Given the instrumental value of good collaborations for societal flourishing, educating for good collaborators (viz., agents who have the motivation and ability to collaborate with others) should be one of the fundamental goals of contemporary education. Still, fostering the growth of dispositions needed for successful collaborations is not explicitly considered to be a first-rate pedagogical goal in most contemporary virtue education programs. To remedy this omission, I propose a virtue-based method for developing good collaborators through an education that involves a (...) mixture of three complementary educational techniques: i) collaborative problem-based learning, ii) physical education, and iii) direct teaching. Learning through collaborative problem-based learning educates students on the motivations and abilities needed to be good collaborators in epistemic pursuits, whereas physical education teaches learners how to be good collaborators in non-epistemic endeavors, whilst direct teaching ties everything together by giving learners an explicit understanding of the value of good collaborations. (shrink)

In recent decades, the digital age and the Third Industrial Revolution have attracted significant attention in terms of their benefits and risks. Scholars have explored the impact of these changes on autonomy, freedom, human interactions, cognition, and knowledge sharing. However, the influence of the digital communicative environment on civic interactions and public deliberation processes has received limited attention from virtue theorists. This paper aims to address this gap. First, we discuss the challenges posed by the digital communicative environment, and we (...) present recent attempts to revive civility within this context. Then, we propose a twofold account of civility as consisting in the two virtues of civic benevolence and civil deliberation. Finally, we focus on the epistemic side of civility, civil deliberation, and we conduct the first empirical studies on two of its components. (shrink)

This paper investigates civility from an Aristotelian perspective and has two objectives. The first is to offer a novel account of this virtue based on Aristotle’s remarks about civic friendship. The proposed account distinguishes two main components of civility—civic benevolence and civil deliberation—and shows how Aristotle’s insights can speak to the needs of our communities today. The notion of civil deliberation is then unpacked into three main dimensions: motivational, inquiry-related, and ethical. The second objective is to illustrate how the post-truth (...) condition—in particular, the spread of misinformation typical of the digital environments we inhabit—obstructs our capacity to cultivate the virtue of civility by impairing every component of civil deliberation. The paper hopes to direct virtue theorists’ attention to the need to foster civic virtues as a means of counteracting the negative aspects of the post-truth age. (shrink)