"Is higher education a right, or a privilege? This author argues that all citizens in a free and open society should have an unconditional right to higher education. Such an education should be costless for the individual and open to everyone regardless of talent. A readiness and willingness to learn should be the only qualification. It should offer opportunities that benefit citizens with different interests and goals in life. And it should aim, as its foundational moral purpose, to help citizens (...) from all walks of life live better, freer lives. Using concepts and ideas from liberal political philosophy the author argues that access to educational goods and services is something to which all citizens have a right over a full life. Such goods, it is argued, play a key role in helping citizens realize self-determined goals. Higher education should therefore be understood a basic social institution responsible for ensuring that all citizens can access such 'autonomy-supporting' goods. The book examines the implication of this justification of the right to higher education for questions of educational justice, political authority, distributive justice, civic education, and personal autonomy"--. (shrink)

I consider the question of how literally one can construe the “gauge argument,” which is the canonical means of understanding the putatively central import of local gauge symmetry principles for fundamental physics. As I argue, the gauge argument must be afforded a heuristic reading. Claims to the effect that the argument reflects a deep “logic of nature” must, for numerous reasons I discuss, be taken with a grain of salt.

I consider the question of how literally one can construe the “gauge argument,” which is the canonical means of understanding the putatively central import of local gauge symmetry principles for fundamental physics. As I argue, the gauge argument must be afforded a heuristic reading. Claims to the effect that the argument reflects a deep “logic of nature” must, for numerous reasons I discuss, be taken with a grain of salt.

(2008). The Framework of Essences in Spinoza's Ethics. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 489-509. doi: 10.1080/09608780802200489.

This handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education combined with an up-to-date selection of the central themes. It includes 95 newly commissioned articles that focus on and advance key arguments; each essay incorporates essential background material serving to clarify the history and logic of the relevant topic, examining the status quo of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discussing the possible futures of the field. The book provides a state-of-the-art overview of philosophy (...) of education, covering a range of topics: Voices from the present and the past deals with 36 major figures that philosophers of education rely on; Schools of thought addresses 14 stances including Eastern, Indigenous, and African philosophies of education as well as religiously inspired philosophies of education such as Jewish and Islamic; Revisiting enduring educational debates scrutinizes 25 issues heavily debated in the past and the present, for example care and justice, democracy, and the curriculum; New areas and developments addresses 17 emerging issues that have garnered considerable attention like neuroscience, videogames, and radicalization. The collection is relevant for lecturers teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of education as well as for colleagues in teacher training. Moreover, it helps junior researchers in philosophy of education to situate the problems they are addressing within the wider field of philosophy of education and offers a valuable update for experienced scholars dealing with issues in the sub-discipline. Combined with different conceptions of the purpose of philosophy, it discusses various aspects, using diverse perspectives to do so. Contributing Editors: Section 1: Voices from the Present and the Past: Nuraan Davids Section 2: Schools of Thought: Christiane Thompson and Joris Vlieghe Section 3: Revisiting Enduring Debates: Ann Chinnery, Naomi Hodgson, and Viktor Johansson Section 4: New Areas and Developments: Kai Horsthemke, Dirk Willem Postma, and Claudia Ruitenberg. (shrink)

Takes the student step-by-step through the intellectual problems of Medieval thought, explaining the principal lines of argument from Augustine of Hippos to the sixteenth century.

Current debates regarding justice in university admissions most often approach the question of access to university from a technical, policy-focussed perspective. Despite the attention that access to university receives in the press and policy literature, ethical discussion tends to focus on technical matters such as who should pay for university or which schemes of selection are allowable, not the question of who should go to university in the first place. We address the question of university admissions—the question of who should (...) go to university—from an ethical perspective. We find that most discussions draw on a generic conception of what the university is good for that is too thin to provide deliberative guidance and hold that a full account of the ethics of admissions needs to take into account the distinctive good that the university provides—knowledge and understanding. This view, we hold, does not imply that measures should not be taken to widen access to university; however, the basis for such measures should be grounded in that distinctive good in the first instance. (shrink)

_Reading R. S. Peters Today: Analysis, Ethics and the Aims of Education_ reassesses British philosopher Richard Stanley Peters’ educational writings by examining them against the most recent developments in philosophy and practice. Critically reassesses R. S. Peters, a philosopher who had a profound influence on a generation of educationalists Brings clarity to a number of key educational questions Exposes mainstream, orthodox arguments to sympathetic critical scrutiny.

