Suchergebnisse

There were and still are several ways of meeting — getting acquainted with, knowing — the philosopher Jacques Maritain, the centenary of whose birth is this year. We could consult people who knew him, heard him lecture and hobnobbed with him; we could read his voluminous letters to and from Yves Simon, letters to which we hope the public will soon have access; and we might ask him what he meant by "Christian philosophy," a key concept in many of his sixty published books.

Jacques Maritain began his theory of education by supposing that the child is made for freedom, that formal education on all levels, rightly conceived, is essentially aimed at truth and that the achievement of truth in areas such as philosophy, science and art progressively helps to make us free. The child is made to know. This means that he is made for a spiritual conquest of all nature. He is made also to love God and man, and this means that he is made for a conquest of himself. These simple statements were basic.

In his ideas on education, Alfred North Whitehead was a man of good sense as well as of wide experience, a traditionalist and yet full of new life. Freshest and as if novel are two ideas: there should be spontaneous joy in learning: joy is its life; and although reason and logic are of course necessary, vital intuitions belong to the essence of learning.

Aristotle'S attitude and procedure in dealing with moral standards suggest that he assumed the following points: a) That he was speaking of something real and given; b) to be discovered and formulated and, if possible, applied; c) that in fact, standards satisfactory for human life — at least satisfactory and perhaps unsurpassable — had already been embodied in Grecian life and art and thought; and if this is the case, then in regard to moral standards, as in regard to many problems, Aristotle is a preserver and savior rather than an innovator and is like "prudence" as he delineates it; d) that if there is a divine source of these Grecian known and lived standards, these are just and true; if there is not, or if we do not know whether there is, they remain just and true; in any case, at least some of them are "by nature."