An attempt is made to identify what some have felt to be absent from recent official views as to how curricula and the transfer of knowledge are most performatively to be managed. To this end, particular conceptions of teaching and learning are proposed, and use is made of recent work by George Steiner in elaborating a third variant of the relationship between teacher, learner and what is to be learned, namely that of discipleship. While noting that Steiner is concerned with (...) a small number of exceptional teachers, the possibility is considered that the concept may have some more general educational application, attention nevertheless being drawn to the possible dangers and drawbacks this may present. (shrink)

Note is taken of the requirement (expressed in the British Educational Reform Act 1988 and other documents) that the curriculum should contribute to the spiritual development of pupils in the school and of society. Declining to reject the term as vacuous, the paper explores various suggested meanings: induction into a particular religion, consideration of fundamental questions, a sense of self, certain largely inexpressible states of mind, and pupils' non–material well–being. All of these, with the possible exception of the first in (...) the context of a multicultural public educational system, are shown to have some possible validity, subject to the need for further explication. Sincere concern with any profound notion of spiritual development is, however, held to be difficult to reconcile with current officially sanctioned conceptions of education. (shrink)

The dichotomy between virtue and self-interest or pleasure is held to face modern moral educators with a conflict between the interest of society and that of their pupils, as well as presenting obvious motivational difficulties. Three possibilities for mitigating this conflict are offered. First, it is argued that virtue is an essential constituent of our well-being insofar as even undetected wickedness isolates us from others. Second, young people, alienated by the negative nature of conventional morality, may respond positively to certain (...) moral appeals in a way that is fulfilling and life-enhancing. Third, it is argued that moral education which emphasises the rights of young people themselves alongside those of others would be both more reputable and more effective than that based on the opposition between virtue and self-interest or pleasure. (shrink)

So-called family values and their part in education are considered. ‘Traditional’‘modern’ and ‘deviant’ patterns of family relationships are discussed and the moral superiority of the first is questioned. The single life without family involvement is also proposed as a possibly fulfilling mode of existence in its own right.

This paper argues that young people are unlikely to integrate themselves positively into adult life - to adopt its values, responsibilities and opportunities - unless that life is made more morally acceptable in their terms. Central to this process of community building and reconciliation with the young is the condition of solidarity which both results from and results in common values and a shared conception of the good life.

A notion of Education for Active Citizenship is identified in the pronouncements of certain politically influential individuals. Key elements in this are seen to include action, the citizen, appreciating the benefits of democracy and freedom, respect for the rule of law, a due balance between rights and duties, participation and service to the community. These are shown to be systematically ambiguous, simultaneously capable of evoking critical, independent-minded, socially effective citizens and docile conforming subjects. Clarification is held to be a necessary (...) precondition of translating the ideal of citizenship into specific curricular goals. (shrink)

Moral education is complex: its major issues are not resolvable in terms of contests between rival ethical theories. Five tasks of moral education are identified: dealing with blatant misdemeanours, developing virtues, developing skill in moral reasoning, teaching to care and enabling individuals to choose a worthwhile way of life. These are mutually irreducible in terms of their justification and capable of irreconcilable conflict in practice. Moral education must recognise such conflicts and the consequent inevitability of wrongdoing in human life as (...) well as the need for humility this implies. The position argued for is inconsistent with, and does not imply, moral relativism. (shrink)

Colin Wringe; Educational Rights in Multicultural Democracies, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 29, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 285–292, https://doi.o.

While not underestimating the value of useful knowledge and skills, it is suggested that education should also develop the subjective self of the learner. A distinction is drawn between an ‘additive’ view of education which simply furnishes the individual with knowledge and skills and a ‘transformative’ concept which concerns itself with changes to more central parts of the learner's self. In developing a concept of the subjective self, reference is made to the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous rational self and (...) the interpersonal or cultural self of the Symbolic Interactionists and Communitarians. Particular attention, however, is given to Heidegger's three categories of entities experienced by the phenomenological self: the ‘present at hand’, the ‘ready to hand’ and those entities with whom we share the experience of ‘being with’. An attempt is made to interpret important aspects of education in terms of the development of learners' growing knowledge and deepening understanding of these three kinds of entity and the relation in which they stand to them. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The “Traditional” Picture The “Progressive” Picture The General Change of Society Childhood and Modern Marriage Childrens's Rights Parents' Rights and the Nature of Child‐rearing Educational Practice Nowadays: A Tentative Interpretation Lyotard and the “Inhumanity” of the Child: Taking a Radical Inspiration for Philosophy of Education.

