In this response to Steven Nadler’s paper, I ask whether Spinoza views the transition from rational to intuitive knowledge as an individual or a collective project and conclude that it is largely a collective one. For Spinoza, our individual capacity to reason is underwritten by a social practice, an art of reasoning, which licences the rational conclusions on which intuitive knowledge rests. Equally, the pursuit of intuitive knowledge rests on a shared art of intuiting. Both kinds of knowledge are therefore collective achievements. If this is right, acquiring intuitive knowledge presupposes a certain kind of education. While it may be in principle available to everyone, as Nadler claims, it depends in practice on educational luck.

This paper introduces the symposium on Spinoza on perfectionism and education. It frames the key issue of Spinoza’s perfectionism in terms of a perennial educational problem and introduces the different contributions to this special issue, where Steven Nadler’s main paper is followed by a series of full paper responses by a group of Spinoza scholars and educational theorists. To round off the special issue, Nadler comments on the responses to his main paper.

Steven Nadler has written an insightful paper on ‘Spinoza and Maimonides on Human Perfection and the Love of God’, in which he analyses the differences and similarities between Spinoza and Maimonides related to the suggested themes, and he argues that becoming blessed is possible. Nadler does not, however, say much about whether blessedness is possible for a few or the whole human species. I argue, though, that pursuing blessedness is hard work and that only a few, if any, seem to engage or are being enabled to engage in the pursuit of becoming blessed, that is, in striving for the highest possible good, namely, the intellectual love of God or Nature. I begin by showing what humans’ typical potentials and limitations are with respect to achieving perfection, according to Spinoza. I also show that that we cannot achieve perfection: at least not in the same sense as God or Nature. In the second part I show what we as human beings have to do in order to engage ourselves in the pursuit of becoming blessed. In the final part I discuss some current conditions for education which does not in-themselves make it possible to become blessed in education, and put forward some ideas of what can be done in education in order for those concerned to strive to become blessed.

In building his account of human blessedness in Ethics 5, Spinoza offers two closely related conceptions of the love of God: the love toward God and the intellectual love of God. While Steven Nadler maintains that these loves are different affects, I argue that these are different descriptions of the same thing: any instance of the active affect that is a love toward God is at the same time an instance of the intellectual love of God. Spinoza’s views about society and its importance for education and human perfection are, I argue, nicely compatible with this account of the love of God, which suggests that all human beings possess, albeit in different degrees, the same sort of knowledge of God.

This essay (written in response to Steven Nadler’s article in this issue) seeks to interrogate the promise of Spinoza’s perfectionism for education. It does so by first establishing Spinoza’s perfectionism as a striving toward the intellectual love of God, occasioning an investigation of the relation Nadler sets up between Spinoza’s and Maimonides’ perfectionist schemes, and then evaluating the educational currency of such a striving. It is argued that while Spinoza’s highest good is difficult to construe as a widely attainable educational aim, it allows for two different educational pathways, where one focuses on the reeducation of passions via narratives adjusted to the ingenia of students and the other on attaining the highest good. At a glance, these two pathways come across as radically different in their setup, but they are aligned insofar as the stability of the community (agreeability) is a precondition for the striving for intellectual perfection. In parallel, this tracks how a pedagogical relation – being necessarily asymmetrical from the outset – can evolve into a relation of mutual friendship once the striving for perfection is identified and accepted as a common goal.

Part Five of Spinoza’s Ethics includes a notoriously challenging set of propositions about human perfection. Part of the difficulty in interpreting these elements of the work arises from neglecting important philosophical background for the relevant propositions, namely, medieval Jewish rationalism and Maimonides in particular. Spinoza was well acquainted with Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexted as well as his halakhic or legal writings. For both Spinoza and Maimonides (who, in turn, is a good Aristotelian on this matter), human perfection is essentially a cognitive matter, albeit one with an affective component, whereby the highest good for a human being consists in the superb and joyful intellectual condition that is the knowledge and love of God. My goal in this essay, then, is to see whether any light can be thrown on Spinoza’s views on this topic by considering them through a Maimonidean lens.

Despite concerted efforts to improve educational practices through reform, classroom implementation remains a persistent challenge. This theoretical article draws on recent work in cultural sociology to offer a fresh perspective on this problem. It introduces a framework that differentiates between declarative, procedural, and public forms of culture, highlighting their unique mechanisms of internalization and enactment. This multidimensional understanding of culture reveals the cognitive challenges inherent in translating reform principles into classroom practices. More specifically, the article contends that the common assumptions of convertibility and transferability between these forms of culture underlie the limited success of many reform initiatives. By attending to the cognitive dimensions of cultural dynamics, the proposed framework opens new avenues for understanding and addressing the difficulties of educational change. This article concluded with an agenda for future research to test and refine the framework.

This article argues that conceptualization through the long-term view strengthens the case for education for deliberative democracy. This is due to two key factors. First, education for deliberative democracy has novel potential in helping curb the negative effects of political polarization, which, when analyzed through longtermism, can be identified as an important existential risk factor. Second, education for deliberative democracy enables societies to defuse the threat of a value lock-in, and in doing so to keep their cognitive space open to enable increased flexibility in dealing with new challenges that will arise in the future. Consequently, this article further argues that education for deliberative democracy as an education initiative can be normatively justified but acknowledges that there are still theoretical and practical hurdles to overcome, and thus calls for more research into developing a mature, pedagogically sound program of education for deliberative democracy.

This essay is a commentary on Curren et al., ‘Finding consensus on well-being in education’. It acknowledges a growing international consensus that presents educational systems need to change and argues the case for consensus on flourishing as the overall purpose of education can be strengthened by drawing on economists’ work on well-being with respect to the inclusive wealth of nations. It emphasizes the need for tangible and measurable indicators that educators can use when implementing Curren et al.’s recommendations and outlines the International Science and Evidence based Education assessment’s suggestion of a ‘whole brain’ approach to education for flourishing.