Michael Bergmann seeks to motivate his externalist, proper function theory of epistemic justification by providing three objections to the mentalism and mentalist evidentialism characteristic of nonexternalists such as Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. Bergmann argues that (i) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that justification depends on mental states; (ii) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of an epistemic input to a belief-forming process must be due to an essential feature of that input, and, (...) relatedly, that mentalist evidentialism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of doxastic response B to evidence E is an essential property of B–E; and (iii) mentalist evidentialism is “unmotivated”. I object to each argument. The argument for (i) begs the question. The argument for (ii) suffers from the fact that mentalist evidentialists are not committed to the consequences claimed for them; nevertheless, I show that there is, in the neighborhood, a substantive dispute concerning the nature of doxastic epistemic fittingness. That dispute involves what I call “Necessary Fittingness”, the view that, necessarily, exactly one (at most) doxastic attitude ( belief , or disbelief , or suspension of judgment ) toward a proposition is epistemically fitting with respect to a person’s total evidence at any time. Reflection on my super-blooper epistemic design counterexamples to Bergmann’s proper function theory reveals both the plausibility of Necessary Fittingness and a good reason to deny (iii). Mentalist evidentialism is thus vindicated against the objections. (shrink)

The history of pedagogics gives the impression that pedagogics has never had an identity of its own. Throughout history it has borrowed its identity from philosophy, theology, psychology and sociology. Against the background of this historical challenge, the article proposes pedagogical practice as an alternative identity to pedagogics, although not in the classical sense of an absolute and self‐sufficient identity, and it develops one particular ontological theory of pedagogical practice viewed from a life‐world approach with the ambition of suggesting a (...) theoretical point of departure for pedagogical research. (shrink)

In thinking of my relationship to Peter McHugh as an intimate collaboration, I take some reactions elicited to a most recent unpublished writing of his on intimacy as an occasion for discussing both intimacy and collaboration as a notion in-itself and as applicable to us in particular, treating that space between the general and particular of intimacy as its zone of fundamental ambiguity. I try to being to view a story of the imaginary of community, its elemental stirrings, that Peter (...) might appreciate. In this, I reorient Arendt’s notion of communicating with the dead to the problem of the intimate collaboration and of how each might be a practice that mirrors the other, intimate collaboration being one way of confirming the vow in communicating with the dead to witness, and reciprocally, such communication being a way of practicing intimate collaboration. This leads me to bring to view a range of unstated resonances of the discussion that have applicability to our shared history. First, is intimate collaboration possible in organizations such as the university and how does it coexist among adversarial exchanges, factitious coteries, alliances, and collegial networks? Second, is communicating with the dead another way of speaking of tradition and dissemination in any context as such and what could the manner and method of orienting to this desire say about the quality of life in commemoration per se? (shrink)

The conception of time that dominates in the educational world of today is that of measurable, invested and managed chronological time. It is the conception of time that corresponds to current priorities such as performativity, global synchronization of educational systems, raising standards and meeting the challenges of the market. The educational transformation of the self and the world, however, requires another conception of time, one that frames another kind of thought and another meaning of education. This article discusses these two (...) conceptions of time by employing the distinction between chronos and kairos. The aim is not to turn this distinction into a dichotomy; instead, the aim is to recuperate the conception of time as kairos and connect it with a desire of philosophy and with education as a lifelong effort towards transformation rather than success. In a complex relation with chronosophy as time management, kairosophy is thus introduced as a critical reflection on lived time. (shrink)

Plato’s Apology of Socrates contains a spirited account of Socrates’ relationship with the city of Athens and its citizens. As Socrates stands on trial for corrupting the youth, surprisingly, he does not defend the substance and the methods of his teaching. Instead, he simply denies that he is a teacher. Many scholars have contended that, in having Socrates deny he is a teacher, Plato is primarily interested in distinguishing him from the sophists. In this article, I argue that, given the (...) historic educational transformation in Socrates’ and Plato’s lifetimes, Socrates’ denial is far more complex and far reaching than the Socrates-versus-the-sophists distinction indicates. Socrates suggests that Athenians have failed to recognize that there were various types among the new educators of fifth century Athens: orators, sophists, natural philosophers and, perhaps, a philosopher like Socrates. Further, the traditional education, which the Athenians believed was threatened by the new educators, was itself fractured. Ultimately, rather than offering a straightforward distinction between philosophizing and teaching, Socrates and the sophists, Plato treats the question of teaching aporectically in Apology; that is, after pointing to various alternatives for understanding the nature of teaching, Plato concludes the work without offering a clear resolution to that question. (shrink)

In his work on truth telling, avowal and juridical processes, Foucault alerts us to legal ‘apparatuses’ that demand certain ways of speaking the truth and the sorts of subjects these recursively produce. This paper explores the role of truth telling in a specific context; namely, ‘criminal’ accusation as instanced by the agora-like processes that enabled Socrates’ notorious accusation for impiety, his defence and the resultant death sentence. Through this analysis, I seek to highlight elements of truth telling required by accusatorial (...) apparatuses that prefigured criminal justice. By examining selected texts detailing Socrates’ trial, I will indicate several aspects of accusation and an exclusionary political logic to which it has long been attached. (shrink)