Arthur Danto, in Transfiguration of the Commonplace, poses the important, but easily neglected question, as to whether art is the sort of thing of which there can be a philosophy (1981, 54). If it...

This paper does not present an advocacy of a passive education as opposed to an active education nor does it propose that passive education is in any way ‘better’ or more important than active education. Through readings of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and B.S. Johnson, and gentle critiques of Jacques Rancière and John Dewey, passive education is instead described and outlined as an education which occurs whether we attempt it or not. As such, the object of critique for this essay (...) are forms of educational thought which, through fate or design, exclude the passive dimension, either within or outside of formal educational settings. An underlying component of this argument is therefore also that education does occur outside of formal educational settings and that, contra Gert Biesta and his critique of ‘learnification’, we may gain rather than lose something by attending to it as education. (shrink)

(2013). Sport and Philosophy. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy: Vol. 7, Sport and Art: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Sport, pp. 10-29. doi: 10.1080/17511321.2013.761882.

According to the principles derived from his theory of discourse ethics, Habermas's model of deliberative democracy is justified only if the public is capable of making political decisions that advance the common good. Recent public‐opinion research demonstrates that the public's overwhelming ignorance of politics precludes it from having such capabilities, even if radical measures were taken to thoroughly educate the public about politics or to increase the salience of politics in their lives.

Risk communication poses a challenge to ordinary norms of truth-telling because it can easily mislead. Analyzing this challenge in terms of a systematic divergence between expertise and public attitudes fails to recognize how two specific features of the concept of risk play a role in managing daily affairs. First, evaluating risk always incorporates an estimate of the reliability of information. Since risk communication is an effort at providing information, audiences will naturally and appropriately incorporate their assessment of the reliability of (...) the risk communicator into their assessment of the risk as such. Second, one conceptual and grammatical feature of the concept of risk is to categorize experience as non-routine and demanding further deliberation. That is, the whole point of calling something a risk can be to distinguish it from activities or phenomena that need no further attention. Risk communications that stress relative comparisons of measured probabilities and expected utilities can be inconsistent with both features of our concept of risk. At best they mislead; at worst they undermine our society’s capacity to cope with risk. While there are no simple answers to these two conundrums, technical experts should bear them in mind when communicating with the broader public. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss globalisation as an empirical reality that is in a complex relation to its corresponding discourse and in a critical distance from the cosmopolitan ideal. I argue that failure to grasp the distinctions between globalisation, globalism, and cosmopolitanism derives from mistaken identifications of the Is with the Ought and leads to naïve and ethnocentric glorifications of the potentialities of globalisation. Conversely, drawing the appropriate distinctions helps us articulate a more critical approach to contemporary cultural phenomena, and (...) reconsider the current place and potential role of education within the context of global affairs. From this perspective, the antagonistic impulses cultivated by globalisation and some globalist discourse are singled out and targeted via a radicalization of educational orientations. The final suggestion of the article concerns the vision of a more cosmopolitically sensitive education. (shrink)

In the world of Philosophy for Children, the word “method” is found frequently in its literature and in its practitioner’s handbooks. This paper focuses on the idea of community of philosophical inquiry as P4C’s methodological framework for educational purposes, and evaluates that framework and those purposes in light of the question, what does it mean to bring children and philosophy together, and what methodological framework, if any, is appropriate to that project? Our broader aim is to highlight a problem with (...) regards to the concept of method in P4C, and to question the consequences of that concept in the practice of philosophical dialogue with children. To better situate the concept of method within P4C, we will identify two different historical understandings—represented by Rene Descartes and Hans Georg Gadamer—of the concept, and suggest new possibilities for understanding philosophical practice with children in light of their difference. (shrink)

This paper suggests that pragmatism makes a distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of radical democracy. It investigates the relation ship between the renewal of interest in pragmatism and the recent attempts to develop radical democratic alternatives to political liberalism. With particular reference to the contemporary critical social theory of Habermas and Honneth, the paper outlines key dimensions of the civic republican, deliberative democratic and reflexive cooperative reconstructions of John Dewey's conception of democracy. These reconstructions are shown to have (...) explicated important pragmatist insights concerning public participation in civic associations, the discursive practices of deliberation, and the cooperative organization of the division of labour. However, it is argued that each of these reconstructions pre suppose some facet of the additional pragmatist understanding of the creativity of action and that the most distinctive contributions of pragmatism to radical democratic theory and practice derive from a notion of democracy as instituted and emergent meaning. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss globalisation as an empirical reality that is in a complex relation to its corresponding discourse and in a critical distance from the cosmopolitan ideal. I argue that failure to grasp the distinctions between globalisation, globalism, and cosmopolitanism derives from mistaken identifications of the Is with the Ought and leads to naïve and ethnocentric glorifications of the potentialities of globalisation. Conversely, drawing the appropriate distinctions helps us articulate a more critical approach to contemporary cultural phenomena, and (...) reconsider the current place and potential role of education within the context of global affairs. From this perspective, the antagonistic impulses cultivated by globalisation and some globalist discourse are singled out and targeted via a radicalization of educational orientations. The final suggestion of the article concerns the vision of a more cosmopolitically sensitive education. (shrink)

In this essay, I term the dominant educational paradigm of our time as scientific education and subject it to historical analysis in order to bring its tacit racial, colonial and Eurocentric biases into view. I subsume this cluster of problems under the general heading of “the problem of scientific education”, a problem simultaneously submerged deeply in the invisible background of current education and across its foreground inasmuch as it conditions daily educational practices beyond educators’ awareness. The delicate question to be (...) answered is: enclosed as we are within a scientific framing of our educational system, how can we find an alternative way of looking at this educational system that will help us resolve the problem of colonial, racial and cultural subordinations inherent in its scientific framing? (shrink)

Research Articles James W. Ceaser, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.