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Reading propositions: a perspective of the archive of production in the fields of Philosophy and Philosophy of Education in the 30 years of the Brazilian journal Pro-Posições 1 1 The authors thank Espaço da Escrita – Pró-Reitoria de Pesquisa – UNICAMP - for the language services provided. 2 2 References correction and bibliographic normalization services: Leda Farah (farahledamaria@gmail.com) e Vera Bonilha (verabonilha@yahoo.com.br) 3 3 This text is a part of “Dossier: 30 years of Pro-Posições”, organized by Prof. Dr. André Luiz Paulilo. Responsible Editor: Prof. Dr. André Luiz Paulilo

Abstract

In this article we aim to collect and comment on the production in the fields of Philosophy and of Philosophy of Education published during the 30 years of the Pro-Posições journal. To do so, we organized into three thematic parts a set of thematic occurrences that are present, at the same time, in three decades of publications. The first decade covers the years from 1990 to 1999, highlighting the theme of Education and its republican value in the Brazilian redemocratization, with emphasis on critical thinking; the second decade, between 2000 and 2009, brings to light a series of analyses concerning the millenary challenges for the field of Education, mainly the ethical-political problematization of society in general; the last decade, from 2010 to 2018, evidences the increase of the presence of Philosophy and Philosophy of Education in the field of Education, entailing themes such as differences, inclusion, and subjectivities. Besides observing that Philosophy and Philosophy of Education are remarkable fields over the 30 years of the Pro-Posições journal, we argue that the same problematizations of all three decades of publication are urgent for reiterating one of the struggles of critical thinking in the defense of the republican Education and of its democratic principles, in addition to drawing attention to the urgency of the place of differences and multiplicities in the field of Education.

Keywords
Philosophy; Philosophy of Education; Education; thought; archive

Resumo

O artigo reúne e comenta a produção nos campos da Filosofia e da Filosofia da Educação publicada durante os 30 anos da revista Pro-Posições. Organiza em três blocos temáticos um conjunto de incidências temáticas que se faz presente, ao mesmo tempo, em três décadas de publicações. Na primeira década, de 1990 a 1999, destaca-se a temática da educação, com ênfase no pensamento crítico, na redemocratização brasileira e seu valor republicano; a segunda década, entre os anos 2000 e 2009, traz à tona uma série de análises acerca dos desafios milenares para o campo da Educação, sobretudo acerca da problematização ético-política da sociedade em geral; a última década, de 2010 até 2018, evidencia a explosão da presença da Filosofia e da Filosofia da Educação na área da Educação, encampando temas como diferenças, inclusão e subjetividades. Além de evidenciar que Filosofia e Filosofia da Educação são campos marcantes ao longo dos 30 anos da revista, o artigo sustenta que as mesmas problematizações de 3 décadas de publicações são urgentes como retomada de uma luta de pensamento crítico em defesa da educação republicana e democrática, além de convocar a urgência do lugar das diferenças e das multiplicidades para a área da Educação.

Palavras-chave
Filosofia; Filosofia da Educação; Educação; pensamento; arquivo

Introduction

In our studies on the field of Philosophy of Education, we base our research on the notion of Philosophy presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1992)Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1992). O que é a filosofia?. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34., who state that the activity of conceptual creation is proper to this discipline of thought, differentiating it from Science, which creates functions; and Art, which creates perceptions and affections. According to these authors, it is inherent in Science to produce propositions: “Science does not aim at concepts, but functions that are presented as propositions in discursive systems. The elements of these functions are called functives. A scientific notion is determined not by concepts, but rather by functions or propositions” (Deleuze, & Guattari, 1992Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1992). O que é a filosofia?. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34., p. 153) [free translation].

However, there are other perspectives for understanding Philosophy according to which its intrinsic relationship with logical propositions are corroborated. Furthermore, according to one of the most important conceptions of the XX century, Philosophy is an activity of logical analysis of language or even of logical analysis of propositions, being responsible for establishing its criteria of truth and validity. Hence the joke in the title: looking at the production of Pro-Posições journal over its 30 years of existence, can we find philosophical propositions?7 7 “Propositions” is the English word for proposições, which is the title of the journal (Pro-Posições).

