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This paper studies how Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' offers a meaningful account of political and moral self-education in Western democracies. Emerson's moral perfectionism involves an ethical, political and democratic individualism that needs to be reconsidered. This paper explores a perfectionist interpretation of the modern forms of self-education as political and ordinary practices, first with the case of conspiracy theories, which express an individual desire for self-education but appear as the result of a lack of self-reliance and a failure of political self-education, and then through the explicit claim to self-education made by activists in ecological, anti-racial or feminist organisations, which embodies the democratic need for self-reliance. These two examples reveal a new kind of efficient and ordinary political power at the edge of civic commitment. This leads us to define an alternative conception of pedagogy, in which equality in self-reliance matters. This also underlines our moral and ordinary political responsibility and challenges the traditional philosophical opposition between personal and public, subjective and universal. This paper underlines the accuracy of Stanley Cavell's interpretation of Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' in order to provide a perfectionist interpretation of activism. It also opens a new crossed perspective between the French and American approaches.

Immanuel Kant famously wants us to think for ourselves. However, thinking collaboratively is often preferable to solitary thinking, especially in educational contexts. In this paper, I argue that Kant does not advocate a problematic form of epistemic or pedagogical individualism. For my argument, I focus on the area that, one might suspect, lends itself the least to collaborative reasoning on Kant's framework: morality founded in rational a priori structures. I show that Kant is aware of both the prospects and limits of reasoning on one's own and with others. According to Kant, openness, rooted in an attitude of mutual trust, is required to reason well with others. Kant, however, does underestimate the significance of diversity for collaborative reasoning.

In this paper, I investigate the potential of a Kantian account of moral education to facilitate the development of humanity towards much-needed change in individual and collective responses to global problems such as climate change. Kant's account of moral development is focused on the internal motivation for and not the external result of action. An often-proposed strategy to tackle climate change consists of calling for various juridical sanctions, rules and laws that regulate the climate-affecting actions of agents, as well as the behaviour of corporations and even nations. I agree with such approaches, which on a Kantian framework belong to the sphere of state or international legislation. Significantly, Kant emphasises that legal sanctions on external actions are only one of two main aspects of morality, the other being free actions and their underlying motivations. My focus is on investigating how Kant's account of moral progress on an individual and collective level can provide a perspective that complements the politico-juridical solutions to this problem. My starting point is a brief overview of the available means of bettering human beings on an individual level. I then discuss Kant's propositions for moral change on the collective and eventually global levels, while showing the significance of shaping not only the global legal order, but also communal participation in the idea of the kingdom of ends. I then proceed to show how Kant's demanding account of the ethical community can be interpreted in a weaker sense and serve to better understand some modern problems and offer practical prescriptions for informal moral education on a collective level. In so doing, I apply the general account of moral education on the collective level to the problem of climate change, while showing that the Kantian means for moral progress might be of value in stopping humanity on its march to self-destruction.

Posing the question "How diverse is philosophy of education in the West?" this paper responds to two recent defences of African philosophy of education which endorse its communitarianism and oppose individualism in Western philosophy of education. After outlining Thaddeus Metz's argument that Western philosophy of education should become more African by being more communitarian, and Yusef Waghid's defence of communitarianism in African philosophy of education, we develop a qualified defence of aspects of individualism in education. Our reservations about some aspects of communitarianism lead us to argue for a role for some forms of individualism in African as well as Western education. Finally, reflecting on what is at stake in this kind of comparative philosophy of education, we argue that an over-emphasis on cultural differences can distract philosophers of education from the attention they should pay to the common dangers posed across continents by the influence of global capitalism on education.

We suggest in this paper that the practice of philosophy with children can be fruitfully understood as an example of a transindividual system. The adoption of the term "transindividuality" serves two main purposes: it allows us to focus on individuation as a process and at the same time to problematise some of the classical antinomies of Western philosophy that continue to inform our understanding of the relation between individuality and community. We argue that the practice of philosophical inquiry with children, when interpreted in terms of Spinoza's conceptions of relational individuality and affective reason, offers a compelling example of how shared thinking operates as an individuating process in that knowledge and affect, interiority and exteriority, individuality and collectivity can be experienced in action and thought as complementary aspects of the same process.

