E-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 9, 2024

Analytic Philosophy of Education, Then and Now
Koichiro MISAWA
Kyoto University
Abstract
Analytic philosophy of education is now a somewhat forgotten tradition of enquiry in Japan, or so it
often appears. In this paper, I challenge this ignorance or indifference by highlighting the striking
parallel between the historical and contemporary thinking and literature on reason, represented mostclearly by the so-called London line’s Education and the Development of Reason (1972) and David
Bakhurst’s The Formation of Reason (2011). I have no wish to claim that looking into the parallel isthe only right way to give analytic philosophy of education the fuller attention it deserves. Exploring
the parallel, however, offers the advantage of allowing us to recognise that reason and humanrationality pervade human life and to acknowledge the importance of enquiring into education withthat recognition. Questions regarding acquiring a mind at all and having the capacity to reason at all
are therefore part and parcel of philosophical studies of education. Significant attention to the twooverlapping threads of analytic philosophy of education reminds us of the commonsensical, but often
academically overlooked, notion that the question of what it is to be a human being is inseparable fromthe question of what it is to become a human being. Such a philosophical-educational exploration, or‘philosophical anthropology’, can be advanced most substantially when we pay due respect to thefruitful interactions between early and contemporary analytic philosophy of education without
favouring one at the expense of the other.
Key words: analytic philosophy of education, reason, human nature, the London line, David Bakhurst

I. Introduction
The last fifteen years have witnessed the deaths of the founding figures of the socalled analytic philosophy of education. The eastern side of the Atlantic lost Richard
Stanley Peters (1919–2011) and Paul Heywood Hirst (1927–2020); the western side lost
Israel Scheffler (1923–2014).
Correspondence:
Koichiro MISAWA, Kyoto University. Email: misawa.koichiro.5i@kyoto-u.ac.jp

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Many readers of this journal might see the deaths of such principal protagonists ofyore as threatening the existence of, or representing the demise of, the analytic philosophyof education itself. Indeed, this classical discipline easily succumbs to caricature,especially in Japan – painted as constantly and hopelessly engaging itself in thefoundationalist business of formulating high-level/foundational directives which would
guide educational research and practice, through the austere but inadequate methodology
of logical/conceptual analysis (cf. Carr 2004). I am highly sceptical, however, of this andmany other criticisms directed at analytic philosophy of education.
In this paper, I attempt to justify my scepticism, thereby underlining the importanceof giving analytic philosophy of education the attention it merits. Contrary to the standard
image in Japan, and though often neglected and sometimes even maligned, analytic
philosophy of education is surviving and even flourishing – to the point of resurrection.
Addressing its resurrection clearly requires attention to two periods. One is obvious: theperiod of excitement and enthusiasm in the 1960s and early 1970s when Peters, Hirst andScheffler played leading roles in establishing and solidifying the philosophy of education
as an independent academic discipline, whose methods, insights and outlooks derived
from analytic philosophy. The precise dating of the other period and, in fact, the existenceof the resurrection itself might well be much more controversial, but I would identify theperiod of resurrection with the 2010s and after, taking David Bakhurst’s The Formationof Reason (2011) as a primary point of departure for an analytic new wave.
It might be objected that no such landmark revival occurred around 2010. My
insistence, critics might continue, makes it sound as though the account I provide is little
more than a manifesto for a preferred history, and tendentious as a result. Only time will
tell, of course, whether and how my resurrection perspective makes sense in the historyof analytic philosophy of education. It is by no means my intention, however, to boldly
assert that Bakhurst’s book will prove to have been seminal of a whole new tradition. Nor
am I intent on claiming that currently there exists a large cadre of philosophers who
identify themselves as analytic philosophers of education, working towards a common
goal; Bakhurst and like-minded thinkers are, unlike the London line, not developers or
promotors of a new academic discipline. My aim is simply to draw attention to a clear
and interesting parallel between what progenitors of analytic philosophy of education didin the heyday of the discipline and what Bakhurst and others have recently been trying todo, bringing out not just that the analytic discipline is neither moribund nor already deadbut that it keeps evolving in ways that would enrich philosophy of education discourse.
The following sections provide a lens through which the evolution – as opposed totwo separate programmes in separate periods – can be recognised. In Section II, I lay out
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K. Misawaa historical account of the way in which (British) analytic philosophy of education took
distinct shape in the 1960s and developed subsequently as a new academic discipline. As
reliable commentators (e.g. Cuypers 2018) as well as some founders themselves (e.g.
