Philosophy of Education 5:2
Sku: 20000A0E050
Archival Number: CD/mp3 200
Author: Lonergan, B.
Language(s): English
Decade: 1950
Description:
CD/mp3 200, second part of fifth Cincinnati lecture on philosophy of education. Corresponds to CWL 10: 119-31. Sponsored by Nancy Ring. The classical ideal can be distinguished from the pre-classical and the post-classical. It is the idea of the post-classical that is the idea of the new learning, going beyond the Athenian achievement with fuller refinements of what the Greeks originally attained. The pre-classical is thematized in depth psychology, the study of intersubjectivity, Scheler, the phenomenologists and existentialists, and the influence radiating from Heidegger: Binswanger, Bultmann, Jonas; also in Eliade, Voegelin, Cassirer, Piaget, all of whom articulate forms of experience that are prior to the specialization of intellect that arises with the Greeks. Next, the post-classical versatility of understanding brings us to what is new in the new learning. First, there is Lobatchevski, whose discovery effected a transformation in the notion of what mathematics is: not deducing conclusions from necessary self-evident truths but hypothetical-deductive working out the implications of postulates. Combining with this change in mathematics, there arose the quest for rigor. Mathematics turned to symbolic logic to secure rigor in its hypothetic-deductive structure. The notion of abstraction becomes generalized: Newton's first law, Einstein's transposition to electromagnetics and field theory, Hilbert's implicit definition, quantum theory, group theory, where abstraction falls upon the operations of the subject. Operations give an alternative approach to the integration of the sciences and to many other problems. And Insight is this kind of study of operations.