A global journey showing how philosophy can transform our biggest disagreements Teaching Plato in Palestine is part intellectual travelogue, part plea for integrating philosophy into our personal and public life. Philosophical toolkit in tow, Carlos Fraenkel invites readers on a tour around the world as he meets students at Palestinian and Indonesian universities, lapsed Hasidic Jews in New York, teenagers from poor neighborhoods in Brazil, and the descendants of Iroquois warriors in Canada. They turn to Plato and Aristotle, al-Ghaz?l? and Maimonides, Spinoza and Nietzsche for help to tackle big questions: Does God exist? Is piety worth it? Can violence be justified? What is social justice and how can we get there? Who should rule? And how shall we deal with the legacy of colonialism? Fraenkel shows how useful the tools of philosophy can be—particularly in places fraught with conflict—to clarify such questions and explore answers to them. In the course of the discussions, different viewpoints often clash. That's a good thing, Fraenkel argues, as long as we turn our disagreements on moral, religious, and philosophical issues into what he calls a "culture of debate." Conceived as a joint search for the truth, a culture of debate gives us a chance to examine the beliefs and values we were brought up with and often take for granted. It won’t lead to easy answers, Fraenkel admits, but debate, if philosophically nuanced, is more attractive than either forcing our views on others or becoming mired in multicultural complacency—and behaving as if differences didn’t matter at all.

This book develops a new philosophy of Israel education. “Person-centered” Israel education is concerned with developing in individual learners the ability to understand and make rational, emotional, and ethical decisions about Israel, and about the challenges Israel regularly faces, whether they be existential, spiritual, democratic, humanitarian, national, etc. Chazan begins by laying out the terms of the conversation then examines the six-pronged theory of “person-centered” Israel education to outline the aims, content, pedagogy, and educators needed to implement this program. Finally, the author meditates on what a transformation from ethnic to ethical education might look like in this context and others. This book is Open Access under a CC-BY license.

Boycott Theory for Palestine aims to advance academic boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) by presenting the fullest and most sophisticated justification for it yet given, demonstrating how the boycott relates to current debates within contemporary political and intellectual life.

Many pagan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim philosophers from Antiquity to the Enlightenment made no meaningful distinction between philosophy and religion. Instead they advocated a philosophical religion, arguing that God is Reason and that the historical forms of a religious tradition serve as philosophy's handmaid to promote the life of reason among non-philosophers. Carlos Fraenkel provides the first account of this concept and traces its history back to Plato. He shows how Jews and Christians appropriated it in Antiquity, follows it through the Middle Ages in both Islamic and Jewish forms and argues that it underlies Spinoza's interpretation of Christianity. The main challenge to a philosophical religion comes from the modern view that all human beings are equally able to order their lives rationally and hence need no guidance from religion. Fraenkel's wide-ranging book will appeal to anyone interested in how philosophy has interacted with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious traditions.

This scholarly volume proposes protreptic as a radically new way of reading Plato’s dialogues leading to enhanced student engagement in learning and inquiry. Through analysis of Platonic dialogues including Crito, Euthyphro, Meno, and Republic, the text highlights Socrates’ ways of fostering and encouraging self-examination and conscionable reflection. By focusing his work on Socrates’ use of protreptic, Marshall proposes a practical approach to reading Plato, illustrating how his writings can be used to enhance intrinsic motivation amongst students, and help them develop the thinking skills required for democratic and civic engagement. This engaging volume will be of interest to doctoral students, researchers, and scholars concerned with Plato’s dialogues, the philosophy of education, and ancient philosophy more broadly, as well as post-graduate students interested in moral and values education research.

In this magisterial cultural history of the Palestinians, Nur Masalha illuminates the entire history of Palestinian learning with specific reference to writing, education, literary production and the intellectual revolutions in the country. The book introduces this long cultural heritage to demonstrate that Palestine was not just a 'holy land' for the four monotheistic religions – Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Samaritanism – rather, the country evolved to become a major international site of classical education and knowledge production in multiple languages including Sumerian, Proto-Canaanite, Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin. The cultural saturation of the country is found then, not solely in landmark mosques, churches and synagogues, but in scholarship, historic schools, colleges, famous international libraries and archival centres. This unique book unites these renowned institutions, movements and multiple historical periods for the first time, presenting them as part of a cumulative and incremental intellectual advancement rather than disconnected periods of educational excellence. In doing so, this multifaceted intellectual history transforms the orientations of scholarly research on Palestine and propels current historical knowledge on education and literacy in Palestine to new heights.