Bücher von Israel Scheffler

Features essays that challenge contemporary notions of education and rationality. While defending the ideal of rationality, this title insists that rationality not be identified with a mental faculty or a mechanism of inference but taken rather as the capacity to grasp principles and purposes and to evaluate them in the light of relevant reasons.

The concept of potential plays a prominent role in the thinking of parents, educators and planners. This book aims to demythologize the concept of potential. It shows the roots of potential in genuine aspects of human nature, and offers an interpretation of policy-making in education.

Ambiguity, vagueness and metaphor are pervasive features of language, deserving of systematic study in their own right. This book presents a study of these features from a philosophical point of view, providing analyses of each and treating their relations to one another. It analyzes several varieties of ambiguity.

Having spent forty years teaching education and philosophy at Harvard, and publishing widely on these topics during this period, Israel Scheffler has now written a more personal book, looking at education through the prism of his own early experience, primarily of religious learning.