Introspection, Independence, and Empathy: How Philosophy Shapes Global Citizens

For the past several years, international educators and the public alike have debated artificial intelligence—its impact on individuals and communities, the opportunities and risks it presents, and what it can and cannot do. As AI and other dominant technologies introduce or exacerbate significant challenges, and as moral questions continue to unfold, it may be time to consider what a much older technology—philosophical education—still offers and how it can help students, educators, and others navigate the most urgent issues of the day.

International educators are familiar with the work of cultivating the mental and personal qualities that will serve students in meeting the challenges and opportunities ahead, paving paths toward fulfillment and flourishing. Many educators aspire to create new generations of global citizens—people who can bridge differences, forge meaningful connections, navigate challenges and complexity with confidence, and recognize the dignity and full personhood of others, even those who are vastly different from themselves.

Below, five educators from across the world articulate a shared belief that philosophical inquiry has always cultivated these essential qualities and that the relevant principles are applicable well beyond the philosopher’s classroom.

Some people hear “philosophy” and picture an abstract, rarefied pursuit—ontology, epistemology, aesthetics—but the educators featured here, who teach philosophy or philosophically grounded approaches, argue that the discipline is concerned with the great universal questions, many of which bear directly on what every person encounters daily. One of the most important of these great questions—and one that international educators share a stake in—is the human capacity for compassion toward others.

In the nineteenth century, Arthur Schopenhauer identified compassion, or Mitleid, as the foundation of ethics. For Schopenhauer, recognizing ourselves in another person’s emotions and suffering means being able to move beyond what he, borrowing from Vedic thought, called the “veil of Maya,” the illusion that we are separate from one another.

Today’s students face a world that makes it easy to reduce people to statistics, mistake data and unsubstantiated opinion for truth, and let unexamined assumptions calcify into certainty. Piercing that veil of illusion, these educators argue, is as essential for young people today as it was for Schopenhauer.

Moving beyond this illusion isn’t achieved through any single method, but rather through an overall approach that aims to foster enriching qualities: empathy, skepticism, autonomy, introspection, and curiosity. Together, these teachers suggest that global citizenship is not solely a matter of travel, language, or exposure to other cultures, it is a habit of mind that philosophy has been cultivating for more than two thousand years.

The Challenges Philosophy Addresses

Ask any of these educators why this work matters now, and they point to the same pressures.

The first is the sheer complexity of a globalized world, which creates a constant temptation to flatten people into abstractions. “Philosophy stops us from reducing globalization to a mere collection of statistics regarding one place or the other,” says Paulo Lévano, who teaches history, philosophy, and Latin grammar at the Liceo Raimondi in Lima, Peru, “by reminding us to consider the human factor.”

The second challenge is informational: a media environment that often rewards certainty and sensationalism rather than nuance. Almudena Torres García, who teaches philosophy to 15 to 18 year olds at a public school in Sitges, Spain, says one of the discipline’s central goals is “seeking truth and knowledge, especially in a world of post-truth and fake news.”

She warns that the onslaught of information, if uncritically or thoughtlessly consumed, isn’t neutral but actively harmful. “It’s poison we absorb unless we have tools to shield ourselves—critical thinking, reflection, respect for human dignity, fact-checking, and a real understanding of the information we consume.” Lévano sees the same pattern in his own classroom: “People nowadays treat texts as if they were data; they take them at face value because they are not used to the nuances of textual interpretation.”

The third pressure is less obvious but no less corrosive: biases and assumptions students inherit but never examine. Luigi Rossi, who taught philosophy at Italian universities for decades, recalls a course on Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm: Kuhn argued that what people in a given era accept as scientific truth is shaped by a dominant framework of assumptions, a framework that eventually gives way to another as knowledge evolves.

During the course, Rossi says his students discovered that their certainties, the beliefs they had always taken for granted, were historically contingent rather than absolute. “The certainties these students had acquired in school turned out to be inexact and incorrect,” Rossi says, “because no one had explained to them that historical time and knowledge itself move at different rhythms.” The lesson, he adds, left them with “a more complex view of reality and greater caution in their judgments.”

Philosophical education, these experts suggest, doesn’t eliminate these challenges. But it gives students tools to meet them, tools that no other technology can adequately replicate.

The Qualities Philosophy Cultivates

Skepticism

For Rossi, the discipline’s oldest gift is doubt. Pointing to Descartes, Hume, Locke, and Kant, he notes that philosophy has always used skepticism “to avoid absolutism and arrogance in argument.”

