Book Reviews 711

on the contemporary scene as ethically neutral philosophy of action. Fur-

thermore, if practical judgments, like other kinds of judgments, are
equally judgments whether they are true or false (Korsgaard, we have
noted, is hospitable to the idea of practical truth), there is a presumption
that the action embodying a practical judgment (on which see the elo-
quent peroration of Essay 7, “Acting for a Reason,” 228-29) is equally an
action ceteris paribus whether it and the judgment are morally right or
wrong. It may be possible to argue effectively against this presumption.
On the other hand, it would be difficult, under the aegis of Plato and
Aristotle, to argue that a false practical judgment fails to be a judgment
whereas a true one succeeds. It is vitally important to Plato (although not
particularly in the Republic: see, rather, the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Phi-
lebus) that false judgment (doxa) is as much judgment as true; it is one of
his greatest achievements to have shown that this is so. And Aristotle
takes this part of the Platonic legacy for granted.
The themes I have selected to discuss from Korsgaard’s collection
deserve much lengthier attention that the present space allows. And the
volume contains much else besides that will more than reward the inter-
est of philosophers.

Sarah Broadie
University of St. Andrews
Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 36, No. 4 (October 2010)

Harvey Siegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xiii + 548 pp.

This handbook joins several heavyweight companions, guides, and an-

thologies published in the last decade on philosophy of education, signal-
ing a renaissance in a field that seemed moribund after the 1970s. It thus
joins a very small library of indispensable starting points. It will reward
study by philosophers already actively engaged with educational issues
and well serve philosophers new to the field.
The Handbook delivers twenty-eight substantial, carefully wrought,
informative chapters treating such topics as indoctrination, fallibility,
empathy, values, skepticism, imagination, stereotypes, and many others.
The chapters try to extract the good from the bad in debates about critical
thinking, constructivism, multiculturalism, religious toleration, moral and
civic education, parents’ rights, and curriculum design. Some of the
chapters are quite original (e.g., Philip Kitcher’s and Elijah Millgram’s);
712 Book Reviews

some ought to go on required reading lists (e.g., Nicholas Burbules’s and

Meira Levinson’s); all make important distinctions and clarify contempo-
rary debates. There’s not a clunker in the lot.
Each chapter deserves its own comments, but here I will touch on
only a handful to address a question that in one form or another raises its
head throughout the Handbook: does philosophy have anything useful to
say to educational practitioners—teachers, principals, curriculum design-
ers, and policymakers? When I declared in my initial paragraph that the
Handbook was an indispensable starting place, the claim required a qua-
lification. This is a book written by philosophers for philosophers. The
chapters presuppose too much familiarity with philosophical argument
and philosophical topics to allow nonphilosophers ready access to their
results. Even academics in allied fields will find the chapters hard going.
Teachers, principals, and other practitioners will find them impenetrable.
Perhaps this is unavoidable. Philosophical issues are abstruse and diffi-
cult. There’s no getting around this fact.
Yet there are hints in the Handbook of a different story line. D.C.
Phillips in his contribution contends that philosophers of education give
“short shrift” to empirical research. They are not well-grounded in edu-
cational practice and “claim more” for philosophical argument than it can
deliver. If this is true, what lesson should we draw? Lesson One points
toward a multidisciplinary engagement with education: the philosopher
of education should let go of disciplinary boundaries and embrace the
full panoply of scholarship in education. She should become historian,
economist, sociologist, legal analyst, and engaged observer as well as
philosopher. Lesson Two—one Phillips more explicitly embraces—
points toward fertilizing traditional philosophy with new material. More
familiarity with the educational research literature would enable philoso-
phers to tackle “substantive and methodological issues” that lurk there,
such as issues about causation. However, unless the philosopher is will-
ing to become a statistician in the process, her thoughts on causation are
likely to reach back to the standard philosophical tangles that make cau-
sation such a recondite and intractable subject. Lesson Two sends us
back to square one. If getting straight on educational policy requires sett-
ling philosophical issues about causation, then there’s little hope of suc-
cess. Similarly, if to support educational proposals we first need to re-
solve the free will-determinism debate, or propose a correct metaethics,
or decide between internalist and externalist accounts of epistemic justi-
fication, then surely the task is hopeless.
The essays into which these concepts enter offer very thoughtful and,
to my mind, persuasive resting places, but I wonder why the concepts
need to be introduced at all. Stefaan Cuypers, for example, works
through the “metaphysics of free will” on his way to offering an unex-
 Book Reviews 713

