Steinar Bøyum

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is best known for its documentation of increasing social inequality, but it also has a notable normative aspect. Although Piketty is far less clear on the normative level than on the empirical, his view of justice can be summarised as meritocratic luck egalitarianism. This leads him to condemn as unjust the fact that inheritance is once again becoming more important than education for determining social position. In this paper, I discuss whether Piketty's normative conception can justify this condemnation. My main thesis will be that Piketty ends up in a dilemma that he cannot resolve with the normative resources he has at his disposal. The horns of this dilemma are defined by whether or not we accept what Susan Hurley calls ‘the regression requirement’, and in both cases the normative distinction between inheritance and education as ways to achieve social positions disappears. Toward the end, I shall suggest an alternative justification for the moral superiority of education over inheritance, which makes use of one of Piketty's key empirical arguments.

In this paper, I explore different ways of picturing language learning in philosophy, all of them inspired by Wittgenstein and all of them concerned about scepticism of meaning. I start by outlining the two pictures of children and language learning that emerge from Kripke's famous reading of Wittgenstein. Next, I explore how social-pragmatic readings, represented by Meredith Williams, attempt to answer the sceptical anxieties. Finally, drawing somewhat on Stanley Cavell, I try to resolve these issues by investigating what characteristically happens to our view of language learning when we do philosophy. The focus throughout is on the relation between the individual (the learning child) and the community (usually represented by the parents), and how that relation is deformed when we operate with a certain philosophical notion of ground.

Strangely, the concept of philosophical education is not much in use, at least not as a philosophical concept. In this essay, Steinar Bøyum attempts to outline such a philosophical concept of philosophical education. Bøyum uses Plato's Allegory of the Cave, René Descartes's life of doubt, and Immanuel Kant's criticism of metaphysics as paradigms or defining examples of this concept. Bøyum's aim in this essay is not exegetical; rather, he hopes to describe these examples in a way that will let their character as conceptions of philosophical education show forth. His underlying aims are to show which forms such conceptions may take and why philosophical education is or should be an important topic for both philosophy and education.

This paper explores John Rawls’s strangely neglected notion, the political conception as educator, which captures how the public political culture can educate citizens. The aim is to elucidate both the idea itself and above all its function in Rawls’s Political Liberalism. After first surveying its main content and some historical parallels, the main body of the paper explores why Rawls places so much trust in the educative effect of institutions and, apparently, so little in schools. Along the way we shall discuss the relation between political liberalism and republicanism, the border disagreement between political conception and comprehensive doctrine, Mackie’s distinction between wide and narrow morality and the importance of trust in Rawls’s view of society

In the present essay, I aim to accentuate an analogy between the patterns of thought articulated by Berkeley's Hylas and those of Nagel in his philosophy of bats and aliens. The comparison has a critical purpose, with Philonous playing a role similar to that of Wittgenstein. I argue that Nagel's central claim comes down to statements that are marked by a peculiar form of emptiness. Towards the end, though, I will concede that this kind of Wittgensteinian criticism runs up against certain limits. The fantasies produced by Hylas or Nagel have as counterparts genuine philosophical expressions of experience, which are not vulnerable to the charges levelled at their theoretical parallels.