James Scott Johnston

In this paper I examine a controversy ongoingwithin current Deweyan philosophy of educationscholarship regarding the proper role and scopeof science in Dewey's concept of inquiry. Theside I take is nuanced. It is one that issensitive to the importance that Dewey attachesto science as the best method of solvingproblems, while also sensitive to thosestatements in Dewey that counter a wholesalereductivism of inquiry to scientific method. Iutilize Dewey's statements regarding the placeaccorded to inquiry in aesthetic experiences ascharacteristic of his method, as bestconceived.

Concentrating on Schelling’s lectures of 1833–1834 regarding the history of philosophy, together with the Berlin lectures of 1842, I will discuss Schelling’s critique of negative philosophy in light of Hegel’s philosophy of negation. I then turn to the contemporary tendency to immanentize Hegel—the reliance of the strictly dialectical movement in coming to determine a shape of Spirit; this will be done with reference to two modern examples in the Anglo-American Hegel scholarship. Finally, drawing on particular statements from Hegel’s Encyclopedia logic and Philosophy of Mind, I turn to the speculative interest Reason takes in the dialectical movement and discuss why and how only this interest can qualify as a positive intervention that can be used to respond back to Schelling.

James Scott Johnston's incisive study draws on a holistic reading of Kant: one that views him as developing and testing a complete system (theoretical, practical, historical and anthropological) with education as a vital component. As such, the book begins with an extensive overview of Kant's chief theoretical work (the Critique of Pure Reason), and from that overview distils crucial discussions (the role of practical reason; the claims of the third antinomy) for his moral theory. An extended discussion of Kant's moral and political theories and the place of pedagogy in it follow, with attention to all of Kant's important moral works as well as his chief religious work, Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason. A discussion of culture and character follows, chiefly through a discussion of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint, together with certain lectures and published essays on history and politics. Finally, an extensive discussion of Kant's published works on education, together with only recently published letters and announcements (in English), is provided. This culminates in Johnston's estimation of what a Kantian education, systematically conceived, might look like: an education that is attentive to theoretical, moral, cultural-historical, and pedagogic domains of Kant's thinking.

In this paper, I discuss the Ontario College of Teachers’ most recent versions of the Standards of Practice with William Hare’s counsel on being open-minded regarding open-mindedness in mind. Specifically, I insist that the use of the Standards of Practice as guidelines for working through cases of professional and ethical issues requires yet another rule to indicate when to deviate from this or that standard. In this way, open-mindedness consists of developing and following rules to indicate when and where specific standards should be bypassed. These rules vary, however, one source of these can be found in what Barbara Herman has called, “Rules of Moral Salience”—rules that guide us in our day-to-day moral decision-making and that we draw on when called upon to make moral-ethical judgments. What this means for various ethics (ethics of care; Kantian-type ethics, psychological and/or developmental accounts of ethics) is also broached.

These are exciting times for the philosophy and historiography of German Idealism. While in the first half of the 20th century, scholars have been content to provide stand-alone works on single thinkers, we see since Dieter Henrich’s Hegel im Kontext a trend that involves the setting of thinkers side by side in a constructive dialogue. While not every thinker gets an equal share of the time, the trend is towards more equitable exegeses. Rethinking German Idealism is no exception. While the editors did not set out to overtly juxtapose various thinkers and programs of German Idealism in the text, they did set out to create a dialogue amongst them, and the upshot of this dialogue serves nicely as an example of such juxtaposition.

Katrin Flikschuh presses Karl Amerik’s notion of recursive justification into service with respect to the question whether nomads have an obligation to enter statehood. Flikschuh answers in the negative, and claims that nomads, who have not entered into the civil condition, cannot be expected to conform to the obligations of statehood. I agree with Flikschuh’s claim, and provide further support through Kant’s arguments in the Lectures on Logic that such obligations as statehood are objective criteria of judging, and require the raising of subjective claims to practical reality—a condition that cannot be meet on the part of settlers alone.