Philosophy of Education in a Poor Historical Moment: A Personal Account

Under the post-metaphysical sky “old” humanistic-oriented education is possible solely at the cost of its transformation into its negative, into a power that is determined to diminish human potentials for self-exaltation. Nothing less than total metamorphosis is needed to rescue the core of humanistic genesis: the quest for edifying Life and resistance to the call for “home-returning” into the total harmony that is promised to us within nothingness.     

The Knowledge Argument and Objectivity

In this paper I argue that Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument is better considered not as an argument against physicalism, but as an argument that objective theories must be incomplete. I argue that despite the apparent diversity of responses to the knowledge argument, they all boil down to a response according to which genuine epistemic gains are made when an individual has an experience. I call this the acquaintance response. I then argue that this response violates an intuitive stricture on the objectivity of theories. Therefore, the knowledge argument does show that objective theories cannot provide a complete understanding of the world. The result, however, is that both objective dualism and objective physicalism are refuted by the argument. In the end it is suggested that the notion of “subjective physicalism” is one that should be pursued.