Benjamin Miller

This book argues that Aristotelian character education cannot work in liberal democracies today. It shows that when we clearly understand the basic structure of Aristotle’s value theory and correctly grasp the core requirements of liberalism, we will see that they are incompatible with one another through and through. Neo-Aristotelian theories of character have been immensely influential, receiving endorsements from academics, educators, and elected representatives while establishing and influencing major academic centers and numerous K-12 schools, especially in the UK and US. This book argues that despite its meteoric rise and its widespread public influence, neo-Aristotelian character education should be rejected. The author argues that the underlying structure of the theory is incompatible with the sort of value pluralism and antipaternalism that liberal democracies require. The main features that make Aristotelianism attractive—its robust theory of human flourishing that grounds character and its account of the virtue of practical wisdom—are the very same features that make its educational theory illiberal. Understanding the problematic structure of neo-Aristotelian education helps us to better grasp the demands of liberal democracy while also bringing attention to the neglected question of how education for democratic citizenship can be made to fit with equal respect and tolerance of all liberal-compatible ways of living and worldviews. Against Aristotelian Character Education is essential reading for scholars and graduate students interested in philosophy of education, education theory, virtue ethics, practical wisdom, political theory, and Aristotle.

We generalize the [Formula: see text] dichotomy to doubly-indexed sequences of analytic digraphs. Under a mild definability assumption, we use this generalization to characterize the family of Borel actions of tsi Polish groups on Polish spaces that can be decomposed into countably-many Borel actions admitting complete Borel sets that are lacunary with respect to an open neighborhood of the identity. We also show that if the group in question is non-archimedean, then the inexistence of such a decomposition yields a special kind of continuous embedding of [Formula: see text] into the corresponding orbit equivalence relation.

I argue that we cannot fully understand Aristotle’s position on political stability and state preservation in the Politics with paying close attention to his Eudemian Ethics. We learn from considering the Politics and the Eudemian Ethics in concert that even ‘correct’ regimes are unstable when citizens do not possess full virtue. Aristotle introduces his formal account of the knowledge requirements for virtue in Eudemian Ethics 8.3, and he applies these knowledge requirements as an explanation for state decline in Politics 2.9 when discussing the Spartans. If we primarily focus on the Nicomachean Ethics as Aristotle’s single essential ethical work, we will not learn the lesson he intends his readers to take away from the Spartan discussion in the Politics: that virtue requires correct understanding of the hierarchy and structure of the good life. This knowledge prevents the erosion of the virtues of character and the decline of political regimes.