Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of Education can refer to either the academic field of applied philosophy or to one of any
educational philosophies that promote a specific type or vision of education, and/or which examine the
definition, goals and meaning of education.

As an academic field, philosophy of education is "the philosophical study of education and its problems...its
central subject matter is education, and its methods are those of philosophy".[1] "The philosophy of education
may be either the philosophy of the process of education or the philosophy of the discipline of education.
That is, it may be part of the discipline in the sense of being concerned with the aims, forms, methods, or
results of the process of educating or being educated; or it may be meta disciplinary in the sense of being
concerned with the concepts, aims, and methods of the discipline."[2] As such, it is both part of the field of
education and a field of applied philosophy, drawing from fields of metaphysics, epistemology, axiology and
the philosophical approaches (speculative, prescriptive, and/or analytic) to address questions in and
about pedagogy, education policy, and curriculum, as well as the process of learning, to name a few.[3] For
example, it might study what constitutes upbringing and education, the values and norms revealed through
upbringing and educational practices, the limits and legitimization of education as an academic discipline,
and the relation between educational theory and practice.

Instead of being taught in philosophy departments, philosophy of education is usually housed in departments
or colleges of education, similar to how philosophy of law is generally taught in law schools.[1] The multiple
ways of conceiving education coupled with the multiple fields and approaches of philosophy make
philosophy of education not only a very diverse field but also one that is not easily defined. Although there is
overlap, philosophy of education should not be conflated with educational theory, which is not defined
specifically by the application of philosophy to questions in education. Philosophy of education also should
not be confused with philosophy education, the practice of teaching and learning the subject of philosophy.

Philosophy of education can also be understood not as an academic discipline but as a normative educational
theory that unifies pedagogy, curriculum, learning theory, and the purpose of education and is grounded in
specific metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological assumptions. These theories are also called
educational philosophies. For example, a teacher might be said to follow a perennialist educational
philosophy.

Idealism
Plato
Date: 424/423 BC - 348/347 BC
Plato's educational philosophy was grounded in his vision of the ideal Republic, wherein the individual was
best served by being subordinated to a just society. He advocated removing children from their mothers' care
and raising them as wards of the state, with great care being taken to differentiate children suitable to the
various castes, the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and
care for the less able. Education would be holistic, including facts, skills, physical discipline, and music and
art, which he considered the highest form of endeavor.

Plato believed that talent was distributed non-genetically and thus must be found in children born in
any social class. He builds on this by insisting that those suitably gifted are to be trained by the state so that
they may be qualified to assume the role of a ruling class. What this establishes is essentially a system of
selective public education premised on the assumption that an educated minority of the population are, by
virtue of their education (and inborn educability), sufficient for healthy governance.

Plato's writings contain some of the following ideas: Elementary education would be confined to the
guardian class till the age of 18, followed by two years of compulsory military training and then by higher
education for those who qualified. While elementary education made the soul responsive to the environment,
higher education helped the soul to search for truth which illuminated it. Both boys and girls receive the
same kind of education. Elementary education consisted of music and gymnastics, designed to train and
blend gentle and fierce qualities in the individual and create a harmonious person.

At the age of 20, a selection was made. The best one would take an advanced course in mathematics,
geometry, astronomy and harmonics. The first course in the scheme of higher education would last for ten
years. It would be for those who had a flair for science. At the age of 30 there would be another selection;
those who qualified would study dialectics and metaphysics, logic and philosophy for the next five years.
They would study the idea of good and first principles of being. After accepting junior positions in the army
for 15 years, a man would have completed his theoretical and practical education by the age of 50.

Immanuel Kant
Date: 1724–1804

Immanuel Kant believed that education differs from training in that the latter involves thinking whereas the
former does not. In addition to educating reason, of central importance to him was the development of
character and teaching of moral maxims. Kant was a proponent of public education and of learning by
doing.[4]

Realism
Aristotle
Date: 384 BC - 322 BC

Only fragments of Aristotle's treatise On Education are still in existence. We thus know of his philosophy of
education primarily through brief passages in other works. Aristotle considered human
nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated in education. Thus, for example, he
considered repetition to be a key tool to develop good habits. The teacher was to lead the student
systematically; this differs, for example, from Socrates' emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out
their own ideas (though the comparison is perhaps incongruous since Socrates was dealing with adults).

Aristotle placed great emphasis on balancing the theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught. Subjects
he explicitly mentions as being important included reading, writing and mathematics; music; physical
education; literature and history; and a wide range of sciences. He also mentioned the importance of play.

