Editorial: 7th Issue May 30th 2018

Blog: http://michaelrdjames.org/
Journal site: https://www.aletheiaeducation.eu/

The first lecture is entitled “TheSecond Centrepiece lecture on The Philosophy

of Education” and it is the second lecture given by Jude Sutton, one of the main
characters in the recently published Philosophical/educational novel “The
World Explored, the World Suffered: The Exeter lectures”.

The lecture defines education in partly Aristotelian and partly Wittgensteinian

terms. It is an umbrella term for a range of normative activities conducted in
accordance with normative attitudes that all aim at a telos of understanding and
virtue. The normative structure of these activities and attitudes are compared to
the Kantian Categorical imperative . Jude Sutton compares the moral law to
science and its laws which possess a fact determining nature. Sutton ends with
the following claims:

“education is fundamentally in its nature, a process obeying the laws of the

categorical imperative…”education is fundamentally concerned with the project
of Humanity”

A project which Kant argues will last for one hundred thousand years. A project
that will not be hastened by the periodic appearance of biblical style prophets.

The second lecture which will appear in the next volume of the trilogy of
lectures is entitled “Darwin and William James: The inroads of physiology and
Biology”. This is a lecture taken from a series of lectures on the History of
Psychology that are also concerned with problems in the arena of Philosophical
Psychology. The lecture series is commenting upon and criticizing The work
entitled “History of Psychology” by Brett and Peters.

Brett begins by claiming the following:

“The influence of biology proved to be the most far-reaching of all influences

coming into psychology from outside the philosophical, religious and medical
traditions from which psychology, in the main has developed. But its full
influence did not make itself felt until the end of the 19th century and the
beginning of the 20th century when men who had been trained in Darwinian
Biology started to study man in the same sort of way as they studied animals and
to use the same sort of explanatory hypotheses for human behaviour. There was,
however, a transitional period before the rise of various schools of psychology
in the 20th century when the biological outlook exerted a correcting rather than
a radical influence on the old tradition of “idea” psychology.. The systematizers,
Ward , Stout and James, for instance, though strongly influenced by biology
were what we would now call “philosophical psychologists”. They were
interested primarily in traditional topics like the relationship between perception
and conception, the self, and self-consciousness, the association of ideas
etc…..stress on conation, on plasticity and adaptability, and on function was
beginning to replace the old interest in cognition, faculties, and structure. But
Psychology remained predominantly introspective. The mind rather than
behaviour remained the centre of interest: the difference was that a more
biological account was given of mental processes.”(Brett and Peters)

Brett contunues with a general review of the contributions of various schools of

thought:

“The latter half of the 18th century was a period of intense activity in the
sciences including some interesting research on the brain in which memory, for
example, was explained as “the persistence of impressions on the brain
substance”. Cartesian dualism surprisingly dominated psychological discussion
and the physiological “vis nervosa” was distinguished from the soul or psychic
force. In Germany the notion of “Lebenskraft” was influential and the concept
of development was the focus of much theorizing. The Sciences were beginning
to assemble themselves into a series of ascending steps beginning with physics
reaching through chemistry, physiology, biology to psychology. Functionalism
supplemented the materialism of the day and was interwoven with the activity of
the will. Bichat, for example in the spirit of functionalism defined life as “the
complex of functions which resist death”. The dualism was almost Platonic:
man was a divided being composed of natural forces functioning “

William James was probably the most famous of the so called “philosophical
psychologists” influenced by Darwin and the Physiological theorists. His
definition of Psychology was : “the science of mental life, both of its
phenomena and their conditions” : and the data of the science were 1. Thoughts
and feelings. 2. a physical world in space and time with which these thoughts
and feelings oexist , and which 3. they know. He defined consciousness in terms
of thought and postulated that in the stream of consciousness thinking of some
sort is always going on. James has this to say about the conscious mind in
general:

“The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilitues.

Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection
of some, and the suppresiion of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency
of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from
the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the
faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of
yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives
very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone.”

The above quote reminds one of Hughlings Jackson and his hierarchical systems
of the brain,. Freud was also influenced by Hughlings Jackson and his three
principles of Psychology: the energy regulation principle, the pleasure-pain
principle, and the reality principle find a natural home in Hughlings Jackson’s
reflections.

The final lecture is part of an Introduction to Philosophy course text book which
will be published at the end of 2019. It is entitled “Part one--Aristotle,
Metaphysics and Science” .

Aristotle’s method , it is argued, contributed to the panoramic view he could

form of reality and the previous thinkers thought about reality. His matrix of
space , time and causation is often cited as the reason for the inadequacy of his
more metaphysical reflections but commentators engaged in this line of
criticism have often failed to understand the meanings of potentiality, form,
finality and materiality. His teleological reasoning is often regarded as
embodying an incoherent conception of “backward causation” but this too rests
on a misunderstanding it is argued. The following contributes to this discussion:

“There has been much ado about the latter component of the above account,
namely the 4 aitiai or kinds of “explanations”. The Scientific matrix and method, for
example conceives of matter, not as potential to be formed, but rather as “events
observed” in accordance with the cause-effect rule. This conception insists that
teleological explanation is incoherent: it cannot be observable when the builder is in
the process of building the house. Science, in other words, cannot conceive of
potentiality because potentiality is not actual and real—because it has resolved the
one event of change into the two events of cause and effect which are, according to
Hume connected because of the regularity of the world and the “conventional” way
in which we characterise the world. Science sees these events in terms of
observation and any reasoning about unobservables(such as the thought of the
house “in” the mind of the builder cannot be observed )therefore does not exist.
What is being imagined here is that the metaphorical “in” is a spatial
characterisation. There is nothing “in” the mind of the builder: rather there is a
principle related to the builders powers operating in the movement of the materials
from one location to another. The scientist who is committed to denying the
Aristotelian account just does not know how to characterise the holistic event of
“the builder building a house”.”
It was Descartes Hobbes and Hume that launched the so-called resolution-
composition method of scientific inquiry which using observation to detect linear
causation as a consequence failed to provide satisfactory explanations in so many
of the human and psychologically based sciences. This method at its best resulted
in the dualism pointed to by Wilfred Sellars, namely that between the Scientific
Image of the world and the Manifest image of the world. Without hylomorphic theory
we are left with the modern post Aristotelian inadequate alternatives of dualism and
materialism in our theorizing about the world.