Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s articulation of education as an attempt to take responsibility for a world out of joint, this short essay advocates for an approach to General Education rooted in a renewed commitment to cultivate capacities that enable citizens to discern truth from falsity, advocate for those who are unable to advocate for themselves,…[Read more]

As my inaugural editorial note for the Journal of General Education, this short essay outlines the arts of liberty as a cultivated activity at the heart of General education in the United States. The challenge of the general education endeavor is to teach the virtues of the arts of liberty at scale, recognizing that our communities are enriched…[Read more]

A homage in the guise of an essay, this is the story of the last course Reiner Schürmann taught. As a text, it attempts to describe, situate, and come to terms with the power of Schürmann’s teaching in the context of his last lectures on Heidegger’s Being and Time. But if it is to be true to the deepest lessons of Schürmann’s thinking, it will als…[Read more]

Although Aristotle is often thought to give canonical voice to the priority of vision as the most noble of the human powers of perceiving, this article demonstrates that in Aristotle, touch has a priority vision lacks. By tracing the things Aristotle says about touch in the De Anima and specifically the manner in which he identifies touch as a…[Read more]

Following the scent of wolves and dogs in Plato’s Republic, this essay attempts to track a path that leads us to one of the central teachings of the text itself: that the philosophical life is situated precariously between the tyrannical tendencies of the wolf and the blind obedience of the well-trained dog.