The dichotomy between virtue and self‐interest or pleasure is held to face modern moral educators with a conflict between the interest of society and that of their pupils, as well as presenting obvious motivational difficulties. Three possibilities for mitigating this conflict are offered. First, it is argued that virtue is an essential constituent of our well‐being insofar as even undetected wickedness isolates us from others. Second, young people, alienated by the negative nature of conventional morality, may respond positively to certain (...) moral appeals in a way that is fulfilling and life‐enhancing. Third, it is argued that moral education which emphasises the rights of young people themselves alongside those of others would be both more reputable and more effective than that based on the opposition between virtue and self‐interest or pleasure. (shrink)

The earlier much discussed issue of a society's right to educate the young is the starting point for various observations regarding education itself. A distinction is drawn between additive and transformative conceptions of education, the latter seeking to bring about changes to the learner's subjective self as reflected in a tripartite division of entities intended by the phenomenological self. Despite liberal or progressive educators' intuitive preference for the transformative conception, it may be asked whether this may not infringe the learner's (...) rights, however worthy the educator's motives or benign the intended outcomes. This possibility is rejected, however, on grounds of the learner's residual freedom to criticise the educator's values, the necessity of value assumptions as the essential basis of moral freedom and the unpredictability of human perceptions and responses, given the potential gap between the intentions and perceptions of the emitter of language and the understandings of the receiver. (shrink)

Moral education is complex: its major issues are not resolvable in terms of contests between rival ethical theories. Five tasks of moral education are identified: dealing with blatant misdemeanours, developing virtues, developing skill in moral reasoning, teaching to care and enabling individuals to choose a worthwhile way of life. These are mutually irreducible in terms of their justification and capable of irreconcilable conflict in practice. Moral education must recognise such conflicts and the consequent inevitability of wrongdoing in human life as (...) well as the need for humility this implies. The position argued for is inconsistent with, and does not imply, moral relativism. (shrink)

Some traditional assumptions regarding rational autonomy are examined and criticised. The exclusion of subjective considerations from autonomous choice is shown to be unjustified, as are attempts to identlfji autonomy with morally desirable conduct. Unexpected implications of these conclusions for education and certain other social institutions are also indicated.

In the mid-eighteenth century David Hume argued that successful prediction tells us nothing about the truth of the predicting theory. But physical theory routinely predicts the values of observable magnitudes within very small ranges of error. The chance of this sort of predictive success without a true theory suggests that Hume's argument is flawed. However, Colin Howson argues that there is no flaw and examines the implications of this disturbing conclusion; he also offers a solution to one of the (...) central problems of Western philosophy, the problem of induction. (shrink)

Ambivalence—where we experience two conflicting emotional responses to the same object, person or state of affairs—is sometimes thought to pose a problem for cognitive theories of emotion. Drawing on the ideas of the Stoic Chrysippus, I argue that a cognitivist can account for ambivalence without retreating from the view that emotions involve fully-fledged evaluative judgments. It is central to the account I offer that emotions involve two kinds of judgment: one about the object of emotion, and one about the subject's (...) response. (shrink)

This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.

In this paper I attempt to show how an appeal to a particular kind of collective obligation - a collective obligation falling on an unstructured collective consisting of the world’s population as a whole – can be used to undermine recently influential objections to the idea that there is a human right to health which have been put forward by Gopal Sreenivasan and Onora O’Neill. -/- I take this result to be significant both for its own sake and because it (...) helps to answer a challenge often put to Those who argue for the existence of collective obligations: namely, to explain why the question of whether there are any such obligations might matter from a practical point of view. One way of introducing the objection is to focus on questions of agency. Here I'll argue both that there can be obligations on groups that are not themselves collective agents, and that these can play an important explanatory and clarifcatory role in accounting for obligations which fall on individuals. (shrink)

