Teaching is a paradoxical activity, beset by ironies and apparent contradictions: Educated people are autonomous and self-directed, but schooling generally involves expert direction of compliant and dependent students. Empathy, imagination, and creativity characterize fully actualized people, but these qualities seem at odds with mastering received bodies of material. Societies value testable facts and abilities, but these are of little use, and can even be dangerous, without maturity of character. Educators rightly value teaching for maturity, but risk in the process indoctrination or natural resistance. Modeling forthrightness would seem indispensable to character development, but some of the most effective teachers induce learning by good-natured trickery. These are genuine paradoxes, in that even when we work out credible resolutions for them they tend not stay solved. Their tensions continue to bedevil us in each new class, with each new student, and at each phase of learning. The insights and conclusions of this conversation are neither inflexible doctrines nor a compendium of abstract disputes unrelated to actual teaching practices. Rather, the reader at once witnesses and participates in the philosophy of education as a vital process, experiencing the kind of passionate and imaginative conversations that good teachers often have, and from which they learn to understand and engage the elusive art of teaching.

Sentience and Sensibility is a dialogue that engages a number of issues in moral theory in a rigorous and original manner, while remaining accessible to students and other nonspecialist readers. It accomplishes this by means of the time-honored (if presently dormant) medium of philosophical dialogue, in which its characters actively challenge each other to clarify their ideas and defend their reasoning. In this manner the conversation develops and weighs some proposed solutions, in largely non-technical language, to a number of current and traditional moral problems (including the nature and origin of moral value, the moral status of nonhuman animals, problems of partiality, and other vexed topics). Moral philosophy and theory can seem as remote and intimidating as everyday ethical matters and moral intuitions are pressing. Sentience and Sensibility proposes that these two should meet. The book's characters gently challenge each other to clarify their thinking and defend their reasoning, and in this rigorous yet personable manner explore traditional and fresh takes on morality. The conversation aims not only to discover thoughtful answers to such questions, but to do so while being respectful of both philosophical theory and ordinary moral intuitions. David Weissman of CCNY believes this "may be the best use of the very difficult medium of philosophical dialogue" he has read, and that the book "deserves a wide audience." Kay Mathiesen of the University of Arizona compares the appeal of the book to that of Jostein Gaarder's bestselling novel about the history of philosophy, with the difference that Sentience and Sensibility develops original ideas in moral thought: "It's like a Sophie's World for grownups."