_ Source: _Volume 56, Issue 3-4, pp 340 - 366 The history of thinking about consequences in the Middle Ages divides into three periods. During the first of these, from the eleventh to the middle of the twelfth century, and the second, from then until the beginning of the fourteenth century, the notion of natural consequence played a crucial role in logic, metaphysics, and theology. The first part of this paper traces the development of the theory of natural consequence in (...) Abaelard’s work as the conditional of a connexive logic with an equivalent connexive disjunction and the crisis precipitated by the discovery of inconsistency in this system. The second part considers the accounts of natural consequence given in the thirteenth century as a special case of the standard modal definition of consequence, one for which the principle _ex impossibili quidlibet_ does not hold, in logics in which disjunction is understood extensionally. (shrink)

The orthodox view on higher education financing is that students should bear some of the costs of attending and, where necessary, meet that cost through debt financing. New economic realties, including protracted economic slowdown and increasing austerity of the state with respect to the public funding of goods and services has meant that the same generation who have to borrow the most in order to attend face significantly fewer employment prospects upon graduation. In this context, is the current approach of (...) shifting the costs of post-secondary education from the general public to individual students justified? Most debate on the issue has focused on the demands of distributive justice within the modern higher education system and on the whole accepts the idea that students ought to pay. I argue that distributive arguments alone are insufficient because they tacitly endorse the provision of higher education as being much like a consumer's choice. As an alternative, I explore the place and importance of higher education in supporting personal autonomy as a central liberal democratic value. I then argue that debt financing of higher education places unreasonable constraints on student's choices with respect to the kind of democratic citizens that they would otherwise aspire to be. This constraint has negative implications for the wellbeing of individual students and the larger society. (shrink)

This introduction to this special issue offers an overview of R. S. Peters' seminal role in the development of modern philosophy of education, acknowledging the originality and range of his work, and indicating his continuing importance to the field. It explains the structure and organisation of the collection and provides a rationale for this body of work as a rereading of Peters in the light of current concerns.

I defend a new reading of Spinoza's account of causation that reconciles the strengths of the mechanist and formal cause interpretations by locating instances of nature's fixed and unchanging laws inside individual natures; natures are efficacious because that's where the laws are. God's necessity, for instance, follows from certain logical principles contained within God's nature. Causes between finite particulars likewise stem entirely from finite natures. They do so, I argue, because finite instances of nature's fixed and unchanging laws are inscribed (...) within those natures. In each of these instances, effects follow from natures on account of laws contained within them. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Spinoza's philosophy of mind is thought to lack a serious account of consciousness. In this essay I argue that Spinoza's doctrine of ideas of ideas has been wrongly construed, and that once righted it provides the foundation for an account. I then draw out the finer details of Spinoza's account of consciousness, doing my best to defend its plausibility along the way. My view is in response to a proposal by Edwin Curley and the serious objection leveled against it by (...) Margaret Wilson and Jonathan Bennett. (shrink)

Aristotle's discussion of relatives in the Categories presented its eleventh- and twelfth-century readers with many puzzles. Their attempt to solve these puzzles and to develop a coherent account of the category led around the beginning of the twelfth century to the invention of relations as items which stand to relatives as qualities stand to qualified substances. In this paper, I first discuss the details of Aristotle's accounts of relatives and the related category of ‘situation’ and Boethius' commentary on them. I (...) then examine some of the earliest mediaeval commentaries on the Categories showing how the notion of relation, and in particular of individual relations, was developed. I conclude by showing how Peter Abaelard's treatment of relations in his Dialectica was part of an ongoing and sophisticated debate over the nature of relations. (shrink)

