulation pro-
vide educators and philosophers alike with an opportunity to rehabilitate the norms of their
oft sedentary, static, and solitary endeavors, and restore their practices to shared core com-
mitments including embodied, mobile, and shared experiences through the world.

High‑Stakes

Barf Bags

A key part of every debate is the contest over terminology. In the educational assessment
debate, one side speaks of “merit,” “standards,” and “accountability” while the other
sounds the alarm over “high-stakes testing.” And the warning is well-heeded. While it is
not clear how well standardized tests measure what they claim to measure, their aura of
proofiness leads us to beg the crucial questions. We act as if the data speak for themselves,
instead of engaging in thoughtful interpretation and application. And we beg the even
more fundamental question of whether we are indeed measuring the right thing. Even a
moment’s reflection suggests that we are not, unless we really want to define the educated
person as a high-speed, pressure-proof symbol manipulator. This is a parody of even a nar-
rowly intellectual education. The irony of the accountability movement is that everyone
and everything is to be judged on outcomes except for high-stakes testing itself. Let us
grade our testing regime, considering both stated outcomes and unintended consequences,
in three areas: motivation and achievement, curriculum and pedagogy, and meritocratic
school reform:
Motivation and Achievement. No one doubts that high-stakes testing destroys intrinsic
motivation for students and teachers alike. Indeed, this result is so predictable that one
wonders whether it really should be called an “unintended” outcome. What is more sur-
prising is that, as David Berliner (2003) has shown, high-stakes testing fails to increase
extrinsic motivation. The eighteen states adopting the most intensive accountability meas-
ures saw no consistent gains in student learning outcomes, only an increase in school drop-
outs and a sharp rise in cheating. Meier and Knoester (2017, 8) point out another distress-
ing side effect: our tests “give students the idea that there is only one right answer to any
question,” making them misaligned with “the central purpose of public schools: to prepare
graduates to effectively participate in a democracy, by exercising judgment, weighing evi-
dence, and defending ideas.” Even if the tests did motivate genuine learning, it is not clear
that the ends would justify the means. Consider this disturbing anecdote offered by Nichols
and Berliner (2007, 161):
It is standardized testing day, and an armored truck is pulling up to an elementary
school in the Boston suburbs. The principal comes out to receive the test kits from
the guard, but there is something beyond the tests and answer sheets: a large Ziplock
bag, a pair of latex gloves, and a set of instructions. The principal is instructed to don
Teaching and Philosophy: Three Reunions 181

the gloves before inserting any booklets the children vomit “on into the Ziplock bag,
and to return these tests along with the others to the Department of Education.”8
Curriculum and Pedagogy. Predictably, high-stakes testing immediately began wagging
the curricular and pedagogical dog. Chasing scores, we increasingly neglect the hard-to-
measure “learning outcomes” that make us human. Even within the narrowed curriculum,
we teach to the test exacerbating our tendency toward teacher-directed, didactic, instrumen-
tal, one-size-fits-all pedagogy. Far from a surprise, this is assessment 101: when a measure
becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure (Goodhart’s Law). Meier and Knoester
(2017, 8) point out that high-stakes tests were obviously not designed to help teachers think
through their practice since “scores are received months after the test and therefore are not
conceivably useful to students’ current teachers” (Ibid.). Indeed, the testing regime seems
well designed to take “key decisions away from school communities, teachers, and stu-
dents” (Ibid.).
Meritocratic School Reform. On this charge, we can skip right to closing arguments.
Again, we yield the floor to Meier and Knoester:
Test results are strongly correlated with race and class and therefore provide “scien-
tific” justification for racial and class inequalities in society and in schools…. Pub-
licly grading schools based on test results, as many states do, combined with school
choice programs has been found to exacerbate segregation. (Ibid.)

