Epiphanic versus incremental routes to moral growth

In this, the first of two Target Articles, written to launch the current Special Issue on Epiphanies and Moral Education, I explore the common dichotomy—represented historically by Plato and Aristotle—between fast and epiphanic versus slow and incremental moral growth. I compare and contrast Aristotle’s and Plato’s moral developmental theories, under the guiding light of epiphanies, paying special attention to the recent retrieval of Plato’s account of epiphanies by Jonas and Nakazawa. I then turn the lens to the current literature on transformative education, drawing specifically on Yacek’s critical overview. Subsequently, I introduce two putative paradoxes of epiphanic education—on how epiphanic moral growth as an educational ideal is (1) psycho-epistemically possible and (2) psycho-morally justifiable—and explain how those relate to the relevant literatures, while leaving the hard task of trying to sort them out to James Pawelski’s second Target Article and the other contributions to this Special Issue.