In this essay I begin with remarks made by Bernard Williams that there are two main motives for philosophy, curiosity and salvation, and that he is not ‘into salvation’. I seek to make the case for the claim that philosophy, at its best, should aim at a kind of ‘salvation’. In the first section, I discuss the problematic character of the world that philosophy should aim to address as a matter of seeking a kind of salvation. I (...) identify this as the problem of ‘cosmodicy’, i.e., the problem of how to justify life in the world as meaningful and worthwhile in the face of extensive evil, suffering, disorder, and the like. In the second section, I discuss how Williams’s claim not to be ‘into salvation’ is not entirely accurate. Although he rejects a certain ‘grand’ traditional picture of salvation, he still seeks a more minimal kind insofar as he addresses the problem of cosmodicy. This comes through in his advocacy of ‘humane’ philosophy and in his attempt to support the values that arise for us from within our historically contingent forms of life. I argue here that Williams is wrong to reject the human concern for a larger cosmic significance. In the final section, I discuss two secular attempts to address the issue of cosmic significance: viz., those of Thomas Nagel and Paolo Costa. I also briefly consider here what a theistic perspective has to offer. I conclude by suggesting that if I am right that philosophy, at is best, should aim at a kind of salvation, then this means that the philosophy of religion should have a central place in any philosophy curriculum. (shrink)

Recent Anglophone scholarship has successfully shown that Nietzsche's thought makes important contributions to a wide range of contemporary philosophical debates. In so doing, however, scholarship has lost sight of another important feature of Nietzsche's project, namely his desire to challenge the very conception of philosophy that has been used to assess his merits as a philosopher. In other words, contemporary scholarship has overlooked Nietzsche's contributions to metaphilosophy, i.e. debates around the nature, methods, and aims of philosophy. This (...) important new collection of essays brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to explore and discuss these contributions and debates. It will appeal to anyone interested in metaphilosophy, Nietzsche studies, German studies, or intellectual history. (shrink)

While professional philosophers are often reluctant to address the issue of the aims of philosophy, the field of philosophy with children is abundant with articulated aims which tend to be more concrete and ambitious than those of academic philosophy. Is this asymmetry a problem? And how are we to think about the aims of philosophy with children? This article argues that not much will be gained from looking to academic philosophy because discussions (...) here are surprisingly meager and have provided little agreement. Nevertheless, it is also argued that the aims of philosophy with children must be constrained by what can be achieved by academic philosophy. (shrink)

According to the received view on logical empiricism, the logical empiricists were involved in the same project as Popper, Lakatos and Kuhn: a project of describing actual scientific method and (with the exception of Kuhn) prescribing methodological rules for scientists. Even authors who seek to show that the logical empiricists were not as simpleminded as widely believed agree with this assumption. I argue that the received view has it wrong.

This volume brings together well-established Nietzsche scholars working within diverse philosophical and stylistic frameworks to address the question of how Nietzsche understands philosophy. Specifically, Loeb and Meyer aim to investigate Nietzsche's answers to the following three questions: "What should philosophy be? How should philosophy be done? Why, or to what end, should philosophy be practiced?". The question of what philosophy means for Nietzsche is arguably central to a great deal of existing secondary literature, from French (...) interpreters of the 1960s and 1970s to the numerous contemporary volumes that take Nietzsche's style seriously as illuminating, rather than obfuscating, his philosophical... (shrink)

I define ‘philosophical scepticism’ as the view that philosophers do not and cannot know many of the substantive philosophical claims that they make or implicitly assume. I argue for philosophical scepticism via the ‘methodology challenge’ and the ‘disagreement challenge’. I claim that the right response to philosophical scepticism is to abandon the view that philosophy aims at knowledge, and (borrowing from David Lewis) to replace it with a more modest aim: that of finding ‘equilibria’ that ‘can withstand examination’. (...) Finally, I consider what our attitude to our own philosophical theses should be. (shrink)

