Stefaan E. Cuypers

There is something deeply wrong with the debate on personal identity in contemporary analytical philosophy. This paper offers an overall view in terms of which this debate can be diagnosed and offered a therapy. In the diagnostic sections, the bundle and ego-theory are described as forms of the selfsame philosophical atomism, and the untenability of one strand in this still highly influential habit of thought is demonstrated. In the therapeutic section, the author exposes in what way Peter Strawson's descriptive metaphysics of the person contains the essential preliminaries for an alternative solution. In the concluding section, it is indicated how such a Strawsonian nonatomistic view can be developed further into an Aristotelian-Thomistic validatory metaphysics of personal identity

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.

Harry Frankfurt is one of the leading contemporary analytical philosophers. His research interests are mainly free will and moral responsibility, as well as moral psychology and ethics in general. He is the author of Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’s Meditations — published in 1970 with a French translation in 1989 — and numerous scholarly articles on Descartes’s philosophy. He is the editor of Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays which appeared in 1972 . His most important book until now is The Importance of What We Care About published in 1988 and a new work, provisionally entitled Necessity, Volition, and Love is forthcoming later in 1998

Although the contributions of John Locke's memory-theory and David Hume's bundle-theory to the construction of the contemporary empiricist theory of personal identity are explicitly acknowledged, empiricist philosophers relatively neglect another important source of inspiration in their debate on personal identity in analytical philosophy, namely Bertrand Russell's philosophy of logical atomism. However, Derek Parfit's radically empiricist and impersonal view on personal identity implicitly is a direct heir of Russell's view on personal identity. In this article, I try to make explicit the Russellian heritage in the contemporary empiricist theory of personal identity by reconstructing Russell's view on the existence and the nature of the 'I' and the identity of the self. For the purpose of explaining Russell's view that 'I' really is the abbreviation for the description 'the subject of the present experience' or 'the subject of «this»', the technical concepts of knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description as well as the notion of a proper name in the logical sense are introduced. And, in order to explain Russell's view on self-identity as constituted by the synchronic relation of 'compresence' and the diachronic R-relation of 'co-personality', the technique of logical construction is appealed to

In the course of presenting the classical debate on personal identity in analytical philosophy, the article argues that this debate leads to an aporetic result. Neither the Bundel Theory nor the Ego Theory can adequately account for both the nature and the importance of personal identity. According to the empiricist account the importance of personal identity is nothing but an existential fiction, while according to the metaphysical account the nature of personal identity in the last analysis consists of an ontological fiction. Correspondingly, the empiricist Bundel Theory gives rise to a destructive conventionalism, whereas the metaphysical Ego Theory involves a miraculous essentialism. The problem of personal identity in analytical philosophy, therefore, still remains unresolved in the light of common-sensical intuitions

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 child's 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 child's own’ only relationally: the autonomous motivational elements are ones with respect to which the future child is self‐governing.

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 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.

abstract An appeal to children's authenticity is widespread in major debates in the philosophy of education. However, no evident uniform conception of authenticity informs the dialectic. We begin with examples that confirm this multiplicity. We then uncover a common strand that unifies these seemingly differing conceptions: authenticity is exemplified by motivational elements, such as the agent's desires, when these elements are, in a manner to be explicated, ‘truly the agent's own’. It is this view of authenticity that is the mainstay of a predicament in the philosophy of education: if education entails intentional instilment of certain motivational elements in the child but such intentional moulding, in the absence of the agent's consent, is generally incompatible with authenticity, how is an authentic education possible? We respond by developing a relational account of authenticity that denies that motivational elements are authentic in their own right; they are authentic only relative to ensuring certain ends.

This article points out an internal tension, or even conflict, in the conceptual foundations of Harvey Siegel’s conception of critical thinking. Siegel justifies critical thinking, or critically rational autonomy, as an educational ideal first and foremost by an appeal to the Kantian principle of respect for persons. It is made explicit that this fundamental moral principle is ultimately grounded in the Kantian conception of autonomous practical reason as normatively and motivationally robust. Yet this Kantian conception openly conflicts with Siegel’s own two-component theory of critical thinking, which on close inspection turns out to be a version of the Humean conception of instrumental practical reason as normatively and motivationally powerless. It is concluded that Siegel cannot have it both ways: he cannot appeal both to means-end and to robust rationality. Siegel’s Kantian justification of the critical thinking educational ideal is, therefore, found wanting in terms of his own Humean premises.

We have conflicting pre-philosophical intuitions about what it means ‘to be true to ourselves.’ On the one hand, autonomy and authenticity seem closely connected to the lucidity of reflectiveness; on the other, they seem tightly interwoven with the immediacy of unreflectiveness. As opposed to a ‘Platonic’ intuition about the inferiority of the unexamined life, we have an equally strong ‘Nietzschean’ intuition about the corrosiveness of the examined life. Broadly speaking, the first intuition is more akin to the tradition of the Enlightenment, and the second, more to that of Romanticism; the one is reminiscent of Descartes and Hume, the other of Rousseau and Herder.The use of the technical term ‘autonomy’ and the concomitant term ‘self’ is primarily limited to philosophy, while in daily life ‘freedom’ and ‘person,’ respectively, are used instead. Unfortunately, in their deployment of these technical terms philosophers have generally failed to acknowledge the two modes of ‘being true to ourselves’ associated with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, for they usually employ the concept of autonomy in a unitary way.

We haveconflictingpre-philosophical intuitions about what it means ‘to be true to ourselves.’ On the one hand, autonomy and authenticity seem closely connected to the lucidity of reflectiveness; on the other, they seem tightly interwoven with the immediacy of unreflectiveness. As opposed to a ‘Platonic’ intuition about the inferiority of the unexamined life, we have an equally strong ‘Nietzschean’ intuition about the corrosiveness of the examined life. Broadly speaking, the first intuition is more akin to the tradition of the Enlightenment, and the second, more to that of Romanticism; the one is reminiscent of Descartes and Hume, the other of Rousseau and Herder.The use of the technical term ‘autonomy’ and the concomitant term ‘self’ is primarily limited to philosophy, while in daily life ‘freedom’ and ‘person,’ respectively, are used instead. Unfortunately, in their deployment of these technical terms philosophers have generally failed to acknowledge the two modes of ‘being true to ourselves’ associated with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, for they usually employ the concept of autonomy in a unitary way.