Many recent writers on democracy have lamented its decay and warned of its imminent death. We argue that the concerns are focused at three different levels of democracy. The most fundamental of these, celebrated by Tocqueville and by Dewey, recognizes the interactions and joint deliberations among citizens who seek sympathetic mutual engagement. Such engagement is increasingly rare in large-scale political life. In diagnosing and treating the problems, we recommend returning to the debate between Lippmann and Dewey, in which many of (...) the concerns now prominent were already voiced. This inspires the main work of the paper – the reconstruction of Dewey’s conception of democracy as a ‘mode of associated living’. We focus on the thesis that democracy is educative and explicate Dewey’s notion of growth, showing how democratic education contributes to three important functions: the capacity for sustaining oneself, the enrichment of individual experience, and the ability to enter into cooperative discussions with fellow citizens. Dewey’s conception of democratic education is directed at fostering particular virtues and, if citizens come to possess them, the need for Lippmann’s ‘omnicompetent individual’ vanishes. We conclude by suggesting that Dewey’s project of educating democratic character is pertinent for addressing the disaffection of our times. (shrink)

I offer some responses to the principal points raised by Ben Kotzee, Alexis Gibbs, Sheron Fraser-Burgess, and Nigel Tubbs in their commentaries on my book, The Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education (MEW), and to John White's penetrating and constructive review (the four commentaries and White's review all appear in this issue). In reply to Kotzee's challenge, I argue that MEW supports an improved approach to specialized scientific education, and that worries about the future of technology are unfounded. Gibbs’ (...) critique, I contend, assumes a one-size-fits-all approach to the arts, in an area where I am concerned to make fine differentiations. Fraser-Burgess is right to wonder how my educational program can overcome the problems of multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic societies, but I maintain that the approach to educating citizens MEW outlines is the appropriate means to address those problems. Finally, I am happy to modify my conception of the Deweyan Society by introducing the kinds of Socratic explorations Tubbs proposes.John White introduces a number of significant issues and concerns. Some of these arise, I claim, from his adoption of familiar versions of concepts MEW takes pains to explicate in new ways. Since I argue for the superiority of my explicated versions, I view the correct strategy to involve discarding the presuppositions of the traditional notions White favours. With respect to moral education, for example, White's ‘precept-centered’ conception contrasts with my emphasis on the fundamental importance of skills of mutual engagement. His most extensive discussion, on my approach to fulfilment, poses a deep challenge. Here, I attempt to clarify and motivate the concepts I deploy. With respect to his review, however, as with my exchanges with the other commentators, this response can only be the beginning of what I hope will continue to be a fruitful conversation. (shrink)

In The Main Enterprise of the World, Philip Kitcher identifies an over-specialized and over-loaded curriculum as a particular affliction of education in our time. Kitcher criticizes a narrow view of education on which it is conceived as being no more than job training and proposes a more humane set of educational goals to be pursued in school. For Kitcher, the problem of the narrowness of the economic aims of education and the problem of the over-loaded curriculum are connected and, in (...) Chapter 2 of the book, he presents a thoroughgoing critique of educational specialization as a distinguishing feature of education today. He holds that the economic value of education cannot capture education's full value and that true education should build children and young people's capacities for meaningful life and work. In this paper, I discuss Kitcher's critique of educational specialization. I note that Kitcher draws most of his inspiration from considerations about what makes a human life go well and therefore situates his thinking about education in the realm of ethics, rather than in his home discipline of the philosophy of science. Defending educational specialization, I turn to some of Kitcher's earlier work in the philosophy of science to show that the epistemic division of labour calls for a considerable degree of specialization in educational curricula on epistemic, rather than on economic, grounds. (shrink)

In placing education at the centre, as The Main Enterprise of the World, Philip Kitcher has undertaken a monumental task. He has come to the field of philosophy of education captivated by the importance of its substantive preoccupations for the advancement of democratic aims. Accordingly, his book argues that the most salient obstruction to preparing citizens who will contribute to society is the seeming irreconcilability of the demands of industry, on the one hand, and of students’ personal growth, on the (...) other. In spite of his desire to accommodate diverse accounts of the human good, and his recognition of the formative role of culture, broadly conceived, there are strains in his account of human fulfilment deriving from the disjunction of the self and others. It is not evident, on his Deweyan onto-epistemology, that there is adequate attention to the imprint on an individual, and on the beliefs they come to form, of proximal social groups. The nature of the balance between ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ influences, between those that are near and those that are far, can profoundly affect the plausibility of Kitcher's account of a socially based sense of fulfilment. (shrink)

The third formulation of the Categorical Imperative rarely receives the attention devoted to its predecessors. This paper aims to develop a naturalistic approach to morality inspired by Kant’s conception of moral agents as legislating in a Kingdom of Ends. Positions derived from the third formulation, John Rawls’s Kantian Constructivism and T. M. Scanlon’s Contractualism, cleave closely to Kant in idealising the process of legislation. For Rawls, the citizens of the Kantian Reich can be reduced to one, a representative of all, (...) who deliberates behind the veil of ignorance using minimax reasoning. Scanlon includes other lawmakers, but any potential diversity among them is overridden by trans­historical canons of reason. By contrast, I view morality as developing historically through the interactions among people with different views and conflicting aims. The task of moral theory is to construct an appropriate methodology to govern their deliberations. My naturalised Kant takes the first steps. Morality arises from the recognition of problematic situations, identified first by listening to the complaints of actual people, by judging whether they are warranted, and by seeking to amend them when the warrant is confirmed. Societies (and individuals) make moral progress when they deliberate (or simulate deliberations) in accordance with three norms. All those potentially affected should be included; the best available information should be used; and participants should aim for an outcome all can accept. How far is naturalised Kant from the great philosopher? I leave the answer to the scholars. (shrink)

