Abstract

This volume of essays marks the launch of the series ‘St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs’ and consists of revised versions of the Victor Cook Memorial Lectures, a series of public lectures dedicated to the general theme of values and education. The collection’s editor, John Haldane, here assembles a distinguished cast of contributors—including the likes of Jonathan Sacks, Stewart Sutherland and Mary Warnock—which seeks to fuse intellectual rigour with the practical experience of issues relating to values and education in public life. In his introduction, Haldane is careful to stress that, while the collection will be of interest to a diverse range of subject specialists, ‘it is equally important that the general educated reader should engage with these discussions and they have been written with that purpose very much in mind’ (p. x). He elaborates on this point by appealing to Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion, in his Edinburgh Gifford Lectures, of the idea of an ‘educated public’, and suggests that part of the purpose of the essays, and of the public lectures from which they are derived, is to address precisely that audience (p. xiii).