ABSTRACT
The genesis of this book occurred more than a decade ago, when Paul Smeyers and Nicholas Burbules were visiting the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, while Michael Peters and James Marshall were both faculty there. Together we formed a group to read and discuss several of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s texts, and we found in the course of those discussions that we shared a broadly similar way of understanding Wittgenstein as a philosopher with something important to say about teaching and learning. Although some of us had known each other previously, and in some cases had already collaborated on work in this area, this reading group sparked a more active interest in developing an explicit account of Wittgenstein, particularly the later Wittgenstein, as a philosopher for whom educational questions were central to understanding his philosophical concerns. Several important publications grew
more or less directly out of those discussions, including several that have evolved into chapters in this book.