Hirst 1993) admit, analytic philosophy of education at that time had a rather ‘rationalist’
ring. (Those already well acquainted with the contours of the analytic paradigm may wish
to skip to Section III.) In Section III, I describe why this paper omits (i) the NorthAmerican tradition of analytic philosophy of education (represented by Scheffler andHarvey Siegel, for instance) and (ii) a considerable body of work by analytic philosophersof education in the intervening period (roughly from 1980 to 2010), in favour of theremarkable similarities that contemporary analytic philosophy of education bears to early
analytic philosophy of education. The account is intended to indicate that the two strands
can be seen to work with so broad a conception of reason – broader than is standardly
interpreted – that it informs and even permeates human life. In Section IV, after
elaborating on John McDowell’s philosophical view of transformation from humananimals to rational agents, a view that may not be identical with but is closely analogous
to Peters’s conception of ‘education as initiation’, I look to Bakhurst’s philosophicaleducational exploitation of McDowell’s transformational view. In Section V, I seek toclear the ground for fascinating future investigations into how the early and contemporary
versions of analytic philosophy of education feed into each other, appreciating thecentrality of education (in the broadest sense) for the human condition and thus for thehuman life-form. I conclude with some remarks on the distinctive character of thephilosophical-educational exploration adumbrated in the preceding sections, with one
caveat that calling such an exploration ‘analytic philosophy of education’ might be amisnomer – ‘philosophical anthropology’ being a better candidate.

II. The London Line and Analytic Philosophy of Education in its Heyday
British philosophy of education, also known as analytic philosophy of education, isroughly sixty years old. As the sobriquet indicates, it has its explicit origin in analytic
philosophy, which appeared on the scene through what Gilbert Ryle and others called a‘revolution in philosophy’ (Ryle, et al. 1956) during the first half of the twentieth century
and has since been prevalent in many Anglophone countries and their zone of influence.
The founding figures of analytic philosophy of education, often called the ‘London line’,1
1. In his final published work, Peters recalls a description by Bernard Williams of him and his fellow analytic
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successfully applied the techniques developed in such a revolutionised philosophy, inparticular the methodology of logical and conceptual analysis (of the sort the so-called‘ordinary language philosophy’ had honed), to educational problems and practices or,perhaps more accurately, to educational concepts,2 such as learning, teaching, training,
creativity, autonomy, indoctrination and punishment. The analytic paradigm came into
prominence, however, not only by virtue of its method or approach, but also of a familyof substantive conceptions of education – education understood as a distinctive epistemic
and moral enterprise concerned with the promotion of mind, knowledge, understanding
and rationality (Martin 2021: 98). The general climate of the analytic philosophy ofeducation in its heyday is well epitomised by the title of the compilation edited by thecentral members of the London line (i.e. Peters, Hirst and Robert Dearden): Educationand the Development of Reason (2010/1972).
By the mid-1960s, analytic philosophy of education had taken clear shape andprogressed as an autonomous academic discipline. In 1962, R. S. Peters, who was alreadyan established analytic philosopher with one co-authored book, Social Principles and the
Democratic State (1959, with S. I. Benn) and two monographs, Hobbs (1956) and The
Concept of Motivation (1958)3 as well as having been described by John White as ‘thefounding father of British philosophy of education as practised in the second half of thetwentieth century’ (White 2001: 118), was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy of
Education at the Institute of Education, University of London.4 In 1964, Peters and P. H.
Hirst, who, alongside Peters, played a major role in the establishment and developmentof the analytic philosophy of education, launched the Philosophy of Education Society ofGreat Britain (PESGB), where Peters occupied the seat of Chairman from 1964 to 1975;
Peters was also the editor of the society’s annual conference Proceedings and its
successor the Journal of Philosophy of Education from 1966 to 1982. In 1966, Peters
published his ground-breaking chef d'oeuvre in the philosophy of education, Ethics andphilosophers of education as the ‘khaki regulars from Malet Street’ (Peters 1983: 36). The London line dominatedthe subject, at least during the decade of 1965–1975 (ibid.). The majority of philosophers of education during thisperiod, who tried, along with Peters, to bring about a revolutionary break with the past styles of philosophy ofeducation, were based in, or had intimate connections with, the Department of Philosophy of Education at the
London Institute, which itself, under Peters’s influential leadership, expanded rapidly to become the largest in theworld. In addition to Peters and Hirst, the London line included, among others, Robert Dearden, R. K. Elliot,
David Cooper and John White (Cuypers and Martin 2013: 6).
2. Thanks to John White for this point.
3. In addition, Peters published Authority, Responsibility and Education (1959), whose first edition was based on histalks delivered mainly on the Home Service and Third Programme of the BBC between April 1956 and January
1959. Its revised edition (1973) incorporates his further work in the decade that followed, and it is this revised
edition that was reprinted in 2015 by Routledge.
4. Peters was the second Chair of Philosophy of Education at the London Institute, preceded only by Louis Arnaud
Reid, who took office in 1947 as the first Chair.
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Education (Peters 1966a), whose influence can easily be perceived in the fact that that
title has been adopted for the official journal of the International Network of Philosophersof Education (INPE).
