Megan Jane Laverty

The perceived importance of a global experience in higher education is hard to underestimate. University presidents are known to boast of their “percentage,” or the proportion of undergraduates who study abroad. At least part of the rationale is a cosmopolitan one: an essential part of being acknowledged as educated derives in part from an appreciation of different cultures and development of worldliness. The expectation is that a global experience will stand out as an enduring memorial of an encounter with others. These experiences are edified in resumes and narrated with veneration, further illuminating their cultural importance as coming-of-age rituals, particularly among a striding upper middle class...

In this chapter, I address the central and vital role of education in Iris Murdoch’s philosophy. Beginning with her idea of life as a spiritual pilgrimage, I consider two aspects of her thinking. First, I examine her belief in the unavoidable nature of morality and explain that it is implied by her commitment to the progressive character of consciousness. Good can be learnt through everything because human experience is formative. Thus, life forces the concept of value upon us. Second, I expand upon Murdoch’s argument that we find evidence, or a kind proof, for the necessity and sovereignty of the Good in our truth-seeking activities. For Murdoch, these activities are analogues of, and exercises in, moral improvement, and they inspire us to recognise an absolute dimension to life.

In this article we respond to the reviews, which appear in this issue, by Harry Brighouse, David Bakhurst, and Sheron Fraser-Burgess of our edited book Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher (Routledge 2022a). We are grateful for their sympathetic yet critical perspectives, which we take to be the very kind of engagement the philosophy for children movement requires in order to become more integrated with professional philosophical and educational theory and practice. We particularly value this opportunity to dialogue with scholars outside the movement, which has generated the insights we address here. In what follows, we think with our reviewers about what Matthews’ work reveals about areas of promise and of concern in the movement.

I argue that philosophy has a dual role in teacher education: first, it prompts teachers to take individual responsibility for and become more reflective about the values expressed by their teaching practices so as to enable them to teach with greater authenticity; second, it provides teachers with a disciplinary technique that is useful in the facilitation of student reflection and dialogue so as to enable students to think and live more authentically. In this paper, I focus on the former and suggest that because teaching practices are expressions of values, teachers need to become more aware of competing conception of the human good(s)—including their own—and how these inform their relationship to disciplinary expertise, educational institutions, and teaching. I argue that authentic teaching necessitates: a conviction that individuals are improved, as human beings, by what it is they study; a deepening engagement with what this conviction means; and a commitment to its truth by way of how one engages with one’s discipline and students. It is in this regard that I explore Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, in particular, the example of Socrates, his conversations with Callicles, as well as his distinction between sophistry/pandering and educating/healing. In the final part of the paper, I argue that, assuming I am correct about the necessity and value of teaching authentically, philosophy—conceived of as honest, rigorous, ongoing, open-ended and dialogical engagement with our convictions—should be an integral part of any good teacher education program.

Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur both argue for the narrative unity of human life and see this as a basis for ethical theory. Differences aside, they argue that to conceive of one's life as a whole is to tell a story about it, and that, as the good life is the best possible living out of this whole, telling a story about one's life, is a founding move in the good life. Alternatively, Raimond Gaita argues that meaning bestows upon human life a distinctive kind of unity, which he refers to as the narrative unity of a life for the reason that we uniquely disclose the meaning of a life in a story about that life. He argues that the narrative unity of a life is connected with an ethically conditioned consciousness because ethics deepens our sense of the meaning of life. Whilst I agree with Gaita as to both the distinctive unity that meaning confers upon a life, and the connection between the meaning of a life and an ethically conditioned consciousness, I argue that this unity is better characterized as an expressive unity which can be illustrated through the operation of metaphor . I develop my argument by firstly drawing on the resemblance between Gaita's moral philosophy and what Charles Taylor refers to as the expressivism' of Romanticism, and secondly reading E. Annie Proulx's prize winning novel, The Shipping News. What emerges from my reading of The Shipping News with respect to the meaning of a life is, that it is the transformation of the narrative unity of a life that is crucial, and that this transformation is connected with metaphor. The connections that emerge in the first part of the thesis between: narrative unity, metaphor and ethical consciousness open up possibilities for a fresh approach to the connections between aesthetic and ethical consciousness in some central themes in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement. I offer a reading of these central themes in Kant's Critique of Judgement which highlights the connections between narrative unity, the structure of judgement and the unity of consciousness