The journal was created at the School of Education of the University of Campinas in 1990, 18 years after the implementation of this school, which occurred in 1972. Since its foundation, the School has a Department of Philosophy and History of Education (from Portuguese, Departamento de Filosofia e História da Educação – Defhe), having assembled a set of philosophers whose activities have been and are guided towards thinking of the educational field. In its trajectory, Defhe was marked by phenomenology and Marxism, since several of its professors have conducted studies in this field, besides advising Master’s studies (since 1975) and PhD studies (since 1980) in these areas. However, the department has always been a space for a plural and multiple perspectives of Philosophy, welcoming research of several theoretical orientations. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Defhe professors have been actively involved with the Pro-Posições journal, by submitting articles for publication, proposing dossiers, and stimulating graduate students to also submit their texts to be published in the same journal as well as attracting researchers from the field of the Philosophy of Education of Brazilian and foreign institutions to participate in the journal with their texts. Considering the tradition of working with Philosophy in the School of Education, it was expected, therefore, on the part of the institution, to address publications within this field on the pages of its journal.

On the other hand, the creation of the journal took place in a moment of consolidation of research in Philosophy of Education in Brazil. Gradually, the research carried out, especially in the graduate programs in Education, with a philosophical approach, constituted the Philosophy of Education as a disciplinary field. We understand disciplinary field based on the work of Michel Foucault (1981)Foucault, M. (1980). L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard., when considering the discipline as an ordering principle of discourses:

The discipline is a principle of control over the production of discourse. The discipline fixes limits for discourse by the action of an identity which takes the form of a permanent re-actuation of the rules.

We are accustomed to see in an author’s fecundity, in the multiplicity of the commentaries, and in the development of a discipline so many infinite resources for the creation of discourses. Perhaps so, but they are nonetheless principles of constraint; it is very likely impossible to account for their positive and multiplicatory role if we do not take into consideration their restrictive and constraining function (p. 61)

In this movement of its constitution as a disciplinary field of research, Philosophy of Education was consolidating itself, defining the boundaries of what can and what cannot be said in philosophical terms about the educational issue. Such path has the 1990s as its reference, and as a historical marker the creation, in the Brazilian Association of Research and Graduate Studies (Anped), of the Philosophy of Education Working Group, whose activities began in 1994.8 8 For an analysis of this process of constitution of the Philosophy of education as a disciplinary field, see Gallo (2007). Hence, to identify the presence of articles on Philosophy of Education or on philosophical themes/contributions in the pages of Pro-Posições, is also a way to witness the emergence and consolidation of this field in Brazil, and this journal consists in one of the means that have enabled such process.

By analyzing the production of the Pro-Posições journal since its first issue, published in 1990 (v. 1, i. 1), up to the last issue, in 2018 (v. 29, i. 3), we identified a total of 146 articles that, somehow, are related to Philosophy and/or Philosophy of Education. The search was made through titles and keywords and, in a second moment, through the abstracts of the published texts. We chose not to limit ourselves to articles that were strictly within the field of Philosophy of Education, also considering those which, although not within this field, make use of philosophical instruments in their analytical efforts. Thus, we found articles from several subfields of the great field of Education that, somewhat, have dialogued with Philosophy for creating their theoretical arguments as well as specific articles of the Philosophy of Education field.

It is noteworthy that we chose, in this mapping, to limit ourselves to the articles of spontaneous submission and those that compose dossiers. We disregarded reviews and reading comments. Considering its relevance, we also chose some Editorials from issues with special philosophical focus, as well as some texts in the Diverso e Prosa [Diverse and Prose texts] section, in which translations of unpublished texts in Brazil and other theoretical materials, such as interviews, are published. In cases in which these publications addressed philosophical perspectives, we included them in the list of our analytical material.

To present this vast production and make some analytical remarks, we decided to organize it into decades, in three large parts. In the period from 1990 to 1999, we found 36 articles; between 2000 and 2009, 34; and in the final period, from 2010 to 2018, although temporally shorter, 76 articles were published, more than the sum of the previous two decades, which indicates a considerable increase in the presence of Philosophy/Philosophy of Education fields in the Pro-Posições journal. In the following sections, we will present a table with basic information about the surveyed articles and make some remarks.

First decade: a certain endogenous quality, but with theoretical and thematic diversification

If in its inaugural issue, published in the first half of 1990, the Pro-Posições journal had no article on Philosophy of Education or in which a central contribution of Philosophy could be identified; on the other hand, in its second and third issues, published still in that first year of the journal and privileging texts that addressed the republican education, such were present: there were two articles in issue 2 and three others in issue 3. Henceforth, in almost all of the following publications, there were articles with this profile. Next, we present Table 1, which allows visualizing general information about the 36 articles published in the first decade of the journal’s production.