In the ‘General editor’s preface’ to the first volume of the acclaimed book series
International Library of the Philosophy of Education 5 starting in 1965, Peters, after
describing the volume as ‘the first English collection of essays on philosophy ofeducation written from the “analytic” point of view’, proclaimed: ‘Philosophy ofeducation has now become firmly established in England as a branch both of educational
theory and of philosophy’ (Peters 2010/1965: xi, italics added). It is of crucial importancehere to understand how this newly established academic discipline diverged,
conceptually and substantively, from the then extant types of philosophy of education: (i)‘principles of education’, (ii) ‘the history of educational ideas’ and (iii) ‘philosophy andeducation’ (Peters 2010/1966b: 62–9; Peters 2010/1983: 30–2). Peters claimed thatcalling (i) ‘principles of education’ philosophy of education is tantamount to ‘[making] atakeover bid for the philosopher as a kind of oracle’ (Peters 2010/1983: 32). Principles of
education consisted, at their best, in ‘wisdom and aphorisms about education’ (ibid., 31),and Peters and other analytic philosophers of education neither made little of theirimportance, nor were they sceptical about whether they have any place at all in
educational research or in the training of teachers. Nonetheless, Peters averred, and others
agreed, that ‘the philosopher, qua philosopher, cannot formulate such principles’ (Peters
2010/1966b: 63) on the grounds that they necessarily contain empirical elements. And
empirical speculation, as found in A. N. Whitehead’s The Aims of Education (1967/1929)
and Percy Nunn’s Education: Its Data and First Principles (2009/1920), is not a task forphilosophers proper; philosophers are not oracles.
The analytic conception of philosophy of education differs also from (ii) ‘the historyof educational ideas’ or ‘the Great Educator’s approach’ (Peters 2010/1983: 31). On thelatter conception, students in most colleges of education were taken on ‘a Cook’s tour ofthinkers’ typically from Plato (Republic) through J. J. Rousseau (Emile) to John Dewey(Democracy and Education), mainly by historians, 6 with the aim of relating great
educators’ thought to current educational problems (Peters 1966b: 64; Peters 2010/1983:
31; Cuypers and Martin 2013: 9). Peters saw (at least some of) the ideas of the great
5. International Library of the Philosophy of Education comprises 24 distinguished books and essay collections,published by Routledge & Kegan Paul. Volume 1 is Reginald Archambault’s edited Philosophical Analysis andEducation (1965), and all 24 texts were reprinted in 2010 by Routledge.
6. This was not surprising, given the fact that while ‘philosophers were not, in general, interested in the study ofeducation’, educational psychology and the history of education were ‘most fully developed within the orbit ofteacher education itself in the first half of [the twentieth] century’ (Tibble 1966: viii).
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thinkers of the past as ‘the heritage’ into which every teacher ought to be initiated at somestage of their career, but regarded such initiation as ‘supplementary to and not a substitutefor the philosophy of education’ (Peters 2010/1966b: 65). This historical conception does
not count, according to Peters, as philosophy of education due to two main flaws. For one
thing, works treated in courses of this kind were ‘works in general theory of education’;thus, those works also have components other than philosophical ones, such as ‘empiricalgeneralizations’ (ibid.). They were thereby ‘only minimally philosophical’ (Peters
2010/1983: 31). For another, those courses seldom bear fruit unless students are given
some philosophical training, without which they will be unable to critically evaluate theideas offered; ‘Plato Today has to be very skilfully contrived to be effective’ (ibid., italics
in original). In effect, students with no such philosophical preparations, almost inevitably,found difficulties in grasping the relevance of classical ideas to the pressing issues withwhich they were confronted (ibid.).
Finally, the analytic style of philosophy of education must not be conflated with theconception of philosophy of education as (iii) ‘philosophy and education’. This thirdconception concerns itself with drawing out and examining the ‘implications’ of ‘pure
philosophy’ for education (Peters 2010/1983: 30). There were, and are, basically two
motives for this conception of philosophy of education. The first is sociological or
institutional. Those working in colleges or departments of education were (and are) often
eager to convince their ‘pure’ colleagues in the Faculties of Arts or Philosophy
Departments, who were (and are) occasionally ‘supercilious critics’, that they are
genuinely and competently doing philosophy. The second, more philosophical motive
derives from the belief that ‘one cannot go very far without tackling fundamental issues
in logic, epistemology, and metaphysics’ (Peters 2010/1966b: 67). This ‘applied
approach’ (Cuypers and Martin 2013: 9) struck Peters as quite dubious, because, in his
conception, philosophy of education must start from actual problems of education. So,
while the first two conceptions of philosophy of education from which the analytic
conception sought to mark itself off were concerned with ‘many matters that are notstrictly philosophical’, the third conception was ‘not concerned specifically enough withwhat is educational’ (Peters 2010/1966b: 67, italics added). Not surprisingly, therefore,Peters thought more highly of John Dewey’s writings on education (though he foundthem insufficiently analytic) than of D. J. O’Connor’s An Introduction to the Philosophyof Education (1957), which is quintessentially analytic in style.

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III. Analytic Trajectories
Analytic philosophy of education was established and prospered in the 1960s andthe early 1970s as a branch both of educational theory (like educational psychology andthe sociology of education) and of academic philosophy (like the philosophy of scienceand political philosophy). For the founding figures, ‘analytic philosophy of education’
was a pleonasm, as it were, since they believed all philosophy of education worthy of thename was analytic.
According to the generally accepted account (at least, in Japan), the excitement andenthusiasm did not last long (e.g. Miyadera 1997; Carr 2005; White 2024). From the late1970s onwards, the analytic paradigm was subjected to serious criticism from various
quarters (e.g. existentialism, phenomenology, (neo-)Marxism, neo-Aristotelianism,
critical theory, multiculturalism, postmodernism and poststructuralism). This
diversification of philosophical traditions and intellectual resources that contemporary
philosophers of education draw on characterises the philosophy of education in the postanalytic era; the place of the analytic approach, within the discipline, is now accordingly
peripheral in a recognisable sense.
