Introduction To Philosophy,
Psychology and Sociology
of Education
Created by Jeff Strauss
MA Educational Foundations
Branches of Study
• Philosophical Theories of Human
Existence: Pre-Socratic, Medieval, Modern, 19 and 20
th
th
Century
• Theories of Human Behavior and
Development: Biological, Religious, Psychological,
Behavioral, Socio-cultural
• Historical Eras:
Ancient, Dark Ages, Enlightenment,
Age of Reason, Modernism, Industrial, Information
• Sociological Theories of Society
and Cultures: Structuralism, Conflict Theory, Marxism,
Critical Theory, Post-Modernism
Philosophy
From the earliest beginnings of recorded history it has involved discussions and
debates not just about truth, but what are our methods of inquiry into truth. So
one of the differences between philosophy and straightforward scientific inquiry
is that in philosophy the issue isn’t merely about what the truth is, but how we
can know what the truth is. A physicist and biologist know things, but the
philosopher asks, How do they know?
It is for that reason that philosophy is often described as a ‘second-order’
activity: thinking about thinking, knowing about knowing.
Thales (624-546 B.C.E)
“Everything is made of water”
There is an underlying reality beyond appearances that is radically
different from things as they appear to us through our senses
25 Centuries Since Philosophy and
Science Have altered only 1 word
• Everything is made of water
• Everything is made of air
• Everything is made of the indeterminate
boundless
• Everything is made of fire
• Everything is made of numbers
• Everything is made of atoms
• Everything is made of quarks
The ancient Greeks as a starting point for western civilizations
philosophical traditions
Socrates
Plato
Los Tres Amigos
Aristotle
Socrates (470 to 399 B.C.E)
• “The unexamined life is not worth living”
• This statement sets the stage for a
revolutionary progression of Western
thinking. That the individual is responsible
to answer questions such as What
meaning do I want to give my life? How
should I live? What really matters? What is
truth and how can I know it.
• Intrinsic Value
Plato (428-348 B.C.E)
Plato and the Allegory of the Cave
• Plato viewed the world of appearances as
an illusion
• True knowledge (ideas) could not be
sought through the senses
• Wisdom requires us to see beyond sense
experience and to learn about the
underlying first principles and causes of
things.
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)
• Aristotle collapsed the physical world of
matter (the realm of appearances) and the
world of ideas to explain change.
• He saw the soul as not independent of the
physical body
• He invented the syllogism (deductive logic)
as well as inductive logic
THE DARK AGES
Decent into The Darkness
• Marcus Aurelius (121-180) 14th Emperor of
Rome. He regarded Christians as the most
subversive and dangerous element within
the Roman Empire and warned that if
Christians were allowed to corrupt the
intellect and souls of the citizens of Rome,
the Empire would fall
• They would have been wise to heed his
warnings
The Rise of Christianity
In the third century the philosophical traditions from Thales to
Aurelius ground to a screeching halt. To the enlightened
citizens at the height of the Roman Empire, with the Hellenic
philosophical genius behind them and the emerging political,
social and cultural advances before them, it must have
seemed as if some great, cosmic awakening was about to
happen, as if the next level of enlightenment within human
consciousness was just around the corner. What they got
instead was the Dark Ages: the burning of books, the closing
of the philosophy schools, the collapse of the Roman Empire.
- Daniel Kolack “From the Pre-Socratic to the Present”
Medieval Philosophy
• By 3rd century C.E., Roman Empire is unwinding
• Because they were no longer persecuted the
Christians were now winning more converts
• Catholic philosophy developed from the view of Plato,
the Stoics and Neo-Platonists dominated Western
thought for a 1000 years
• Augustine, Averroes, Maimonides, Aquinas
• Ockham, Bacon, Martin Luther, Copernicus
How Ancient People Envisioned the
Universe
Martin Luther & The Reformation
• Martin Luther dealt the symbolic blow that
began the Reformation when he nailed his
Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the
Wittenberg Church. That document
contained an attack on papal abuses and
the sale of indulgences by church officials.
• Translation of the Bible into German from
the Latin broke Rome’s stranglehold on
the “Word”
The Renaissance
The Age of Modern Philosophy
Empiricism
• Descartes: “I think
therefore I am”
• Kant: The
Transcendental
Idealist
• Hegel: The Absolute
Idealist
Rene Descartes
• Cogito Ergo Sum
• Cartesian geometry
• Methodological
Skepticism
• Differentiated the
“handing down of
knowledge” with
“truth”
Immanuel Kant
• Not “how does an
object affect the mind”
but “how does the
mind affect an
object?”
• Transcendentalism:
Space and time are
not part of the
noumenal world, but
constructs of the mind
Hegel
• Much as Aristotle collapsed the physical
world of matter (the realm of appearances)
and the world of ideas to explain change.
Hegel paved the way for not transcending
beyond the phenomenal world or inwardly
to the mental faculties (empirical and the
rational) but to break through logical
categories themselves.
The Implications
• From Kant to Hegel there was an
enlightenment
• This paved the way for existentialism in which
the individual is primary and existence is
understood in individualistic terms
• So now Comte’s positivism is based in part
on the notion that “social” verification is a
necessary condition for truth and meaning.