This article analyses ChatGPT from the perspective of the philosophy of education. It explores ChatGPT’s implications for universities, focussing on the intertwined concepts of critical thinking, the crisis of higher education, and humanity. Does ChatGPT sound the death knell for critical thinking and, thus, exacerbate the oft-diagnosed ‘crisis in education’? And is ChatGPT really a convenient, but dangerous, tool to outsource humanity to machines?. In addressing these questions, the article’s two main arguments offer an alternative to both triumphalist and overly (...) pessimistic narratives: first, ChatGPT can lead to a revitalisation of critical thinking in higher education. However, it arrives at this conclusion not from the triumphalist viewpoint that celebrates ChatGPT’s (allegedly) limitless potential, but from the more sober perspective that ChatGPT combines remarkable strengths with considerable weaknesses and built-in limitations. Secondly, ChatGPT can prompt a return to the qualities that distinguish humans from calculating machines and (re)instate critical thinking as the pivotal virtue of higher education. The article arrives at this conclusion by rejecting the overly pessimistic concern with ‘outsourcing humanity’ and endorsing the idea that ChatGPT lays bare a ‘crisis in education’ that constitutes, simultaneously, a precious opportunity. Finally, the article stresses that this opportunity inevitably comes at a price. There will be winners and losers of the ChatGPT revolution and there is a danger that ChatGPT reintroduces elitism through the back door. One urgent task of the near future, therefore, will be to keep this danger in check. (shrink)

The manifesto presented in Philip Kitcher's exhaustive appraisal of contemporary American education—and the case for its potential reform—is so wide-ranging that it is not possible to do justice to its every component. Instead, I will speak to one of its parts in an attempt to recognize what I take to be the value of the whole. My aim is to address the section on the role of the arts in formal education, and the nature of aesthetic experience within that, to (...) test whether we can take the arts from their current state of being subject to Adam Smith's model of market utility, to being appreciated for their necessary and organic vitality. Kitcher provides strong arguments for exposure to the arts as leading to invaluable aesthetic experiences for young people. By extension—and at times by contrast—I will explore the possibility that the ‘aesthetic’ in aesthetic education does not just come into force with the student's encounter with art works or creative activity in the classroom, but should be integral also to the development of a particular sensibility amongst educators (i.e. the aesthetic education of the educators) for the shape and form of a ‘good’ education, according to its context and circumstance. It is through this sensibility that we might rediscover the necessity of the arts in schools at a time when their importance has been significantly devalued. (shrink)

John Dewey stated that ‘[h]owever far apart philosophy and educational theory may later have become, in their beginnings they were strictly identical.' Dewey's ‘progressivism' in Democracy and Education rests on this communion. A self-reflective philosophical education by the community, about the community, for the community, would create the conditions for the advance of social justice. But new progressive ideas championing redistributive justice might appear to be in worryingly short supply. That is one reason, among many, why Philip Kitcher’s The Main (...) Enterprise of the World is to be welcomed. His rethinking about education amounts to a radical re-education of our thinking about social justice, seeking redistribution of wealth, reduction of privilege, and a redefinition of what is valuable for people and planet in regard to production, distribution, and consumption. I will summarize his book and offer critical thoughts on it relating to three themes: the relation of his proposed Deweyan Society to some current and powerful criticisms of Western rationality; his proposals for classrooms; and the extent to which its own pragmatic philosophical justifications are open to deeper philosophical and educational significance. (shrink)

In recent work, Mark Johnson has argued that a scientifically updated version of John Dewey’s pragmatism affords human beings the opportunity to feel at home in the world. This feeling at home, however, is not fully problematized, nor explored, nor resolved by Johnson. Rather, Johnson and his collaborators, Don Tucker (2021) and Jay Schulkin (2023), defend this updated pragmatism within the historical development of the sciences of life and mind from the twentieth century to the present day. A central theme (...) in this defense is the affinity pragmatism has with neurophenomenology, especially the enactivism seen in 4E cognition. Another theme is the future orientation of pragmatism, especially as it is focused on developments in cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Given Johnson’s previous work on expanding the number of E’s to 7, and other pragmatist suggestions for more, I argue that neuropragmatism’s development of Dewey’s conception of experience as organism-environment transaction (symbolized by the diphthong, Œ) is critical for understanding what Johnson and Tucker call the cybernetic revolution as an enchanting and welcoming future instead of a disenchanting and alienating one. (shrink)

This paper introduces a suite of articles devoted to Philip Kitcher’s The Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education (Oxford University Press, 2021). The suite opens with a paper by Kitcher, which presents the central themes of his important book. This is followed by an assessment of the work as whole by John White, and four commentaries discussing in detail various aspects of Kitcher’s position by Ben Kotzee (on science education), Alexis Gibbs (on arts education), Sheron Fraser-Burgess (on deliberative democracy (...) and inclusivity), and Nigel Tubbs (on Kitcher’s ‘Deweyan Society’). In the final contribution, Kitcher replies to his critics. The introduction sketches the character of Kitcher’s project and comments on his pragmatist method. (shrink)