This account, while not entirely without foundation, is untenable. Analytic
philosophy in no way faded from the philosophy of education scene around 1980 (in the
U.K. or, more broadly, in Anglophone areas). On the contrary, much philosophy ofeducation in the ensuing decades might well have been described as ‘footnotes to Peters’7
in many respects, through to the end of the century and after. Many carved their own
significant paths in the analytic tradition – e.g. Robin Barrow, Eric Bredo, Eamonn Callan,
Emily Robertson, Hugh Sockett in North America and David Bridges, Andrew Davis,
Penny Enslin, Richard Pring, Judith Suissa in the U.K., to name but a few.
But if the familiar account fails to carry conviction, would it not follow that my
picture that places considerable emphasis on a close parallel between the London line andDavid Bakhurst also loses ground? Why not give closer consideration to the North
American tradition of analytic philosophy of education? More specifically, why suppose,in relation to the London line’s conception of the development of reason, that Bakhurst’s
The Formation of Reason has more to say about reason and rationality than Harvey
Siegel’s Educating Reason and Rationality Redeemed? have to say about them?
Certainly, my description of post-Second World War English-language philosophyof education is severely partial, not least because it makes little or no mention of what
7. I owe this phrase to Paul Standish.
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93happened on the western side of the Atlantic, which has clearly also served its own role
as a vital and leading force in the Anglophone philosophy of education. Indeed, the U.S.
also witnessed the analytic turn in philosophy of education around the 1960s, advocatedand promoted most notably by the American counterpart to Peters, Israel Scheffler, whois perhaps better known than his British counterpart in the world of academic philosophy
today.8 Analytic developments in North America were undoubtedly and inarguably anessential and integral part of the development of analytic philosophy of education.
My aim is not to offer an exhaustive historical account, however. For my purposes,
I opt to emphasise the analytic trajectories in the U.K. rather than giving both sides of theAtlantic equal billing. The primary reason for this is, apart from my personal commitment
to British philosophy of education (as an outsider to both sides of the Atlantic), that there
does seem to have been a North American tendency to address the issues of reason andhuman rationality in the light of critical thinking. The work of Harvey Siegel, a powerful
successor to Scheffler, at least in terms of his analytic spirit, exemplifies this tendency.
Few would, of course, deny the importance of fostering one’s reasoning ability in schools
or elsewhere. The ability to reason well (or better), or to think critically (or more critically),
is necessary for a flourishing life. Yet the ability is often (naturally enough) associatedwith the ability to step back from situations with which one is (unreflectively) engaged.
Whether the scope of reason extends beyond the ability to step back into our unreflective
perceiving and acting is an issue as yet unresolved but one that needs to be addressed if
we want to make sense of the character of reason and rationality and of the place theyoccupy in education and in human life more generally. And the question requires attention
to the capacity to reason at all, including but not exclusive to the ability to step back, andthis in turn necessitates attention to the nature of human beings as such, which at least
some of the London line set themselves the task of considering. Largely for this reason,
while fully aware that it is possible to cast, in a different context, Siegel’s seminal works,
such as Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking and Education (1988) and
Rationality Redeemed?: Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal (1997), as sequels
to the London line’s Education and the Development of Reason (2010/1972) and as
precursors of Bakhurst’s The Formation of Reason (2011), I highlight the likenesses and
8. Like the London line, Scheffler thought of philosophy of education as a discipline, whose methods, insights andoutlooks should derive from analytic philosophy. Scheffler’s inclination is well represented in, for example, his‘Toward an Analytic Philosophy of Education’ (1954), The Language of Education (1960) and Conditions ofKnowledge: An Introduction to Epistemology and Education (1965). The clear parallel between Scheffler and theLondon line was not a strange coincidence; they fed each other. For instance, Peters took advantage of Scheffler’s
invitation to Harvard and spent some time there as a Visiting Professor in 1961 (White 2001: 119; Cuypers andMartin 2013: 6).
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K. Misawadifferences between the latter two.9
The two versions of analytic philosophy of education – one led by the London line
and the other reanimated by Bakhurst and others – have much in common, especially interms of their endeavour to develop accounts of human beings as rational animals. They
share the conviction that we cannot understand how (best) to educate our children if we
do not take due account of the human condition. And yet, Peters, reflecting back on thetwo decades after the establishment of analytic philosophy of education, deplored the lackof ‘an explicit theory of human nature’ (Peters 2010/1983: 33, italics added). In thosedays, philosophers of education were enamoured with analysing such concepts as‘reason’, ‘autonomy’, ‘needs’, ‘interests’ and ‘learning’, but Peters was adamant that‘they drifted on the surface with no general account of man [sic] and his place in thenatural world and social order to anchor them’ (ibid.). This is what many contemporary
analytic philosophers of education are centrally concerned with, as far as I can see. Oneof the major issues addressed in such a new analytic philosophy of education is thequestion of what it is to be distinctively human.10 In other words, the reinvigorated
analytic philosophy of education attempts to provide a fuller account of not just reason
but of human nature – the latter of which Peters diagnosed as remaining largely andproblematically unexplored in the analytic philosophy of education of his time.
