Philosophy of Education 4:2

CD/mp3 198, second half of fourth Cincinnati lecture on philosophy of education. Corresponds to CWL 10: 91-103. Sponsored by Grey Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. When the intellectual pattern ceases to be dominant, one can narrow one's horizon. To move into the practical pattern without narrowing one's horizon presupposes charity. The pure desire includes the supernatural goal to which we are destined in this life. Correlative to the supernatural end is charity. In scientific development, in mathematics or natural science, the horizon expands when a crisis occurs that shows that previous assumptions cannot handle something that has to be accepted. There follows a radical revision of basic concepts, postulates, axioms, methods. Such a recession of the horizon meets with resistance, but it is overcome relatively quickly, and universally and permanently. Development in philosophy, human science, and theology is different. The recession of the horizon does not result in a universal and permanent difference. The new horizon is accepted only by some. The ground of the difference is that scientific development involves a transformation of the object, whereas in the philosophic field the subject is one of the objects, and the subject can accept a transformation of the object only by accepting a transformation in one's own living, a conversion, a real development in the subject. Moral development is the development in the good that is one's concern. One's concern can fall upon particular goods, the good of order, or values. One's apprehension of values can be aesthetic, ethical, or religious. These differences give rise to the possibility of a great variety of modes of organization of the moral subject. Particular considerations follow: Piaget's study of the moral development of children, and intellectual development in adolescents. Education has to be a preparation to help adolescents go through the period in which they become their own masters. It does this by being a broadening of the horizon towards a real apprehension of the real good in all its dimensions. The ethics of law is contasted with the ethics of achievement.

Database and descriptions © Copyright 2017 by Robert M. Doran

 

Audio restoration by Greg Lauzon