The point of education is to support students to be able to live meaningful, autonomous lives, filled with rich experiences. The arts and aesthetic education are vital to such flourishing lives in that they afford bold, beautiful, moving experiences of awe, wonder and the sublime that are connected to the central human functional capability…

There seem to be obvious virtues to keeping a sense of balance. In this paper, I consider some examples from ordinary life and education where the pursuit of balance would appear to be a benefit. Yet I also draw upon lines of thinking from John Stuart Mill and Adam Phillips to examine whether the apparent good sense of balance can be disturbed. I…

This article proceeds from a consideration of what John Baldacchino calls 'viable ignorance', attempting to take leave from the critical and pedagogical obligations of certain elements of Barbara Johnson's 'positive ignorance'. It considers Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard and the composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen's reflections on modes of…

This paper asks where Kant stands on the question of the connection between the experience of artistic beauty and moral education, framing this discussion with Batteux's and Schiller's conceptions of this connection. Batteux articulates a cognitivist view of art as engaged with the presentation of morally significant content and draws a direct…

In this short article, in response to the urgent invitation of Arcilla's book, I would like to address the question of how to resuscitate liberal education today and how this might be possible with education through film. First, I shall highlight the perfectionist dimension of Arcilla's idea of liberal education from the perspective of Emersonian…

In this paper I outline an answer to the following question: What are the abilities that make you the sort of subject who can learn, who can acquire new concepts, new skills? There are many traits that matter in providing an answer. But I want to suggest that the ability for creative and imaginative engagement with and sustenance of the playful…

To speak of democracy is often to speak less of a fact than of a hope. In his introduction to "Democracy in America," Alexis de Tocqueville admitted that '… in America I saw "more than" America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices and its passions, in order to learn what…

The main purpose of this article is to describe and analyse time in schools from an everyday aesthetics perspective. Expanding on current scholarship, the article calls attention to the way everyday sensory experiences in schools models time in peculiar ways that have serious educational implications. On the one hand, based on the work of Katya…

Following the definition of 'practice' conceptualised in "After Virtue," the paper argues that literature as creative writing and reading is a MacIntyrean practice. Literature's key internal goods are spelled out: the common aesthetic enjoyment achieved by the writer's ability to create a truthful fictional narrative the reader is drawn…

This paper explores education as a context for facing what Susie Orbach has termed 'climate sorrow' and asks: what 'relations to the world' are we imagining might help youth stay with difficult feelings about the future by enabling them to develop a living relationship to the more-than-human world in the present? By way of response, the paper…

At the 2019 Annual Conference of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, Michael Bonnett was an invited speaker, giving a paper entitled 'Transcendent nature, sustainability, and 'ecologising' education'. In this keynote, Bonnett shared portions of his forthcoming book, "Environmental Consciousness, Nature, and Philosophy of…

Charles Sanders Peirce did not present a full account of a philosophy of education in his open-ended conception of a philosophical system. However, he did have multiple and scattered reflections on the subject that can be used for addressing and criticising our conceptions of education. This article has been conceived as part of a broader project…

What is thought, and how can it be taught? Philosophy and literature have often promoted different conceptions although each requires, consciously or not, a mutually inclusive understanding. The question of value, which lurks at the centre of this, was given special salience by the literary critic, and 'anti-philosopher', F. R. Leavis who still…

The purpose of this article is to carry out a philosophical enquiry into the affective nature of creative and innovative processes. Recent studies on future employment suggest that we are at an inflection point whereby any job is in principle at risk of being taken over by computers and robots in the near future. The jobs least at risk, it is…

For millennia it has been discussed whether literature appropriately can or should be used in education for a moral purpose. Taking as a premise that it can actually be educative and not merely moralising, we tackle the case made against such use, based on the claim that it would be perverting the aesthetic nature of literature as a form of art,…