Review of Bernard E Harcourt Critique and Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action (original) (raw)
Related papers
Education, Illusions and Valuable Fictions
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2019
Saul Smilansky's Illusionism suggests that some false beliefs are important enough to warrant the indefinite perpetuation of illusions in order to protect the larger moral community from breaking down. In this article I suggest that this position actualises an old educational paradox where education is expected to protect the common moral community (even if this means maintaining some illusions), and at the same time promote the pursuit of truth. Taking Smilansky's position of Illusionism as a starting point, I argue that while Illusionism highlights and addresses an important problem—that sometimes false beliefs can function to maintain social stability where the truth threatens to unsettle it—relying on indefinite illusions is problematic from an educational point of view. It is difficult to justify that education, being at least in part motivated by truth‐seeking, should (or even could) be grounded in illusion. Taking seriously the fact that a dimension of education concerns maintaining social stability, I suggest that Spinoza's notion of fiction can complement Smilansky's view in that it can be conceived in terms of an instrument for maintaining social stability and promoting truth‐seeking without assuming that one end is pursued at the expense of the other.
In my essay I argue that lying and deception have often been treated in isolation, only from the point of view of their moral and ethical dimension. Lying, however, is part of the life of society, of the community, and it should be judged as such. I analyse the concepts of lying, deception, spins and half-truths, as defined by Thomas L. Carson. Metaphors are studied from the point of view of their truth-value. Carson's approach is compared to that of Friedrich Nietzsche, and further, the moral dimension of lying is also be included in my work.