One of education's primary missions for Aristotle, perhaps it’s most important, was to produce good
and virtuous citizens for the polis. All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been
convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

Avicenna
Date: 980 AD - 1037 AD

In the medieval Islamic world, an elementary school was known as a maktab, which dates back to at least the
10th century. Like madrasahs (which referred to higher education), a maktab was often attached to a mosque.
In the 11th century, Ibn Sina (known as Avicennain the West), wrote a chapter dealing with
the maktab entitled "The Role of the Teacher in the Training and Upbringing of Children", as a guide to
teachers working at maktab schools. He wrote that children can learn better if taught in classes instead of
individual tuition from private tutors, and he gave a number of reasons for why this is the case, citing the
value ofcompetition and emulation among pupils as well as the usefulness of group discussions and debates.
Ibn Sina described the curriculum of a maktab school in some detail, describing the curricula for two stages
of education in a maktab school.[5]

Ibn Sina wrote that children should be sent to a maktab school from the age of 6 and be taught primary
education until they reach the age of 14. During which time, he wrote that they should be taught
the Qur'an, Islamic metaphysics, language, literature, Islamic ethics, and manual skills (which could refer to
a variety of practical skills).[5]

Ibn Sina refers to the secondary education stage of maktab schooling as the period of specialization, when
pupils should begin to acquire manual skills, regardless of their social status. He writes that children after the
age of 14 should be given a choice to choose and specialize in subjects they have an interest in, whether it
was reading, manual skills, literature, preaching, medicine, geometry, trade and commerce, craftsmanship, or
any other subject or profession they would be interested in pursuing for a future career. He wrote that this
was a transitional stage and that there needs to be flexibility regarding the age in which pupils graduate, as
the student's emotional development and chosen subjects need to be taken into account.[6]
The empiricist theory of 'tabula rasa' was also developed by Ibn Sina. He argued that the "human intellect at
birth is rather like a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know"
and that knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one
abstracts universal concepts" which is developed through a "syllogistic method of reasoning; observations
lead to prepositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts." He further
argued that the intellect itself "possesses levels of development from the material intellect (al-‘aql al-
hayulani), that potentiality that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect (al-‘aql al-fa‘il), the state of the
human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge."[7]

Ibn Tufail
Date: c. 1105 - 1185

In the 12th century, the Andalusian-Arabian philosopher and novelist Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or
"Ebn Tophail" in the West) demonstrated the empiricist theory of 'tabula rasa' as a thought
experiment through his Arabic philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in which he depicted the development
of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on
a desert island, through experience alone. The Latin translation of his philosophical novel, Philosophus
Autodidactus, published byEdward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's
formulation of tabula rasa in "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding".[8]

John Locke
Date: 1632-1704

Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education is an outline on how to educate this mind: he expresses the
belief that education maketh the man, or, more fundamentally, that the mind is an "empty cabinet", with the
statement, "I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or
evil, useful or not, by their education."[9]
Locke also wrote that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very
important and lasting consequences."[10] He argued that the "associations of ideas" that one makes when
young are more important than those made later because they are the foundation of the self: they are, put
differently, what first mark the tabula rasa. In his Essay, in which is introduced both of these concepts,
Locke warns against, for example, letting "a foolish maid" convince a child that "goblins and sprites" are
associated with the night for "darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall
be so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other."[11]

"Associationism", as this theory would come to be called, exerted a powerful influence over eighteenth-
century thought, particularly educational theory, as nearly every educational writer warned parents not to
allow their children to develop negative associations. It also led to the development of psychology and other
new disciplines with David Hartley's attempt to discover a biological mechanism for associationism in
his Observations on Man (1749).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Date: 1712-1778

Rousseau, though he paid his respects to Plato's philosophy, rejected it as impractical due to the decayed state
of society. Rousseau also had a different theory of human development; where Plato held that people are
born with skills appropriate to different castes (though he did not regard these skills as being inherited),
Rousseau held that there was one developmental process common to all humans. This was an intrinsic,
natural process, of which the primary behavioral manifestation was curiosity. This differed from Locke's
'tabula rasa' in that it was an active process deriving from the child's nature, which drove the child to learn
and adapt to its surroundings.

