Stefaan E. Cuypers

Education for Critical Thinking: Can it be non-indoctrinative?

An ideal of education is to ensure that our children develop into autonomous critical thinkers. The ‘indoctrination objection’, however, calls into question whether education, aimed at cultivating autonomous critical thinkers, is possible. The core of the concern is that since the young child lacks even modest capacities for assessing reasons, the constituent components of critical thinking have to be indoctrinated if there is to be any hope of the childs attaining the ideal. Our primary objective is to defuse this objection. We argue, first, that even if the indoctrination objection can be dealt with at the level of beliefs by an account that distinguishes between beliefs instilled in the child at the non‐rational stage that are indoctrinative and those that are non‐indoctrinative, there can be non‐autonomous ‘proto critical thinkers’ who lack autonomy with respect to the requisite motivational components. We then ask what must be added to the account to ensure that proto critical thinkers develop into autonomous ones. We suggest that motivational elements, even if instilled at a stage at which the child has insufficiently developed cognitive capacities, can be ‘truly the childs own’ only relationally: the autonomous motivational elements are ones with respect to which the future child is self‐governing.

Moral responsibility and the problem of manipulation reconsidered

It has been argued that all compatibilist accounts of free action and moral responsibility succumb to the manipulation problem: evil neurologists or their like may manipulate an agent, in the absence of the agent’s awareness of being so manipulated, so that when the agent performs an action, requirements of the compatibilist contender at issue are satisfied. But intuitively, the agent is not responsible for the action. We propose that the manipulation problem be construed as a problem of deviance. In troubling cases of manipulation, psychological elements such as desires and beliefs, among other things, are acquired via causal routes that are deviant relative to causal routes deemed normal or baseline. We develop and defend rudiments of a baseline that is acceptable independently of whether one has compatibilist or incompatibilist leanings.

Reading R.S. Peters today : analysis, ethics, and the aims of education

Notes on Contributors vii Preface xi Paul Standish Introduction Reading R. S. Peters on Education Today Stefaan E. Cuypers and Christopher Martin 1 I. The Conceptual Analysis of Education and Teaching 1 Was Peters Nearly Right About Education? Robin Barrow 6 2 Learning Our Concepts Megan Laverty 24 3 On Education and Initiation Michael Luntley 38 4 Ritual, Imitation and Education in R. S. Peters Bryan Warnick 54 5 Transformation and Education: the Voice of the Learner in Peters Concept of Teaching Andrea English 72 II. The Justification of Educational Aims and the Curriculum 6 R. S. Peters Normative Conception of Education and Educational Aims Michael Katz 94 7 On the Worthwhileness of Theoretical Activities Michael Hand 106 8 Why General Education? Peters, Hirst and History John White 119 9 The Good, the Worthwhile and the Obligatory: Practical Reason and Moral Universalism in R. S. Peters Conception of Education Christopher Martin 138 10 Overcoming Social Pathologies in Education: On the Concept of Respect in R. S. Peters and Axel Honneth Krassimir Stojanov 156 III. Aspects of Ethical Development and Moral Education 11 Reason and Virtues: The Paradox of R. S. Peters on Moral Education Graham Haydon 168 12 Autonomy in R. S. Peters Educational Theory Stefaan E. Cuypers 185 IV. Peters in Context 13 Richard Peters and Valuing Authenticity Mike Degenhardt 205 14 Vision and Elusiveness in Philosophy of Education: R. S. Peters on the Legacy of Michael Oakeshott Kevin Williams 219 Index 237

The relevance of the philosophical 'mind-body problem' for the status of psychosomatic medicine: a conceptual analysis of the biopsychosocial model.

