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The purpose of this paper is to lay the foundations for new ways of management and personality development by using the same way Peter Drucker developed his ideas. What was this “teaching philosophy”? Where else can it be found? Which learning phenomena are typical for this way of teaching? Can this “teaching philosophy” be replicated? Can it be applied to management in general?

The historical genetic method developed by Ernst Mach from the historical‐critical method. Using this approach the paper traces the origin of Drucker's central ideas for management in his early learning experiences. It then asks the question, in how far can these central ideas be generalized and used to develop the central ideas of Drucker (including the intuitive ones) further? The question is genetically left open, i.e. it is continually transformative.

Drucker was heavily influenced in his way of thinking by his education at a special school in Vienna. The school was organized by Eugenie Schwarzwald. Many of Drucker's ideas on personality development and his intuitive theories on psychology and learning can be traced back to that time. What was especially important for Drucker's later works was the “teaching philosophy” taught by Schwarzwald's teachers.

There is a direct link between the science teaching results for Finland in the OECD PISA study and Drucker's way of thinking. Drucker acquired an exponential way of learning, instead of a learning based on a linear model. This is what made his thoughts so challenging and ahead of his contemporaries. As the example of Finland shows, this is not a light‐tower method (i.e. a singular phenomenon without empirical evidence of its reproducibility). One can use these ideas in general for all of education and it has been used in over a dozen cases at different around the world times. It is especially valuable in management education of knowledge workers. In such a way, one can create a much more efficient and effective way of education, an “education 2.0”.

This is the first time that Drucker's ideas can be linked to the ideas of Ernst Mach and to similar types of education based on ideas of Mach, such as used in Finland. The empirical results of such methods can therefore not only be found in Drucker's autobiography as a single case, but they can be compared in much more general contexts, for instance in the large‐scale field study OECD PISA study or in Hattie's educational meta‐meta analysis.

Some of Heinz von Foerster's central topics of reflection (the crucial role of the observer, the admission of the autonomy of the knowing subject, the rejection of all absolute conceptions of truth, the significance of paradoxical and circular figures of thought, etc.) are of consequence to university education and teaching in many different ways.

The author crucially describes the central ideas of Heinz von Foerster and related authors on education, learning and teaching.

The author shows that the concepts developed by Heinz von Foerster suggest a paradigmatic re‐orientation; the concept of knowledge transfer must be replaced by the stimulation of self‐directed learning geared to the reality of students; learning environments must be created that enable students to recognise and experience ready‐made answers primarily as questions, and solutions primarily as problems. The constructivist understanding of the multiplicity of worlds and realities is particularly well suited for university teaching to support intellectual curiosity, fascination, and cooperative reflection.

Heinz von Foerster's brand of subversive constructivism inspires the dismantling of stifling hierarchies of knowledge, encourages dialogue‐oriented learning, relies on the autonomy and intellectual self‐sufficiency of the individual, and stimulates the delineation of ideal‐type role‐models and interaction patterns of different kinds.

“In so far as stray thoughts, giants, and brownies, lies and errors are really existing, though only in the imaginations of men, to that extent they are true. All errors and lies are true errors and true lies, hence are not so far removed from truth that one should belong to heaven and the other to eternal damnation.” (Dietzgen: The Positive Outcome of Philosophy).

Ridley Scott’s 1982 cinematic production of Blade Runner, based loosely on a 1968 story by Philip Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), is read within a general context of critical theory, the purpose being twofold: first, to highlight the film’s fit with, and within, several issues that have been important to critical theory and, second, to explore some questions, criticisms, and extensions of those issues – the dialectic of identity/difference most crucially – by speculations within and on the film’s text. The exploration is similar in approach to studies of specific films within the context of issues of social, cultural, and political theory conducted by the late Stanley Cavell. Interrogations of dimensions of scenarios and sequences of plotline, conceptual pursuit of some implications, and assessments of the realism at work in cinematic format are combined with mainly descriptive evaluations of character portrayals and dynamics as these relate to specified thematics of the identity/difference dialectic. The film puts in relief evolving meanings of prosthetics – which is to say changes in the practical as well as conceptual-semantic boundaries of “human being”: what counts as “same” versus “other”? “domestic” versus “foreign”? “integrity” versus “dissolution”? “safety” versus “danger”? And how do those polarities, understood within a unity-of-opposites dialectic, change, as human beings are confronted more and more stressfully by their own reproductions of “environment” – that is, the perspectival device of “what is ‘text’ and what is context’?” – and variations of that device by direct and indirect effects of human actions, as those actions have unfolded within recursive sequences of prior versions of perspectival device, a device repeatedly engaged, albeit primarily and mainly implicitly, as a “prosthetic that could not be a prosthetic.”