I shall argue that advocates of denunciatory forms of expressivism can make a good case for restricting the range of measures that can be an appropriate form of punishment. They can do so by focusing not on the conditions of uptake of the message conveyed by punishment, but by the content of that message. For it is plausible that part of that message should be that the offender is a responsible agent and a member of the political community. Forms of (...) punishment which do not treat the offender as such are, for that reason unacceptable. Among the forms of punishment which are thereby ruled out are the extended use of solitary confinement, since this undermines the capacity for moral agency – and permanent felon disenfranchisement. -/- I also address two objections to this line of argument. One focuses on penal practices involving those who are not members of the political community: resident aliens and minors. These two cases raise different issues, but they both appear to show that justifiable punishment does not need to communicate a message which has components affirming agency and membership of a political community. I argue that in both cases the justifiability of punishment piggy-backs on the kind of justification available in the standard case. A second objection suggests that the offender has excluded themselves from the political community, and that measures that recognize this are therefore acceptable: I argue that very few offences, if any, have this character. ---. (shrink)

Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. (...) Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? -/- Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools. (shrink)

McGinn's latest brings together moral philosophy and literary analysis in a way that illuminates both. Setting out to enrich the domain of moral reflection by showing the value of literary texts as sources of moral illumination, McGinn starts by setting out an uncompromisingly realist ethical theory, arguing that morality is an area of objective truth and genuine knowledge. He goes on to address such subjects as the nature of goodness, evil character, and the meaning of monstrosity in the context of (...) an aesthetic theory of virtue, which maintains that goodness of character is the same thing as beauty of soul. Looking at such literary works as Billy Budd, Lolita, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Frankenstein, as well as examples from film and painting, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction is an original and compelling book by a leading philosopher who is also a critic and novelist. (shrink)

In the past two decades, much work on Kant has aimed to delimit and evaluate the bedrock assumptions of Kant's mature Critical philosophy. This volume brings together leading Kant scholars to address this issue in conversation with each other, articulating and interrogating Kant's critical assumptions.

Many weaknesses of game theory are cured by new models that embody simple cognitive principles, while maintaining the formalism and generality that makes game theory useful. Social preference models can generate team reasoning by combining reciprocation and correlated equilibrium. Models of limited iterated thinking explain data better than equilibrium models do; and they self-repair problems of implausibility and multiplicity of equilibria.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the 20th century. In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the centre of Levinas's thought - alterity, the Other, the Face, infinity - concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation. Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, describing the context in which he worked, (...) and the impact of his writings. He argues that Levinas's work remains tied to the ontological tradition with which he wants to break, and demonstrates how his later writing tries to overcome this dependency by its increasingly disruptive, sometimes opaque, textual practice. He discusses Levinas's theological writings and his relationship to Judaism, as well as the reception of his work by contemporary thinkers, arguing that the influence of his work has led to a growing interest in ethical issues among poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers in recent years. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in continental philosophy, French studies, literary theory and theology. (shrink)

Henry More argues that materialism cannot account for cases where a single subject or perceiver has multiple perceptions simultaneously. Since we clearly do have multiple perceptions at the same time--for example, when we see, hear, and smell simultaneously--More concludes that we are not wholly material. In response to More's argument, Margaret Cavendish adopts a two-fold strategy. First, she argues that there is no general obstacle to mental unification in her version of materialism. Second, Cavendish appeals to the mind or rational (...) matter--terms she often uses interchangeably—to explain the integration of sensory input from multiple senses. When the mind integrates perceptions across modalities, the different parts of rational matter share their knowledge so that they all come to perceive alike. When rational parts successfully communicate their knowledge, each part knows what all the others know. They pool their knowledge; they perceive alike. Thus, when someone hears, sees, and tastes, each part of her mind hears, sees, and tastes alike, in parallel and in unison. The Cavendishian mind, in short, approximates simplicity by achieving uniformity or homogeneity of perceptions across its parts. (shrink)

The Oxford-educated philosopher serves up his trenchant survey of his academic discipline, offering his commentary on Descartes, Anselm Bertrand Russell, Sartre ...

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to (...) conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible. (shrink)

The heart of this book is the reciprocal relationship between philosophical theories of mind and empirical studies of animal cognition.

