ABSTRACT In this article, play is taken up as a mood that incites and mediates inquiry. As such, play is said to produce not only, following Gadamer, the “forms of our freedom,” but also the very being of human meaning, giving it both ethical and ontological import.

ABSTRACT Dewey draws a critical distinction between immaturity in a comparative sense and in an absolute or intrinsic sense. He identifies immaturity in the intrinsic sense with “a force positively present—the ability to develop.” Whereas immaturity in the comparative sense indicates a lack, the other meaning denotes “a positive force of ability,—the power to grow.” This implies that both the child’s plasticity and even dependence on others are “something positive.” “Since growth is the characteristic of life,” Dewey claims, “education is (...) all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself.” Properly understood, then, ineradicable immaturity is the primary condition of human growth. The aim of this article is accordingly to show in detail how Dewey’s understanding of such immaturity is central not only to his philosophy of education but also to his philosophy more generally. This requires explicating several crucial distinctions, above all, that between qualitative immediacy and experiential continuity as well as the distinction between educative and miseducative experiences. In turn, this explication demands, on the one hand, showing how immediacy and continuity are inseparably linked and, on the other hand, identifying the criteria for marking the difference between the educative and the miseducative. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article considers the role of testimony in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience in order to highlight the unique style and structure of the text and its effect on readers. Understanding Varieties as a performative, multivocal, creative experiment in pedagogy and teaching puts the book in conversation with more contemporary theorists of liberatory education including Paulo Freire and bell hooks.

ABSTRACT Friendship is often regarded as an enriching social relationship that improves our quality of life. It is far less common to explore it as a site of ongoing education, let alone moral education, even though intimations of such a view can be found in canonical treatments of friendship. This article defends the view the friendship is an ongoing learning process with significant moral import. In particular, it is argued that through friendship we learn to care for others in their (...) singularity, which is an improvement on standard conventional and post-conventional moral theories. Moreover, the goodwill that emerges over the course of a friendship eludes some of Nietzsche’s deepest suspicions about morality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There are many kinds of moral mistakes, including wrong actions (such as stealing, killing, lying, and so on), but also maintaining false beliefs about morality, moral misperceptions and misattention, and morally problematic ways of feeling and thinking. According to Buddhist moral psychology, such mistakes are understood as due to misunderstanding (avidyā), either directly or indirectly. This article will present and defend the fourth-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu’s account of misunderstanding as the active opposition to moral knowledge that creates and (...) sustains false beliefs, problematic emotions, and fragile identities, which, in turn, lead to moral mistakes. This article argues that making moral mistakes, although different in kind from making non-moral ones, still can promote moral and spiritual growth in the right conditions. This article argues that we should resist having an “abstinence-only” approach, or even an “elimination” approach, to making moral mistakes. Instead, we should think about how we want to relate to the moral mistakes we (inevitably) make and how we want to change in light of them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What sort of education does democracy require? How can we balance the ideals of openness to others and assertion of our own ideas to disagreeing others that democracy demands? This article explores the tempting solutions to the paradoxical charges of democracy—skepticism and partisan dogmatism—and finds them lacking. Using insights from William James and John Dewey, this study argues that there are two habits or senses of charity needed in pluralistic democracies. These habits of imagination open us to the complexities (...) of other agents and to moral situations in general. Democratic education thereby seeks these habits as a way to maintain the tentative balances required by living among agreeing and disagreeing others. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article addresses six questions: What is education?; What is the difference between education and schooling?; What is democratic education?; What is public education?; What are public goods?; and, What changes are needed to render schooling more democratic and a more effective public good? In answering these questions, this article sets forth a pragmatic view of education, an account of public schooling based on its aims and outcomes rather than funding sources, and a list of institutional changes needed to (...) make public education reflect and advance a democratic way of life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Little has been said about Martin Heidegger’s influence on Latin American philosophy. This article addresses this oversight by investigating how twentieth-century Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch uses ser and estar and the formula estar-siendo to dethrone Heidegger’s famed Dasein. Drawing on estar’s etymological roots in the semantic element, Kusch recovers a phenomenological tradition rooted in the Greek histemi instead of the on of “ontology.” To champion Kusch’s phenomenology, this article borrows from analytic philosophy. Beginning