Table 1
Articles related to Philosophy/Philosophy of Education published in Pro-Posições between 1990 and 1999

The first aspect that draws our attention, when looking at this table, is the endogenous quality of the early days of the journal, at least in the area we are focused in this analysis. Of the 36 published articles, 28 were written by authors from the University of Campinas, being one by a professor of the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences and the other 27 from authors of the School of Education, the unit responsible for the journal. Of these 27 articles, 19 are authored by different teachers and researchers of the School of Education, and the others were written by graduate students from the School at the time. The 8 articles that were submitted by authors other than those from Unicamp already show a certain territorial diversity: 3 of them came from other universities in São Paulo, 2 came from authors linked to institutions in the state of Paraná and 1 from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Two articles were published by foreign authors: one from the University of North Caroline at Greensboro, in the United States of America, and another from the Universidade Nacional Autônoma do México, from Mexico.

This initial endogenous quality can be understood by the effort of professors of the Department of Philosophy and History of Education of the School of Education in collaborating to the journal in order to consolidate it, whether by concentrating part of its intellectual production or by stimulating PhD advisees to submit their articles to the journal. However, since we did not restrict the scope of the analysis to the field of Philosophy of Education, other professors and researchers of the School of Education, from other departments, but who work with philosophical aspects, were also present. This endogenous quality persisted, somehow stable, throughout the first decade of publication, with some decrease in recent years. In 1990, three articles were published by authors linked to the School of Education, whether professors or graduate students; in 1991, six articles; in 1992, three; in 1993, three articles again; in 1994, there was a decrease – only one published article; in 1995, three; in 1996, one; in 1997, five; in 1998, no article from authors linked to the institution was published; and in 1999, two articles by authors from the institution were published in Pro-Posições. After this first decade, this endogenous aspect of production in Philosophy/Philosophy of Education would dramatically decrease as we shall see further.

Another aspect that we may highlight in this first decade is the immediate presence of a variety of philosophical themes and perspectives. Several authors of the philosophical tradition and/or pedagogical thought appear as protagonists in this set of articles. We highlight, in alphabetical order: Adorno; Arendt; Frankfurt School; Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia; Habermas; Illich; Lyotard; Marcuse; Marx; Platão; Reich; Ricoeur; and Robert Owen, who were taken as protagonists by the authors of the articles published in the first decade of Pro-Posições, but numerous other thinkers were mentioned throughout the articles. We draw attention to those who appear as central theoretical instruments, to emphasize that, since its early days, the journal believed on the pluralism of philosophical approaches and theoretical diversity, and did not opt for a single or even central line of thought, but made room for any theoretical perspective, provided that it was analyzed with seriousness and academic competence.

This diversity is also evident in the themes of the articles. In this set of 36 texts marked by the Philosophy/Philosophy of Education published in the first decade of Pro-Posições, the following topics were addressed: positivism and education; republican education; leftist thinking in Brazilian education; Marxism and education; historical-critical pedagogy; anarchism and libertarian pedagogy; freedom, self-management and education; ideology and ideological aspects of education; values and valuation; egalitarianism and social justice; university and higher education; university extension; comparative education in Brazil and Latin America; teaching philosophy in high school and elementary school; thought, awareness, and educational initiative; philosophical anthropology and the issue of human nature and condition; education and polytechnic education; research issues and methodologies; bioethics, feminism, and feminist thinking; modernity and postmodernity; emancipation; education and otherness; epistemological aspects of education; education and liberalism; utopianism and education; cultural industry and semiformation; curriculum.

If we could draw a line that crossed this thematic multiplicity, it would be circumscribed to the political aspect of the analyses. In this first decade, despite thematic and theoretical diversity, the political concern seems to have been a continues matter. The authors of articles published in the Pro-Posições pages analyzed the aspects of republican education in Brazil in its multiple biases, unfolding their philosophical foundations; they have studied the main pedagogical perspectives present in the Brazilian education and their relationship with political parties and social movements, they have diagnosed the present time and thought of ways for working in the everyday life of the school, they have created political criticism of the institutionalized education, they have sought to unravel ideological aspects of education, they have been concerned about the philosophy taught in elementary school and its political aspects.

Second decade: diversification and consolidation

The intermediate period of our analysis marks a fundamental change, which denotes the consolidation of the journal and the expansion of its horizons. In the second decade of operation, comprising the years between 2000 and 2009, we identified the publication of 34 articles on Philosophy of Education or containing philosophical themes, a number very close to the 36 published in the previous decade.

In Table 2 we present the articles, indicating authorship, the authors’ academic filiation, the theme of the text, and the philosopher(s) that served as an analytical instrument as well as the issue of the journal in which they were published.