What ought a political philosophy seek to achieve? How should political philosophy address itself to its subject matter? What is the relation between political philosophy and other forms of reflective inquiry? In answering these metaphilosophical questions, political philosophy has long been dominated by a roughly utopian self-image. According to this conception, the aim of political philosophy is the rigorous development of theoretical ideals of justice, state, and law. I show that leading political philosophers of the (...) twentieth century, most notably John Rawls, have continued to perpetuate this utopian conception of the aims of political philosophy. I then explicate an emerging alternative metaphilosophical view of political philosophy which has recently emerged in two seemingly disparate strands of political philosophy: the first strand being Bernard Williams's realist conception of political critique and the second strand being Richard Rorty's pragmatist conception of cultural criticism. The views developed by Williams and Rorty leave to the side questions about political ideals and focuses instead on definite ways in which we can improve the situations in which we find ourselves. Such improvement, Williams and Rorty provocatively argue, does not require an ideal theory of best justice. (shrink)

What is belief? "Beliefs aim at truth" is the commonly accepted starting point for philosophers who want to give an adequate account of this fundamental state of mind, but it raises as many questions as it answers. For example, in what sense can beliefs be said to have an aim of their own? If belief aims at truth, does it mean that reasons to believe must also be based on truth? Must beliefs be formed on the basis of evidence (...) alone? Is truth the constitutive norm of belief? Does aiming at truth bring in a normative dimension to the nature of belief? How can the aim of truth guide the formation of our beliefs? In what ways do partial beliefs aim at truth? Is truth the aim of epistemic justification? Last but not least, is it knowledge rather than truth which is the fundamental aim of belief? In recent years, pursuing these questions has proved extremely fertile for our understanding of a wide range of current issues in philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, and meta-ethics. The Aim of Belief is the first book to be devoted to this fast-growing topic. It brings together eleven newly commissioned essays by leading authors on the aim of belief. Contributors: Jonathan Adler, Krister Bykvist, Timothy Chan, Pascal Engel, Kathrin Glüer, Anandi Hattiangadi, Michael Hicks, Paul Horwich, David Papineau, Andrew Reisner, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, Ralph Wedgwood, Åsa Wikforss, Daniel Whiting. (shrink)

For many years, the aims of education have been informed by liberalism, with an emphasis on autonomy. The aim has been to mentally equip students to be autonomous individuals, able to live self-directed lives. In this volume, international philosophers of education explore and question diverse strains of the liberal tradition, discussing not only autonomy but other key issues such as: social justice; national identity; curriculum; critical thinking; and social practices. The contributors write from a variety of standpoints, offering many (...) interpretations of what liberalism might mean in educational terms. The result is a collection of research, which is intended to stimulate debate. (shrink)

Brandon Absher demonstrates that the neoliberalization of higher education has led to a paradigm shift in contemporary philosophy in the United States. Neoliberal philosophy aims to produce human capital and profitable knowledge.

Nietzsche thought of himself as heralding an era of ‘new philosophers’, philosophers who would produce new philosophical insights and practice a new kind of philosophy. This is one of the many sign...

In a candid autobiographical chapter (Hirst 2010), which numbers among his last writings, Paul Hirst subjects his upbringing within a fundamentalist Christian sect to searching moral appraisal. He concludes that his parents wronged him by religiously indoctrinating him, stifling his emotional development, and arbitrarily restricting his range of valuable morally permissible experiences. This upbringing undermined his autonomy and—more fundamentally, on his account—kept him from living the life he had most reason to live. Surprisingly, however, Hirst suggests that his parents had (...) a right to initiate him into this conservative religious life, though the wider community owed him a more non-directive form of religious education to temper it. This is a striking concession to the scope of parental rights, especially in view of Hirst’s complaint that the emotional repression required by his parents was to ‘distort [his] experience and understanding of [himself] and others in ways that persisted well into [his] adult life’. Engaging with Hirst's evaluation of his upbringing, I argue for a narrower range of parental rights than Hirst–one which excludes a parental moral right to religious initiation–and provide an account of the kind of emotional experiences to which children plausibly have a right. (shrink)

