“COSMOPOLITAN ETHICS & BEING PEACE: EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPIRITUALITY, JUSTICE, & PEACE”
DALE SNAUWAERT
Associate Professor of Educational Theory and Social Foundations of Education; Chair of the Department of Foundations of Education, University of Toledo
Thursday, October 19, 2006 - 7:00-9:00pm
Location: Teachers College, Columbia University (Room 179 Grace Dodge)
***NOTE VENUE CHANGE (formerly at Fordham University)***
RSVP KINDLY REQUESTED (not required) send to: peace-ed@tc.edu
The purpose of this presentation is to explore the relationship between a cosmopolitan conception of justice and spirituality as foundations of peace. “Peace” is a cosmopolitan social order that secures justice by guaranteeing all dimensions of rights and common duties necessary for human flourishing. Justice and thus peace are in turn contingent upon the development of internal moral capacities necessary for moral responsibility, the most central of which is the notion of Being Peace. Being Peace is a spiritual condition that functions as our moral compass, ensuring that we are capable of responding to others with respect and compassion. In a negative sense the moral standard here is internal discord. The positive conception is being-peace, is being at peace with one’s self. This perspective asserts an independent moral resource that is not contingent upon social custom. It thus provides a moral check on the society, enabling one to say no when the society around you is saying yes to an immoral act. From this perspective, ethics is a function of our spiritual condition, the state of our being.
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DALE SNAUWAERT
Dale T. Snauwaert, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Educational Theory and Social Foundations of Education and Chair of the Department of Foundations of Education at the University of Toledo. He received his B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1983, a M.Ed. in Educational Policy and Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990. He has also taught at Colgate University, The University of Missouri, Teachers College, Columbia University, and Adelphi University. He is the author of Democracy, Education, and Governance: A Developmental Conception (State University of New York Press, 1993), which received an American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award in 1995. He has published in such academic journals as Educational Theory, Journal of Educational Thought, Peabody Journal of Education, Holistic Education Review, Current Issues in Comparative Education, and Encounter on such topics as democratic education, the nature of teaching, moral education, holistic education, and international ethics. He is currently working on a book on the ethics of war and peace and human rights education. He was Associate Editor of Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice from 1997-2002, and remains on their editorial board. His research interests focus on two areas: (1) moral and political philosophy as they pertain to educational theory, especially the ethics of war and peace, democracy, and human rights, and (2) the nature of consciousness and holistic education. He teaches courses in the philosophy and social foundations of education.