Despite Peters’s diagnosis, however, I do not think it is the case that the issue ofhuman nature was totally ignored for the first twenty years in the history of analytic
philosophy of education. The work by the London line – in particular, Peters himself –did yield insights about human nature and the human condition. And yet it is the case thatthey are often only implicit and lurk in the discussions that focus on other issues, such asreason, mind and initiation. Hence, revisiting this and other neglected aspects of the ‘old’
analytic philosophy of education, with twenty-first-century eyes, deserves to be promoted
and deepened. No substantial treatment has yet been offered of their affinities andtensions and of the transition between early and more recent strands of analytic
philosophy of education. To embark on such a project, it is advisable to situate the line ofargument advocated by the ‘new’ analytic philosophy of education vis-à-vis that provided
by the London line. The next section is an initial effort for that.

9. I hasten to add, though, that attempts to draw a sharp line between British and American lines of development inphilosophy of education are practically useless, especially in recent times. It is also noteworthy here that theagenda of research on critical thinking continues to expand, too. For a succinct account of recent scholarship in
critical thinking, see Kunimasa Sato’s contribution to Misawa, Tsuchiya and Sato (forthcoming).
10. The title of Jan Derry’s recent article, ‘A Problem for Cognitive Load Theory—the Distinctively Human Lifeform’ (Derry 2020), exemplifies this present-day trend.
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IV. The McDowellian Preliminary to the Resurgence of Analytic
Philosophy of Education
In an oft-cited passage of Mind and World, John McDowell claims: ‘Human beings
are not [born at home in the space of reasons]: they are born mere animals, and they aretransformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of coming to maturity’(McDowell 1996: 125, italics added).11 There immediately arises a familiar temptation
to dismiss this claim as being ignorant or uninformed of the achievements of, say, thebiological and ecological sciences (e.g. MacIntyre 1999: 60–1). There is indeed noshortage of empirical studies that seem to show that newborn human babies and at least
some of the ‘mere animals’ exercise or are guided by a kind of practical reasoning –reasoning about what to do – implying that it is hubristic and anachronisticallyanthropocentric to suppose that rationality is the sole preserve of mature human beings.
Such an implication is ostensible, however; McDowell’s claim does notnecessarily conflict with the best discoveries of today’s natural-scientific investigations.
His point is that a human animal with no second nature becomes a human individual who
is capable of responding to reasons with a distinctive mode of rational-conceptual
intelligibility that is open to the world. It is ‘initiation into conceptual capacities’(McDowell 1996: 84, italics added) that makes us inhabitants of what Wilfrid Sellars calls‘the logical space of reasons’ (Sellars 1997/1956: 76), where its denizens are rational, notjust in the sense that they can, like non-human animals, flee from danger, but also in thesense that they are, unlike non-human animals, responsive to reasons as such. McDowellclaims that we need not be spooked by this transformation, for which he evokes theGerman idea, Bildung (ibid.). There is no mystery in the story, he urges, because suchinitiation is a normal part of human maturation as long as we are first initiated, except invery special conditions or circumstances, into a natural language. McDowell writes:
In being initiated into a language, a human being is introduced into
something that already embodies putatively rational linkages between
concepts, putatively constitutive of the layout of the space of reasons,
before she comes on the scene. … [A] natural language, the sort oflanguage into which human beings are first initiated, serves as a repositoryof tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is areason for what. The tradition is subject to reflective modification by eachgeneration that inherits it. (McDowell 1996: 125–6)

11. Compare Peters’s ‘No man is born with a mind’ (Peters 1965/1964: 102).
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K. MisawaThrough this initiation into the space of reasons, an individual human being acquires
a mind – i.e. the capacity to think and act intentionally at all, the capacity that enables her
to live her life in the world (ibid.). McDowell’s line of argument is strikingly analogous
to what Peters insists in ‘Education as Initiation’: ‘To have a mind is not to enjoy a private
picture-show or to exercise some inner diaphanous organ; it is to have an awarenessdifferentiated in accordance with the canons implicit in all these inherited traditions[constituted by distinctive forms of knowledge such as science, history, mathematics,
religious and aesthetic appreciation as well as the practical types of knowledge involved
in moral, prudential, and technical forms of thought and action]. “Education” marks out
the processes by means of which the individual is initiated into them’ (Peters 1965/1964:
103).
The picture of initiation into the logical space of reasons is key to apprehending theway in which McDowell painstakingly denies the prevailing view, which he calls‘modern naturalism’ (e.g. McDowell 1996: 85), the view that our being natural animals
is profoundly at odds with the distinctive character of our mindedness, namely with thesui generis character of our responsiveness to reasons as such. The seeming oddity andthe threat of incoherence disappear once we acknowledge that such initiation equips us
to acquire rational powers by means of which we can live a certain kind of life – adistinctively human life. Human life is our natural way of being, which is ‘already shapedby meaning’ (McDowell 1996: 95), but this ‘natural’ cannot be exhausted by the modern
conception of nature that tends, as in the natural sciences, to suppose ‘whatever is natural
is as such empty of meaning’ (McDowell 2000: 107). McDowell’s corrective to thisexcessive domination of the modern conception of nature is to bring into view the simple‘reminder’ that ‘our nature is largely second nature’ (McDowell 1996: 91) since‘responsiveness to reasons is second nature to human beings’ (McDowell 2008: 225).
