Natural language contains a variety of means for expressing possibilities consistent with what is known. Particularly well-studied among them are the epistemic modal auxiliaries "might" and "must": (1) a. Ann: "Where is Peter?" b. Mary: "He {might/must} be in his office." There is broad agreement that…

This paper is an investigation of pedagogical tact in terms of vigilance. It is based on a close reading of a passage from Rousseau's "Emile:" a (problematic and troubling) narrative account on the art of hosting a dinner party. Working with the narrative of the dinner party, distinctions are drawn between contrasting ways of knowing,…

While the integrity of academic work has always been vitally important, since the establishment of the International Center for Academic Integrity in 1992 increasing attention has been paid to the area. The term academic integrity now explicitly appears in policy and in job titles or offices tasked with either detection, training, or both.…

In order to include all outlooks and perspectives on the world prevalent in contemporary society, countries like Sweden have replaced traditional religious education with worldview education. However, current worldview theory fails to make justice to two important facts concerning the contemporary religious landscape. Firstly, a great many people…

The recent shift in social science research toward philosophies of the more-than-human has pushed many scholars to question their understanding of units of analysis and agency. While many engage with agencies of the material, few have attempted to address what might be called the agency of ideas. Here, Alexander Pratt argues that engaging with the…

This article's question is whether Spinoza understands the highest human perfection -- which he equates with both our highest good and the love of God -- as a theoretical state, consisting in having knowledge and the perfection of beliefs, or as a practical state, consisting in having virtue and the perfection of action. Consequently, the article…

Part Five of Spinoza's "Ethics" includes a notoriously challenging set of propositions about human perfection. Part of the difficulty in interpreting these elements of the work arises from neglecting important philosophical background for the relevant propositions, namely, medieval Jewish rationalism and Maimonides in particular. Spinoza…

This article develops the ideas of perfection and education in Spinoza and Maimonides. Both thinkers identify human perfection with intellectual knowledge and a transformation in affect. They accordingly envision education in terms of enhancing cognition and shaping the desire to know. The first steps are a critical evaluation of imagination and…

Taking Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu)" as a literary vehicle, this article uses a psychoanalytic lens to examine the problem of what to do with our desires in the philosophy of education. The article describes an apprenticeship, a personal process of learning in which an ethical rapport with…

This article delves into the multifaceted nature of pedagogy, examining its role as both a practical pursuit and an academic discipline concerned with education and upbringing. Positioned within the context of modernity, the overarching objective of pedagogy is framed as the cultivation of a free subject in communities of free people, emphasizing…

This article explores the diverse epistemic perspectives on intelligence, tracing its conceptual evolution across early Indian philosophy, Western philosophical thought and contemporary computational theories. Intelligence is examined as a dynamic, multifaceted phenomenon that transcends mere cognition, extending into embodied, ecological and…

Siegel claimed that teachers are obliged to provide grounds whenever demanded, as a result of which they must be able to subject to scrutiny whatever they teach. In this paper, however, and taking as a reference Wittgenstein's "On Certainty," it is shown that such a demand cannot work for second language teachers because their main task…

The recent proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) raises questions as to the role of such tools both within an educational learning environment and their epistemic capacity. If, as Alfred North Whitehead remarked, western philosophy indeed 'consists of a series of footnotes to Plato', it would be of doubtless importance to evaluate the…

This paper outlines the development of a new Indigenous research methodology: Indigenous Literature Re-view Methodology (ILRM). In the rejection of the idea that Western, dominant forms of research 'about' Indigenous peoples are most valid, ILRM was developed with aims to research in ways that give greater emphasis to Indigenous voices and…

This article draws on the research findings of a case study at Greerton Early Learning Centre in Aotearoa, New Zealand, utilising data from the teachers' research inquiries into their professional practice. Teachers' inquiries included Learning Stories -- a research-based sociocultural narrative assessment approach -- written for children and…