Daniel Vokey

Intercultural Philosophy and the Nondual Wisdom of ‘Basic Goodness’: Implications for Contemplative and Transformative Education

Radical personal and systemic social transformation is urgently needed to address world-wide violence and inequality, pervasive moral confusion and corruption, and the rapid, unprecedented global destruction of our environment. Recent years have seen an embrace of intersubjectivity within discourse on educational transformation within academia and the public sphere. As well, there has been a turn toward contemplative education initiatives within North American schools, colleges and universities. This article contends that these turns might benefit from openness to the ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics of the ‘wisdom traditions’ from which many contemplative practices are drawn. To illustrate this point, we discuss the value of intercultural philosophy of education, and introduce Eastern philosophical ideas, specifically, the Shambhala Buddhist notion of the nondual ground and wisdom of basic goodness and related teachings. We detail how awareness of basic goodness and its holistic expression in the ground, path, and fruition of Shambhala teachings can open vital questions regarding intersubjectivity, challenge and reinvigorate aspects of current engagements with contemplative practices, and provide significant insights and educational paths for transformational endeavours in neoliberal times. Informed by our learning from Shambhala, we conclude with a deepened understanding of intercultural philosophy of education.

Pursuing the Idea/l of an Educated Public: Philosophy's Contributions to Radical School Reform

Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that our modern, post-Enlightenment societies lack the shared standards of moral argument that are prerequisite to productive public debate. He measures our situation against the ideal of an educated public, members of which share enough common ground to resolve disagreements rationally because they have been prepared to participate in disciplined argument by their school and university curricula. This paper identifies questions to be addressed and tasks to be undertaken by philosophers who seek radical school reform in order to help create the intellectual, cultural and institutional conditions for productive public debate.

Evolving a public language of spirituality for transforming academic and campus life

A growing interest in spirituality in higher education has been accompanied by a range of responses to the challenge of defining the term. These responses include avoiding the problem by leaving it undefined; stipulating a particular and often context-specific definition of spirituality; and practising a kind of ad hoc eclecticism. This article promotes the project of creating a conceptual framework that would serve as a ‘public language’ of spirituality for scholar-practitioners who may not share a common religious, philosophical, political, and/or cultural tradition. In the first section, we present and account for the criteria we believe a conceptual framework must meet to serve as a public language of spirituality. In the second section, we draw from Ken Wilber’s integral theory to bring forth distinctions that we believe will be useful in facilitating this project. We conclude with suggestions for further work to advance this project within higher education.

Objectivity and Moral Judgement: Towards Agreement on a Moral Education Theory

Abstract The paper proposes that general agreement on a theory for moral education would increase its chances of having positive impact on a socially significant scale. To facilitate reaching such agreement, the paper specifies what is required of an account of the objectivity of moral judgement, if that account is to provide one component of a sound conceptual framework for moral education programmes. On the assumption that agreement on a theory for moral education requires agreement on its objectives, it is argued that moral education must help its participants learn (a) to choose the values that will inform their moral judgements, (b) to deal with moral conflict, and (c) to appropriate critically the assumptions underlying their value‐choices. The paper concludes that, if it is to inform programmes with these objectives, an account of moral objectivity must specify in what sense, and under what conditions, moral judgement can be said to reflect knowledge of something that is good independent of human c...