This paper will consider whether Martin Buber's affirmation of relationships offers a means for people to cooperate in seeking social change. On the one hand, Buber determined that the essence of humanity was in the relationships people formed. On the other hand, he did not think that genuinely mutual relationships could fuel political…

While there is a whole field devoted to the widely esteemed enterprise of epistemology, until fairly recently much less attention has been given to "agnotology," the study of ignorance. Epistemologists of ignorance use the concept agnotology to signify the study of the making and unmaking of ignorance, as well as the task of…

This paper considers phenomenology as a philosophical framework from which to understand the moral experience of collective memory. As a philosophical approach to human reality, phenomenology contributes insight into the connection between the experiential grounding of collective memory and the reality of the social world. The inspiration for…

The English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) is one of the most prominent figures in the development of liberal Anglo-American political thought. Locke's writings had a significant influence on the American Revolution and founding principles of the United States in fundamental ways. The author argues that Locke's influence is…

In this paper, the author outlines what No Child Left Behind policy might mean first in personal then in philosophical terms. First, the author will trace a bit of Obama's own educational development: how he was first set on a personal educational journey and how, proceeding along with that journey, he eventually came to successfully elicit "us"…

In this article, the author calls for an analysis of integrity and contends that attempting to describe wholeness precisely and incisively is not necessarily a contradiction in terms. The author makes some distinctions about integrity using two moves, one inspired by Plato, and one by Aristotle. The author uses the phrase "humane letters" to name…

Disability and dependence are integral to the human experience and yet have been largely marginalized or denigrated within Western philosophy. Joining a growing counter narrative from the disability studies movement, several mainstream moral philosophers are helping to redress this error. In this essay, the author discusses ideas from four such…

This article considers the notion of service-learning (SL) as essentially different from other similar activities, such as philanthropy, charity, voluntarism, or a single act of kindness which are "one-way" socially engaged activities. Service-learning is different because it necessarily entails reciprocity and mutuality which are "two-way"…