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.

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)

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)

_ 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)

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.

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)

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 byEdwin Curley and the serious objection leveled against it by Margaret (...) Wilson and Jonathan Bennett. (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)

The contribution of philosophical ethics to the development of a just conception of education becomes increasingly complex under modern conditions of democratic pluralism. This is because the justification of moral policies for education faces the skeptical challenge of showing how the substantive moral principles upon which a policy rests do not arbitrarily privilege one culturally situated conception of justice over others. In this essay, Christopher Martin argues that this challenge highlights how any legitimate moral point of view on education requires (...) public justification, where a valid moral policy must be demonstrated to be worthy of recognition in a public setting and justified through the reciprocal exchange of reasons. He develops the scope and nature of public justification through an analysis of R.S. Peters’s Ethics and Education and the work of Jürgen Habermas. Both Peters and Habermas argue that public justification entails necessary and unavoidable presuppositions of practical reason, presuppositions that form the basis of a procedural theory of moral justification. Martin discusses the implications of such a procedural approach for the development of educational policy. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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, 1 four record their commitment to the apparently outrageous thesis that nothing grows. My aim in this essay is to explore the reasons the Nominales 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 (...) only one aspect of twelfth-century Nominalism 2 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. So 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)

This article offers an account of the understanding citizens need in order to justify moral principles in the public sphere and it identifies an important role for moral education in the promotion of that civic understanding. I develop this account through a contrastive analysis of Phillip Kitcher’s conception of public knowledge and Jurgen Habermas’ Discourse Ethics. Kitcher is focused on the social conditions necessary for the circulation of scientific knowledge in advanced democracies; the analysis offered in this article expands on (...) what Habermas and other deliberative democrats claim are epistemic conditions necessary for the construction and circulation of moral understanding. I use this account to critically assess public policy that aims to ‘get around’ public deliberation by using strategies derived from behavioral economics in order to shift civic behavior in specific directions. Finally, I specify how such strategies have the potential to undermine moral understanding in the public sphere and I argue for a central role for moral education in mitigating such effects. (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.

In this paper, I explore our common-sense thinking about the relation between moral value, moral merit, and well-being. Starting from Ross’s observation that welfarist axiologies ignore our intuitions about desert, I focus on axiologies that take moral merit and well-being to be independent determinants of value. I distinguish three ways in which these axiologies can be formulated, and I then consider their application to the issue of punishment. The objection that they recommend penalties in circumstances in which intuitively we would (...) judge them to be unjustified is examined, and I suggest that it can be met by incorporating temporal information into the way in which value, well-being and moral merit are linked. (shrink)

Mediaeval logicians inherited from Boethius an account of conditional propositions and the syllogisms which may be constructed using them. In the following paper it is shown that there are considerable difficulties with Boethius' account which arise from his failure to understand the nature of compound propositions and in particular to provide for their negation. Boethius suggests that there are two different conditions which may be imposed for the truth of a conditional proposition but he really gives no adequate account of (...) how such propositions may be obtained. The true greatness of Peter Abaelard as a philosophical logician is revealed in what he is able to do with the material which he found in Boethius. It is shown that he developed a precise theory of conditionals giving an account of how true conditionals may be obtained and principles which may be used to reject others as false. Unlike Boethius Abaelard properly appreciates that conjunctions must be treated as logical units. Even he, however, falls victim to difficulties which arise when this connective is brought into contact with negation and the conditions which he lays down for the truth of a conditional. (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.

Aristóteles admite la posibilidad de que muchos vicios se opongan a una virtud, pero insiste en que siempre hay al menos dos, relacionados con la deficiencia y el exceso. Así, la doctrina de que la virtud está en el medio es tanto verdadera como útil.

This paper seeks to address what I claim are competing utopian and anti-utopian impulses within educational discourse aimed at formulating a just and fair conception of public education. On the one hand, there is a tendency to prescribe concrete utopias – normative blueprints that claim to portent how a redeemed public education will be. On the other hand, there is the tendency to prescribe material revolutions – strategic blueprints that dictate the kinds of political action that educators must undertake in (...) order to bring about lasting social change. I argue that both of these approaches to formulating a just conception of public education are flawed for pragmatic as well as normative reasons. As a way of avoiding the pitfalls inherent to utopianism and anti-utopianism, I suggest that those of us interested in a just conception of education maintain our focus on a kind of pragmatic utopianism. While pragmatic utopianism requires that we abandon the notion that we can ever know what a redeemed public education will look like in its particulars, it does set out standards of deliberation that can increase the likelihood that we will be able to address issues of educational justice as they arise. (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)

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.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

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.