With the notion of second nature in mind, he seeks to accomplish the overarching projectof Mind and World and many other writings: ‘We need to recapture the Aristotelian ideathat a normal mature human being is a rational animal, but without losing the Kantianidea that rationality operates freely in its own sphere’ (McDowell 1996: 85).
Obviously, the notion that human animals are transformed into thinkers andintentional agents through initiation into conceptual capacities that enable us to become
able to be at home in the logical space of reasons – i.e. to live our lives in the world – hasdevelopmental and educational aspects and implications. McDowell is notoriously silent,
nonetheless, about such dimensions (except his frequent reference to Aristotle’s story of
moral education, in which, McDowell thinks, the idea of second nature finds expression).
It does not mean, of course, that McDowell fails to countenance the importance ofThematic Research: How to Envision 'Education': Based on the Publication of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy of
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Bildung in human life; it is rather that talk of Bildung in detail does not fall within thesphere of philosophical enquiry as he conceives it.
Greatly inspired by McDowell’s line of argument, David Bakhurst, a former studentof McDowell’s at Oxford, brings illuminating the Bildungsprozess into focus as a genuine
philosophical exploration. Extending and complementing McDowell’s picture, his
programme culminates in The Formation of Reason (2011). As he admits, Bakhurst
originally did not set out to write a book in philosophy of education, but, through the
influence of Jan Derry and others, the book came out as part of The Journal of Philosophy
Education Book Series. 12 In that widely read book, he develops a socio-historicalaccount of the human mind primarily by defending and expanding McDowell’s
philosophy, along with the work of thinkers on which he has extensively written, such asthat of Lev Vygotsky, Evald Ilyenkov and Jerome Bruner. The broad thrust of Bakhurst’s
argument is that the distinctive character of human mindedness resides in our
responsiveness to reasons, which is not an inborn ability but one that we normally acquire
as a child through initiation, typically via the acquisition of our first language, into stylesof thinking and reasoning by virtue of which we can navigate the relevant normative
landscape. In the process, human children become minded beings, that is, rational agents
who self-consciously appreciate reasons about what to think and do. Thus, one of themost significant educational ends is the cultivation of autonomy, the power to determine
for oneself what to think and do in light of what there is reason to think and do. In thisway, the philosophy of McDowell in general and what Bakhurst terms McDowell’s‘“transformational view” of human development’ (Bakhurst 2015: 302) in particularhave been successfully brought to the attention of philosophers of education, leading to
the symposium ‘Second Nature, Bildung and McDowell: David Bakhurst’s The
Formation of Reason’, which appeared in the first issue of the 50th anniversary volumeof the Journal of Philosophy of Education in 2016.13

V. The Centrality of Education in Human Life: The Bakhurstian
Orientation
I was – and, in fact, still am – enamoured of Bakhurst’s philosophical accounts (with
12. Bakhurst, who was not originally trained as a philosopher of education (in colleges or departments of education),has taken over as Executive Editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education since 2021.
13. For a good overview of the current state of the debate about the transformational view, see C. J. An (2018, esp.
sections 1–3); I have also discussed each symposium contribution in Misawa (2017).
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relevant empirical insights) of the process of initiation, and thought – and still think – thatthey have a vital bearing on the way we think about education in human life. I therefore
thought The Formation of Reason and his subsequent writings broke new ground in
philosophy of education (especially in its analytic tradition). It is not that I was unawareof Peters’s well-known conception of ‘education as initiation’ and that that conception
had been honed and amplified by the London line and subsequent generations. It is rather
that I held ‘initiation’ in the educationally relevant context applies to two different levels
and that the London line’s conception is concerned, as Hirst’s famous ‘forms ofknowledge’ thesis exemplifies,14 with the later stage of initiation – i.e. initiation into
particular knowledge domains (e.g. physics). For this stage of initiation to come about,someone who will be initiated into or participate in a particular domain of knowledge
needs to have a mind at all, even if she has no knowledge or skill in the domain in question
prior to the initiation or participation. Bakhurst’s McDowellian conception of initiation,in contrast, focuses attention on the earlier stage – i.e. the very beginning of human life,a special kind of life being transformed from a merely animal mode of living. I therefore
took the view that whereas the London line’s conception still afforded a framework
capable of examining and improving the way we consider schooling, it said little about
the issue of our fundamental condition as rational beings, which Bakhurst’s conception
directly addressed. In effect, their difference in emphasis seemed to be vividly reflectedin the titles of their representative works: the London line’s edited Education and theDevelopment of Reason (2010/1972) and Bakhurst’s The Formation of Reason (2011).15
The analytic philosophy of education as the London line established and advanced it
would be rejuvenated, I thought, if it incorporated the new wave of philosophicaleducational interest in the human condition, human nature and the human life-form, thewave that had almost brought about a sea change in (analytic) philosophy of education
by Bakhurst and like-minded philosophers (of education).