This article examines the possibility of a Kantian justification of the intrinsic moral worth of education. The author critiques a recent attempt to secure such justification via Kant's notion of the Kingdom of Ends. He gives four reasons why such an account would deny any intrinsic moral worth to education. He concludes with a tentative justification of his own and a call for a more comprehensive engagement between Kant's moral theory and the philosophy of education for purposes of understanding what (...) constitutes the moral core of education. (shrink)

This paper offers a preliminary account of the educative potential of mindfulness by revisiting the long-debated status of physical activity and sport as educationally worthwhile. We argue that previous attempts in the tradition of analytic philosophy of education to offer a justification of physical activity and sport have not been sufficiently grounded in the most distinctive feature of those activities—the body. As an alternative, we claim that the theory and practice of body-based mindfulness can explain how physical activity can satisfy (...) the analytic philosopher of education R.S. Peters’ requirement that for an activity to be educationally worthwhile, it must possess ‘wide-ranging cognitive content’. We conclude that physical activity and sport are justifiable on Petersian grounds: physical activity can broaden understanding mostly inaccessible to the kinds of theoretical activities that Peters argued are exemplary. We then assess the implications for this argument... (shrink)

I defend an expanded reading of immanent causation that includes both inherence and causal efficacy; I argue that the latter is required if God is to remain the immanent cause of finite modes.

Since autumn 2012, higher education institutions in England have been able to charge undergraduate students up to £9,000 a year in tuition fees. Full-time students are expected to take out loans large enough to cover their tuition fees and living costs for the duration of their studies. They must start repaying these loans if and when their earnings reach £21,000 a year. In this bold and timely pamphlet, Christopher Martin argues that forcing students to borrow is a serious mistake. He (...) contends that higher education is a welfare good on a par with basic schooling and health care. To flourish in liberal democratic societies, citizens must be personally autonomous, and the educational demands of personal autonomy are too heavy to be met by compulsory schooling alone. To lead autonomous lives, adult citizens need ongoing educational support, support that the liberal democratic state has an obligation to provide. Higher education should therefore be a universal entitlement and free at the point of use. The global debate about who should pay for higher education is by no means settled. As England shifted the financial burden from taxpayers to students, Germany moved in the opposite direction: all German universities have offered free tuition since 2014. Christopher Martin's distinctive contribution to the debate is to lay out a principled argument, based on a plausible assessment of the purpose of higher education, for the view that students should not have to pay for their education. His argument is controversial, to be sure, but it represents a serious and considered attempt to set the question of higher education funding on sure normative foundations. (shrink)

sProblems about the nature of integral parts and wholes were central to twelfth-century discussions of the individuation and persistence over time of both substances and artifacts. This paper examines in detail Abaelard’s contribution to these discussions arguing that Abaelard proposes a solution to these problems which preserves our common sense intuitions about identity over time. In Abaelard’s work we find an explicit solution to the problem of the identity over time of living things which appeals to the persistence of the (...) vegetative soul through the loss or addition of corporeal matter. In work from the school of the Montani we apparently also have an account of Abaelard’s solution to the problem of the identity over time of artifacts which distinguishes between the role of a part in an integral whole and the material which plays that role such that the role persists when the matter is replaced. (shrink)

Aristotle admits the possibility of many vices opposed to one virtue, but insists that there are always at least two, related as deficiency and excess. The doctrine that "virtue is in a mean" is thus both true and useful.

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on (...) from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns. (shrink)

The concept of indoctrination is typically used to characterize the actions of individual educators. However, it has become increasingly common for citizens to raise concerns about the indoctrinatory effects of institutions such as schools and universities. Are such worries fundamentally misconceived, or might some state of affairs obtain under which it can be rightly said that an educational institution is engaged in indoctrination? In this paper Christopher Martin outlines what the concept of institutional indoctrination could mean. He then uses Jürgen (...) Habermas's discourse theory in order to develop a specific conception of institutional indoctrination: an educational institution indoctrinates when it exercises its authority in order to support the deliberative norm that some belief P ought to be exempt from tests of or challenges to its truth or rightness just because it is belief P. Martin argues that this norm undermines conditions of symmetrical and inclusive public discourse essential to the development of knowledge and understanding among free and equal citizens. That is, institutional indoctrination involves a closing of the public mind. (shrink)

