Abstract: Social ontology examines the nature and mechanisms in human society of concepts that pertain to various kinds of social collectivities. A pioneer in the development of this philosophical field, Mills theorised a social metaphysics of racial constructivism for modern philosophy in order to explain the enduring orthodoxies of its Anglo-centric dominance. This paper invokes the term, supervenience, to further elucidate the causal bearing of race on individual and social facts. Turning to the philosophy of education, the ontological bifurcation of asymmetrical racial worlds is a salient divide to which discourses of normative individual ethics, analytic critical thinking, and generalized social justice contribute. Given the pervasiveness of supervenience, in the unwillingness to traffic in the ontology of race, educational philosophy hamstrings the creative and critical dimensions of advancing education for a racially equitable and pluralistic democracy.
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Abstract: The article draws on critiques in political theory and morality to argue that womanism, a worldview rooted in Black women’s lives and history, provides an alternative conceptual framework to prevailing Eurocentric thinking, for promoting socially just institutions of higher education. Presupposing a positioned, encultured, and embodied account of identity, womanism’s social change perspective holds transformative promise. It foregrounds Black women’s penchant for reaching solutions that promote communal balance, affirm one’s humanity and attend to the spiritual dimension (Phillips, 2006). Directed first towards scholars of color, fostering inclusivity, communalist values and acknowledged intersectionality offers an ethic of the embodied self. As a corollary, it argues for a universal that recommends at least two guiding principles for a pedagogical philosophy. It is, first oriented towards a love of self and second towards placing all disciplines within a cultural-historical context. In the first claim, there is potential for nothing less than suspending the symbolic and ontological violence to one’s sense of belonging in academia. In the second claim, such an understanding can position scholars of color to actively re-narrate their fields. As illustrations, we focus on three academic fields of education, theology in higher education, and criminal justice.
Abstract: This article examines approaches to doing philosophy of education and critiques what the authors regard as overly theorized approaches which fail to take adequate account of the vexing issues and complex realities facing human society. The article posits that philosophy of education must engage the sites of human struggle and provide contextually relevant solutions for how these struggles may be addressed. The study uses as a point of departure the African concepts of Kagisano and Ubuntu and seeks to explore the usefulness of these concepts for the study and application of philosophy of education in the Caribbean. The article then invokes critical theory in conjunction with post-structuralism to relate critical pedagogy to the ethnic and social conditions of the Caribbean and Latin American context. The article purports to represent a departure from philosophical constructs which are defined by western and Eurocentric dominance to one that is contextual and original while at the same time being informed by a long history of philosophical ideas.
Abstract: Democratic deliberation places the burden of self-governance on its citizens to provide mutual justifying reasons (Gutmann & Thompson, 1996). This article concerns the limiting effect that group identity has on the efficacy of democratic deliberation for equality in education. Under conditions of a powerful majority, deliberation can be repressive and discriminatory. Issues of white flight and race-based admissions serve to illustrate the bias of which deliberation is capable when it fails to substantively take group identity into account. As forms of Gilbert's (1994) plural subjects, identity group members holding the group identity can experience agency as the freedom to believe together with members of their group. I argue that attending to how group members acquire group beliefs through trust is a reasonable accommodation of group identity in deliberation.
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