In this edited volume, Paul Loeb and Matthew Meyer have assembled thirteen contributors to address the topic of Nietzsche and metaphilosophy. We know that Nietzsche was preoccupied with questions about the nature and tasks of philosophy from the very beginning of his intellectual career, notably in his lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers, and that these questions assume a central role in the writings of his late period, notably BGE.The volume is divided into four main parts. The first part is (...) entitled "Evolving Metaphilosophies" and features three chapters: Marco Brusotti on metaphilosophy and natural history in Nietzsche, Matthew Meyer on the dialectics of Nietzsche's metaphilosophies, and Antoine Panaïoti... (shrink)

This book develops a conception of student flourishing as the overarching aim of education. Taking as its basis the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, it provides a theoretical study of the foundations of flourishing that goes well beyond Aristotle's approach. Flourishing as the Aim of Education argues that the 'good life' of the student, to which education should contribute, must involve engagement with self-transcendent ideals and ignite awe-filled enchantment. It allows for social, individual and educational variance within the concept of flourishing, (...) and it engages with a host of socio-political as well as 'spiritual' issues that are often overlooked in literature discussing character education. Each chapter closes with food for thought for practitioners who can directly facilitate student flourishing. An outgrowth of the author's previous monograph Aristotelian Character Education, this book follows new directions in questioning how to educate young people towards a life of overall flourishing. It will be of great interest to researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the fields of character education, moral education and moral philosophy, as well as to educators and policy-makers. (shrink)

J P White; The Aims of Education: three legacies of the British idealists, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 5–12, http.

Between 1987 and 1997, Thailand experienced a bubble economy. When the bubble economy exploded in 1997, the country suddenly experienced an economic crisis: it was in heavy debt and became financially controlled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The problem was caused by the country’s desire to rapidly change itself from an agricultural country to an industrial one, without considering its own comparative advantage in that its climate and resources are more suitable for agriculture. Thailand also wanted to become a (...) newly industrialized country and a inancial hub of Southeast Asia without considering its readiness. These ideas came to a halt after the bubble economy explosion. However, just after Thailand managed to solve its debt problem with the IMF, thegovernment once again declared its desire to turn the country into the ‘Detroit of Asia’, to develop the capital, Bangkok, into the region’s fashion hub and to launch a substantial number of mega-projects, albeit with the existence of a widening economic gap between the rural and urban areas. This economic trend became known as “Thaksinomics” with reference to the name of the Prime Minister at that time, Thaksin Shinawatra. On the other hand, there has been a great deal of criticism of such a trend, which has been seen as a capitalist move promoting the consumerist behaviour of Thai people. There is, therefore, a call for Thai society to review itself, especially in its social and economic development aspects, and a change to a new kind of development with an emphasis on self-reliance andmoderation. This call is based on a Buddhist belief which is reflected in the old Thai way of life. This kind of economy is called “Self-Sufficiency Economy” as opposed to a capitalist-consumerist economy. It is believed that this new direction will help lay a strong foundation for the Thai economy and provide it with a high level of immunity for progress towards a more stable and sustainable economy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the nature, scope and importance of philosophy in the light of its relation to other disciplines. This work pays its focus on the various fundamental problems of philosophy, relating to Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology Logic, and its association with scientific realism. It will also highlight the various facets of these problems and the role of philosophers to point out the various issues relating to human issues. It is widely agreed that (...) class='Hi'>philosophy as a multi-dimensional subject that shows affinity to others branches of philosophy like, Philosophy of Science, Humanities, Physics and Mathematics, but this paper also seeks, a philosophical nature towards the universal problems of nature. It evaluates the contribution and sacrifices of the great sages of philosophers to promote the clarity and progress in the field of philosophy. (shrink)

In his later works Nietzsche repeatedly underscores the importance of philosophical methods. In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, he takes issue with the ‘awkw.

