Imagining Epistemic Justice
Trayvon Martin is dead. He died with a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles in his possession. This seventeen-year-old black man was shot on February 27, 2012, in a gated townhouse community near Orlando by a male block captain who was not black and who had a handgun in his possession. Trayvon was in the community with his father visiting friends and left briefly for a “snack run” to the 7-Eleven.
Education and Epistemic Injustice
In the history of philosophy, education is a somewhat forgotten issue. Plato and Aristotle were both deeply occupied with the contribution of education to ethics and politics, and many major philosophical questions in, for instance, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Mill concern what and how the young should be taught. (For perspectives, see Rorty, 1998) Happily, education is receiving new attention in epistemology. This is especially so in the fields of social epistemology (e.g. Goldman, 1999) in which the social arrangements by which knowledge is transmitted are studied and in virtue epistemology (e.g. Baehr, 2011) that studies the character of the individual knower and the experiences and practices through which good intellectual character develops. Both social and virtue epistemology have a strong normative focus and see epistemology’s task not only as understanding what knowledge is, but as promoting good knowledge gathering practices. Furthermore, both these fields are deeply sensitive to the suboptimality of many of our ingrained epistemic habits and practices (on the individual and social level). In her account of epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker draws explicitly on both social and virtue epistemology to develop her account of epistemic injustice. (See, e.g. Fricker, 1998; Fricker, 2007: 72–81) In particular, she sees the virtues of epistemic justice as developing through a process of individual and social ‘training’ and locates the source of the vices of epistemic injustice in suboptimal or downright bad epistemic training. (Fricker, 2007: 82–85) Amongst those who consider themselves education scholars first and foremost, it is these critical perspectives on the epistemic dimensions of inequality and exclusion and how they operate in the classroom that have struck a particular chord. In this chapter, I will give a brief account of some work on epistemic justice in education. I open with a discussion of epistemological thought about education to map the terrain ( Section 2 ) before outlining features of the educational context, specifically, that make educational justice such a pressing concern ( Section 3 ). Next, I outline some responses to problems of educational justice in education ( Section 4 ) before concluding with a discussion of three challenges for thinking about epistemic justice in education ( Section 5 ). Discussion of these challenges can fruitfully structure further research in the area. 31 EDUCATION AND EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of