Table 2
Articles related to Philosophy/Philosophy of Education published in Pro-Posições between 2000 and 2009

In this set of texts, the endogenous tendency we identified in the previous period disappears. Of the 34 articles, only 4 were authored by researchers from the School of Education of Unicamp: 3 professors (2 from the Department of Philosophy and History of Education) and 1 graduate student. Two other articles were written by people linked to Unicamp: one from the School of Physical Education and one from the Institute of Language Studies. It is also worth highlighting the publication of 2 articles authored by retired professors of the School of Education – Unicamp who, at the time, were affiliated with other universities. From the list of 34 articles published in this decade, focused on the Philosophy/Philosophy of Education theme, 28 were written by authors from other educational and research institutions. We found the publication of 5 articles from foreign institutions: University of Winchester, United States of America; University of Coimbra, Portugal; University of Sevilla, Spain; National Pedagogical University/Javeriana University, Colombia; and University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The other 23 texts were written by authors from several Brazilian institutions, with a certain concentration in São Paulo: eight articles comprising USP, Unesp, Ufscar, Uniso, Unisal, and Unimep, and the others, from several states: Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Pernambuco, Goiás, Paraná, Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio Grande do Norte. In this period, we found no articles written by authors from institutions in the Northern region of the country, which did not fail to establish a great national representativeness. The highest concentration in the Southeast and South regions is explained by the concentration of universities and graduate programs in these regions.

Thus, since the 2000s, Pro-Posições journal has evidently gained national projection in the field of Philosophy/Philosophy of Education, and it ceased to be a means for publishing articles only written by researchers of the institution that edits the journal in order to welcome the production of the Brazilian academic community that works in the field, eventually publishing research results from Unicamp’s authors.

We are unable to analyze here whether such a process of national consolidation corresponds to the general movement of the journal, in its various subfields of publication. To do so, we would have to analyze the set of publications, which is not the scope of this article. But it is clear that, concerning the production related to Philosophy/Philosophy of Education, the second decade of the journal’s activity was the moment of its effective national consolidation, regional diversification, and greater scope in international insertion, comprising more articles from foreign researchers.

In terms of the themes addressed by the articles, as well as their philosophical references, we also noticed broadening and diversification and compared with the previous decade. We identified an emphasis on contemporary themes and debates, although classic aspects themes have emerged as well. The authors of one of the articles dialogued with Socrates; another, with Rousseau; a text dealt with the origins of the Philosophy of Education in the literary epic histories by Homer and Hesiod. XIX century philosophers emerged as a reference or as a theme, highlighting Hegel, Marx and Marxism, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in dialogue with Elisée Reclus, and positivism. But thinkers and schools of the XX century predominated as a reference in this set of articles. We found dialogues with Herbert Read, the British thinker of the arts; with Husserl and phenomenology; with the philosophy of language; with Hannah Arendt; with the Frankfurt School, in several of its representatives: Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm, Habermas; the French thought was also present in these articles, with Foucault, Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari. Contemporary authors also appeared as a reference for the published articles: Marc Augé, David Le Breton, Andrew Feenberg.

The themes of the articles were quite diverse: holocaust and history of everyday life; challenges to think about postmodernity and its repercussions on education; the issues of inclusion and exclusion in educational practices; processes of governmentality and subjectivation; ethics and citizenship; communication and normativity in education; body and cultural industry; body and singularization, permeated by the clown exercises; body and individuality and virtual body; aesthetics and otherness; aesthetics and anarchism; image and representation; image and sensation; myth and Paideia in the constitution of education; subjectivity and humanistic theory; philosophy teaching; interfaces between history of philosophy and history of education; education and revolution from an anarchist perspective; epistemology and education theories; knowledge society and its challenges; experience and classroom; social epistemology; phenomenology, knowledge and education; language and culture; rhizome and education; cartography and rhizome in educational processes; critical theory of technology; technology and contemporary society; television and education; and sexuality and the cultural industry.

It is noteworthy that, in this period, Pro-Posições started publishing thematic dossiers. The first of them, organized by UFRGS researchers and published in 2001, had as theme “Special Education and Inclusive Policies.” Although it was not directly focused on Philosophy of Education, it imposed a philosophical problematization of the theme and presented two articles with a strong philosophical perspective. On the other hand, in 2007, in issue 1, volume 18, the dossier “Epistemology and Education Theories in Brazil: framework and perspectives,” was published organized by professor of the School of Education – Unicamp, consisted in one presentation and nine articles by authors from several Brazilian universities. This was the first dossier with a theme strictly articulated with the Philosophy of Education present in the pages of Pro-Posições.