Rousseau wrote in his book Emile that all children are perfectly designed organisms, ready to learn from
their surroundings so as to grow into virtuous adults, but due to the malign influence of corrupt society, they
often fail to do so. Rousseau advocated an educational method which consisted of removing the child from
society—for example, to a country home—and alternately conditioning him through changes to his
environment and setting traps and puzzles for him to solve or overcome.

Rousseau was unusual in that he recognized and addressed the potential of a problem of legitimation for
teaching. He advocated that adults always be truthful with children, and in particular that they never hide the
fact that the basis for their authority in teaching was purely one of physical coercion: "I'm bigger than you."
Once children reached the age of reason, at about 12, they would be engaged as free individuals in the
ongoing process of their own.

He once said that a child should grow up without adult interference and that the child must be guided to
suffer from the experience of the natural consequences of his own acts or behaviour. When he experiences
the consequences of his own acts, he advises himself.

Mortimer Jerome Adler

Date: 1902-2001

Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a philosopher he
worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for the longest stretches in New York
City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He worked for Columbia University,
the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research.
Adler was married twice and had four children.[12] Adler was a proponent of educational perennialism.

Harry S. Broudy
Date: 1905-1998

Broudy's philosophical views were based on the tradition of classical realism, dealing with truth, goodness,
and beauty. However he was also influenced by the modern philosophy existentialism and instrumentalism.
In his textbook Building a Philosophy of Education he has two major ideas that are the main points to his
philosophical outlook: The first is truth and the second is universal structures to be found in humanity's
struggle for education and the good life. Broudy also studied issues on society's demands on school. He
thought education would be a link to unify the diverse society and urged the society to put more trust and a
commitment to the schools and a good education.

Scholasticism
Thomas Aquinas
Date: c. 1225 - 1274

John Milton
Date: 1608-1674

The objective of medieval education was an overtly religious one, primarily concerned with uncovering
transcendental truths that would lead a person back to God through a life of moral and religious choice
(Kreeft 15). The vehicle by which these truths were uncovered was dialectic:

To the medieval mind, debate was a fine art, a serious science, and a fascinating entertainment, much more
than it is to the modern mind, because the medievals believed, like Socrates, that dialectic could uncover
truth. Thus a ‘scholastic disputation’ was not a personal contest in cleverness, nor was it ‘sharing opinions’;
it was a shared journey of discovery (Kreeft 14-15).

Pragmatism
John Dewey
Date: 1859-1952

In Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, Dewey stated that education,
in its broadest sense, is the means of the "social continuity of life" given the "primary ineluctable facts of the
birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group". Education is therefore a necessity,
for "the life of the group goes on."[13] Dewey was a proponent of Educational Progressivism and was a
relentless campaigner for reform of education, pointing out that the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained
knowledge approach of modern traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not
enough with understanding students' actual experiences.[14]

William James
Date: 1842–1910

William Heard Kilpatrick

Date: 1871-1965
William Heard Kilpatrick was a US American philosopher of education and a colleague and a successor
of John Dewey. He was a major figure in the progressive education movement of the early 20th century.
Kilpatrick developed the Project Method for early childhood education, which was a form of Progressive
Education organized curriculum and classroom activities around a subject's central theme. He believed that
the role of a teacher should be that of a "guide" as opposed to an authoritarian figure. Kilpatrick believed that
children should direct their own learning according to their interests and should be allowed to explore their
environment, experiencing their learning through the natural senses.[15] Proponents of Progressive Education
and the Project Method reject traditional schooling that focuses on memorization, rote learning, strictly
organized classrooms (desks in rows; students always seated), and typical forms of assessment.

Nel Noddings
Date: 1929–

Noddings' first sole-authored book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984)
followed close on the 1982 publication of Carol Gilligan’s ground-breaking work in the ethics of care In a
Different Voice. While her work on ethics continued, with the publication of Women and Evil (1989) and
later works on moral education, most of her later publications have been on the philosophy of education
and educational theory. Her most significant works in these areas have been Educating for Intelligent Belief
or Unbelief (1993) and Philosophy of Education (1995).

