Following Lyotard's death in 1998, this book provides an exploration of the recurrent theme of education in his work. It brings to a wider audience the significance of a body of thought about education that is subtle, profound and still largely unexplored. This book also makes an important contribution to contemporary debates on postmodernism and education.

Education lies at the heart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): ‘Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms’. However, when education is mentioned in the philosophical literature on human rights, or even within the literature on educational policy, it is usually within the context of its being treated as a specific right—as education as a human right rather than human rights education. (...) Taking rights and obligations to be intimately tied within a full human rights educational regime, I argue for the role of education in establishing and realizing freedom from poverty as a human right. The arguments for why this freedom should be considered a human right are compelling. I offer five educational moments in the human rights movement in general, and the arguments for freedom from poverty as a human right, more specifically, in my discussion of human rights education. (shrink)

Is it possible to look at schools as spaces for encounters? Could schools contribute to a deliberative mode of communication in a manner better suited to our own time and to areas where different cultures meet? Inspired primarily by classical and modern pragmatists, I turn to Seyla Benhabib, posing the question whether she supports the proposition that schools can be sites for deliberative communication. I argue that a school that engages in deliberative communication, with its stress on mutual communication between (...) different moral perspectives, gives universalism a procedurally oriented meaning, serving as an arena for encounters that represents a weak public sphere. An interactive universalism of this kind attaches importance to developing an ability and willingness to reason on the basis of the views of others and to change perspectives. In that respect, the institutional arrangements of schools are potential parts of the political dimension of cosmopolitanism, as well as its moral dimension, in terms of the obligations and responsibilities we develop through our institutions and in our actions as human beings towards one another. (shrink)

(Un conversation honnete) … pour la justice, la sincerité, l’amitié, et le courage: je soustiens que ces quatre qualitez sont le fondement de la morale des honnestes gens.In this time of grave global concern, awareness, and exchange, there is a pressing need for an adequate global moral theory.1 Within the various areas of the humanities and the social sciences, value scholarship, which is dominated by concerns of cultural particularity, is consequently placed in serious dispute. In ethics and aesthetics, the narrow (...) communities of judgment that have come to shape much of our evaluation of, and guidances for, action are rendered inadequate as global issues place ever-increasing normative demands on our attention... (shrink)

In this essay, I first argue for the importance of somaesthetics in thinking about “autonomy” and “atmosphere” in architecture in a manner that brings about a critical re-education. Refusing the strict distinction between these architectural approaches through a turn to somaesthetics, I then turn to Kant’s theory of reflective judgment to set forth discursive possibilities for arriving at some understanding of the concept of architectural atmosphere. Finally, I suggest ways in which somaesthetics and Kantian thought can be seen as mutually (...) enhancing, rather than opposing each other. (shrink)

I examine a link between forms of argument and aesthetics that occur in "premodem" Westem and non-Western texts so as to build toward a universal theory of knowledge while taking postmodern criticisms seriously. Such a method allows for dialogue across time and space. Specifically, I focus on John Bunyan's "Apology" for the Pilgrim s Progress, published in 1674, and the Tibetan logician Acarya Dignaga's fifth-century treatise Hetucakra. Their claims to tmth proceed through allegory and poetry. This examination does not settle (...) existing debates; it brings a prior question more sharply into focus: In this time of cosmopolitan promise, how should considerations of universalism proceed? (shrink)