Auguste Comte The birth of Positivism
The 3 conditions of intellectual development
☻Primitive stage: human beings rely on the power of
supernatural beings existing beyond the natural
world. So explanations are given in supernatural
terms
☻Metaphysical stage: explanation is ultimately
theological and supernatural entities are replaced
with abstract notions.
☻Positive stage: the mind is freed by reason and
observation from its vain egotistical search for
“Absolute Notions”
Sociology
The Players and Theories
•
•
•
•
•
•
Functionalism: Weber, Durkheim
Conflict Theory: Marx, Engle
Critical Theory: Frankfurt School
Semiotics: Pierce, Saussure
Pragmatism: William James, John Dewey
Post Modernism: Foucault, Lyotard
Functionalism
• In explaining the basis of social order in societies the starting point
for Functionalists is to look at whole societies and not the individual
• The starting point of all Functionalism is that all societies have
certain basic needs
• Emile Durkheim draws an analogy between the way a biological
organism works and society. The various organs of a living thing
work together in order to maintain a healthy whole in much the same
way that various institutions in society work together to produce
social order.
•
Functionalists believe that the basis of an orderly society is the
existence of a central value system that imposes common values on
all its members.
MAX WEBER
• Bureaucratic coordination of
human action, Weber believed,
is the distinctive mark of
modern social structures.
•
•
•
•
Hierarchy of authority
Impersonality
Written rules of conduct
Promotion based on
achievement
• Specialized division of labor
• Efficiency
Conflict Theory & Karl Marx
• The following are
four primary
assumptions of
modern conflict
theory
•
•
•
•
Competition
Structural inequality
Revolution
War.
Frankfurt School
• They were concerned to develop critical theory from the
works of Karl Marx, whilst radically revising many
Marxian ideas. They greatly developed the critique of the
mass media in mass society (what they referred to as
the culture industry) and their work is therefore at the
root of much Marxian criticism of the mass media. As
they saw it, the culture industry played a highly
manipulative role in modern society and served to
control or subvert oppositional consciousness, thus
removing any threat to the dominant capitalist class. The
possibility of revolutionary transformation of society was
seen by them as being effectively excluded by a
dominant bureaucracy which was supported by the
culture industry.
critical theory
• Developing from the work of the Frankfurt School
theorists, critical theory has always been
multidisciplinary (perhaps more accurately
'supradisciplinary'), drawing on sociology, literary
criticism, philosophy, psychology, art criticism, political
science and many other fields. Central to critical theory
is an emancipatory imperative directed towards the
abolition of social injustice and focused principally on a
critique of ideology, showing how repressive interests
underlie the ostensibly neutral formulations of science,
politics, economics, culture in general
In philosophy, where the term is extensively used, it applies to movements that
include post-structuralism, deconstruction, multiculturalism, gender studies and
literary theory, sometimes called simply "theory". It emerged beginning in the
1950's as a critique of doctrines such as positivism and emphasizes the
importance of power relationships, personalization and discourse in the
"construction" of truth and world views.
P
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3 Major Theories of Development
• Psychoanalytic Theories: Stress the importance of
children’s unconscious thoughts. It is heavily colored by emotion and
influenced by parents as to the child’s development
• Cognitive Theories: Stress children’s conscious
thoughts.
• Behavioral Theories: Stress the effects of the
environment on the organism to adapt, learn and change
Behaviorism
• Definition
Behaviorism is a theory of animal and
human learning that only focuses on
objectively observable behaviors and
discounts mental activities. Behavior
theorists define learning as nothing more
than the acquisition of new behavior.
Constructivism
• Definition
Constructivism is a philosophy of learning
founded on the premise that, by reflecting on our
experiences, we construct our own
understanding of the world we live in. Each of us
generates our own "rules" and "mental models,"
which we use to make sense of our experiences.
Learning, therefore, is simply the process of
adjusting our mental models to accommodate
new experiences.
Freud, Sigmund - (1856-1939)
• Responsible for developing theories
central to psychoanalysis, the psychology
of human sexuality, and dream
interpretation. His major contribution was
in pointing to connections between
aberrant behavior and the unconscious.
• The Id, Ego and Superego
Lev Vygotsky: Social Development Theory
• The major theme of Vygotsky's theoretical framework is
that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the
development of cognition. Vygotsky (1978) states:
"Every function in the child's cultural development
appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the
individual level; first, between people (interpsychological)
and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This
applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory,
and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions
originate as actual relationships between individuals."
Howard Gardner: Multiple Intelligences
• Definition
This theory of human intelligence,
developed by psychologist, suggests there
are at least seven ways that people have
of perceiving and understanding the world.
Gardner labels each of these ways a
distinct "intelligence"--in other words, a set
of skills allowing individuals to find and
resolve genuine problems they face.
Jean Piaget: Genetic Epistemology
• The concept of cognitive structure is central to his theory
(Schemas). There are four primary cognitive structures
(i.e., development stages) according to Piaget:
sensorimotor, preoperations, concrete operations, and
formal operations. In the sensorimotor stage (0-2 years),
intelligence takes the form of motor actions. Intelligence
in the preoperational period (3-7 years) is intuitive in
nature. The cognitive structure during the concrete
operational stage (8-11 years) is logical but depends
upon concrete referents. In the final stage of formal
operations (12-15 years), thinking involves abstractions.
THE END