This book argues that education is thrown badly off course by dominant tendencies of late industrial societies that are now deeply embedded in the practices and policies of schools and universities. Dunne identifies and offers a critique of these tendencies, while arguing for a radically different conception of education. He argues for an education that attends closely to the nature of learning and teaching, and is buttressed by sustained philosophical reflection on ethical and political issues pertaining to childhood, citizenship, and the kind of practices that can support human flourishing across a whole life-time. Dunne engages with a range of philosophers including Arendt, Gadamer, Habermas, Latour, MacIntyre, Murdoch, Plato, Rousseau, Taylor and Wittgenstein. At the core of the book is a concern about the potential and pitfalls of human personhood, a concern that deepens through reflection in the final chapters on the challenges and fulfilments opened by the spiritual dimension of human life.

Series Editor's Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: On Learning and Teaching: Interlocutors and Exemplars
1. What's the Good of Education? Narrating a Life in Learning and Teaching
2. Beginning in Wonder: Children and Philosophy
3. Learning from MacIntyre about Learning: Finding Room for a Second-Person Perspective?
4. Figures of the Teacher: Fergal O'Connor and Socrates
Part ll: From Education to Philosophical Anthropology
5. Crossing Childhood and Adulthood: Growing Up and Growing Down
6. Education and Citizenship: Between the Classical Ideal and the Modern Identity
7. An Intricate Fabric: Understanding the Reasonableness of Practice
8. Beyond Sovereignty and Dissolution: The Storied Self
Part III: Limits of Ethics? Questions of Spirit
9. After Philosophy and Religion: Spirituality and its Counterfeits
10. More than Moral: A Reading of Dependent Rational Animals
11. Our 'Ethical Predicament': Getting to the Heart of a Secular Age
12. From Field to Forest: Fullness Beyond Flourishing?
Conclusion
References
Index

Joseph Dunne is Cregan Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Education at Dublin City University, Ireland.