•  11
    Testimonial justice and the voluntarism problem: the virtue of just acceptance
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 57 (4-5): 803-825. 2024.
    ABSTRACT This paper examines the ‘voluntarism’ challenge for achieving testimonial justice and advocates the virtue of just acceptance of testimony as the right target for efforts to alleviate testimonial injustice. First, we review the credibility deficit case of interpersonal testimonial injustice and explain how the doxastic voluntarism problem poses a challenge to redressing such testimonial injustice. Specifically, the voluntarism problem seems to rule out straightforward control over what …Read more
  •  31
    Introduction: A Thicker Epistemology?
    Philosophical Papers 37 (3): 337-343. 2008.
    Abstract The distinction between thick and thin concepts has been a central part of recent discussion in metaethics. Whilst there is a debate regarding how best to characterise the distinction, it is commonly accepted that ethical theorising traditionally focuses on the thin, leading some to contend that moving from considering thin to thick concepts leads to a very different, and preferable, conception of ethics. Not only does a similar distinction between thick and thin concepts suggest itself…Read more
  •  9
    In The Main Enterprise of the World, Philip Kitcher identifies an over-specialized and over-loaded curriculum as a particular affliction of education in our time. Kitcher criticizes a narrow view of education on which it is conceived as being no more than job training and proposes a more humane set of educational goals to be pursued in school. For Kitcher, the problem of the narrowness of the economic aims of education and the problem of the over-loaded curriculum are connected and, in Chapter 2…Read more
  • Education and the Growth of Knowledge (edited book)
    Wiley. 2013-12-25.
  •  3
    Two Social Dimensions of Expertise
    with J. P. Smit
    In Christopher Winch & Mark Addis (eds.), Education and Expertise, Wiley. 2018.
    In the study of expertise, few debates come as big as that between constructivists and realists. This chapter discusses the signal debate between realists and constructivists about expertise. It sets out a view that includes aspects of both the constructivist and realist position to show that insights from what is often considered to be rival camps can be incorporated in a position that does justice to both. The chapter argues that, while expertise is real, there are two distinct social dimensio…Read more
  •  65
    Who Should Go to University? Justice in University Admissions
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 47 (4): 623-641. 2013.
    Current debates regarding justice in university admissions most often approach the question of access to university from a technical, policy-focussed perspective. Despite the attention that access to university receives in the press and policy literature, ethical discussion tends to focus on technical matters such as who should pay for university or which schemes of selection are allowable, not the question of who should go to university in the first place. We address the question of university …Read more
  •  68
    Why hobbits cannot exist
    with J. P. Smit
    Think 8 (21): 29-36. 2009.
    Kotzee and Smit explain why, if unicorns don't exist, then they could not possibly have existed. In fact, even if horned horses were discovered somewhere, they would not necessarily be unicorns. The key to understanding why this is so lies in understanding how so-called natural kind terms function
  •  10
    The Intellectual Goals of Character Education
    Philosophy of Education 72 315-324. 2016.
  •  3
    Educating Cyborgs
    Philosophy of Education 73 82-100. 2017.
  •  6
    Purism About Educational Justice
    Philosophy of Education 77 (1): 18-23. 2021.
  •  12
    Commentary on Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence
    Studies in Philosophy and Education 41 (1): 121-125. 2021.
  •  61
    Virtue epistemology is among the dominant influences in mainstream epistemology today. An important commitment of one strand of virtue epistemology – responsibilist virtue epistemology – is that it must provide regulative normative guidance for good thinking. Recently, a number of virtue epistemologists have held that virtue epistemology not only can provide regulative normative guidance, but moreover that we should reconceive the primary epistemic aim of all education as the inculcation of the …Read more
  •  45
    Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have, in recent years, become increasingly popular. An important challenge facing MOOCs is the ‘teacher bandwidth problem’: In the MOOC environment, where there are potentially hundreds of thousands of students, it is impossible for a few teachers to interact with individual students—there is not enough ‘teacher bandwidth’. According to Siemens and Downes’s theory of ‘connectivism’ (Siemens, 2004) one can make up for the lack of teacher bandwidth by relying on…Read more
  •  14
    Show and Tell: Demonstration as Practical Testimony
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 54 (2): 356-376. 2020.
  •  1112
    Virtue epistemology is among the dominant influences in mainstream epistemology today. An important commitment of one strand of virtue epistemology – responsibilist virtue epistemology (e.g., Montmarquet 1993; Zagzebski 1996; Battaly 2006; Baehr 2011) – is that it must provide regulative normative guidance for good thinking. Recently, a number of virtue epistemologists (most notably Baehr, 2013) have held that virtue epistemology not only can provide regulative normative guidance, but moreover t…Read more
  •  29
    Intellectual Perfectionism about Schooling
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (3): 436-456. 2018.