This book is intended not only for scholars and students in humanities, history (esp. the history of ideas), Jewish studies, philosophy (esp. the history of philosophy), and Christian theology, but also for those concerned with the roots of anti-Semitism and with the need for toleration and intercultural pluralism. Modernity and the Final Aim of History: * Combines the development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to Idealism, and from Idealism to the revolutionary turning-point of the mid-nineteenth century (...) with the Jewish question; * Shows the close entwining of anti-Jewish prejudices with awareness of the importance of Judaism in the formation of modern thought; * Points out the hopes, obstacles, compromises, and disappointments of Jewish emancipation right up to the appearance of racial anti-Semitism; * Traces the changes in the debate over Judaism from the theological perspective to the philosophical and from the philosophical to that of the economic and naturalistic; * Underlines the dangers to toleration that arise from seeing human history as directed towards a single aim; *Can be used in university courses and seminars, as well as in research groups. (shrink)

I argue that three main interpretations of the aim of Russell’s early logicism in The Principles of Mathematics (1903) are mistaken, and propose a new interpretation. According to this new interpretation, the aim of Russell’s logicism is to show, in opposition to Kant, that mathematical propositions have a certain sort of complete generality which entails that their truth is independent of space and time. I argue that on this interpretation two often-heard objections to Russell’s logicism, deriving from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (...) and from the non-logical character of some of the axioms of Principia Mathematica respectively, can be seen to be inconclusive. I then proceed to identify two challenges that Russell’s logicism, as presently construed, faces, but argue that these challenges do not appear unanswerable. (shrink)

The paper examines the significant relationship between the history of philosophy and the systematic form of philosophizing in the 19th and 20th cenutries as develo_ped in the conceptions of G. W. F. Hegel and M. Heidegger. The first part discusses the essential models of the philosophy of the history of philosophy illustrated by Hegel's conception of the history of philosophy and its relationship to the systematic form of his philosophy. Hegel's philosophy of the history (...) of philosophy as philosophizing about philosophy is a metatheoretical movement inside historical-philosophical thinking, the aim of which is not to describe the process of the history of philosophy from outside, but to understand it and to explain it as an inseparable part of the resolution of the most important philosophical problems. The second part of the contribution focuses mainly on Heidegger's question What it is – philosophy?, as well as on his later writings, which offer a remarkable picture of the unity of philosophy and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

I argue that the constitutive aim of belief and the constitutive aim of science are both knowledge. The ‘aim of belief’, understood as the correctness conditions of belief, is to be identified with the product of properly functioning cognitive systems. Science is an institution that is the social functional analogue of a cognitive system, and its aim is the same as that of belief. In both cases it is knowledge rather than true belief that is the product of proper functioning.

A technocratic model of curriculum design that has been highly influential since the middle of last century assumes that the aims of education can be, and should be: 1. Causally brought about by administering educational experiences; 2. Specified as objectives that can be attained, reached or completed; 3. Changes in students that are described in advance. Richard S. Peters argued against the first of these three tenets by making a distinction between aims that are causally brought about by (...) the means and aims that are constituted by the means. I argue that further distinctions between ways in which ends and means can be related throw doubt on the remaining two tenets. My argument against the second one rests on a distinction between open aims that cannot be completed and closed aims that can be reached. I use a third distinction, between aims as principles of design and aims as principles of reform, to show that the third tenet of the technocratic model is also suspect. I conclude that a realistic view of educational aims must take into account that they are more multifarious than envisaged by the technocratic model of curriculum design. (shrink)

This book is the first monograph fully devoted to analyzing the philosophical aspects of affordances. The concept of affordance, coined and developed in the field of ecological psychology, describes the possibilities for action available in the environment. This work offers a systematic approach to the key philosophical features of affordances, such as their ontological characterization, their relation to normative practices, and the idea of agency that follows from viewing affordances as key objects of perception, while also proposing an innovative philosophical (...) characterization of affordances as dispositional properties. The Philosophy of Affordances analyzes the implications that a proper understanding of affordances has for the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, and aims to intensify the dialogue between philosophy and ecological psychology in which each discipline benefits from the tools and insights of the other. (shrink)

