Knowledge and a new Paideia
10
ago
Paideia was the ideal of education of Socrates, the eidos to be more
exact, more than forming the man should form the citizen, remember and contextualize that the city-state was a specific form of organization where the polis appears as an extra organization Civilization, that is, it was not a mere form of power, but rather how to think of the city as ethics and virtue, the first sketch of an idea of the common good.
Thus defined Plato, since we only know Socrates through Plato, Paideia was: “(…) the essence of all true education or Paideia is that which gives man the desire and eagerness to become a perfect citizen and it teaches to order and obey, having justice as its foundation”, looking at today’s society, it is easy to see that we have not achieved it.
Contextualizing the period of Socrates and the sophists is the one in which, while the former said that it was possible and necessary in addition to organizing the ethos, and praxis, the knowledge to achieve them, this set is episteme.
Episteme, true knowledge, of a scientific nature, as opposed to unfounded or unreflective opinion, was a clear opposition to the sophists, who among other things said that the truth cannot be reached, so all were ways to manipulate the truth, in current terms, only narratives according to convenience.
Gorgias (485-380 BC) said verbatim: “Nothing is; if anything was, it could not be understood; and if it could be understood, it could not be communicated to other people”, thesis that will be denied by Plato, and the best known allegory is the myth of the cave, which is a metaphor, and whose episteme will develop in the categories of Aristotle, with the problem of the analogy already discussed.
The Platonic/Aristotelian knowledge over a long course of the medical age, including Augustine Hippo, who imagines that the truth as being obtained through self-reflection made by man and his interiorization in God, in the low middle age Boethius develops the idea of universals and particulars, whose discussion will be divided between nominalists.
Nominalists did not admit the existence of universals, Roscelin de Compiègne (1050-1120) is one of the founders, and on the other hand realists, like Thomas Aquinas, all entities can be grouped into two universal and particular categories
Idealism emerges as a realist current, but it distances itself from it creating an immanent objectivity, and transcendence is the knowledge that the subject has of the object, whereas in phenomenology, the transcendent is what transcends consciousness itself, it is objective in the sense that only there is awareness of “something”, and thus it is linked to the subject that goes beyond.
Bachelard (1884–1962) was a pioneer in studying how epistemology, referring to “revolutionary” ruptures, creates new ways of thinking and knowing, we will return to the theme.
