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Daoist Onto-Un-Learning as a Radical Form of Study: Re-imagining Study and Learning from an Eastern Perspective

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Abstract

Within educational philosophy and theory, there has been an international re-turn to envision study as an alternative formation to disrupt the defining learning logic. As an enrichment, this paper articulates “Daoist onto-un-learning” as an Eastern form of study, drawing upon Roger Ames’s (Confucian role ethics: a vocabulary, Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 2011) interpretation of the ancient Chinese correlative cosmology and relational personhood thinking. This articulation is to dialogue with the conceptualizations of study (with) shared by Giorgio Agamben, Derek Ford, and Tyson Lewis, and unfolds in three steps. First, I examine how their conceptualizations of study (with) constrain the studier-doing-study logic as a commonsensical expression of “foundational individualism” (Rosemont and Ames in Confucian role ethics: a moral vision for the 21st century?, VetR Unipress, Göttingen, 2016) and anthropocentric disordering (Harari in Sapiens: a brief history of humankind, Vintage, London, 2015). Second, re-invoking the ancient Chinese wisdom, I envision “Daoist onto-un-learning” as a non-individualistic and non-anthropocentric form of study, re-configuring study and learning no longer as two disparate, if not necessarily oppositional, formations but into a Daoist bipolar yin-yang movement. Finally, I story-tell my doctoral research experience as a Daoist onto-un-learning journey, a spiralling learning-study movement, to unpack the ways it suspends and overturns the modern-Western(nized) trap/trope of anthropocentric-foundational individualism. In so doing, this paper further internationalizes and supplements the current study scholarship in relation to learning in a way so-far hardly explored yet cross-culturally provocative.

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Correspondence to Weili Zhao.

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Zhao, W. Daoist Onto-Un-Learning as a Radical Form of Study: Re-imagining Study and Learning from an Eastern Perspective. Stud Philos Educ 38, 261–273 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-019-09660-5

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