The aim of this essay is to track two parallel currents in educational theory. These currents have a long-standing and varied history, traceable to at least as far back as ancient Greek philosophy. This essay is not primarily concerned with the history of these currents, however, but is rather conceived as an endeavor to identify and grapple with a persistent tension at the heart of the philosophy of education, one that remains alive and well to this day. The tension in question is between the current of fictionalism and the current of dogmatism. For this tension to make sense, the two different currents (and their respective conceptual landscapes) need to be unpacked. The best way of doing this, to my mind, is via an example that in some ways stands out as paradigmatic within the history of the philosophy of education; Plato’s Republic. It is paradigmatic in the sense that it clearly illustrates how both of these currents or opposing impulses intertwine and collide within the same educational landscape.

In this paper my aim is to compare and contrast Linda Zagzebski’s theory of moral exemplarism with a form of fictionalism modeled after Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if.’ The purpose for doing so is to address the pedagogical implications of underestimating affective and social dimensions of modeling moral behavior in a general educational setting. It is suggested that Vaihinger’s fictionalism offers a less instrumental view than moral exemplarism, and that focusing on getting started by way of expedient fictions is a more productive approach in education than focusing on attaining the exemplary via a model of admiration-emulation. Because the role of the teacher in the exemplarist setup is limited to offering narratives portraying exemplars, the pedagogical relation between teacher and student is downplayed in favor of the unidirectional relation between the student and the exemplary narrative. In the fictionalist setup, in contrast, the teacher is tasked with the more demanding and pedagogically rich undertaking of affective attunement, where awakening the curiosity of students through fictions demands an acute sense of how different people with different ingenia can be influenced to strive for the same thing via mind-reading and the imitation of affects. It is concluded that the main challenge for the fictionalist teacher is not to ensure that students admire and emulate what is truly admirable (i.e. to function as a corrective of students’ unreflective admiration), but to endeavor to prevent expedient fictions from turning into dogmas that inhibit moral thought and action rather than promote it.

In his From Bondage to Freedom, Michael LeBuffe argues that Spinoza's theory of ethics hinges on a figure that he calls the optimistic nutritionist. LeBuffe sets up the optimistic nutritionist as a thought experiment useful for illustrating how Spinoza's ethical theory can be put into practice. While LeBuffe offers some illuminating examples intended to illustrate how the optimistic nutritionist would function as a pedagogical guide of sorts, the practical aspects of this figure remain vague and underdeveloped. In this paper, the aim is to read Nietzsche's controversial autobiography Ecce Homo as an exemplification of how the optimistic nutritionist might be conceived in situ, in terms of a person applying a systematic form of selectivity to different things so as to determine whether or not they are useful for furthering their self‐preservation and empowerment. This amounts to a practical guide to a form of Spinozistic ethics, where Nietzsche's optimistic nutritionist functions by setting up concrete guidelines for the selectivity of useful things, without succumbing to the hazards of moral universalism and abstract perfectionism.

This invited talk was given as part of the Societas Spinozana lecture series STORIA ED EDUCAZIONE NELL’ETÀ MODERNA:SPINOZA E DINTORNI organized and curated by Marta Libertà De Bastiani and Alessio Lembo on November 6, 2025. The theme of the talk was to explore the pedagogical importance of Spinoza's concept of ingenium and how this impacts the relation between storytelling and truth-striving in a pedagogical setting.

In this paper, my aim is to sketch out a pedagogical concept departing from the existing musical term sympathetic resonance. This is an admittedly experimental endeavor, serving to test out the currency of an already well-established term in a conceptual landscape that is foreign to it. What I hope to attain by this is to open up for a new array of questions for the philosophy of education, indicating a novel approach to the study of pedagogical relations. My hypothesis, such as it is, is that sympathetic resonance stands to offer a conceptual guide for understanding how teaching a group of students can work by teachers (knowingly or unknowingly) offering various overtones to be latched onto and elaborated in different ways by different students. I am specifically not intending to use sympathetic resonance as a metaphor, however, as I aim to propose it as a pedagogical concept capable of illuminating what happens in teaching when teachers and students find degrees of resonance that carry overtones easily disregarded and mislabeled as mere background noise. I am also not intending to construe sympathetic resonance as a teaching method to develop and promote, but rather as a conceptual tool for better understanding the complex dynamics of maintaining parallel pedagogical relationships. 

The aim of this paper is to offer an account of the teacher as optimistic nutritionist. Drawing on recent theoretical work seeking to identify and elucidate the main components of the optimistic nutritionist as an ethical ideal (by way of Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s ethical theories), this paper proposes a model of ethical teaching that opts for a different route from that of amodel grounded in moral exemplarism. This route is not oriented around admiration and imitation, but rather around the axioms of selectivity and selfishness. Instead of grounding educational transformation in the student’s ability to emulate the teacher (or the exemplars identified by the teacher), educational transformation is here grounded in an aspirational account where the self-cultivation of the student is influenced and promoted by a combination of practical embodied experimentation and the guidance of the teacher qua optimistic nutritionist.

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.

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.

While it is well known that Plato’s Republic contains arguments both for and against the use of fictions in education (376e–398b), it is less widely recognized (at least in an educational context) that the entire premise of the Republic is a fictional endeavor set up to arrive at the truth of justice in itself. This, in fact, corresponds well with Hans Vaihinger’s conception of the purpose of an expedient fiction, being a fiction that is specifically geared at facilitating the process of truth-striving. As such, this paper argues that the Republic is best read as an expedient fiction, constructed so as to render the truth of justice within grasp of the understanding of the less-than-fully rational (i.e., ordinary) reader.