How should we interpret this abysmal report card? Two obvious conclusions arrive by
armored car: the accountability movement is engaged in doublespeak, and the stakes are
too high. However, hidden within these patent truths is another, more subtle one: educa-
tion is indeed a high-stakes endeavor. It is a pyrrhic victory to trade assessment sticks
for engagement carrots while retaining the idea of education as an economic competition
where one redeems the currency of seat time and test scores for positional advantage and
cash? Enough with the Ziplock bags; on this, all people of conscience will agree. But now
let us imagine a different starting point, with teachers tasked not with preparing tributes for
the hunger games, but with cura personalis, care for whole persons striving to lead good
and meaningful lives. Once we have dialed down the pressure of the credentialing game,
the opposite problem comes to the fore, recovering the existential stakes of the endeavor,
wrestling with thorny questions about goodness, meaning, and personhood. This suggests
that in order to relocate its stakes, teaching must rediscover its inherent philosophicality.
While this may be true, there is a dialectical complication. Philosophy too is subject to
drift. And as we will now attempt to show, in order to relocate its stakes, philosophy must
rediscover its inherent pedagogicality.

We Scholars

In the opening pages of Walden, Thoreau puts his philosophical cards on the table:
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admi-
rable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not

8
As William Deresiewicz (2014) has recently pointed out, not even the winners in this cruel contest
emerge unscathed: having made oneself into a hoop-jumper, one is incapable of taking advantage of prize
of launching on the risky, self-directed process of liberal learning on offer at our ultra-selective universities.
182 S. Ha‑DiMuzio et al.

merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as
to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and
trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
(Thoreau 1971, 14)

To this, the contemporary academic philosopher might retort as follows. Thoreau writes
this decades before the German research ideal found its footing in the US establishing phi-
losophy and other subjects as true disciplines. He has never even seen a philosophy profes-
sor as we now understand the role. Why should we listen to a nineteenth century outdoors-
man-essayist about who counts as a philosopher?
And yet, Thoreau seems to have been prescient about the tendency to elevate intellectual
dexterity over other humane virtues in philosophical formation. Compare what the great
academic philosopher, Bernard Williams, has to say about our scientistic misunderstanding
of this “humanistic discipline,” moving from an observation about how philosophers write
to an insight about their formation (Williams 2000). “What is familiar to any reader of ana-
lytic philosophy,” Williams writes is the quixotic attempt:
to remove in advance every conceivable misunderstanding or misinterpretation or
objection, including those that would occur only to the malicious or the clinically lit-
eral-minded. This activity itself is often rather mournfully equated with the boasted
clarity and rigour of analytic philosophy. (Williams 2000, 480)

While Williams suspects that this malady has multiple causes, he zeroes in on a disturbing
fact about the philosophical psyche:
the teaching of philosophy by eristic argument… tends to implant in philosophers an
intimidatingly nit-picking superego, a blend of their most impressive teachers and
their most competitive colleagues, which guides their writing by means of constant
anticipations of guilt and shame.9

Philosophy as collective neurosis? It seems far fetched until you observe how philosophy
seminars can devolve into an exercise of ever-finer distinctions, a game of “Who has the
sharpest scalpel?” “Nitpicking” or not, there is real pain in failing to live up to one’s ego
ideal. Earning the respect of your peers, avoiding shame in your chosen community: these
are high-stakes indeed.
But once again, it seems to be a matter of the wrong stakes. Perhaps Thoreau had the
Socrates of the Republic in mind. “It is not a trivial question,” Socrates chides his interloc-
utors, “what we are talking about is how one should live.”10 In the Republic, the company
has agreed to explore this primary existential-ethical question. In other dialogues, however,
Plato recognizes that these stakes, this question of what sorts of lives are worth living, can
be lost and must be retrieved. The elenctic dialogues read as a series of rescue missions,
recovering the ethical stakes from conversations likely to devolve into chatter, didacticism,
or debate.

9
Ibid. Note, though, that in Shame and Necessity, Williams challenges the commonplace that shame is
primitive moral emotion from which we were liberated by modern moral notions of guilt.
10
This is Williams’ translation of Republic 352d. See Williams (1985, 1).
Teaching and Philosophy: Three Reunions 183

What Do You Stand For?

