Character education in schools in England is flourishing. I give many examples of the enthusiasm for it as well as drawing attention to the UK government's new ambivalence towards it. Character education seems largely impervious to the many criticisms to which it has been subjected. I touch on these only briefly as my focus is on a criticism that…

The main purpose of this article is to question and finally reject the tendency to see philosophy and literature (especially poetry) as essentially distinct forms of language, a tendency which sometimes extends to regarding them as mutually exclusive and to be understood as in some way in opposition to each other. The idea of that opposition is…

It is sometimes said that we are strangers to ourselves, bearers of internal alterity, as well as to each other. The profounder this strangeness then the greater the difficulty of giving any systematic account of it without paradox: of supposing that our obscurity to ourselves can readily be illuminated. To attempt such an account, in defiance of…

Proponents of philosophy for children generally see themselves as heirs to the "Socratic" tradition. They often claim too that children's aptitude for play leads them naturally to play with abstract, philosophical ideas. However in Plato's dialogues we find in the mouth of "Socrates" many warnings against philosophising with the young. Those…

There is a longstanding difficulty in distinguishing philosophy (and philosophy of education) from other kinds of writing. Even the notions of clarity and rigour, sometimes claimed as central and defining characteristics of philosophy at its best, turn out to have ineliminably figurative elements, and accounts of philosophical method often display…

The recent wave of interest in "teaching happiness" is beset by problems. It consists of many different emphases and approaches, many of which are inconsistent with each other. If happiness is understood as essentially a matter of "feeling good", then it is difficult to account for the fact that we want and value all sorts of things that do not…

In his writings Jim Marshall has helpfully emphasized such Wittgensteinian themes as the multiplicity of language games, the deconstruction of "certainty," and the contexts of power that underlie discursive systems. Here we focus on another important legacy of Wittgenstein's thinking: his insistence that human activity is rule-governed. This idea…

The language of self-belief, including terms like shyness and diffidence, is complex and puzzling. The idea of self-esteem in particular, which has been given fresh currency by recent interest in "personalized learning", continues to create problems. I argue first that we need a "thicker" and more subtle moral psychology of self-belief; and,…