In this paper I explore the prospects of a Neo‐Aristotelian position—according to which the difference between the human species and non‐human animals is a difference in ‘form’—in the context of the question of how the human form of life is related to the idea of education. Two interpretations of this idea have been suggested by contemporary Neo‐Aristotelian philosophy that offer contrasting accounts of the role played by education. According to the first, the idea of a formal difference goes with a notion of potentiality, according to which the distinctiveness of the human is mainly a product of education, and hence a matter of second nature. According to the second, the idea of the human is the idea of a formally distinctive kind of first nature that explains the very possibility of education. I maintain that both interpretations do justice to an important aspect of human life yet fail fully to grasp the significance of the notion of ‘form’ that they employ. I argue that to embrace the insight that the difference of the human is a difference in ‘form’, we must think of the human as a form of life whose very concept contains the concept of education. The concept of education, I argue, is a logical concept, contained in the concept of life that it describes.
Saul Kripke famously argued that there are no facts about what people mean by the words and sentences they utter. His 'skeptical paradox', as he called it, has generated an enormous secondary literature. Indeed, it's not an exaggeration to say that it gave birth to a new subfield of the philosophy of mind and language. Despite the degree of attention, however, I believe that the real source and character of Kripke's skeptical doubts have never come into clear view. Previous commentary on Kripke has failed to grasp that the doubts fundamentally concern the possibility of a person's following a rule. That might seem an absurd charge, given that everyone knows that Kripke conceives the skeptical paradox as a development of Wittgenstein's remarks on rule following. But the point of the charge is that previous interpretations of the paradox go astray because they miss that its central target is the idea that person's performance might be based upon a rule-that a rule might be her reason for proceeding as she does. The skeptical paradox belongs to the philosophy of rational explanation, of explanations that account for what people do or think by citing their reasons for doing or thinking so. That this feature of the paradox has been overlooked is partly Kripke's fault. His exposition of the skeptical argument intertwines two strands without adequately distinguishing them. The secondary literature has picked up on one of these strands. But the material constituting this strand cannot make sense of crucial steps in the discussion; thus commentators are led to find Rule-Following Skepticism Jason Bridges
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