Third decade: multiplicity

In the third decade of Pro-Posições publication, although we consider one year less, since our survey comprised the period from 2010 to 2018, we found 76 articles on Philosophy of Education or addressing philosophical themes, which indicates a very considerable increase, since this number exceeds the total amount published in the previous 20 years (70 articles). Although the adoption of exclusively electronic publication in recent years has resulted in a significant increase in the number of articles per issue, after overcoming the limitation of printed publication, such an increase has been consolidated only in 2018 and partly explains the considerable increase of articles in the field addressed here. From our perspective, this increase was due to the consolidation of a double visibility: on one hand, the visibility achieved by the journal, which has been classified as A1 by the Qualis Capes system since 2009, and has been part of the SciElo Library since 2008, which calls the attention to the qualified-demand publication in the field of Education; and, on the other hand, the visibility of the very Philosophy of Education field, achieved in Brazil in recent years.

In Table 3 we list the basic information about this set of articles.

Table 3
Articles related to Philosophy/Philosophy of Education published in Pro-Posições between 2010 and 2018

Still commenting on the periods previously evaluated, regarding the academic filiation of the authors of the published articles, we highlight that this third decade consolidates plurality instead of the endogenous quality in Pro-Posições. Of the total of 76 published texts, 12 were written by authors from the University of Campinas – 3 of them from the School of Physical Education and 9 others from the School of Education. However, of these 9, 5 were published as Editorials or Presentations in the Diverso e Prosa section; therefore, as an editorial piece, and not as submitted articles. Of the 4 articles submitted, approved, and published, 2 are authored by professors of the School of Education and 2 others by researchers who, at the time of publication, were PhD students from the Graduate Program in Education. Six of the articles in this edition were written by foreign authors from institutions of several countries: 2 from France (University of Rouen), 1 from Italy (International Gramsci Society), 1 from Spain (Complutense University of Madrid), and 2 from Latin America – 1 from Argentina (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) and 1 from Colombia (National Pedagogical University). Articles written by authors from Brazilian institutions accounted for 12 states of the federation, from all regions: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Pernambuco, Mato Grosso do Sul, Paraná, Ceará, and Pará. Although the concentration of the production in the south-southeast axis still draws our attention, as also highlighted in previous periods, we highlight here a movement of greater dispersion, considering the proliferation of Graduate Programs in Education in the other regions, and in the coming years such trend is expected to be even more pronounced. But what we can perceive by analyzing this production is that Pro-Posições also consolidated itself as a means of publication in the Philosophy/Philosophy of Education theme, which is perhaps the main mark of this journal amid the theoretical and thematic multiplicity.

On the main themes addressed in the last decade, we highlight four initial aspects. The first is that, by editorial initiatives, some texts with philosophical contributions were published to think about education. In 2012, in volume 23, issue 3, the journal paid tribute to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the celebration of the 300th anniversary of his birth and 250 years of the first publication of his treatise Émile, or on Education. In the Diverso e Prosa section, a presentation written by one of the associated editors was published (Gallo, 2012Gallo, S. (2012, setembro/dezembro). Jean-Jacques Rousseau: uma dupla comemoração. Pro-Posições, 23(3), 217-222. Diverso e Prosa. Recuperado em 20 de julho de 2019, de http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0103-73072012000300013.
https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-7307201200...
) and two letters written by Rousseau (2012)Rousseau (2012, setembro/dezembro). Duas cartas (Dorothée de Bruchard, Trad.). Pro-Posições, 23(3), 223-225. Diverso e Prosa. Recuperado em 20 de julho de 2019, de http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0103-73072012000300014.
https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-7307201200...
, unpublished in Brazil, taken from his complete works and translated into Portuguese especially for this edition. In 2015, volume 26, issue 1, an unprecedented interview with the French philosopher Michel Serres was published, held in Paris by the PhD student Maria Emanuela Esteves dos Santos. In this interview (Santos, 2015Santos, M. E. E. dos. (2015, janeiro/abril). Educação e Contemporaneidade em Michel Serres. Pro-Posições 26(1), 239-257. Diverso e Prosa. Recuperado em 20 de julho de 2019, de http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0103-7307201507615
https://doi.org/10.1590/0103-73072015076...
), not only aspects of his “mixed philosophy” and his educational thinking were highlighted, thought of as a crossing of a “educated third party,” especially addressed in a book published in 1991 and translated into Portuguese in 1993, but also his most recent reflections on the impact of technology on the education of new generations, in a work published in France in 2012 and translated into Portuguese in 2013. Considering the almost absent production in Brazil in the field of Education regarding the thought of this contemporary philosopher, this interview is especially interesting due to its new analytical perspectives. Michel Serres died in June 2019 at the age of 88.

