PHILOSOPHICAL EDUCATION: TOWARDS A CONCEPT OF CONTENT

Abstract

The foundation of a philosophy course, it seems, should be based on the logic of the first chapter of K. Marx’s “Capital”. It encompasses the dialectic of the material and the ideal, as well as the dialectic of object-based and energy-based existence. These categories are presented in the dynamics of ascent, as an investigation, and in the dynamics of descent, as an exposition. The four stages of inquiry in the “Form of Value” represent a process of abstraction from different orders of relatedness and specificity. The philosophically evolving individual navigates four stages of social and personal object identity in the process. This enables the emerging researcher to conceptualise their self as a genesis traversing the levels of individuality, particularity, universality, and totality. The historical political economic process, running in parallel to the logical development, illustrates not randomly extracted examples, but the sequential emergence of human essence across various orders of universality and different orders of essence. The logic of the abstract and the concrete in a philosophy course concludes the exploration of reality and the learner’s identity with extremely abstract categories, only to embark on a reverse journey: from the exceedingly abstract to the mentally concrete. In this process, the investigation is replaced by a phase of exposition, both intellectual and practical construction. The exposition is objectively grounded in the research, which limits the arbitrariness of subjective imagination in the presentation. Overall, it is suggested that the foundation of philosophical education should rest on a tripartite structure, determined by research, exposition, and creative imagination, which generates variations of philosophical worlds based on examples from the history of philosophy.