Man as the Subject of Education

Education is a “leading out” (e-ducere) of an imperfect state and a “raising up” to an ideal; as such, it cannot but presuppose a particular interpretation of human nature: what man is, and what man ought to be.  This course is an investigation in philosophical anthropology, which will explore the nature of the human being as the subject of education.  Taking our bearings from Thomas Aquinas’s “Treatise on Man” (Questions 75-102 of the prima pars of the Summa Theologiae), and developing his principles in light of later thinkers and contemporary authors, we will begin the course with a careful study of the relationship between body and soul.  Then, we will unfold human nature further in a consideration of the various powers of the soul, which represent the multifaceted way that man relates to himself, to others, to the world, and to God.  The emphasis will be on an integrated view of man, who operates as a whole in all of these relations.  Finally, we will contemplate the “educative act” from the perspective of beauty in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, and the metaphysics of human development in Ferdinand Ulrich’s Man in the Beginning: A Philosophical Anthropology of Childhood.