One example will have to suffice. In the bulk of the Meno, Socrates questions his interlocu-
tor about the nature of virtue. But here as elsewhere, Plato makes a point of showing us
the pedagogical prologue to the standard elenchus. The dialogue begins with Meno as the
questioner, asking a related but distinct question: “Can you tell me Socrates, can virtue be
taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men
possess it by nature or in some other way?” (Plato 1981, 59 (70a)). The question is ambigu-
ous. Or rather one of the ambiguities of the opening is whether, punctuation aside, it genu-
inely is a question. Consider Gadamer’s point that something only counts as a question if it
passes this test: that someone actually poses it from a place of genuine interest or perplex-
ity. On one plausible reading, Meno’s only real question is whether Socrates’ reputation as
a debater is warranted. Meno wants to know if he can take him. In this way, we read the
opening as a challenge as in: let’s debate the origins of virtue; here are three possible posi-
tions; choose your weapon! As we will come to learn, Meno has speeches about virtue at
the ready. But we cannot rule out the possibility that something in Meno hungers for more
substantive intellectual fare. Then we may begin to notice the reflexivity built into Meno’s
opening gambit. For if one may be instructed in virtue, then Socrates’ answer itself might
make Meno more virtuous. Or if virtue is learned through practice, then perhaps this dia-
logue amounts to moral education. It is certainly possible that Meno only wants a victory,
or some entertainment, but we can also make out the whisper of the question, is it too late
for me to seek genuine virtue.
Socrates seems aware of both possibilities since he forces Meno to declare himself
through three rapid maneuvers. The first is harder than it sounds, for one must have tamed
one’s vanity: Socrates simply admits that he doesn’t know the answer. Indeed, Socrates not
only refuses to grab any of Meno’s three weapons, but disarms himself further, adding that
“I am so far from knowing whether virtue can be taught or not that I do not even have any
knowledge of what virtue itself is” (59 [71a]). This sets up Socrates’ second maneuver.
Socrates, accuses Meno of begging the question, asking whether, if one “does not know
what something is,” one could know “what qualities it possesses” (60 [71b]). Meno acqui-
esces, but then tries to bait Socrates with some trash talk: “Do you really not know what
virtue is? Are we to report this to the folks back home about you?” (60 [71b-c]). Black-
belt in pedagogical jiu-jitsu, Socrates counters that in fact he has never met anyone who
knew what virtue is. This is too much for Meno, who lacks control over his vanity. But he
only puts one foot into Socrates’ trap, hiding behind a proxy figure, his sophistic mentor
Gorgias:
Meno: How so? Did you not meet Gorgias when he was here?
Socrates: I did.
Meno: Did you not then think that he knew?
Socrates: I do not altogether remember, Meno, so I cannot tell you now what I
thought then. Perhaps he does know; you know what he used to say, so you remind
me of what he said. You tell me yourself if you are willing, for surely you share his
views.
Meno: I do
Socrates: Let us leave Gorgias out of it, since he is not here. But Meno, by the gods,
what do you yourself say that virtue is? Speak and do not begrudge us…
Meno: It is not hard to tell you, Socrates. First… (60 [71c-d])
184 S. Ha‑DiMuzio et al.

And so, with a simple shift of weight, Socrates forces Meno to abandon the pretense of
questioning and admit that he is stuffed full of answers that he is more than happy to
propound.
All of this has occurred in the first two pages of a thirty-page dialogue. For many, the
value of the dialogue lies in what follows as Meno advances no fewer than seven accounts
of virtue, each rebutted by Socrates, before the pair goes on to consider the nature of
knowledge, the soul, and whether there are teachers of virtue. However, we may read the
entire dialogue in light of this opening, as a form of preparation for facing the question. In
the course of the dialogue, Meno employs various strategies—trash talk (70b-c), arguing
by proxy (70c), bullying (79e-80b), and logical tricks (80d)—for evading the disturbing
question, how should I live? The results of the Meno would not be publishable in a peer-
reviewed journal. Throughout, what Socrates attempts is to reestablish the stakes of the
enterprise. If Whitehead is correct that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, then it is a
footnote to a set of works that dramatize the ways in which we are always laboring to find
our way back to the root of philosophy, the question of how to put together a life worth
living. The “we” here is not rhetorical. We cannot go it alone. We rediscover the meaning
of being friends to wisdom in our efforts to help each other confront the task of formation.
The philosophical questions cannot be archived in a fixed form. Each time, they must be
disentangled anew from the tangle of gleams of light and received ideas, the rigamarole
of the mundane and the anguish of finitude. This disentangling, this companionship, and
indeed this provocation “by the gods, what do you yourself say that virtue is” this ur-philo-
sophical activity is pedagogy.
Together, teaching and philosophy, may manage to step away from the crucible of
achievement and rediscover the stakes of their overlapping enterprise. Only in a philosoph-
ical pedagogy and a pedagogical philosophy, can we clear space for what Michael Oake-
shott (1989, esp. 25–7) called “liberal learning.” Because it is valuable and comes in so
many forms, we sometimes forget that all instrumental learning adheres to the same basic
educational logic: learning how to get what you have already happened to learn to want.
But as soon as we state the matter in this way, we can see how disastrous it is when instru-
mental learning, as inviting and capacious as it may be, becomes the only show in town.
For this is to beg the central ethical-existential, pedagogical-philosophical question: what
is truly worth wanting to have, to achieve, to participate in, to become? Here are the truly
high stakes and facing up to them is the responsibility and the joy of teaching and philoso-
phy alike.

