There are surely few writers who have had a more profound impact on European culture, and in the broadest range of fields, than St. Augustine, and this despite the fact that he was North African. Nonetheless, while Augustine is still called upon in debates on interfaith dialogue and in theological and philosophical disputes, one area of his large corpus has received scant attention-his philosophy of education. Although there are references throughout Augustine's writings to his philosophy of education, he devotes only a single text to its elaboration-De Magistro-On the Teacher. The fact that this work has been largely overlooked by scholars is disappointing, because the De Magistro, despite its use of theological language, retains a very modern and contemporary thematic with interesting insights for any contemporary theory of education. In this article we provide a primer in reading Augustine's De Magistro.

We assess the Situational Intelligence (SQ) component of the MirMe assessment system for 21st century skills. MirMe is an online, game-based psychometric instrument developed by LogicMills. The SQ component measures skills related to decision-making and critical thinking. It does so via AI-driven heuristic engines that deploy analogs of “fast and frugal” heuristics. Approximately 7,000 participants (aged 5 to 92) and 25,000 gameplays were involved in the various validation studies. Results support the conclusion that MirMe’s SQ measures are internally consistent (Cronbach alpha ranging from .71 to .93). Results also suggest that MirMe may be a better predictor of student academic performance (measured by GPA) than A-levels (MirMe r2 = .265, p < .001; A-levels r2 = .209, p < .001). MirMe also appears to predict the kinds of co-curricular activities students participate in both prior to and during university.

In this paper, we sketch a metaphysics of natural purposes that supports the claim that there are objective goods that beings need qua the kinds of being they are in order to flourish.We argue that flourishing includes the acquisition of virtues.We give a general account of virtue, roughly as a stable disposition to act upon a habit elevated to a skill of putting one's know-how into practice that springs from one's motivation to pursue what one perceives as good.We then provide a sketch of intellectual virtues as truth-seeking virtues that stem from a love of the truth.We discuss connaturality, namely those specific metaphysical accidents readily acquired by beings due to their first nature.We make an original distinction between ontological connaturality, namely the connaturality that belongs to animals qua beings of a certain kind, and habitual connaturality, namely our first natures suffused with virtues.Habitual connaturality is acquired through the practice of virtue and involves perceptiveness awakened by the possession of the virtue in question.The knowledge arising from this form of connaturality may be a form of know-how.We give an account of connatural apprehension and connatural propositional knowledge and discuss connatural know-how and argue that it makes certain virtues possible.At this point we will have shown that intellectual and moral virtues are informed by know-how.We go on to give analyses of know-how and skill in terms of counterfactual success.We show how skill is a refined form of know-how and how both know-how and skill are informed by moral and intellectual virtues.We conclude that knowhow informs intellectual and moral virtues in the sense that virtue is to be elucidated in terms of skill, which is in turn to be elucidated in terms of know-how.Moreover, virtues inform know-how in the sense that know-how is to be elucidated in terms of intellectual and moral virtues.No circularity arises because different virtues and different forms of know-how are involved.

This article explores the relation between Aquinas’ metaphysical, epistemological and theological ideas and his theory of education as presented in the De Magistro and other writings. Aquinas’ theory of education is based on a theological metaphysics of human nature and an account of human rationality that is grounded in human nature. In the first section after the introduction we provide a synopsis of Aquinas’ metaphysical narrative, but in a contemporary key that draws upon the resources of Analytical Thomism. However, this theologically inspired metaphysics leads to a somewhat neglected epistemology that is crucial to his understanding of teaching and learning in the De Magistro – the notion of connatural knowledge that we explore in the second section. Our exposition of the Thomistic ontology of the human person together with the notion of connatural knowledge, provide the context for understanding the De Magistro in the third section.

A confluence of scholarly interest has resulted in a revival of Thomistic scholarship across the world. Several areas in the investigation of St. Thomas Aquinas, however, remain under-explored. This v

This chapter sketches a contemporary metaphysics that grounds an account of objective purposes and interests. This account is one way of providing the supplementation that Kovesi's account needs. It introduces the notion of connaturality as a way of connecting the metaphysics of purposes with the purposes exemplified in human action and knowing. The authors show here how the purposes revealed at the level of our natures are exemplified in forms of directedness towards objective goods. The habitual connatural knowledge found in intellectual and moral virtues reveals by directed inclinations those interests we have qua human beings and leads us to our distinctively human sort of flourishing. The chapter develops a contemporary analysis of the epistemological notions of know-how and skill that explain why skill is at least in part a refined form of know-how. Keywords:connaturality; epistemological notion; habitual connatural knowledge; Kovesi; metaphysics of virtues; supplementation

This symposium highlighted the relevance of the cultural theory (CT) pioneered by anthropologists Mary Douglas, Steve Rayner, and Michael Thompson and political scientists Aaron Wildavsky and Richard Ellis for explaining political phenomena. In this concluding article, we suggest ways in which CT can be further tested and developed. First, we describe how the theory has been applied thus far and some of the achievements of these applications. Then, we examine some of the challenges revealed by this research. Finally, we discuss ways of applying CT that promise to help meet these challenges. These methods include nesting case studies and combining case study and survey research, simulations, experiments, and approaches from social neuroscience.

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