in the words’ semantics, this article (...) illustrates ser and estar as normative pragmatic functions to understand Kusch’s deployment of the words as phenomenological concepts. Following Kusch, it is argued that estar has an ostensive function meant to signal facticity, rather than to register propositional content apophantically, while ser’s pragmatic function is declarative; it passes on warranted premises for novel inferences. The article concludes by cashing estar-siendo out as a philosophical speech act that revokes the self-verifying nature of accept truths by pointing such truths back to their factive origins. Accordingly, this article brings together continental philosophy, semantics, and analytic strands of pragmatism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article develops a phenomenological account to characterize the openness of the future. More specifically, showing that phenomenological experience is necessary to derive the belief that the future is open by adopting a realist reading of phenomenology where our experience can be used to speculate beyond the thought-world correlation postulated by Quentin Meillassoux and show that this openness is best captured as an indeterminacy of the future itself. This indeterminacy of the future is the indeterminacy of which events are (...) actualized or made to happen out of all the potential events. Here, our phenomenological experience allows us to feel what it is like to have the ability to participate in an event and make it happen. We can then generalize such ability to all other objects even inanimate ones. As a result, we have a phenomenological but non-anthropocentric account of the openness of the future. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the two carceral novels (The Walls of Water and The Hole) of the Mexican philosopher, writer and labor activist José Revueltas using as a lens Richard Rorty’s views on solidarity—particularly, Rorty’s views on what solidarity consists in, how it is developed and the effects it has, and this article argues that, if Rorty’s views on solidarity are correct, Revueltas’s carceral novels have a remarkable ability to expand our solidarity in virtue of their raw portrayal of the (...) shared humiliation and suffering endured by prisoners within the Mexican penal system, which Revueltas was well acquainted with. Specifically, this article shows that Revueltas’s characters in the two novels develop solidarity in virtue of a common susceptibility to pain and humiliation, that they show what solidarity consists in since they share common selfish hopes about small things that are woven into their final vocabulary and, finally, that they illustrate the effects of solidarity as they are forced to live in environments where all traditional differences (e.g., race, tribe, religion, etc.) eventually fade. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the phenomenon of stay-at-home daughterhood to demonstrate how this practice provides a stark contrast to the requirements and rewards of genuine education. It does so, the article argues, both through its dependence upon isolation and indoctrination and its allegiance to conceptions of femininity and masculinity that reveal themselves to be uninhabitable, the latter by trying to cultivate an impossible aspiration to omnipotence and the former by violating what Peirce identifies as “the sole rule of reason,” which (...) is “to not block the road of inquiry.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Jean-Jacques Rousseau is widely credited as the originator of the modern autobiography. To the contemporary reader, his work in the Confessions is a familiar exer-cise in self-discovery and self-evaluation. Rousseau’s project is a courageous one: to lay bare the inner and often secret history of the self and share this revelation with the world. It is this project that was to change the way the individual communed with themselves and additionally changed the way the individual presented themselves to others. (...) The claim the author wants advance in this article is the following: Our primary mode of communication is deeply autobiographical in nature, and yet, the kind of autobiographical work in which we are engaged has radically evolved such that it no longer accomplishes the task that has traditionally defined it. This article argues that rather than affirming the self via a journey of self-discovery and eventual recognition, autobiographical work now explicitly rejects the possibility of genuine recognition and, as a result, alienates and isolates the individual such that active participation within a community is not possible. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The concept of atmosphere is now central within phenomenology, critical theory, and hermeneutics, but it has not yet played a similarly significant role in contemporary pragmatism. Part of the problem is that the term “atmosphere” is not especially salient in classical pragmatism, though the ideas encompassed by that term do play an important role there. This article explores some important ways that classical pragmatist philosophy deploys the ambiguous, polyvalent, and lexically multiple notion of atmosphere. Along with its primary scientific (...) sense as the mixture of gases that surrounds the earth, atmosphere has the central meaning of mood, tone, or felt quality that pervades a situation or place. Having elsewhere shown the vital role of mood in pragmatism, this article extends the study of atmosphere in pragmatism by considering how that notion functions through other terms, including the term “atmosphere” itself, but also through closely associated terms like “ambience,” “climate,” “weather,” “milieu,” “aura,” “halo,” “penumbra,” “situation,” or “felt quality.” This article will focus on the pragmatism of James and Dewey, because the term “atmosphere” is strikingly absent in C. S. Peirce, notwithstanding his many years as a meteorologist for the US Coast Survey. (shrink)