Conclusion

What role might philosophy play in teacher education? Without denying that teachers
might profit from studying philosophy, we have suggested that this familiar problematic
begs the question of how teaching and philosophy are related. From our point of view,
a better question might be, how can philosophy and teaching find their way back to the
estranged aspects of themselves and thus to each other. In this article, we have staged
three such reunions. In the simultaneous quest to understand and act upon wisdom; in the
embodied, moving stance of the shared walk; in the effort to rediscover the true stakes of
an enterprise: in each, we find revealed the deep kinship of teaching and philosophy.
Teaching and Philosophy: Three Reunions 185

Declarations
Conflict of interest On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of inter-
est.

References
Alemánn Martínez, Ana M. 2003. Waiting for Gabriel: philosophical literacy and teacher education.
Teacher Educator 39 (1): 35–51.
Andrews, Kerri. 2020. Wanderers: A history of women walking. London: Reaktion Books.
Arcilla, René Vincente. 2002. Why aren’t philosophers and educators speaking to each other? Educational
Theory 52 (1): 11.
Aristotle. 2004. Nicomachean ethics. Translated and edited by Roger Crisp. Cambridge University Press.
Bang, Megan, Lawrence Curley, Adam Kessel, Ananda Marin, Eli S. Suzukovich, and George Strack. 2014.
Muskrat theories, tobacco in the streets, and living Chicago as indigenous land. Environmental Educa-
tion Research 20 (1): 37–55. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​13504​622.​2013.​865113.
Berliner, David C. 2003. A research report: the effects of high-stakes testing on student motivation and
learning. Educational Leadership 60(5). https://​www.​ascd.​org/​el/​artic​les/-​the-​effec​ts-​of-​high-​stakes-​
testi​ng-​on-​stude​nt-​motiv​ation-​and-​learn​ing.
Beyer, Landon, and Daniel Liston. 1992. Discourse or moral action? A critique of postmodernism. Educa-
tional Theory 42 (4): 371–393.
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. 2000. “Ward No. 6.” Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. In
Selected stories of Anton Chekhov, 171–222. New York: Modern Library. Original edition, 1892.
Colgan, Andrew D, and Bruce Maxwell. 2020. Editor’s Introduction. In The importance of philosophy in
teacher education: mapping the decline and its consequences. New York: Routledge.
Deresiewicz, William. 2014. Excellent sheep: The miseducation of the American elite and the way to a
meaningful life. New York: Free Press.
Dewey, John. 1930. Human nature and conduct: An introduction to social psychology, 1922. New York:
Modern Library.
Dewey, John. 1990. The school and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dunn, Alyssa Hadley. 2021. Teaching on days after: Educating for equity in the wake of injustice. Teachers
College Press.
Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. 30th Anniversary ed.
NY: Continuum. 1973.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and method. Translated by rev. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Mar-
shall. 2nd Rev., Continuum Impacts ed. NY: Continuum. 1960.
Gros, Frédéric. 2014. A philosophy of walking. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso.
Higgins, Chris. 2011. The good life of teaching: An ethics of professional practice. Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Higgins, Chris. 2022. La educación en el corazón de las humanidades/Education at the heart of the
humanities. Teoría De La Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria 34 (1): 49–68.
Holland, LeeAnn M. 2018. Reconsidering the “Ped” in “Pedagogy”: A walking education. In Philosophy
of education 2016, ed. Natasha Levinson, 64–73. Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society.
Hooks, Bell. 1994. Theory as liberatory practice. In Teaching to transgress, 59–75. New York:
Routledge.
Hooks, Bell. 2009. Belonging: A culture of place. New York: Routledge.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1944/1996. The dialectic of enlightenment. New York:
Continuum.
Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge.
Keats, John. 2002. Selected letters. Edited by Robert Gittings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Original
edition, 1817.
Kusenbach, Margarethe. 2003. Street phenomenology: The Go-Along as ethnographic research tool. Eth-
nography 4 (3): 455–485. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​14661​38103​43007.
Lee, Jo., and Tim Ingold. 2006. Fieldwork on foot: Perceiving, routing, socializing. In Locating the field:
Space, place and context in anthropology, ed. Simon Coleman and Peter Collins, 67–85. Oxford: Berg.
Marin, Ananda Maria. 2020. Ambulatory sequences: Ecologies of learning by attending and observing
on the move. Cognition and Instruction 38 (3): 281–317.
186 S. Ha‑DiMuzio et al.