This paper studies how Emerson's 'Self‐Reliance' offers a meaningful account of political and moral self‐education in Western democracies. Emerson's moral perfectionism involves an ethical, political and democratic individualism that needs to be reconsidered. This paper explores a perfectionist interpretation of the modern forms of self‐education as political and ordinary practices, first with the case of conspiracy theories, which express an individual desire for self‐education but appear as the result of a lack of self‐reliance and a failure of political self‐education, and then through the explicit claim to self‐education made by activists in ecological, anti‐racial or feminist organisations, which embodies the democratic need for self‐reliance. These two examples reveal a new kind of efficient and ordinary political power at the edge of civic commitment. This leads us to define an alternative conception of pedagogy, in which equality in self‐reliance matters. This also underlines our moral and ordinary political responsibility and challenges the traditional philosophical opposition between personal and public, subjective and universal. This paper underlines the accuracy of Stanley Cavell's interpretation of Emerson's 'Self‐Reliance' in order to provide a perfectionist interpretation of activism. It also opens a new crossed perspective between the French and American approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immanuel Kant famously wants us to think for ourselves. However, thinking collaboratively is often preferable to solitary thinking, especially in educational contexts. In this paper, I argue that Kant does not advocate a problematic form of epistemic or pedagogical individualism. For my argument, I focus on the area that, one might suspect, lends itself the least to collaborative reasoning on Kant's framework: morality founded in rational a priori structures. I show that Kant is aware of both the prospects and limits of reasoning on one's own and with others. According to Kant, openness, rooted in an attitude of mutual trust, is required to reason well with others. Kant, however, does underestimate the significance of diversity for collaborative reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capability approach is a very fruitful framework for thinking about and assessing the human development of societies. Our purpose in this paper is to analyse whether the capability approach is a suitable way to illuminate education as a common good and how education must be understood as a common good. For this purpose, it is important to first consider the criticism that the capability approach is excessively individualistic. Rather than dwelling on the concept of 'collective capability', we will explore the extent to which the capability approach enables us to understand the concept of the 'common good' of education not in non‐collectivist terms but in terms of human development of individuals and communities as custodians of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White defends his position that educating a pupil for autonomy, where she is left with the option of autonomously choosing to become nonautonomous, is not an arbitrary imposition in the same way as inculcating a Catholic or Communist or Muslim way of life would be. (RM)

John White argues that autonomy is an essential ingredient in anyone's well-being. He holds that for educators to attempt to develop a pupil's autonomy is not an arbitrary imposition in the same way as inculcating a Catholic or Communist way of life would be. Flaws in his argument are discussed. (RM)

Posing the question 'How diverse is philosophy of education in the West?' this paper responds to two recent defences of African philosophy of education which endorse its communitarianism and oppose individualism in Western philosophy of education. After outlining Thaddeus Metz's argument that Western philosophy of education should become more African by being more communitarian, and Yusef Waghid's defence of communitarianism in African philosophy of education, we develop a qualified defence of aspects of individualism in education. Our reservations about some aspects of communitarianism lead us to argue for a role for some forms of individualism in African as well as Western education. Finally, reflecting on what is at stake in this kind of comparative philosophy of education, we argue that an over-emphasis on cultural differences can distract philosophers of education from the attention they should pay to the common dangers posed across continents by the influence of global capitalism on education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the international momentum of the school effectiveness movement continues, its exponents remain largely impervious to criticism. This paper argues that while they may not readily align themselves with the individualistic aspects of Conservative social philosophy, their methodology necessarily secretes an atomised social ontology. The charge of ideological commitment rests on the fact that the essentially positivist epistemology employed by school effectiveness researchers presupposes an ontology of closed systems and atomistic events. Thus any notion of the structuring of life-chances is automatically ruled out of court. The reciprocity of social ontology and methodology is explored in order to account for the myopia of the school effectiveness movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I argue, first, that René Arcilla's project in his book Wim Wenders's Road Movies: Education without Learning, can be understood as an effort to draw the reader away from a conception of personhood grounded in the Enlightenment and towards an expressive‐romantic conception. Yet the sense of the person to which Arcilla leads the reader alters the Romantic conception considerably. Arcilla is attentive not only to how a disengaged, instrumental and fragmented approach to life can lead one astray but also to how a highly individualised search for authenticity and truth can sever one's connection to others and the world. In his proposal for a certain kind of education, Arcilla transcends and yet retains key components of the individualism that has troubled so many critics of both strands of the modern identity. The second argument of this essay is that a distinct pedagogical approach can be detected in Arcilla's text, one that is aligned with his conception of the kind of self into which the reader is being educated. In essence, Arcilla enacts the shifted conception of education that his book describes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing accounts of teaching and the teacher‐learner relationship stand in the tradition of epistemic individualism: The teacher produces signals or utterances that the learner uses as evidence to form beliefs. In this article, I argue for an alternative, second‐personal, account of teaching in which teacher and learner mutually recognise their participation in a joint enterprise to get the learner to acquire knowledge and capacities that she does not yet possess. A particular version of this account is defended which regards children as 'self‐conscious learners' who place their epistemic trust in teachers and recognise them as providing the standards of evaluation against which their behaviour is measured. Empirical work is cited to support these ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]