Analytic Philosophy
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy (sometimes analytical philosophy) is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to
dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. In the United States, United
Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand, the overwhelming majority of university philosophy
departments identify themselves as "analytic" departments.[1]
The term "analytic philosophy" can refer to:
 A broad philosophical tradition[2][3] characterized by an emphasis on clarity and argument (often achieved
via modern formal logic and analysis of language) and a respect for the natural sciences.[4][5][6]
 The more specific set of developments of early 20th-century philosophy that were the historical
antecedents of the broad sense: e.g., the work of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E.
Moore, Gottlob Frege, and the logical positivists.
In this narrower sense, analytic philosophy is identified with specific philosophical commitments (many of which
are rejected by contemporary analytic philosophers), such as:
 The logical positivist principle that there are not any specifically philosophical truths and that the object of
philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. This may be contrasted with the
traditional foundationalism, which considers philosophy as a special, elite science that investigates the
fundamental reasons and principles of everything.[7] As a result, many analytic philosophers have considered
their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, those of the natural sciences.[8]
 The principle that the logical clarification of thoughts can only be achieved by analysis of the logical form of
philosophical propositions.[9] The logical form of a proposition is a way of representing it (often using
the formal grammar and symbolism of a logical system) to display its similarity with all other propositions of
the same type. However, analytic philosophers disagree widely about the correct logical form of ordinary
language.[10]
 The rejection of sweeping philosophical systems in favor of attention to detail,[11] or ordinary language.[12]
According to a characteristic paragraph by Bertrand Russell:
"Modern analytical empiricism [...] differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of
mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems,
to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, as
compared with the philosophies of the system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time,
instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect,
resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such
methods that it must be sought; I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are
completely soluble." Analytic philosophy is often understood in contrast to other philosophical traditions, most
notably continental philosophy, and also Indian philosophy, Thomism, and Marxism.[14]
History

Late 19th-century English philosophy was dominated by British idealism, as taught by philosophers such as F.H.
Bradley and Thomas Hill Green. It was against this intellectual background that the founders of analytic
philosophy, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, articulated the program of early analytic philosophy.

Since its beginning, a basic principle of analytic philosophy has been conceptual clarity,[15] in the name of which
Moore and Russell rejected Hegelianism, which they accused of obscurity and idealism.[16][17] Inspired by
developments in modern logic, the early Russell claimed that the problems of philosophy can be solved by
showing the simple constituents of complex notions.[15]

Russell, during his early career, along with collaborator Alfred North Whitehead, was much influenced
by Gottlob Frege, who developed predicate logic, which allowed a much greater range of sentences to be parsed
into logical form than was possible by the ancient Aristotlean logic. Frege was also a major philosopher of
mathematics in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast to Husserl's 1891 book Philosophie
der Arithmetik, which attempted to show that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of
grouping objects and counting them,[18] Frege sought to show that mathematics and logic have their own
validity, independent of the judgments or mental states of individual mathematicians and logicians (which were
the basis of arithmetic according to the "psychologism" of Husserl's Philosophie). Frege further developed his
philosophy of logic and mathematics in The Foundations of Arithmetic and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic where
he provided an alternative to psychologistic accounts of the concept of number.

Like Frege, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead attempted to show that mathematics is reducible to
fundamental logical principles. Their Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) encouraged many philosophers to
renew their interest with the development of symbolic logic. Additionally, Bertrand Russell adopted Frege's
predicate logic as his primary philosophical method, a method he thought could expose the underlying structure
of philosophical problems. For example, the English word “is” has three distinct meanings by predicate logic:

 For the sentence 'the cat is asleep', the is of predication means that "x is P" (denoted as P(x))
 For the sentence 'there is a cat', the is of existence means that "there is an x" (∃x);
 For the sentence 'three is half of six', the is of identity means that "x is the same as y" (x=y).

Russell sought to resolve various philosophical issues by applying such definite distinctions, most famously in his
analysis of definite descriptions in "On Denoting."[19]

Ideal language analysis

From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers like Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized creating an
ideal language for philosophical analysis, which would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary language that, in
their opinion, often made philosophy invalid. This philosophical trend can be called "ideal-language analysis" or
"formalism". During this phase, Russell and Wittgenstein sought to understand language, and hence
philosophical problems, by using formal logic to formalize the way in which philosophical statements are
made. Ludwig Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism in his Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus. He thereby argued that the world is the totality of actual states of affairs and that these states of
affairs can be expressed by the language of first-order predicate logic. So a picture of the world can be made by
expressing atomic facts as atomic propositions, and linking them using logical operators.