ceptional criterion of “authenticity”: a child has an “authentic evaluative

scheme” if it permits the child as she grows up to act as a morally re-
sponsible agent. A morally responsible agent is one who uses appropriate
moral concepts and conforms her conduct to appropriate moral norms.
Certain kinds of “hideously depraving conditions” or “traumatic expe-
riences” might make a child literally unable as an adult to satisfy the
conditions of responsibility. Fair enough. But what are the actual forms
of “harsh paternalism,” “indoctrination,” or “offensive manipulation”
that generate this literal inability? Garden-variety paternalism, manipula-
tion, and deception are part of any child’s upbringing. Even unattractive
forms can leave grown children with the ability to act as responsible
agents in this weak sense. Cuypers’s very abstract criterion “solves” a
problem in philosophy of education (the “paradox of moral education”)
that practical educators don’t concern themselves about, and leaves un-
addressed the actual practices that may worry them.
Of course, philosophy always has an important negative role to play
in a policy field. Philosophers can help practitioners and scholars avoid
bad philosophy. They can undermine the temptation to drag unneeded
philosophical contentions into practical concerns. They can cut through
stalemated debates by disentangling practical and philosophical claims.
Phillips perhaps has this negative role in mind when he broaches the con-
tribution philosophers can make to research methodology. Richard Gran-
dy aids the constructivism debates by showing that cognitive constructiv-
ism is not the same thing as metaphysical constructivism, that the one
doesn’t imply the other, and that the latter is beside the point for educa-
tors and curriculum designers. Robert Audi distinguishes methodological
naturalism (natural sciences look for natural explanations) from philo-
sophical naturalism (the view that the universe consists only of natural
processes) or philosophical materialism (the view that the universe con-
sists only of material objects and processes). The debate over teaching
evolution might proceed less acrimoniously if anti-evolutionists on the
one side and sloppy scientific textbooks on the other didn’t equate or
thoughtlessly conflate the methodological and the philosophical. Nicho-
las Burbules sets the record straight on what “postmodernism” contends
and doesn’t contend.
However, is there a positive contribution philosophers can make to
practice? Let’s turn back to Lesson One noted above. Philip Kitcher ges-
tures toward such a lesson in his chapter, “Education, Democracy, and
Capitalism.” In it he purports to set out and endorse John Dewey’s “new
conception” of philosophy. “Instead of taking metaphysics, epistemology,
and the study of mind and language” as central concerns, Kitcher writes,
philosophy on Dewey’s view “begins with study of the good life, aims to
understand how opportunities for living well can be promoted by social
714 Book Reviews

institutions,” and considers how education—pivotal to philosophical in-

quiry—can “promote individual flourishing,” prepare thoughtful and co-
operative citizens, “expand public knowledge,” and “foster the advance
of human culture.” This ambitious agenda implies a rich and humane
schooling for all children, an implication that confronts a hard reality,
according to Kitcher. The reality is this: such schooling is economically
inefficient. Societies that sort out children according to talents and train
them in narrowly useful arts will enjoy greater economic success than
societies that try to follow Dewey’s ideal. Dewey’s educational proposals
are a recipe for social eclipse if not social suicide. According to Kitcher,
Dewey saw this clearly; he saw that for his ideal to be realized, “present
economic conditions need transforming.”
Now, I have truncated Kitcher’s argument severely, perhaps making it
seem much less plausible than it is, in order to draw out the apparently
sweeping scope of the “new conception” of philosophy. If philosophers
must tell us how to transform economic conditions, then they need to tell
us about a great many things they don’t talk about now. They need to tell
us about domestic and global finance, international regimes of intellec-
tual property rights, efficient forms of domestic taxation, tariffs and trade
agreements, optimal regulation of markets, viable energy policies, and
much, much more. If they are to tell us how best to live not in sweepingly
general terms but in response to specific conditions, they must truly be
psychologists, historians, anthropologists, legal theorists, theologians,
scientists. In short, they must be polymaths. That, anyway, seems to me
the thrust of the “new conception”—although at the very end of his ar-
gument Kitcher blurs the picture. In his summing-up, he notes that the
question of how to live well arises in a “wide variety of times and places”
with particular social and cultural features.
Philosophers respond to these more localized and precise forms of the general question,
and their attempts to provide answers generate further issues—so arise the fields of meta-
physics and epistemology, as ancillary domains that have to be explored to make progress
on the fundamental issues. (314)

So metaphysics and epistemology come back in after all, it seems. Why?

What “fundamental issues” stand in the way of a localized and tailored
answer to questions of living well? For example, in order to develop a
system of schooling that produces students who can think for themselves,
do we have to follow the lead of Cuypers and address the metaphysics of
freedom?
Having apparently reversed course, Kitcher immediately seems to
take it back. As the philosopher’s exploration proceeds, he writes,
[i]t is all too easy for technical issues to gain a life of their own, and for them to be pur-
sued without any sense of ultimate purpose. Philosophy ossifies, becoming removed from
 Book Reviews 715

the needs of the ambient culture. Dewey invites his contemporaries—and us—to scrutinize
the accepted agenda and accepted programs of philosophy, in the interests of addressing
the most important questions as they arise within our own time and place. (314)

Here the “invitation” is away from metaphysics and epistemology, even

as ancillary inquiries, because the most important questions for us, in
Kitcher’s words, center on the economic preconditions of achieving a
rich and humane schooling for all children. I think this means, whether
Kitcher intends it or not, that we are back to the philosopher as polymath.
Otherwise, the philosopher can offer no useful answers.
Of course, philosophers can’t shed their skins and become masters of
every field of knowledge. However, they can become limited polymaths.
They can master much more of the history and culture of schooling
than they do. They can grasp more of the sociology and psychology of
testing, assessment, and grading. They can learn about school finance,
equitable taxation, and the economic returns to education. They can im-
merse themselves in all sides of the black-white “achievement gap.”
They can easily do these things; they just can’t do them and get tenure
and promotion in regular academic philosophy departments. It would
have been interesting if Kitcher had not only spelled out more concretely
how the Dewey-inspired philosopher proceeds but also addressed head-
on the economic and institutional constraints to producing such philoso-
phers.
In any case, none of the essays in the Handbook displays technical
analysis pursued for its own sake, “without any sense of ultimate pur-
pose.” Their authors all tie their arguments to matters of great importance
in education. Some make conceptual clarifications that are quite useful
even if not particularly philosophical. Others try within the more explicit
precincts of philosophy to clear spaces for common-sense conclusions to
carry the day. Most, however, proceed at a level of abstraction that will
daunt the nonphilosopher. This is not a criticism but an observation. Un-
til someone puts on the table a fully fleshed-out “new conception” of
philosophy, there is no model for doing things differently, and what the
essays in the Handbook do, they do extremely well.

Robert K. Fullinwider
University of Maryland
Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 36, No. 4 (October 2010)
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