I now find the view I took – that the publication of The Formation of Reason
inaugurated a new era in philosophy of education – rather premature and perhaps
tendentious. It is true that central members of the London line were eager to engage withthe development of reason and Bakhurst is keen, as the 2011 book title shows, to elucidate
the formation of reason. The former members – notably Peters – did, however, give asubstantial treatment of the formative period of human development without necessarily
14. For more on Hirst’s forms of knowledge thesis and his later turn of focus from forms of knowledge to forms ofsocial practices, see Misawa and Watanabe (2023) and Misawa (2023).
15. Perhaps, the two apparently different levels (of initiation into the realm of reason) can be seen to be implicit in
the block quote from McDowell and the quote from Peters that follows in the previous section.
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presupposing children’s capacity to exercise rationality; Bakhurst has, from the 2010s
onwards, taken further steps towards enriching the development of reasons. Thereemerges the question, then, of the extent to which, and the sense in which, the London
line (especially Peters) and Bakhurst share a similar view on such fundamental elements
necessary in contemplating education as mind, reason, initiation, experience, personhood,
freedom, knowledge, understanding, rational autonomy, human development and liberal
education. Further questions would be whether and how ideas and conceptions,especially concerning reason and human nature, developed in the twenty-first-century
analytic philosophy of education, are really anything more than an echo of the insights ofthe traditional analytic philosophy of education; and whether and how the London line
might, if we look back from the twenty-first century, have actually gone beyond what has
generally been found in their work.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to pursue these issues in detail, but I want to takenote, before closing, of Bakhurst’s recent slight modification of his McDowellian‘transformational view’ of human development.
Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism features the concept of human nature. As Irene
Liu notes, however, neo-Aristotelians have focused more on advancing ‘a satisfactory
naturalism of first nature’ than on fully developing the naturalism of second nature (Liu
2017: 598, fn. 5, italics added). Rosalind Hursthouse, a leading proponent of that ethicalnaturalism, provides a vivid gloss on the basic Aristotelian idea that is supposed to lend
credence to the naturalism of first nature: ‘what human beings are is a species of rational,social animals and thereby a species of living things—which, unlike “persons” or“rational beings”, have a particular biological make-up and a natural life cycle’(Hursthouse 1999: 206, italics in original, note deleted). Hence comes the central conceptof the naturalism of first nature: ‘species nature’ or ‘life form’ (Liu 2017: 600). This lineof thinking readily invites us to see the findings of natural-scientific investigations asconstituting the primary part (if not the whole) of our understanding of the humancondition.
Bakhurst’s main project is roughly the following: he seeks to substantiate theclassical view that humans are rational animals, in a way which basically agrees with a
McDowellian naturalism of second nature, but whose key focus is on a sine qua non fora fuller realisation of the nature of the beings we are that has largely escaped the attentionof McDowell and his followers: the educational character of the human condition.
Bakhurst once liked to call this line of argument McDowell’s ‘“transformational view”
of human development’, as we have seen. This view is, of course, not without its critics;
for instance, Sebastian Rödl and Andrea Kern recommend conceiving of the process as
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an actualisation (of potentials) rather than a transformation (e.g. Rödl 2016; Kern 2020).
This is a matter of debate in contemporary philosophy of education, in the course ofwhich Bakhurst has made some concession to the actualisation view according to which
we have a single nature—i.e. human nature (e.g. Bakhurst 2016, 2020, 2021). Whatmatters here is not to pursue and analyse the relevant arguments (with which I will engage
on another occasion) but to recognise the basic thrust of his argument: the centrality ofeducation to human nature or our life-form (Bakhurst 2021, 2023).
Many current discussions around, say, human nature, practical rationality and theformation of reason are moving on in step with recent developments in the broadly
analytic tradition of philosophy (whether in a neo-Aristotelian fashion or not). In otherwords, new conversations between philosophers of education and ‘mainstream’
philosophers interested in education (broadly conceived) have now re-started, where
education is no longer almost exclusively associated with ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ inschools but is taken (by many, though not most, philosophers) as central and critical tothe human condition.
Such new conversations have now ‘re-started’ because there was a period in which
the disciplinary and institutional barriers between philosophy of education and generalphilosophy were far less stringent than was the case during the intervening period. The
period was, of course, the 1960s and early 1970s when British philosophy of education –i.e. analytic philosophy of education – was born and advanced. The London line may not
be Bakhurst’s direct intellectual ancestors, but they are, no doubt, intellectual relatives invarious respects.

VI. Concluding Remarks
It is absurd to try to turn the clock back to the heyday of analytic philosophy ofeducation – the 1960s and early 1970s. No room is left for nostalgia for the better times,
economically and institutionally, that enabled its ‘heyday’. And a diverse range ofphilosophical traditions and intellectual resources that characterise contemporary
philosophy of education may well be a sign of the health of the discipline rather than asource of misery. A sharp distinction should be drawn, however, between the fact that
Anglophone philosophy of education today is no longer equivalent to the analytic
philosophy of education and the capricious observation that it has (long) run out of steam.