This paper looks at the case of moral philosophy in order to assess the extent to which and ways in which teacher education should respond to the liberal principle of justification. This principle states that moral and political decisions made by citizens with special kinds of influence and other coercive powers should be accountable to other citizens on the basis of good reasons. To what extent should teachers, who are empowered by the state with such special kinds of influence, be (...) held accountable to this principle and what kind of education is needed in order to prepare teachers for such accountability? Moral philosophy stands as an informative test case because it expressly deals in the justification of judgements and actions and so it stands to reason that arguments for moral philosophy in teacher education are likely to appeal to educational values that dovetail with demands of this principle. I first identify some preliminary criteria under which activities are understood to be educationally worthwhile in the context of the broader principle of justification. I then argue that the justificatory obligations incurred by liberal citizens who adopt the role of teacher not only allow for, but also require, moral philosophy as an activity in programmes of teacher education. (shrink)

Boethius' treatise De Hypotheticis Syllogismis provided twelfth-century philosophers with an introduction to the logic of conditional and disjunctive sentences but this work is the only part of the logica vetus which is no longer studied in the twelfth century. In this paper I investigate why interest in Boethius acount of hypothetical syllogisms fell off so quickly. I argue that Boethius' account of compound sentences is not an account of propositions and once a proper notion of propositionality is available the argument (...) forms accepted by Boethius are seen to be incoherent. It was Peter Abaelard who first understood the nature of propositionality and propositional connectives and used this to criticise Boethius' claims in De Hypothetics Syllogismis. In place Boethius' confusion Abaelard offered a simple and correct account of the hypothetical syllogism. (shrink)

Peters' account of the moral life and the conception of practical reason that informed it reflects a sophisticated moral universalism. However, attempts to extend a similarly sophisticated universalism into our understanding of education are not as well received. Yet, such a project is of clear contemporary relevance given the pressure put on educational institutions to achieve certain ends. If we can show that education entails standards that are not entirely contingent upon current interests, we would have a framework that all (...) institutions seriously claiming to be involved in the enterprise would have to acknowledge. In this paper I argue that a reconstruction of the relationship between Peters' work in philosophical ethics and his conceptual analysis may go some way in showing how one can speak of education in universalistic terms. Accordingly, although many of the criticisms laid at Peters' feet are of merit, they overshadow more potentially useful interpretive moves. Finally, I show how a change in the focus of Peters' account of education and practical reason more generally can provide important resources for engaging in a more plausible exploration of universalistic themes in education. (shrink)

Philosophers of education attempting to develop a reasoned programme of moral education often struggle with the fact that moral philosophy provides many diverse and conflicting accounts of the ethical life. Typically, attempts to resolve the conflict by demonstrating the superiority or priority of a chosen ethical framework have often played out in applied philosophy of education in terms of the development of rival, and often incompatible, moral education curricula. However, recent developments in scholarship have evinced a move to a more (...) pluralistic account of moral education, incorporating insights from a variety of moral paradigms. This shift offers opportunities in the application of moral theory to contemporary issues in education.This essay seeks to define different approaches to pluralism in moral education and critically assess them. Finally, I show how recent work by T.M. Scanlon on moral permissibility stands as an excellent example of how developments in moral theory can make important contributions at the level of applied philosophy to the furtherance of a comprehensive account of moral education in ways that require neither a narrow monolithic nor a radically pluralistic approach. (shrink)

