Theology and Philosophy of Education

Radim Palouš on Perception as Belonging

Ondřej Svoboda — 2022-12-07

Freedom as an Aim of Education

Zuzana Svobodová — 2022-12-07

Platonic Curriculum and the Allegory of the Cave

David Rybák — 2022-11-27

The following paper attempts to show and take into account in basic terms the unity and direction of the movement of education as presented in Plato’s Republic. We show that education, according to Plato, essentially involves a claim to knowledge in the sense of understanding what is valid regardless of space and time and acting on the basis of norming oneself by this understanding. Then, namely, in the sense of this distinction, an educated person is one who is able to distinguish the important and the unimportant in his knowledge and in his life.

Levinas on Teaching

James Mensch — 2022-11-15

The teaching relation has always been a puzzle. Some take education as the passing on and acquisition of information. They regard the lecture format as crucial. Others see it in terms of developing the reasoning ability of students. In seminars and conversations, they strive to have their students reflect and learn to “think for themselves.” Their goal is a rational individual capable of insight. Levinas, the French Philosopher, who famously positioned ethics as first philosophy, i.e., as determinative of how we think of ourselves and our world, advances a novel view, one springing from the “face to face” relation. In this article, we explore how his understanding of this relation leads to his situating education in an ethical context.

Reading as a Creative Process in the Pedagogy of Hugh of St Victor

Rastislav Nemec — 2022-11-15

The pedagogical work of the Victorines represents not only one of the greatest contributions to the history of education in medieval times, but it is also a new and inspirational instrument that combines the reading of classic works with the reading of the Holy Scripture. The topic of this article is to describe the basic lines of pedagogical thinking of one of the doyens of medieval pedagogy – Hugh of St Victor (†1141) – which he introduced in his first medieval didactics, The Didascalicon. The work focuses on the topic of reading, which is broadly thematised in the text. It looks at it through the prism of metaphors used by Hugh to explain reading

Tempting of Speech in Music Education

Michael Pinkas — 2022-11-15

The article deals with the temptation of speech in the teaching of music, as highlighted in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Within the framework of the teacher-pupil, pupil-narrator and narrator-reader dialogue in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, a new perspective on the perception of music is formed without a single note being played. Words are meant to take us to imagery. Correspondingly, is it possible to talk about the music that exists, to construct ideas logically, but to be distant from the identity of what is heard? Such questions are the basis of the hermeneutic spiral of analysis-interpretation and the subject of teacher-pupil dialogue, where true insight can be born.

Outline of the Philosophical Concept of the Child and the “Child in us”

Miriam Prokešová — 2022-11-20

In this article, an outline of the philosophical concept of the child is presented, based on the central idea that our childhood and the child we were is not a thing of the past, but is always present within us, at any age. This “Child in us” is not only our longing for love but is the very love that secretly persists within us. In our lives, we long for this love; we are constantly searching for that ancient “child within us”, mostly without knowing that we are always that child – love.

Why Death Should Be a Topic for Education

Mária Spišiaková — 2022-12-03

Although the Covid-19 pandemic has reintroduced death and dying into awareness and debate, these topics remain in some sense taboo in society. From a philosophical perspective, however, death is closely related to the meaning of life and it is therefore unavoidable to reflect on it. The article attempts to show that reflections on death should be a part of education at different levels.