In this paper, I have tried to build a case for bringing into view striking points ofaffinity between the work by the London line and the McDowell-derived Bakhurstian
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101line of philosophical-educational exploration. My attempt must not be taken as glorifying
the resemblances with a halo, since such a glorification and/or a simplification might givethe reader the wrong impression that during the intervening period between the two inquestion there did not emerge much work that seeks to answer the need for a theory ofhuman nature, as Peters had put it. As alluded to in the third section, many analytic
philosophers of education have attempted to broaden the focus of reason and humannature, even if their works frequently have not advertised themselves in those terms. But
the resemblances between early and contemporary analytic philosophy of education
scarcely need repeating, most vividly with respect to the formation and development of
human reason and to the conceptuality that permeates human life.
Analytic philosophy of education is now a somewhat forgotten tradition of enquiryin Japan, or so it often appears. I hope I have made it explicit that this indifference
constitutes a massive loss for the philosophical study of education, by demonstrating thatthe underlying rumour that the analytic discipline is obsolescent is not true. The adventof the recent ‘resurrection’ can stimulate renewed interest in the earlier ‘incarnation’.
With today’s philosophical-educational perspective, for instance, one can read the workof Peters as concerning himself with not only later stages but also the most formative
years of human development (e.g. Peters 2015/1981); hence, the familiar accusation thatPeters’s concept of education is much too narrow (e.g. Martin 2011, 2020) is unwarranted.
The relationship between the London line and Bakhurst (and scholars broadly alignedwith him) goes the other way also. Just as the work by the latter can rekindle interest in
the work by the former (with twenty-first-century eyes), so the latter work can and ought
to be situated more thoroughly in the context of the history of analytic philosophy ofeducation. This is so that we can gauge the extent to which contemporary analytic
philosophy of education has moved the way forward and, pari passu, acknowledge thesense in which it sheds new light on the educationally fundamental issues previously
discussed by classical analytic philosophers of education, such as mind, reason, nature,normativity, personhood, freedom, knowledge, understanding, rational autonomy andliberal education. (Remember that in the Introduction I wrote that analytic philosophy ofeducation keeps evolving, which does not imply that newer stages are better than earlier
ones.)As the London line guards against the ‘philosophy and education’ approach (asdescribed in the second section), the Bakhurstian line of philosophical-educational
exploration is also not one that seeks to glean educational implications and lessons from(purely) philosophical discussions of reason, human nature and other profound issues.
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K. Misawaleast sometimes) fundamental to these philosophical discussions. In other words, theexploration is premised on the assumption that it is utterly wrong to think that ‘What is it
to be a human being?’ is a question addressed (purely philosophically) in ‘mainstream’
philosophy, whereas ‘What is it to become a human being?’ is a question addressed (moreeducationally) in the philosophy of education—the latter being regarded as an applied
sub-branch of the former. The question of what it is to be a human being cannot
adequately be approached in isolation: it entails first and foremost, or, perhaps moreaccurately, presupposes, the other question. The cogency of the assumption that thequestion of the nature of the beings that we are is a single, philosophical-educationalquestion will become more apparent in further investigations.
One final point worthy of attention: it might not be necessary to make so much ofthe ‘analytic’ identity in advancing and amplifying the philosophical-educational
exploration just outlined. Given that both McDowell and Bakhurst are not exactly typicalanalytic philosophers in that their works do not confine themselves to the narrow senseof the discipline, and that they are widely read beyond it and often hailed as bridging theanalytic-continental divide or moving beyond those terms, it might well seem somewhat
odd that I depict their works as being celebrated for their contributions to a revival of‘analytic’ philosophy of education. Understood in the way I have been delineating,‘philosophical anthropology’, as Bakhurst puts it (e.g. Bakhurst 2020, 2021), might be abetter label for such philosophical human studies, although I have used the expression‘contemporary analytic philosophy of education’ or its cognates for ease of discussion.
Whatever the label, the philosophical-educational exploration as we see it will, no doubt,
make a fresh contribution, together with renewed focus on the works by early analytic
philosophy of education, to addressing perhaps the most difficult question throughout theentire history of the human race: what is the nature of the beings we are?

Acknowledgments
This paper is a substantially revised version of a manuscript prepared for a
symposium on ‘How to Envision “Education”’ held at the 2023 annual meeting of theJapanese Philosophy of Education Society. Portions of the manuscript have appeared in
Studies in the Philosophy of Education (written in Japanese), under the title ‘Revisiting
Analytic Philosophy of Education: Reappraisals and Future Prospects’. I am grateful tothe symposium organisers, Yasuo Imai and Masamichi Ueno, and to other speakers, Mika
Okabe and Satoshi Tanaka. I am also grateful to David Bakhurst, Jan Derry, Paul Standish,
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Keiichi Takaya and Fukutaro Watanabe for their helpful and critical comments on earlier
drafts of this paper, including drafts that did not take a journal article form. Emailexchanges with John White greatly aided me in describing Peters’s project in the 1960s,
for which I am deeply indebted. Finally, I wish to thank the Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science (JSPS) Kakenhi [grant number JP22K02199] for financial support
that enabled me to work on this project.

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