Department of Philosophy

This paper develops the thesis that the sense of vocation is embedded in the interaction of the "I" and the "me" as conceived by G. H. Mead. This interaction occurs in a larger narrative-historical context elaborated by W. Dilthey. In addition, the work of J. Ortega y Gasset clarifies that the cultural context of this interaction is essential. The perspective of the living, active self that emerges from these interwoven notions is a helpful context for developing notions of citizenship relevant to a Latin American setting.
This perspective may be relevant to other settings as well, but that would need to be explored on another occasion.

This essay explores the complex process of achieving self-identity, a process involving both discovery and creativity. The Aristotelian notions of potentiality and actuality are helpful in conceptually relating the notions of discovery, creativity, and the self. We discover that we are potentially many selves; this requires that we creatively decide which of the possibilities to actualize. Moreover, every creative act of becoming constrains what one in the future will discover about oneself, and what one discovers in the future about oneself constrains who one can, in the future, become. Achieving self-identity, then, is a spiraling process of discovery and creativity. Against this background, I advance two claims. First, noting the role others play in our becoming who we are undergirds the notion that self-identity involves both discovery and creativity. Second, understanding self-identity as involving both discovery and creativity illuminates the moral character of the unfolding drama.

While contemporary democracy seems to have prevailed on the stage of world history, it has nevertheless become the subject of intense philosophical scrutiny and debate. At the heart of the controversy lies the question of whether the present configuration of liberal society is capable of cultivating the self-governing citizens that its guiding commitment to liberty presupposes. Michael Sandel, for example, has recently argued that our modern liberal order "cannot contain the moral energies of a vital democratic life," but rather it "creates a moral void that opens the way for narrow, intolerant moralisms," while it "fails to cultivate the qualities of character that equip citizens to share in self-rule" (Democracy's Discontent, 24). My paper seeks to contribute to this debate by examining the political teaching of Aristotle, the ancient fountainhead of the republican tradition that critics of our contemporary order so often draw on to assess the deficits of modern liberalism. I am especially interested in Aristotle's teaching on the soul--that is, on what he took to be essential and non-material parameters to the natural state of human beings--in its relation to his conceptualization of moral and political life. It was, of course, the spiritual or teleological cast of Aristotle's understanding of nature that the seventeenth-century fathers of modern liberalism utterly abandoned in their quest to construct a materialist politics devoted strictly, in John Locke's famous phrase, to care of the body. Insofar as the case against the public philosophy of contemporary liberalism turns on its rejection of the ancient understanding of virtue (as, among others, Alasdair MacIntyre suggests in After Virtue), any resuscitation of the politics of virtue must begin with a critique of the materialist cast of our modern politics. That critique, it seems to me, properly begins with the study of Aristotle's teaching on care of the soul.

In this essay, we critique a familiar and attractive model of American higher education and defend an alternative model of a liberal education, one based upon a careful reading of Augustine's Confessions.
In classicist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum's recent book, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, contends that the aim of a liberal education is to teach students to function as citizens of the world. This task is the "cultivation of humanity." Central to the task of cultivating humanity is getting students committed to Socratic inquiry, that is, "to think for themselves." A commitment to Socratic inquiry includes the disposition to accept no belief simply because it is handed down by tradition or justified by appeal to authority.
Nussbaum considers the role of religiously-identified colleges and universities in her book. According to her account, such colleges and universities have a dual mission: advancing higher education in a pluralistic democracy and perpetuating their specific traditions. Obviously, dual commitments provide the opportunity for conflict. At Baylor, we are familiar with such conflicts. Nussbaum insists that in a real university all such conflicts be resolved by appeal to the aim of education, the cultivation of world citizens. Admittedly, this way of understanding education and resolving conflicts between competing ideals resonates deeply with we Americans who are shaped by our shared democratic culture. Yet, it poses a perplexity for traditional or orthodox Christians, be they Catholic or Protestant. For it prizes a kind of freedom and autonomy uncongenial to traditional Christian accounts of humanity and citizenship. In this essay, we present a different model of a higher education, one that takes classical sources seriously. In so doing, we hope to honor the legitimate claims of both secular learning and religious commitments.

We often recognize that tolerance is a cardinal virtue of a successful democratic polity. Necessary for sustaining participatory democracy, avoiding violent confrontation, and overcoming xenophobic prejudice and hatred, most of us involved in public conversation recognize that "real tolerance" is the one commodity too often in short supply. Or as is more often the case, it is the virtue which is professed, but not practiced, when it's needed the most. This essay begins where tolerance usually breaks off--at the moment when we recognize that our conversation partner holds unfathomable assumptions, is willing to consider unspeakable options, or has drawn what we take to be irrational conclusions. It is my assumption that we should continue to educate for tolerance but we must recognize that tolerance will not sustain our communities or our conversations in moments of intellectual, moral, or religious crisis. Therefore tolerance is ill-suited to address deep political controversy because it is systematically committed to rejecting the inevitable intolerances of the postmodern political landscape. Another virtue is needed at this point; that virtue is hospitality.
In this essay, I argue that interlocutors in a participatory democracy have a greater chance at sustaining conversation and community through the cultivation of the virtue of hospitality rather than through the virtue of tolerance as the rubric under which such conversations can take place. I use the test case of religious believers because they seem to offer historically and ideologically one of the most difficult cases. Religious believers often have what they take to be compelling reasons for not being tolerant. Hospitality as an alternative to tolerance for political discourse is particularly well-suited for mediating disputes among religious contestants.

Michel Foucault, in his History of Sexuality Vol. 1, attempts to explain the multiplicity of force relations he calls "power." Many thinkers view his work as continuing the radical critique and rejection of Christianity begun by Friedrich Nietzsche. However, in an academic culture where some have begun to talk seriously about the nature, importance and even preeminence of community, we would do well to consider the corruptive influence of the institutional structures of our communities. In embracing a MacIntyrian view of community, we must not forget the lessons of the Reformation, one of which is that institutions tend to corrupt practices. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the truth that thinkers as diverse as Alasdair McIntyre and Miguel de Unamuno preach: practices, and the virtues developed therein, cannot be sustained without institutions. Herein lies the "agony of Christianity" or the Angst of the modern believer. This paper will investigate how Foucault's story provides insight into the ongoing struggle between Christendom and the individual.

Pragmatists typically do not endorse traditional descriptions of Christian faith, including such documents as the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, or the Confession of Dort, among others. A reasonable pragmatist, I suggest, should refrain from endorsing these documents because they, like many documents of Western European culture (including America's founding political document, The Declaration of Independence), are "footnotes" to the Platonism pragmatists standardly reject. Their rejection of Platonism requires pragmatists to be heretics. Their rejection, however, does not require pragmatists to be secularists. In fact, pragmatists ought not to be secularists; secularism is, as it were, "against their religion." In claiming pragmatists ought not to be secularists, I object to the views Michael Eldridge expresses in his well-received 1998 book on Dewey, Transforming Experience.