Artificial intelligence technologies have become a ubiquitous part of human life. This prompts us to ask, "how should we live well with artificial intelligence?" Currently, the most prominent candidate answers to this question are principlist. According to these approaches, if you teach people some finite set of principles or convince…

This article's question is whether Spinoza understands the highest human perfection -- which he equates with both our highest good and the love of God -- as a theoretical state, consisting in having knowledge and the perfection of beliefs, or as a practical state, consisting in having virtue and the perfection of action. Consequently, the article…

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…

This article develops the ideas of perfection and education in Spinoza and Maimonides. Both thinkers identify human perfection with intellectual knowledge and a transformation in affect. They accordingly envision education in terms of enhancing cognition and shaping the desire to know. The first steps are a critical evaluation of imagination and…

In this interview, Prof. Vittorio Bufacchi examines in detail the relationship between two equally challenging issues, i.e. violence and social (in)justice [and their intersection]. In the introductory part, he dicusses what triggered his own interest in violence. At the same time, he examines philosophy's main contribution to discussions over…

John White offers a provocative characterization of philosophy of education. In this brief reaction, I evaluate the characterization and urge the maintenance of a strong connection between philosophy of education and philosophy.

This is a reply to six "Theory and Research in Education" commentators on views I expressed in a 2013 "Theory and Research in Education" piece about priorities in philosophy of education today. The first section is about a concession to my critics; the second, about various misconceptions in their views. The third section…

The neo-Kohlbergian model revises and extends Lawrence Kohlberg's model of moral reasoning development to better reflect advances in research and theory. In moving from Kohlberg's global stage model to a multi-process description of moral functioning, these modifications are most evident in the ways in which moral thinking is described,…

The ideal of equality of opportunity plays an important role in contemporary social and political discourse, and it is one of the few ideals which most people, across the political spectrum, accept. In this article, I argue that the seemingly widespread agreement about the value of equal opportunity is more apparent than real. I distinguish…

In higher education, "personal epistemology" is today a significant research area. Personal epistemology has been seen as promising particularly because it focuses on one of the general learning aims of many contemporary universities, namely, the development of students' creative and critical thinking. The article identifies serious…

Moral particularism, defined as the view that moral judgment does not require moral principles, has become prominent both in moral philosophy and in philosophy of education. This article re-examines Nussbaum's case for particularism, based on Sophocles' "Antigone", because her stress on sensitive appreciation of circumstantial specifics is…

In this article I outline an original form of ethical theory that I call exemplarist virtue theory. The theory is intended to serve the philosophical purposes of a comprehensive moral theory, but it is also intended to serve the practical purpose of moral education by structuring the theory around a motivating emotion--the emotion of admiration.…

Can selecting on the basis of academic ability at secondary school level be reconciled with equality of opportunity? One common view is that although the two can be reconciled in principle, for various contingent reasons selection tends to undermine equality of opportunity in practice, for example, it tends to advantage children who have been…

This article is a response to criticism of my book "Big Ideas for Little Kids." The main topics addressed are: Who is the audience for the book? Can people without formal philosophical training can be good facilitators of elementary school philosophy discussions? Is it important to assess attempts to teach philosophy in elementary school? Should…

Whereas most latter-day Aristotelian approaches to moral education highlight the early habituation phase of moral development, they rarely have much to say, beyond truisms from the "Nicomachean ethics," about the ultimate Aristotelian goal of cultivating fully fledged "phronesis." The aim of this article is to repair the dearth…