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This paper will evaluate a range of humanist and posthumanist ethical positions as useful bases for environmental education. It will conclude that a range of such positions can be seen as embracing respect for non‐human nature. Therefore, environmental education can effectively embrace ethical pluralism to some extent. Embracing a degree of pluralism potentially makes it easier for teachers and students with a wide range of preconceptions to become more pro‐environmental, while highly committed and exclusive approaches can prove divisive. However, some humanist and posthumanist positions are grounded in dismissive or reductive attitudes to non‐human nature. In summary, there is no one suitable ethical basis for environmental education in the humanist and non‐humanist traditions, but several. However, the key to the effectiveness of any of these is full acceptance that human and non‐human flourishing are integrally related, and that non‐human nature must therefore be both respected (that is, both admired and cared for), and not merely when this meets short‐term instrumental human goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colin Koopman identifies a longstanding tension between experiential givenism and linguisticism in forms of pragmatism, and offers semiotics as a candidate for resolving this. In this paper, I offer a pansemiotic account that construes the universe as events, and experience as implication in events. This process account resonates strongly with most of Koopman's aspirations for transitionalist pragmatism, but with one notable exception: it is strongly post‐humanist. The argument is in three stages. The first sketches out a semiotic process metaphysics that construes the sign as ubiquitous and evolutionary (qua Peirce) and as deferred (qua Derrida) and also as non‐quantifiable (thus addressing another problem besetting modern philosophy: mathematisation, cf. scientisation), while denying raw quality (contra Peirce) and the primacy of language in any form (contra Derrida). The second stage fleshes out this anti‐Cartesian world picture in terms of its inherent transitionalism, implicit meliorism and inevitable post‐humanism. The nature and role of the human on this account is considered briefly. The final stage considers the semiotics of the encounter on this account, and concludes with some thoughts about the teaching‐and‐learning encounter, taken as emblematic of the human role in taking things forward through explicitly social interaction. Such encounters can only be evaluated contextually, with respect to contestable considerations of significance and of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Peirce is a seminal figure for contemporary semiotic philosophers, it is axiomatic of a fully semiotic perspective that no philosopher or philosophy (semiotics included) can provide any final answer, as signs are always interpreted and the context of interpretation always varies. Semiosis is evolutionary: it may or may not be construed as progressive but it cannot be static. While Peirce offers a way out of the mind-body divide that both permeates and separates classical rationalism and empiricism, he himself is read in this article as closer to the rationalist tradition exemplified by Kant and Hegel that he critiques than to either thoroughgoing empiricism or post-Nietzschean relativism. From a contemporary perspective, Peirce thus falls short of qualifying as a fully semiotic thinker, notwithstanding his key role in the development of semiotic philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to this issue of the "Journal of Philosophy of Education," focusing on semiotics as philosophy, is presented.

A natural resource is not given, but depends on human knowledge for its exploitation. Thus a ‘unit of resource’ is, to a significant degree, a ‘unit of meaning’, and education is potentially important not only for the use of resources but also for their creation. The paper draws on poststructuralism to confirm the intuition that it would be misleading to conceive of ‘units’ of meaning. However, it is commonly acceptable to conceive of ‘units’ of resource, as in much discussion around sustainability; but, if the latter concept is suspect, then so is the former. The error seems to arise from the assumption of identifiable points in space-time, already problematised by quantum mechanics and poststructuralism. Conceiving of ‘now’ as a moving in and with time, rather than as a point in time, human survival is construed as an ongoing process of meaning-making constrained though not determined by the carrying capacity of the planet. The Second Nature conception of John McDowell is critiqued with respect to this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The renewed interest in moral education in Britain has taken only limited cognisance of contemporary social conditions, particularly regarding mass communications and the revolution in information technology. These have had the effect of reducing distance to proximity and have left individuals with choices in areas where no choice formerly existed. It can, however, be argued that moral issues have always been concerned with choices concerning proximity and distance. Thus the proximity/ distance polarity serves as a useful conceptual framework for many aspects of moral education in schools, though one which is problematised by both poststructuralist thinking and developments in mass communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors critique C. A. Bowers' argument that education for sustainability must be inspired by the practices of pre-modern cultures, and cannot be promoted through the postmodern pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Environmental education must rather be grounded in contemporary cultural practice. Although Rorty, like many other postmodernists, has shown little concern for the ecological crisis, his approach is potentially applicable to it. What is required is a broadening of focus: the ecological crisis is a crisis of post-Enlightenment humanism as well as of other aspects of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]