We teach political philosophy to the exceptional students who manage to cross over Stanford University's very high admissions bar. They read works by Plato, Aristotle, Mill, Kant, and Rawls, and in our experience they are shaken up frequently by their encounters with these and other thinkers. These students become more reflective about their values and newly aware of competing ways to live a life or to organize society. But can anyone take up these texts? Or should they be, as is increasingly the case nowadays, offered up only to a fortunate elite?

Three years ago we founded a program through Stanford's School of Continuing Studies and Program in Ethics in Society that brings classes in philosophy and the humanities to groups of fifteen to twenty female addicts and ex-convicts who have been placed, most of them involuntarily, in a residential drug and alcohol treatment program. Classes in recovery, anger management, and parenting consume most of their day. The women are a ...

» Want to continue? Login below:

top  |  print  |  email