Background
Peters, Richard Stanley was born on October 31, 1919 in India.
Peters, Richard Stanley was born on October 31, 1919 in India.
Queen’s College, Oxford, and Birkbeck College, London.
Peters’s early work applied the techniques of contemporary conceptual analysis, with its close attention to linguistic usage, to an examination of psychological theories, both on a large historical canvas, as in Brett’s History of Psychology (1953), and, more specifically, in the field of motivation (1958). From the early 1960s his interests as a general philosopher in psychology, ethics and social philosophy were fruitfully applied to issues in education as he took the lead in establishing British philosophy of education as a serious academic discipline. He based this firmly in the tradition of conceptual analysis, his own major contribution being on the concept of education itself. In Ethics and Education (1966) Peters saw education as initiation into various ‘worthwhile activities’, largely of an intellectual and aesthetic sort, to be pursued for their own sake. His justification of worthwhile activities, like his justification of basic moral principles such as benevolence and liberty in the same book, was in a 'transcendental' mode, Kantian in inspiration. Throughout his various writings on education in general and moral education in particular. Peters developed his own view of the enterprise as based squarely on the pursuit and application of reason—in opposition to both instrumentalist and progressivist accounts. Drawing on his early philosophical interests, he combined in his theory an account of mind and learning as socially determined, a vision of the aims and rational procedures which the educator should follow, and a picture of the principles and institutions of a liberal-democratic society in which the educational ideal was to be realized. He was cofoundcr of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and first editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education.