    In education, character education is a burgeoning field; however, it is also the target of considerable criticism. Amongst criticisms of character education, the political criticism that character education is a form of indoctrination stands out. In particular, the charge is made against character education that it breaches the principle of liberal neutrality about the good. In this article I discuss liberal approaches to character education. I outline the two most prominent liberal approaches t…Read more
  •  20
    Towards an Empirically Informed Account of Phronesis in Medicine
    with Alexis Paton and Mervyn Conroy
    Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 59 (3): 337-350. 2016.
    In medical ethics, a large body of work exists on the virtues that enable good medical practice. Medical virtue ethics singles out a number of virtues of the good doctor for attention; among others, these include empathy, care, truthfulness, and justice. According to medical ethicists like Pellegrino and Thomasma, however, phronesis, or “practical wisdom,” occupies a special place among these virtues. For Pellegrino and Thomasma, phronesis is “indispensable” to good medical practice, because it …Read more
  •  29
    Measuring ‘virtue’ in medicine
    with Agnieszka Ignatowicz
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 19 (2): 149-161. 2016.
    Virtue-approaches to medical ethics are becoming ever more influential. Virtue theorists advocate redefining right or good action in medicine in terms of the character of the doctor performing the action. In medical education, too, calls are growing to reconceive medical education as a form of character formation. Empirical studies of doctors’ ethics from a virtue-perspective, however, are few and far between. In this respect, theoretical and empirical study of medical ethics are out of alignmen…Read more
  •  16
    Two Social Dimensions of Expertise
    with Jp Smit
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 51 (3): 640-654. 2017.
  •  35
    Poisoning the Well and Epistemic Privilege
    Argumentation 24 (3): 265-281. 2010.
    In this paper, a challenge is outlined for Walton’s recent analysis of the fallacy of poisoning the well. An example of the fallacy in action during a debate on affirmative action on a South African campus is taken to raise the question of how Walton’s analysis squares with the idea that disadvantaged parties in debates about race may be epistemically privileged . It is asked when the background of a participant is relevant to a debate and it is proposed that a proper analysis of the poisoning t…Read more
  •  31
    Virtue in Medical Practice: An Exploratory Study
    with Agnieszka Ignatowicz and Hywel Thomas
    HEC Forum 29 (1): 1-19. 2017.
    Virtue ethics has long provided fruitful resources for the study of issues in medical ethics. In particular, study of the moral virtues of the good doctor—like kindness, fairness and good judgement—have provided insights into the nature of medical professionalism and the ethical demands on the medical practitioner as a moral person. Today, a substantial literature exists exploring the virtues in medical practice and many commentators advocate an emphasis on the inculcation of the virtues of good…Read more
  •  153
    Our vision and our mission: Bullshit, assertion and belief
    South African Journal of Philosophy 26 (2): 163-175. 2007.
    “Bullshit”, as Harry Frankfurt writes in his recent book, On Bullshit, is a communication that pretends to be genuinely informative, but really is not. The person who talks bullshit, Frankfurt holds, is unconcerned with whether what he says is true, but is very concerned with how he is thought of by the listener. In this paper, I discuss Frankfurt's theory of bullshit, making specific reference to the requirement for deceptive intent on the part of the bullshitter, and to whether bullshitting mu…Read more
  •  63
    Educational Justice, Epistemic Justice, and Leveling Down
    Educational Theory 63 (4): 331-350. 2013.
    Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that education is a positional good; this, they hold, implies that there is a qualified case for leveling down educational provision. In this essay, Ben Kotzee discusses Brighouse and Swift's argument for leveling down. He holds that the argument fails in its own terms and that, in presenting the problem of educational justice as one of balancing education's positional and nonpositional benefits, Brighouse and Swift lose sight of what a consideration of the n…Read more
  •  31
    Learning How
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 50 (2): 218-232. 2016.
    In this paper, I consider intellectualist and anti-intellectualist approaches to knowledge-how and propose a third solution: a virtue-based account of knowledge-how. I sketch the advantages of a virtue-based account of knowledge-how and consider whether we should prefer a reliabilist or a responsibilist virtue-account of knowledge-how. I argue that only a responsibilist account will maintain the crucial distinction between knowing how to do something and merely being able to do it. Such an accou…Read more
  •  59
    Introduction: Education, Social Epistemology and Virtue Epistemology
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 47 (2): 157-167. 2013.
    Since the heyday of analytic philosophy of education, a chill has come over the relationship between the philosophy of education and analytic epistemology. Wher.
  •  55
    Language Learning in Wittgenstein and Davidson
    Studies in Philosophy and Education 33 (4): 413-431. 2013.
    In this paper, I discuss language learning in Wittgenstein and Davidson. Starting from a remark by Bakhurst, I hold that both Wittgenstein and Davidson’s philosophies of language contain responses to the problem of language learning, albeit of a different form. Following Williams, I hold that the concept of language learning can explain Wittgenstein’s approach to the normativity of meaning in the Philosophical Investigations. Turning to Davidson, I hold that language learning can, equally, expla…Read more