Marin, Ananda, Katie Headrick Taylor, Ben Rydal Shapiro, and Rogers Hall. 2020. Why learning on the
move: Intersecting research pathways for mobility, learning and teaching. Cognition and Instruc-
tion 38 (3): 1–16. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​07370​008.​2020.​17691​00.
Masschelein, Jan. 2009. “The world ‘once more’: Walking Lines.” Teachers College Record 15647.
Masschelein, Jan. 2010. E-ducating the Gaze: The idea of a poor pedagogy. Ethics and Education 5 (5):
43–53.
Meier, Deborah, and Matthew Knoester. 2017. Beyond testing: Seven assessments of students and
schools more effective than standardized tests. New York: Teachers College Press.
Mendieta, Eduardo. 2011. Focus on the funk: An interview with Cornel West. The Immanent Frame,
October 6.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1990. Phenomenology of perception. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
Myers, Misha. 2011. Walking again lively: Towards an ambulant and conversive methodology of perfor-
mance and research. Mobilities 6 (2): 183–201. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​17450​101.​2011.​5527.
Nichols, Sharon L., and David C. Berliner. 2007. Collateral damage: How high-stakes testing corrupts
America’s schools. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.
Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Oakeshott, Michael. 1989. A place of learning. In The Voice of liberal learning: Michael Oakeshott on edu-
cation, edited by Timothy Fuller, 17–42. New Haven: Yale University Press. Original edition, 1975.
Plato. 1981. “Meno.” Translated by G. M. A. Grube. In Plato: Five dialogues. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Postman, Neil. 1996. The end of education: Redefining the value of school. New York: Vintage Books.
Reid, Jo-Anne. 2011. A practice turn for teacher education? Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
39 (4): 293–310. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​13598​66X.​2011.​614688.
Schwab, Joseph J. 1959. The ‘impossible’ role of the teacher in progressive education. The School
Review 67 (2): 139–159.
Siegel, Harvey. 1981. The future and purpose of philosophy and education. Educational Theory 31 (1):
11–15.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Wanderlust: A history of walking. New York: Penguin Books.
Springgay, Stephanie, and Sarah E. Truman. 2019. Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world:
Walking Lab: By Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman, London, Routledge, 2019. New York:
Routledge. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​14780​887.​2019.​17008​77.
Summit, Jennifer, and Blakey Vermeule. 2018. Action versus contemplation: Why an ancient debate still
matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Thoreau. 1971. Walden: or, Life in the Woods. In The writings of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by J. Lyndon
Shanley. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tuck, Eve, and Marcia McKenzie. 2014. Place in research. New York: Routledge. https://​doi.​org/​10.​
4324/​97813​15764​849.
Watson, Lani. 2015. What is Inquisitiveness? American Philosophical Quarterly 52 (3): 273–288.
West, Cornel. 2001. Afterword: Philosophy and the funk of life. In Cornel west: A critical reader, ed.
George Yancy, 346–362. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
West, Cornel. 2023. Afterword: Race matters: Philosophy in the funk. In Prophetic leadership and vision-
ary hope: new essays on the work of cornel west, ed. Barbara Will, 193–200. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Weston, Anthony. 2008. Risking philosophy of education. Metaphilosophy 29 (3): 145–158.
Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the limits of philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 2000. Philosophy as a humanistic discipline. Philosophy 75 (294): 477–496.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under
a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted
manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable
law.