Volume 29, 1998
Philosophy of Education
Marc Smith
Pages 313-316
Educating the Human Subject
The transition from 'classical' to 'modern' culture has meant the disappearance of any normative, universal, and absolute culture in which all humanity is to be educated. But that, in itself, does not mean that there is now nothing 'transcending' culture that philosophy can teach humanity. I argue that Bernard Lonergan's analysis of the rational, self-conscious subject, as constituted by the conscious operations of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding, provides a 'fixed base, an invariant pattern' as the condition for the possibility of educating humanity.