Many, including Marx, Rawls, and the contemporary 'Black Lives Matter' movement, embrace the ambition to secure terms of co-existence in which the worth of people's lives becomes a lived reality rather than an empty boast. This book asks whether, as some believe, the philosophical idea of human dignity can help achieve that ambition. Offering a new fourfold typology of dignity concepts, Colin Bird argues that human dignity can perform this role only if certain traditional ways of conceiving it are (...) abandoned. Accordingly, Bird rejects the idea that human dignity refers to the inherent worth or status of individuals, and instead reinterprets it as a social relation, constituted by affects of respect and the modes of mutual attention which they generate. What emerges is a new vision of human dignity as a vital political value, and an arresting vindication of its role as an agent of critical reflection on politics. (shrink)

Should cognitive scientists be any more embarrassed about their lack of a discipline-fixing definition of cognition than biologists are about their inability to define “life”? My answer is “no”. Philosophers seeking a unique “mark of the cognitive” or less onerous but nevertheless categorical characterizations of cognition are working at a level of analysis upon which hangs nothing that either cognitive scientists or philosophers of cognitive science should care about. In contrast, I advocate a pluralistic stance towards uses of the term (...) ‘cognition’ that eschews the urge to treat cognition as a metaphysically well-defined “natural” kind. (shrink)

As arti® cial intelligence moves ever closer to the goal of producing fully autonomous agents, the question of how to design and implement an arti® cial moral agent (AMA) becomes increasingly pressing. Robots possessing autonomous capacities to do things that are useful to humans will also have the capacity to do things that are harmful to humans and other sentient beings. Theoretical challenges to developing arti® cial moral agents result both from controversies among ethicists about moral theory itself, and from (...) computational limits to the implementation of such theories. In this paper the ethical disputes are surveyed, the possibility of a `moral Turing Test ’ is considered and the computational di culties accompanying the diŒerent types of approach are assessed. Human-like performance, which is prone to include immoral actions, may not be acceptable in machines, but moral perfection may be computationally unattainable. The risks posed by autonomous machines ignorantly or deliberately harming people and other sentient beings are great. The development of machines with enough intelligence to assess the eŒects of their actions on sentient beings and act accordingly may ultimately be the most important task faced by the designers of arti® cially intelligent automata. (shrink)

According to recently influential conceptions of public reasoning, citizens have the right to demand of each other ‘public justifications’ for controversial political action. On this view, only arguments that all reasonable citizens can affirm from within their diverse ethical standpoints can count as legitimate justifications for political action. Both proponents and critics often assume that the case for this expectation derives from the special justificatory burden created by the systematically coercive character of political action. This paper challenges that assumption. While (...) conceding that citizens who propose to deploy the coercive apparatus of the state to enforce controversial legislation owe their fellows a justification that overcomes the strong presumption against coercing agents, it denies that this consideration can explain why public justifications are also required. Having argued that the public justification requirement is not among the justification conditions for public coercion, the paper then proposes an alternative rationale for the expectation that political action be publicly justified. On this alternative, the case for the public justification requirement depends on democratic citizens’ standing as legislative co-authors, and not on considerations having to do with their liability as private individuals to coercion at the hands of the state. (shrink)

According to recently influential conceptions of public reasoning, citizens have the right to demand of each other ‘public justifications’ for controversial political action. On this view, only arguments that all reasonable citizens can affirm from within their diverse ethical standpoints can count as legitimate justifications for political action. Both proponents and critics often assume that the case for this expectation derives from the special justificatory burden created by the systematically coercive character of political action. This paper challenges that assumption. While (...) conceding that citizens who propose to deploy the coercive apparatus of the state to enforce controversial legislation owe their fellows a justification that overcomes the strong presumption against coercing agents, it denies that this consideration can explain why public justifications are also required. Having argued that the public justification requirement is not among the justification conditions for public coercion, the paper then proposes an alternative rationale for the expectation that political action be publicly justified. On this alternative, the case for the public justification requirement depends on democratic citizens’ standing as legislative co-authors, and not on considerations having to do with their liability as private individuals to coercion at the hands of the state. (shrink)

In this entry, the authors outline the goals of a "dynamic reference work", and explain how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been designed to achieve those goals.

In this paper I discuss a number of different relationships between two kinds of obligation: those which have individuals as their subject, and those which have groups of individuals as their subject. I use the name collective obligations to refer to obligations of the second sort. I argue that there are collective obligations, in this sense; that such obligations can give rise to and explain obligations which fall on individuals; that because of these facts collective obligations are not simply reducible (...) to individual obligations; and that collective obligations supervene on individual obligations, without being reducible to them. The sort of supervenience I have in mind here is what is sometimes called ‘global supervenience’. In other words, there cannot be two worlds which differ in respect of the collective obligations which exist in them without also differing in respect of the individual obligations which exist in them. (shrink)