Philosophy of education 7:1

CD/mp3 203, first half of seventh Cincinnati lecture on philosophy of education. Corresponds to CWL 10: 158-68. Sponsored by Glen Pelshea and Jeffrey Sprague. The issue is the theory of philosophic differences. The problem arises from three types of problems of development: development in the sciences, development in the very notion of science, and development of the subject. The subject of a human science is one of the objects, and a higher viewpoint on the object has implications regarding the subject. There is conversion of the subject, and unless it follows, there will be a conflict between object and subject. This is the root cause of philosophic differences. A series of instances illustrates such changes. The first instance is the notion of space, where our first notion is kinesthetic-tactile, and our second is visual. These two have to be united, but also distinguished. Visual space admits indefinite extension, and a correction in the tactile notion is demanded to account for the implications of visual space such as the sphericity of the earth. Still, the felt differences of tactile space are essential. A second development in the notion of space is decentering, a generalization that enables one to imagine how things would look if one were in another place. Corresponding to this in mathematics and physics is the transformation of axes. The laws of a geometry are what do not change when one moves from one set of axes to another. This is the basis of Riemannian geometry, and the fundamental presupposition of Einstein's work on relativity. This last step moves to a purely intellectual view of space as what is independent of the spatiotemporal viewpoint. And there is a resistance at each further step. Again, there is the notion of intersubjectivity. Lonergan presents his phenomenology of a smile. The meaning of a smile is contrasted with the meaning of words, and its truth with the truth of propositions. A smile is an intersubjective act. It does not have meaning in the sense of the meaning of discourse. Intersubjective phenomena have no tendency to univocity; their meaning is immanent in themselves; they are not true or false as propositions are; they are not about something, but are determinants in an interpersonal situation.

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