Seamus Mulryan

In this article, Seamus Mulryan contends that dialogue about questions that matter to a body politic require the ethical virtue of courage, which is distinct from the virtue of intellectual humility, and this is of central importance in the education of members of a pluralist society. Mulryan begins with Robert Kunzman's theory of Ethical Dialogue and departs from it through Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory of hermeneutic experience and Charles Taylor's claims about the inextricable relationship between self-intelligibility and moral spaces. Finally, Mulryan illustrates the promises and perils of courageous dialogue as an educative activity by way of Plato's Meno, Protagoras, and Gorgias.

Gadamer’s account of interpretation draws from Aristotle’s concept of phronesis to explain the relationship between the universal of the text and the particular of the interpreter. However, Gadamer does not address the moral dimensions of his theory of hermeneutic experience. Experience in general makes us aware of our the particular finiteness of our understanding, and in the particular case of the hermeneutic experience, we can be made aware of the finiteness of human existence in general through the challenging of enough of our radically held beliefs. Our fear of death comes into play, and the ability to withstand such fear would be courage. Drawing from Aristotle, Paul Tillich, and Chögyam Trungpa, I work to reinterpret courage for the particular situation of Gadamerian dialogue.

This article considers the ramifications of the persistently negative representations of educational administrators in popular film and television. It begins with the argument that Hollywood’s pejorative portrayals of principals not only reflect something about what it already means to be an educational administrator, but they also serve a pedagogical role in creating educational administrators. While some scholarship in film studies and cultural studies aptly describe representations of educational administrators, much of this work relies on implicit philosophical assumptions that this article attempts to make explicit. To do so, the article begins by generalizing common filmic representations of principals as reflections of culture and as forces in shaping ideas and narratives about them. Drawing from Henry Giroux, Michel Foucault, and Murray Edelman, the article argues that such portrayals are centrally defining and existentially limiting for principals, and, as such, should be taken seriously by scholars and practitioners of educational administration. The purpose of this article is to broaden understanding of the dynamic between film and viewer to make a strong case both for why we should pay attention to Hollywood portrayals of educational administrators and to direct attention to ways of thinking about the power of these portrayals.

The use of "development" is ubiquitous in everyday language, and theories regarding it can be found in the social sciences and humanities. Although much work has been done to examine the meaning of development and its history, little attention has been paid to Hegel's role as the philosophical anchor for the modern life of "development". By revisiting Hegel's "Philosophy of History" and analyzing some of the most influential thinkers in modern theories of human development--spanning economic, social, cognitive and moral--the author argues that these theories are far from escaping the Hegelian logic of "Development". Furthermore, he warns of the potential violence necessarily assumed in such theories, and that revolutionizing the philosophical framework upon which developmental theories rest would be a worthwhile endeavor.