Philip Kitcher

Dec 27, 2023 | news.columbia.edu | Philip Kitcher

John Stuart Mill expressed many of the central tenets of liberalism with unsurpassed clarity and enduring influence. Yet Mill’s apparent victory in the marketplace of ideas has numbed us to the power of his arguments. To many readers today, his views can seem utterly familiar, even banal. Sharing insights from teaching Mill for many years, the eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher makes a cogent case for why we should read this nineteenth-century thinker now.

Jul 21, 2023 | nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com | Philip Kitcher

What should education aim to accomplish? What are its goals and how should it attempt to achieve them? Much excellent work, by philosophers and by policymakers, takes for granted the institutions and practices devised in the past. Yet, from time to time, it is important to stand back and to think more generally, to pose larger questions. My book, The Main Enterprise of the World, is written in that spirit.