In this analysis period, two dossiers directly related to the Philosophy of Education field were published. In volume 21, issue 1, 2010, the dossier “Teaching Philosophy and Citizenship” was written, organized by professors of the School of Education – Unicamp and gathering texts from authors of various institutions, including an article by Giorgio Baratta, Italian researcher, president of the International Gramsci Society. This publication focused on the debate on the teaching of Philosophy in high school, which became mandatory in Brazil by legal provision in 2008, explaining its relations with citizenship issues in a democratic society. Conversely, in 2015, in volume 26, issue 1, the dossier “Didactics for differences” was written, organized by a professor from Unifesp and with collaboration from Brazilian and foreign authors from Spain, France, Argentina. The focus of this set of texts was to think of some didactic aspects of the educational work, when the school is marked by the otherness of differences of all kinds. The analyses were performed based on the philosophies of difference, a philosophical perspective that has been gaining prominence in the Brazilian educational thinking.

Two other dossiers published in the period are worth emphasizing. The editorial committee of the journal decided to celebrate two events taking place in 2014 (the 50 years of Angicos’ experience and the 30th anniversary of Michel Foucault’s disappearance) with 2 dossiers to be produced by public notices of texts that, after peer analysis, would be evaluated by the committee. Each of the productions meant more than 1 year of the committee’s work, but resulted in 2 important publications. “The ‘Foucaudian effect’ on education” (v. 25, i. 2, 2014) had a more directly philosophical profile, gathering 9 articles and 1 Editorial, being 1 article written by a French author and another by Colombian authors, conferring a broader international character to the performed analyses based on the Brazilian reality. On the other hand, the dossier “Paulo Freire and the contemporary educational debate” (v. 25, i. 3, 2014) comprised 2 philosophical-perspective texts. One of them, debating the production of democratic subjectivities in Freire; another, thinking of a critical-emancipatory curriculum based on the Brazilian thinker.

Finally, we highlight the publication, in the last issue of 2018, in the Diverso e Prosa section, of a text by the philosopher Jacques Rancière which, although published in France in 1988, remained unpublished in Portuguese until then. Entitled “School, production, equality,” it discusses the complexities of school relationships and educational processes regarding the policies and economy of neoliberalism, remaining, therefore, as a much current issue. The text was translated from French and an introduction was added by Aimberê Guilherme Quintiliano Rocha do Amaral, professor of Philosophy of Education at Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora.

In addition to these highlights, all articles published in the last decade reinforce the diversity of philosophical themes and inspirations within the pages of Pro-Posições. Once again, the focus lied on XX century authors, even though some classics remain inspiring: Socrates, Montaigne, Spinoza, Emerson, Kant. From the XIX century, we highlight: Max Stirner and, especially, Marx and Nietzsche, probably the two most important reference matrices of the contemporary thought. From the XX century, the following emerge in these pages: Gramsci, Mészáros, and Lukács, following the Marxist tradition; Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas, representing the Frankfurtian thought; following the phenomenological tradition, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Buber; Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt consist in the female voice, still quite shy in this macho universe of philosophy, joined by Mauss, Dewey, Ricoeur, Bergson, Ortega y Gasset, and Winnicott, expanding the universe of references; the thought of the difference continued marked by the thoughts of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, besides Deligny; among contemporary thinkers, we found Edgar Morin, Christoph Türcke, and Michel Onfray.

The list of themes multiplies the already diverse complexity of previous decades. Philosophy and citizenship; time, reality and subjectivation; hypermodernity, citizenship and lines of flight; freedom of education; communication and (in)tolerance in education; education of the body and nature; education and engagement of intellectuals; intercultural multiculturalism and educational processes; aesthetic and subjective experience; human formation and political education; cartography and research in education; corporeity and education; natality and education processes in the education of new generations; Ferrer Guàrdia and the Escuela Moderna; semiformation and contemporaneity: digital processes; education and clinic of subjects; progress and domination of nature; ethics of self-care in the philosophy of Brazilian education; children, childhood, early childhood education and memory; body and education of the senses; conscientization and popular culture; alternative pedagogies and freedom to learn and teach; violence and education; philosophy and interdisciplinarity: challenges in teaching; philosophical perspectives of nursing education; educational policies and neoliberalism; idiocy, ontology and human formation; notion of time in Freire’s thinking; heterotopia in physical education classes; heterotopia, images and education; cinema, education and philosophy.

Final considerations

The recognition achieved by Pro-Posições journal during its 30 years of existence is due to many factors: institutional support, dedication of its editorial board, numerous contributions of Brazilian and foreign researchers committed to publishing their studies, and the increase in the scope of its readers, among others.

But, as we observed in this article, we may state that the Philosophy and Philosophy of Education fields delineated remarkable traits in the dialogical heritage of the area of Education, as broadened in Pro-Posições. From this perspective, it is irrefutable for readers of the journal to disregard the vast fortune of philosophical propositions surrounding the most distinct themes and problematizations for Education. Indeed, as stressed by the tradition of educational thought, Philosophy and Philosophy of Education consist in indispensable bases of the foundations of education.

