Bakgrunn og erfaring
My academic background is in philosophy, religious studies, history, and German. I have completed practical teacher training and worked as a teacher in secondary schools. I currently live in Kristiansand together with my wife and our two children.
Ansvarsområder
PhD Candidate in Philosophy
Forskning
My academic interests include German Idealism and post-Idealism, the Aristotelian tradition of practical philosophy, Bildung and the philosophy of education, and the history of ethical and political ideas.
Abstract
This dissertation examines the philosophical theory of Bildung and pedagogy that Dietrich Benner develops in his Allgemeine Pädagogik. Benner’s work offers a systematic account of the basic principles, theories, and forms of action that constitute pedagogical thought and practice, combining two methods he terms “praxeology” and “problem-history.” The first involves reflection on practical philosophy traceable to ancient sources, above all Aristotle’s practical philosophy; the second reconstructs the intellectual history of the classical German pedagogical tradition as represented by Kant, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and Herbart. This dissertation represents the first comprehensive English-language engagement with Benner’s systematic project. Its central argument is that Benner’s theory, in systematically excluding substantive ethical commitments, cannot sustain a practically effective alternative to the forces that threaten pedagogical practice from within modernity itself and that Benner himself identifies in his work: the pervasiveness of scientific-technical rationality and the functionalist logic of the state and the economy. To develop this critique, the dissertation draws on the neo-Aristotelian thought of Alasdair MacIntyre and Joseph Dunne, whose work on the conditions under which social practices sustain their ethical character provides both diagnostic and constructive resources for identifying what Benner’s framework exclude. These resources, however, require substantive ethical commitments that sit uneasily with, and may prove incompatible with, Benner's post-metaphysical, non-affirmative stance. The dissertation argues that the German Bildung tradition, if it is to meet its own critical aspirations, must engage with the demands of contemporary Aristotelian ethics, even at the cost of radically questioning and revising some of Benner’s foundational commitments.
Beyond these broader areas, I am particularly interested in the work of G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Martin Heidegger, K.E. Løgstrup, Hannah Arendt, Hans Blumenberg, and Alasdair MacIntyre.