Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

About the Authors
David Bridges is professor emeritus at the University of East Anglia (where
he was previously pro-vice-chancellor), professorial fellow at the University of
Cambridge, faculty of education and emeritus fellow of St Edmund’s College
Cambridge. He is honorary vice-president of the Philosophy of Education Society
of Great Britain and a council member of both the British and European Educational
Research Associations – positions which reflect the way in which his academic
career has bridged empirical research and philosophical work. Among the publications
which have arisen out of this dual interest are Fiction Written Under Oath?
Essays in Philosophy and Educational Research (Kluwer 2003); The Ethics of
Educational Research (Blackwell 2003) edited with Mike McNamee; Philosophy,
Methodology and Educational Research (Blackwell 2007) edited with Richard
Smith; and Evidence Based Educational Policy (Wiley Blackwell 2009) edited with
Paul Smeyers and Richard Smith.
Kathleen Coessens’ research is situated at the border of science and art. It deals
with human creativity and cultural representations looked at from an embodied,
epistemological and philosophical perspective. She graduated in piano and chamber
music from the Conservatory of Brussels and the Ėcole Cortot at Paris; at the
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, she studied philosophy, sociology and psychology. She
was awarded her doctorate in 2003. Her thesis was called The human being as a
cartographer – coping with the already epistemized world. A reworked publication
will follow in 2010 with the title: The Human Being as a Cartographer. She
is professor and post-doctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB,
Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science), senior researcher at the Orpheus
Research Centre in Music, Ghent, and guest professor at the Conservatory (Artesis
Hogeschool), Antwerpen where she teaches ‘semiotics’, ‘sociology of artistic practice’
and ‘arts and performance culture’. Her recent publications include The Artistic
Turn–AManifesto(2009, Leuven University Press) written with Darla Crispin and
Anne Douglas.
Marc Depaepe, born in 1953, is full professor at the Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven, where he teaches courses in the history of education and in the history
of behavioural sciences at the campuses Kortrijk and Leuven. He has been
P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: The Ethics and Aesthetics
of Statistics, Educational Research 5, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9873-3,
C○ Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
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