Habits of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education

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iUniverse, 2000 - 584 pages
This stimulating new work is based on a highly-successful--and extremely popular--course which Professor De Nicolas has taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook for over 15 years. In "Habits of Mind," De Nicolas reveals that the most important achievement of education is to develop in students those skills that enable them to participate fully in the life of humankind. He calls these skills the "inner technologies", and intends by the phrase something very different from congnitive skills. Education, he claims, must nurture the capacity for fantasy and imagination. In "Habits of Mind," he traces the relative importance of these capacities through the history and philosophy of education from Plato onward. The habits of intellectual discourse are treated as an organic thread from the ancient past to the present.

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Contents

Higher Education Today
3
Our Philosophical Roots
19
An Alternative Philosophy of Education
32
An Alternative University
52
The Medieval Version of Aristotle
71
Modernity with Galileo Descartes Newton
135
Locke Rousseau Marquis de Sade
163
Vico Voltaire
250
John Dewey José Ortega
292
Socrates Plato the Poets
435
SummaryPhilosophies of Education
531
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