Skepticism, he says, is closely related to intellectual humility, that is, being willing to admit ignorance and uncertainty. To encourage healthy skepticism in students, educators must model humility in the classroom. “Never lie to young people. Tell the truth, and never pretend to already possess it,” he advises.

Introspection and Reflection

Skepticism can also be applied internally—through critical reflection on one’s interior life, questioning the beliefs we take for granted. For Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, this deliberate introspection must come before attempts to understand anyone else. “Before we can understand the world, we have to look within and excavate the beliefs, assumptions, and experiences we carry within us.”

Her Archaeology of Self framework guides students and educators in doing this exploration, which doesn’t come naturally to everyone. In practice, this involves using texts as prompts for reflection and engaging in dialogue rather than debate by asking, “What assumptions is this text asking us to examine?” instead of “Do you agree?”

Over years of teaching, Sealey-Ruiz has watched the same pattern unfold many times: “Students often enter my classroom believing they’re there to interpret someone else’s writing. By the end of the semester, many realize they’ve also been interpreting themselves, their families, histories, and the narratives they’ve inherited about race, [gender], language, belonging, and success.”

Autonomy

Working with texts and reflecting on the themes and questions they explore is a core practice in philosophical inquiry. Torres García sees reading and writing as the primary tools through which students build intellectual independence. “Reading builds worlds, but also knowledge,” she says, describing how philosophical texts can provide students with a new vocabulary for understanding themselves and the world.

Writing does something different, she says. “It lets us develop our own ideas, put them into words, and set them down so they can’t slip away.” The practice encourages the writer to think things through for themselves and clarify their own thoughts and emotions, rather than borrowing or relying on conclusions from others.

Lévano also emphasizes philosophy’s role in developing autonomy, saying that the discipline is “an exercise in walking out of one’s own comfort zone,” an exercise that guides students in questioning notions that seem obvious and unshakable.

Empathy, Compassion, and Openness

Leaving one’s comfort zone and engaging in critical thought and rigorous reflection require courage because each step involves vulnerability. But learning how to be vulnerable and sit with discomfort can open the door for connection with others.

For Sealey-Ruiz and Darius Phelps, a writer and public educator, empathy begins with vulnerability. “Meaningful engagement with others requires the exact same thing with ourselves,” Phelps says. His framework, Embracing Every Hue, is designed to facilitate “brave spaces,” places where students can “tell personal stories, listen deeply, and encounter one another with vulnerability and care.”

Phelps’s own field is English and literature rather than philosophy, but he sees the two fields as doing the same work by different means. He believes that literature, like philosophy, offers students what scholar Rudine Sims Bishop calls “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors”—that is, portals for encountering lives unlike their own. These opportunities encourage learning and create space for students to see themselves in a different, sometimes more honest light.

For Lévano, “The goal [of philosophy] is making [students] understand that human problems are always the same . . . but they look different because, as a species, we have been thinking for a long time and in many different places.” Torres García has a similar aim in her approach to ethics instruction, giving students tools “to approach cultural and social difference with curiosity rather than fear.”

Philosophy in and Beyond the Classroom

If philosophy can help shape citizens capable of doubting, listening, and recognizing the complexity of others, its reach shouldn’t be confined to the philosophy classroom. This is where the educators interviewed converge. They all believe that this work isn’t the exclusive purview to philosophy departments.

As Phelps puts it, “Every discipline tells a story about the world and what it means to be human.” Philosophy teachers and international educators alike want students to ask not only “What am I learning?” but also “How is what I’m learning changing me?”

Education—whether by philosophical instruction or through global experiences—is not the transmission of definitive answers, but an ongoing process of doubt, discovery, and revision. The teacher’s task is to create space for authentic dialogue—with texts, with classmates, and with oneself—to resist the temptation to offer easy answers, and to help students build a defense against the simplistic answers to complex problems that contemporary debate so often supplies.

In this work, philosophy fulfills what is perhaps its most valuable function: It does not simply teach us how to answer; it teaches us to recognize which questions are worth asking.

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics that it was wonder that first prompted human beings to philosophize—the sense of amazement born from the encounter with what we do not yet understand, a phenomenon students can also experience when they explore and engage with a different culture.

It is the same sense of wonder that is reflected in a phrase Lévano attributes to Alfred North Whitehead, “Philosophy is the daughter of astonishment.” In an age dominated by technology, it is perhaps worth returning to the cultivation of that wonder and the capacity to be amazed once again. •