If we are to understand the nature of science, we must see it as an activity and achievement of the human mind alongside others, such as the achievements of children in learning to talk and to cope with people and other objects in their environment, and the achievements of non-scientists living in a rich and complex world which constantly poses problems to be solved. Looking at scientific knowledge as one form of human knowledge, scientific understanding as one form of human (...) understanding, scientific investigation as one form of human problem-solving activity, we can begin to see more clearly what science is, and also what kind of mechanism the human mind is. -/- By undermining the slogan that science is the search for laws, and subsidiary slogans such as that quantification is essential, that scientific theories must be empirically refutable, and that the methods of philosophers cannot serve the aims of scientists, I shall try, in what follows, to liberate some scientists from the dogmas indoctrinated in universities and colleges. I shall also try to show philosophers how they can contribute to the scientific study of man, thereby escaping from the barrenness and triviality complained of so often by non-philosophers and philosophy students. -/- A side-effect which will be reported elsewhere, is to undermine some old philosophical distinctions and pour cold water on battles which rage around them -- like the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, and the battles between empiricists and rationalists. -/- Key idea: A major aim of science is not to discover and explain laws, but to discover what is possible, and how it is possible. -/- This view of science developed further in Sloman (1978) helps to explain the contributions of Theoretical Linguistics, Chemistry, Artificial Intelligence, and Computer Science insofar as they all enrich our understanding of what is possible and how it is possible. -/- Download: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/papers.html#1976-01 . (shrink)

Philosophy is a dangerous profession, risking censorship, prison, even death. And no wonder: philosophers have questioned traditional pieties and threatened the established political order. Some claimed to know what was thought unknowable; others doubted what was believed to be certain. Some attacked religion in the name of science; others attacked science in the name of mystical poetry; some served tyrants; others were radical revolutionaries. This historically based collection of philosophers' reflections--the letters, journals, prefaces that reveal their hopes and hesitations, (...) their triumphs and struggles, their deepest doubts and convictions--allow us to witness philosophical thought-in-process. It sheds light on the many--and conflicting--aims of philosophy: to express skepticism or overcome it, to support theology or attack it, to develop an ethical system or reduce it to practical politics. As their audiences differed, philosophers experimented with distinctive rhetorical strategies, writing dialogues, meditations, treatises, aphorisms. Ranging from Plato to Hannah Arendt, with contributions from 44 philosophers this remarkable collection documents philosophers' claim that they change as well as understand the world. In her introductory essay, "Witnessing Philosophers," Amelie Rorty locates philosophers' reflections in the larger context of the many facets of their other activities and commitments. (shrink)

The neuropsychopharmacological methods and theories used to investigate the nature of depression have been viewed as suspect for a variety of philosophical and scientific reasons. Much of this criticism aims to demonstrate that biochemical- and neurological-based theories of this mental illness are defective, due in part because the methods used in their service are consistently invalidated, failing to induce depression in pre-clinical animal models. Neuropsychopharmacologists have been able to stave off such criticism by showing that their methods are context (...) and domain-sensitive, and that the worth of an animal model is relative to its purpose – thereby creating logical space for the question of whether there could ever be a “good” animal model of depression. I contend that this sort of response implicitly leans on Feyerabendian principles in the philosophy of science, and exemplify this connection using a standard taxonomy of behavioral models of depression. I then take one central Feyerabendian principle – methodological and theoretical pluralism – and show how it maps onto the neuropsychopharmacological research tradition as it is currently practiced. (shrink)

Science and technology have significant roles in life. Most of the researches and discussions about science education are related to development of sciencecurriculum and science education in school. Science curriculum must be developed based on student and society needs, scientific and technological developments in the field of science and educational science. The aims of science curriculum should reflect these elements given above. The aims of science curriculum also refer to changing philosophy of education. In this study, the (...) results of the two studies, which were conducted with 314 primary school class teachers and science teachers, and literature reviews are discussed under the heading of "Future aims of science curriculum for primary school”. (shrink)

Both Walter Kohan (2002) and Nancy Vansieleghem (2005) have questioned the aims of Philosophy for Children (P4C). It is the intention of this current paper to pursue the line of inquiry opened up by these authors, but from the standpoint of John Dewey’s pragmatism. Dewey’s philosophy shifts the focus from discovering the aim of P4C to aims in the particular contexts in which P4C operates. As such, aims in education (including P4C) are seen as: required (...) for intelligent education, inseparable from the means, contingent upon specific contexts, used for ethico-politico-aesthetic purposes, multiple and complementary, and internally generated from those engaged in the practice. (shrink)

Examination of human activities and their outcomes is a basic function of philosophy. Historically such examination has tended to conform to one of two patterns.