This article focuses on a method of moral self-cultivation advocated by the Chinese Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi: deep reading. To Zhu Xi, reading is not only an intellectual activity of learning knowledge, but also a spiritual exercise. Through meticulous, thorough, and unbiased reading, people can gradually cultivate their minds to have three virtues,…

Background: The philosophy of the discipline of physical education among school, further and higher education curriculums remains misunderstood, understudied and underdeveloped. With growing levels of uncertainty concerning its philosophical nature, general future (e.g. eradication, more of the same, radical change), and the role the profession…

Part Five of Spinoza's "Ethics" includes a notoriously challenging set of propositions about human perfection. Part of the difficulty in interpreting these elements of the work arises from neglecting important philosophical background for the relevant propositions, namely, medieval Jewish rationalism and Maimonides in particular. Spinoza…

Sociability is a concept that reflects not only the individual's ability to enter into social communication, but also the dependence of the structure of social interaction on the degree of the individual's freedom in society. Kant's ethics arguably represents a key stage in the development of this idea. However, it was not until a later era that a…

Recent philosophy and theory of education have witnessed considerable attention to the notion of flourishing as a benchmark or guiding principle for educational practice. There can also be little doubt that -- while not all recent advocates of flourishing have drawn explicitly on Aristotle -- a focus on flourishing has emerged in the wake of…

Mindfulness has all but become a mainstay in modern education. Yet despite the incredible enthusiasm and increased application in schools, there remains significant divergence between advocates and critics. Advocates assert that mindfulness practice promotes individual and societal health and well-being. Meanwhile, critics question the intention…

Although John Paul II published "Pastores dabo vobis" specifically for the formation of seminarians for Catholic priesthood, it nonetheless contains much wisdom regarding the formation of any young person on the cusp of full adulthood. John Paul outlines a framework of personal formation according to its human, spiritual, intellectual,…

On the one hand, according to Richard Rorty, Paulo Freire and others, "education" is the practice of freedom. On the other hand, according to Michael Foucault, Mary Midgley and others, "ethics" is the practice of freedom. How, then, are education and ethics related to one another and what do these authors mean by 'the practice…

Nucci (this issue) gives a compelling conceptualization of the ideas needed to understand character as a multifaceted developmental system. In this article, we focus on the idea of coherence as it applies to understanding character development, education, and assessment. Using ideas from relational developmental systems (RDS) metatheory, we…

Through writings of Simone Weil and Michel Foucault, the article explores the notion of education as the formation of the attending and attentive subjects. Both writers have in different ways acknowledged the important relation between attention and the self. While Weil develops a spiritual form of attention, an attention which can be trained in…

It has become commonplace within the educational research community to invoke the transformative power of education. The call to adopt a 'transformative' approach to teaching and learning can be heard in fields as different as adult education and school leadership and as estranged as social justice education and educational psychology. While there…

This article expounds on a neo-Confucian approach to mindfulness by drawing upon the writings of Zhu Xi. I argue that Zhu Xi's notion of mindfulness is encapsulated in the concept of 'jing' that refers to the single-minded and reverential attention to self-cultivation through 'gewu' (investigation of things). The desired outcome of mindfulness is…

This study investigates the educational thought of Confucius with focus on the educational relationship in the "Analects," which is a historical text that defines the foundations of Confucianism. The first part of the investigation examines Confucius' concept of the educational relationship and how it is characterized with a dialogical…

Stories of civilization and progress tell us that humans cannot help being destructive, selfish, and aggressive, which are side effects of progress requiring sanctions and engineering. It can be argued that this approach has brought about the ecological collapse we face today. The older, more widespread view--that human personality and behavior…

This paper addresses the problem of the legacy of Western philosophical thought for community-engaged learning. Binaries between subject and object, and between theory and practice, present challenges to developing a coherent vision of the transformative potential of community-engaged learning or service learning. Some Western thinkers, however,…