Among the various testimonia assembled by Iwakuma and Ebbesen to the twelfth-century school of philosophers known as the Nominales,Iwakuma Yukio and Sten Ebbesen, “Logico -Theological Schools from the Secon d Half of the 12th Century: A List of Sources,” Vivarium XXX (1992):173–210. four record their commitment to the apparently outrageous thesis that nothing grows. My aim in this essay is to explore the reasons the Nominale s had for maintaining this thesis and to investigate the role that the theory which (...) supported it played in the development of late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century debates over the character of the hypostatic union. My investigation concerns onl y one aspect of twelfth-century NominalismSince this group were apparently the first ever to be called ‘nominalists’ I think that we may justifiably capitalize the name of the theory to indicate that we are referring to their version of it. but once this part of their system is understood, we will be better able to characterise the whole and the way in which the views of the Nominales conflicted with those of their opponents. S o long as the testimonia remain few and rather slight such a reconstruction offers our only hope for finding the Nominales and their influence where their name has not been recorded. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas argues that principles of justice should be decided through rational agreement as opposed to force or coercion. Christopher Martin argues in this essay that the success of such a project presupposes sufficiently developed capacities for discursive agency equally distributed within a diverse public sphere. This epistemic presupposition is not explicitly recognized in Habermas's current formulation of his theory and as such the theory implicitly excludes the interest that future citizens have in the development of their own capacities for (...) competent deliberative engagement. Martin argues that this omission is serious enough that Habermas's principle of universalization should be modified, and he articulates this modification in terms of a prohibition against “developmental coercion.” Martin concludes by elaborating on the concept of developmental coercion, and he points to the implications of this addition to discourse ethics for the institutionalization of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that medical education must remain attuned to the interests that physicians have in their own self-development despite ongoing calls for ethics education aimed at ensuring physicians maintain focus on the interests of the patient and society. In particular, I argue that medical education should advance criteria defining what counts as an educationally worthwhile activity from the perspective of the medical student understood as a learner. I offer a preliminary account and justification of such criteria, arguing (...) that such criteria warrant a process of ethical formation that better serves the interests of medical students, their patients and society. (shrink)

Spinoza stipulates in E2def2, his definition of the essence of a thing, that the essence of each particular can neither exist nor, even, be conceived, except alongside its particular. Yet a mere eight propositions later states that God maintains an idea of the essence of nonactual particulars “in the same way as the formal essences of the singular things are contained in God’s attributes”. While there are known interpretive controversies with each of these claims, I argue that according to E2def2, (...) essences of particulars can only be and can only be conceived alongside the actual existence of their particular, and that according to E2p8, the essences of nonactual particulars are conceived by God apart from their particular and that the objects of these ideas—formal essences—are things within God’s attributes whether their particulars exist or not. I argue here that Spinoza’s formal essence has two distinct modes of existing. The essence that at all times is contained within God’s attributes and comprehended by God’s intellect may be expressed also as the essence of an actual particular, and when this occurs the instance of the essence within the particular is thereby unique to and even perishes with the particular. I draw upon the corollary and scholium, as well as other important texts, to suggest that the eternal essence is a kind essence, and that instances of this in particulars are unique and durational. The key to resolving Spinoza’s seemingly inconsistent remarks on essences is to recognize the difference between the eternal kind essence and its unique and durational instances in particulars. (shrink)

The classificatory Kripkean notion of essence is narrowed down until it matches an explanatory Aristotelian notion of essence. The difference between classificatory and explanatory notions of essence is clarified, and each step of the narrowing process is justified on grounds related to the philosophy of science.

The study of the interdependence of grammar and logic at the beginning of the twelfth century is a difficult subject and progress here has been slow. With the recent publication of the Notae Dunelmenses, however, we are now able to see rather more clearly how closely the two disciplines were bound to one another. The following article draws upon this newly published material and on unpublished material from contemporary commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories to investigate how the grammarians’ account of number (...) was reconciled with that given by Aristotle. It considers in particular the problem of the meaning of numerical terms such as ‘pair’ and of collective names such as ‘people’ and how attempting to solve it shaped thinking about the metaphysics of number. (shrink)

descartes appears to intentionally distance his a priori argument for God from the conceptual orientation of earlier arguments by insisting that God's true and immutable nature is something that is real whether he conceives it or not. I find within me countless ideas of things which even though they may not exist anywhere outside me still cannot be called nothing; for although in a sense they can be thought of at will, they are not my invention but have their own (...) true and immutable natures.1 Descartes's idea of a triangle, for instance, is a conception of a true and immutable nature that may be conceived whether any actual triangles do or ever have existed, and that is neither invented by nor dependent on his... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.