I wish to begin by responding, briefly, to Tyson Lewis's assessment of contemporary trends in the philosophy of education that owe their orientation to Hegel's work. I will then say a few words on the nature of the dialectic, and end my response with some remarks about Lewis's very interesting and perhaps controversial conclusion that, to paraphrase, the "teacher should facilitate the proper relation between the student and knowledge as such." Lewis's conclusion speaks to a tension in Hegel's own work between a commitment to an anti-methodology, on the one hand, and a perplexing reliance on logical determinacy, on the other. The latter, it seems to me, deserves some, albeit very brief, consideration for it masks a realism the ethics of the negative may not properly accommodate.

No abstract

This article reflects on a college transitioning into a university in the Canadian context and resisting the temptation to re-create a model of higher education committed to specialization alone. Instead, the university commits all its degree students to a general education, thereby also committing itself to an ideal associated with a diverse, multiethnic, multicultural, rights-oriented public square. By referring to some popular figures and discussions in the media, the article suggests that a general education includes a promise of incompletion and renewal.

I defend the idea that Collingwood’s discussion of self-knowledge implies that meaning is normative. Against the view that treats the social as primitive in explaining a normativity of meaning thesis, I argue that Collingwood is an internalist about epistemic justification. Collingwood’s internalism about epistemic justification and meaning is normative, but its character involves a logical-epistemic relation between use and meaning. I suggest that this view is well represented by Collingwood’s idea of history.

R. G. Collingwood’s theory of re-enactment has long been understood as an important contribution to the philosophy of history. It has also been challenging to understand how re-enactment is operationalized in the practice of understanding past actors or, indeed, other minds occupying less remote regions of our experiences. Sebastian Rödl has recently articulated a compelling defence of second person ascription, arguing that it is, in form, analogous to first person understanding. By Rödl’s lights, second person understanding follows the same order of reason as its first person counterpart. In this paper I argue that Rödl’s case for second person understanding, and its relationship to the first person point of view, is at once compelling in its own right but also helpful in explaining how re-enactment may be operationalized.