In this sense, authors of the articles surveyed in these three decades did not only seek to approach the purposes and consequences of philosophical theoretical foundations for education, but also to problematize and address the critical and revisionary need of the foundations of education itself. In other words, in Pro-Posições journal there are philosophical actions whose intention is not to comprise educational thought in itself; on the contrary, it is a matter of seeking to think differently about our own changing historical conditions.

This perspective is very interesting, because it implies the very archaeology of educational thought in ourselves, in the Foucauldian sense. As Foucault (1980)Foucault, M. (1980). L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. delineated, archaeology is a critical exercise of a thought that cannot apprehend all its meaning and all its historical transition, besides being impossible for us to achieve totality and the flows of historical continuities and discontinuities of our own historical archive. Thus, when we resume the set of publications on the fields of Philosophy and Philosophy of Education as they emerged between 1990 and 1999, 2000 and 2009, and 2010 until 2018, we realize that the concerns addressed in such texts on the field of Education still remain. Hence, we live under the poignant latency of an archive that must be constantly prospected, problematized, brought to light, and considered as a feature of our own historical traces.

If we discuss it in this direction is because we understand that, currently, now in 2019, especially regarding the Brazilian historical-political-social scenario, Education is impelled to the same challenges pointed out since the beginning of the 1990s. Authors of philosophical and philosophical-educational articles considered, at that time, the indispensable care towards the recent process of Brazilian redemocratization and the reaffirmation of the Republican school – universal in its rights, secular, and of quality –, something that still must be carefully treated, just like an infant who requires all the care provided by an emancipated individual. Nevertheless, it is embarrassing to see how urgent that agenda is nowadays.

More than ever, we need to resume studies whose authors insisted on the fundamental markers of a free society, with asserted rights in its absolute guarantee for free thinking, free expression, and educational approaches – clearly – considering the human complexity inherent in all those who create the society. It is disturbing, however, to face demeaning setbacks in relation to the research conducted between 1990 and 1999. Currently, we do not fail to witness the undervaluation of public education as an emancipatory element and of critical education. For example, if the terms of criticism, emancipation, popular school, overcoming the alienation of individuals, the fight against dictatorship, and the ghosts of censorship and persecution still needed to be reconsidered there, surprisingly, we see this same obstacles as a race that has not been completed and whose obstacles are opposed to us as a historical threshold to be understood, analyzed, investigated, problematized, and towards which we should position ourselves. We could highlight, in this dimension, only one current example: the way Paulo Freire has been labeled as an educator unsuitable to the political interests of the status quo. It is not only ignorance, in the philosophical sense, that is, what you do not known. It is, actually, to act in bad faith regarding the historical conditions once consolidated for Education and aimed at educating individuals who can build a society that is fairer, more democratic, and with absolute rights; a society guarded by critics as the limit to the excesses of all governance that seeks to minimize the scope of the rights of its citizens, in any sphere; a society which is impossible to shape without the education of its peers.

Indeed, the plot created from the 2000s until 2009, envisioning the full support of the State based on the rule of law, the universalization of public education, in addition to the introduction of critical thinking and experimentation with Education, put to the test new utopias and projections for educational initiatives. The millennial themes, in their broadest pluralities, considered new technologies for Education, the issues mapped by the debate on postmodernity, the need for economic development as a redistributive condition for public investments in schools, among others. But, in the same sense of the thematic reflection of the previous decade, in contemporaneity we witnessed a subtraction of trends that aimed to advance in educational quality, in all its possibilities. If since the 2000s it was essential to question the Brazilian political-economic neoliberalization that could compromise the educational quality ensured since the 1988 Federal Constitution, reverting to the problematizing framework of the articles written between 2000 and 2009, we cannot fail to notice that the same issue is resumed as a challenging analytical axis nowadays.

From this perspective, Philosophy and Philosophy of Education are summed to reestablish the political-historical place of their investigative purposes. It is worth considering this element, because the archive of our current history has produced a relentless discursivity that undermines the very relevance of the fundamentals of education: thinking has become something very dangerous, besides the target of persecution. Nevertheless, the reading of articles published between 2000 and 2009 is essential for us to realize that the limits denounced for the achievement of millennial education so far, that is, aiming at overcoming the distortions and injustices of the previous century, are more than persistent, they are resurrected.

