A History of Western Philosophy of Education in Antiquity, ed. Avi I. Mintz, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

The first installment of the five-volume A History of Western Philosophy of Education centres on the views of selected philosophers of education in antiquity. The book contains both a series introduction by Megan Jane Laverty and David T. Hansen, and a volume introduction by Avi I. Mintz, plus a collection of nine chapters organized by thinker or school of thinkers including the Sophists (M. R. Engler), Plato (Yoshiaki Nakazawa), Xenophon (William H. F. Altman), Isocrates (Bruce A. Kimball and Sarah M. Iler), Aristotle (Marianna Papastephanou), the Cynics (Ansgar Allen), Cicero (James R. Muir), the Stoics (Annie Larivée), and St. Augustine (Yun Lee Too). The volume’s primary appeal is as a resource for those interested in the views of the philosophers under discussion, or in the history of educational thought more broadly. Chapters focus on bringing coherence to the accounts of education of their featured philosophers, drawing across known works, attending appropriately to historical context, and highlighting the connections to some of the recurring themes in the history of the philosophy of education. Several of the chapters also raise the profile of featured thinkers within the history of philosophy of education by arguing for the underappreciated influence of their work on later thought. (This is especially noticeable in the chapters on Xenophon, Isocrates, and Cicero.) For the most part, chapters stick to descriptive accounts of arguments and do not engage those arguments on their merits; only the chapters on Plato and Aristotle devote significant time to considering the truth of the claims under consideration: Papastephanou pushes the worthiness of aspects of Aristotle’s view, and Nakazawa’s final pages defend the liveliness and promise of our learning through myth, as Plato suggested. The chapters are, to a one, well researched, effective in establishing the boundaries of individual philosophical accounts, and engagingly written – full of good stories of mentoring young political leaders, of Cynic antics and controversial Sophists, of the likeness between education and art or music or even horsemanship. Chapter authors do an exemplary job advertising the disciplinary fluidity in how their featured thinkers do philosophy. As we know, contemporary analytic philosophy mostly happens in isolated lanes (epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and others, including the much less appreciated philosophy of education), and tends to be somewhat conservative in its recognition of what counts as doing philosophy. For the philosophers featured in this volume, however, questions about how to pursue knowledge, about what exists/is real, about the good, and also about how we learn are often treated together and best understood as mutually illuminating. Such questions are, moreover, often pursued in what we contemporary philosophers would tend to consider interdisciplinary or unconventional ways: in conversation with mathematics, art, music, literature, poetry, politics, religion, and more; and through typical philosophical methods like argument, but also via more indirect modes like dialogue, metaphor, and habituation. The essays of the volume move easily into, out of, and within philosophy so understood. Engler starts the first chapter by connecting the Sophists’ educational project to an overarching cultural inquiry, including “nature and being … politics, ethics, art, language, psychology, and so on” (p. 31). The final chapter on St. Augustine ends by tying teaching to the divine (p. 247ff). In between, we encounter connections between education and many disciplines, as well as recurring questioning of/openness to what counts as learning or doing philosophy, for example, myth as argument, education as ongoing over whole human lives (both in and out of the classroom), and a repeated engagement with Hadot’s work on the ancients’ treatment of philosophy as a way of life. Social and political thought are at the core throughout: …