Psychosomatic medicine, with its prevailing biopsychosocial model, aims to integrate human and exact sciences with their divergent conceptual models. Therefore, its own conceptual foundations, which often remain implicit and unknown, may be critically relevant. We defend the thesis that choosing between different metaphysical views on the ‘mind–body problem’ may have important implications for the conceptual foundations of psychosomatic medicine, and therefore potentially also for its methods, scientific status and relationship with the scientific disciplines it aims to integrate: biomedical sciences (including neuroscience), psychology and social sciences. To make this point, we introduce three key positions in the philosophical ‘mind–body’ debate (emergentism, reductionism, and supervenience physicalism) and investigate their consequences for the conceptual basis of the biopsychosocial model in general and its ‘psycho-biological’ part (‘mental causation’) in particular. Despite the clinical merits of the biopsychosocial model, we submit that it is conceptually underdeveloped or even flawed, which may hamper its use as a proper scientific model.

The Existential Concern of the Humanities R. S. Peters' Justification of Liberal Education.

Abstract Richard Stanley Peters was one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy of education in the twentieth century. After reviewing Peters’ disentanglement of the ambiguities of liberal education, I reconstruct his view on the status and the existential foundations of the humanities. What emerges from my reconstruction is an original justificatory argument for the value of liberal education as general education in the sense of initiation into the heritage of the humanities. To close, I evaluate the scope and power of this argument from the existential concern of the humanities.

The Power and Limits of Philosophy of Education.

This article reflects on different conceptions of educational philosophy, their strengths and weaknesses. Against the backdrop of major alternatives, and the received view, delineated by RS Peters, John White’s recent radically practical conception is critically assessed. Notwithstanding a pluralist answer to the question ‘What is, can or ought philosophy of education to be?’, the article advocates the asymmetrical dependence of all other conceptions upon the analytic conception of educational philosophy as the primus inter pares the first among equals.

What Wittgenstein would have said about personal autonomy

In section 122 of the Investigations Wittgenstein writes: “A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. — Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases. The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance to us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)” (PI, I, # 122).

“Plowden” at 50—R.S. Peters’ Response to Educational Progressivism

In this chapter, I reconstruct the basic structure of Peters’ analytic response to educational progressivism as politically expressed in the 1967 Plowden Report. The report expressed a particular line of thought in educational theory, namely that of educational progressivism or child-centred education. In the 1960s, Peters introduced the analytic paradigm into the philosophy of education in Great Britain. In the socio-economic context of the 1960s, this new paradigm had some institutional as well as political effects. In particular, Peters’ theoretical response to the Plowden Report in Perspectives on Plowden had a practical influence. The chapter proceeds as follows. After a short historical note and a brief rehearsal of the contrast between progressivism and traditionalism, I detail Peters’ fundamental presuppositions in the light of which his critique of child-centred education can be elucidated. These two main presuppositions are, first, the primacy of the social or the public and, second, the ideal of liberal education. Next, I organise his critique around two central themes: first, education and its aims, and, second, the curriculum and the teacher.

Analytic Philosophy of Education and the Concept of Liberal Education

In the second half of the twentieth century, two persons had an enormous impact on one branch of philosophy: that branch was the philosophy of education, and these persons were R.S. Peters and I. Scheffler, the founding fathers of the analytic approach in this philosophical subdiscipline. This chapter, first, introduces and contextualizes the analytic school of thought in the philosophy of education. Preliminary, the identity of analytic philosophy as such is outlined. The focus is primarily on showing how analytic philosophy of education is actually done, and not so much on enumerating theories or dropping names ([Curren R, Robertson E, Hager P, The analytical movement. In: Curren R (ed) A companion to the philosophy of education. Blackwell, Oxford, 2003] already gave an informative catalog). Next, as an example of the analytic approach, the chapter details conceptions of liberal education and delineates justifications of its value.

Skepticism about Autonomy and Responsibility as Educational Aims — What Next?

In liberal democracies it is widely assumed that educating for autonomy and moral responsibility, arguably both significant in educating for citizenship, are educational tasks educators should set themselves. However, starting from straightforward principles of intentional action, we advance an argument for the skeptical conclusion that educating for autonomy — endowing youngsters with the skills and dispositions needed to live autonomous lives — and educating for responsibility — nurturing children into agents disposed, minimally, to perform actions for which they are not morally blameworthy, and, desirably, to perform actions for which they are morally praiseworthy — is misguided, because education should not aim to attain what is largely beyond reach.