Then, it is not surprising the fact that being aware of Philosophy and Philosophy of Education themes, developed from 2010 to 2018, barely crawled as a vital pulse of a history that still needs to be written based on much struggle, overcoming, and persistence of new educational propositions. If differences, as a comprehensive educational inclusion agenda, emerged, considering the demands for corporeity, disability, sexuality, ethnic and racial minorities; if subjectivities, as a gradient of multiplicity of human expression, sought to establish themselves as a non-negotiable presence regarding the Brazilian education, for example, guided by the terms “heterotopia,” “singularity,” and “experimentation”; if the term “difference” itself had become an analytical-philosophical place and subfield of the Philosophy of Education, that is, Philosophy of Differences, all this was due to the maturation of a series of research whose State support was irrefutable, from the moment in which it agreed with such demands, for example, presented in a series of public policies on educational inclusion.

But such scenario, however, once again emerges in the opposite direction of the current historical trends of our society. Increasingly, and we could say, in a dystopian and unbelievable manner, we see the themes of differences, minorities, and human multiplicities in their both ethical and aesthetic potential; and undermining the educational strategies that were intended to think, to investigate, and to propose actions with the thought or empirical elements considering such themes.

Moreover, in any moment the Pro-Posições journal ceased to be a cartography that gives publicity to this entire archive that, at the same time, brings about the historical conditions with which we have arrived here. However, we are also challenged by them to create other paths in which we can guide ourselves towards other connections of a historical doing demanding its own transformation.

In short, if in 30 years of publication, Philosophy and Philosophy of Education have composed the archive of this complex archaeology of the Brazilian education, as witnessed by the Pro-Posições journal, it is because both have never ceased to produce their original propositions for education. Such propositions have not ended in these three decades – on the contrary, they pulse as a relentless exercise in the face of historical events that force us searching for other propositions in an era of monotonous rhythm and addicted to circular propositions. But, certainly, Pro-Posições journal does not continues to exist merely for this reason, and neither it is the reason why Philosophy and Philosophy of Education will continue to transition in its pages.

  • 1
    The authors thank Espaço da Escrita – Pró-Reitoria de Pesquisa – UNICAMP - for the language services provided.
  • 2
    References correction and bibliographic normalization services: Leda Farah (farahledamaria@gmail.com) e Vera Bonilha (verabonilha@yahoo.com.br)
  • 3
    This text is a part of “Dossier: 30 years of Pro-Posições”, organized by Prof. Dr. André Luiz Paulilo. Responsible Editor: Prof. Dr. André Luiz Paulilo
  • 7
    “Propositions” is the English word for proposições, which is the title of the journal (Pro-Posições).
  • 8
    For an analysis of this process of constitution of the Philosophy of education as a disciplinary field, see Gallo (2007)Gallo, S. (2007, julho/dezembro). Filosofia da Educação no Brasil do Século XX: da crítica ao conceito. Eccos – Revista Científica, 9(2), 261-284..

Referências

  • Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1992). O que é a filosofia? Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34.
  • Foucault, M. (1980). L’archéologie du savoir Paris: Gallimard.
  • Foucault, M. (1996). A ordem do dicurso (2a ed.). São Paulo: Loyola.
  • Gallo, S. (2007, julho/dezembro). Filosofia da Educação no Brasil do Século XX: da crítica ao conceito. Eccos – Revista Científica, 9(2), 261-284.
  • Gallo, S. (2012, setembro/dezembro). Jean-Jacques Rousseau: uma dupla comemoração. Pro-Posições, 23(3), 217-222. Diverso e Prosa. Recuperado em 20 de julho de 2019, de http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0103-73072012000300013.
    » https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-73072012000300013
  • Rancière, J. (2018, setembro/dezembro). Escola, produção, igualdade. Pro-Posições, 29(3), 669-686. Recuperado em 20 de julho de 2019, de http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1980-6248-2018-0121.
    » https://doi.org/10.1590/1980-6248-2018-0121
  • Rousseau (2012, setembro/dezembro). Duas cartas (Dorothée de Bruchard, Trad.). Pro-Posições, 23(3), 223-225. Diverso e Prosa. Recuperado em 20 de julho de 2019, de http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0103-73072012000300014.
    » https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-73072012000300014
  • Santos, M. E. E. dos. (2015, janeiro/abril). Educação e Contemporaneidade em Michel Serres. Pro-Posições 26(1), 239-257. Diverso e Prosa. Recuperado em 20 de julho de 2019, de http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0103-7307201507615
    » https://doi.org/10.1590/0103-7307201507615
  • Serres, M. (1993). Filosofia mestiça – Le tiers-instruit Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira.
  • Serres, M. (2013). Polegarzinha Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil.

Publication Dates

  • Publication in this collection
    28 Nov 2019
  • Date of issue
    2019

History

  • Received
    30 July 2019
  • Accepted
    29 Aug 2019
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