Logical positivism

During the late 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Russell and Wittgenstein's formalism was developed by a group of
philosophers in Vienna and Berlin, who were known as the Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle respectively, into a
doctrine known as logical positivism (or logical empiricism). Logical positivism used formal logical methods to
develop an empiricist account of knowledge.[20] Philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach,
along with other members of the Vienna Circle, claimed that the truths of logic and mathematics
were tautologies, and those of science were verifiable empirical claims. These two constituted the entire
universe of meaningful judgments; anything else was nonsense. The claims of ethics, aesthetics and theology
were, accordingly, pseudo-statements, neither true nor false, simply meaningless nonsense. Karl Popper's
insistence upon the role of falsification in the philosophy of science was a reaction to the logical
positivists.[21] With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism in Germany and Austria, many
members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled Germany, most commonly to Britain and America, which helped
to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in the Anglophone countries.[22]

Logical positivists typically considered philosophy as having a very limited function. For them, philosophy
concerned the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own. The positivists
adopted the verification principle, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or is capable
of being verified by experience. This caused the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of
philosophy, especially those of metaphysics or ontology, as meaningless.

Ordinary language analysis

After World War II, during the late 1940s and 1950s, analytic philosophy took a turn toward ordinary-language
analysis. This movement had two main strands. One followed in the wake of Wittgenstein's later philosophy,
which departed dramatically from his early work of the Tractatus. The other, known as "Oxford philosophy",
involved J. L. Austin. In contrast to earlier analytic philosophers (including the early Wittgenstein) who thought
philosophers should avoid the deceptive trappings of natural language by constructing ideal languages, ordinary
language philosophers claimed that ordinary language already represented a large number of subtle distinctions
that had been unrecognized in the formulation of traditional philosophical theories or problems. While schools
such as logical positivism emphasize logical terms, supposed to be universal and separate from contingent
factors (such as culture, language, historical conditions), ordinary language philosophy emphasizes the use of
language by ordinary people. Some have argued that ordinary language philosophy is of a more sociological
grounding, as it essentially emphasizes on the use of language within social contexts. The best-known ordinary
language philosophers during the 1950s were Austin and Gilbert Ryle. Some say that this movement marked a
return to the common sense philosophy advocated by G.E. Moore.
Ordinary language philosophy often sought to disperse philosophical problems by showing them to be the result
of misunderstanding ordinary language. See for example Ryle (who attempted to dispose of "Descartes' myth")
and Wittgenstein, among others.

Contemporary analytic philosophy

Although contemporary philosophers who self-identify as "analytic" have widely divergent interests,
assumptions, and methods—and have often rejected the fundamental premises that defined the analytic
movement before 1960—analytic philosophy, in its contemporary state, is usually taken to be defined by a
particular style[4] characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic, and resistance to
"imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics."[23]

In the 1950s, logical positivism was influentially challenged by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical
Investigations, Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", and Sellars in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.
Following 1960, Anglophone philosophy began to incorporate a wider range of interests, views, and methods.
Still, many philosophers in Britain and America still consider themselves to be "analytic
[4][1]
philosophers." Largely, they have done so by expanding the notion of "analytic philosophy" from the specific
programs that dominated Anglophone philosophy before 1960 to a much more general notion of an "analytic"
style, characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic and opposed to "imprecise or cavalier
discussions of broad topics".[23] This interpretation of the history is far from universally accepted, and its
opponents would say that it grossly downplays the role of Wittgenstein in the sixties and seventies.

Many philosophers and historians have attempted to define or describe analytic philosophy. Those definitions
often include a focus on conceptual analysis: A.P. Martinich draws an analogy between analytic philosophy's
interest in conceptual analysis and analytic chemistry, which "aims at determining chemical
compositions."[24] Steven D. Hales described analytic philosophy as one of three types of philosophical method
practiced in the West: "[i]n roughly reverse order by number of proponents, they are phenomenology,
ideological philosophy, and analytic philosophy".[25]

Scott Soames agrees that clarity is important: analytic philosophy, he says, has "an implicit commitment—albeit
faltering and imperfect—to the ideals of clarity, rigor and argumentation" and it "aims at truth and knowledge,
as opposed to moral or spiritual improvement [...] the goal in analytic philosophy is to discover what is true, not
to provide a useful recipe for living one's life". Soames also states that analytic philosophy is characterized by "a
more piecemeal approach. There is, I think, a widespread presumption within the tradition that it is often
possible to make philosophical progress by intensively investigating a small, circumscribed range of philosophical
issues while holding broader, systematic questions in abeyance".[26]

A few of the most important and active fields and subfields in analytic philosophy are summarized in the
following sections.

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science

Motivated by the logical positivists' interest in verificationism, behaviorism was the most prominent theory of
mind in analytic philosophy for the first half of the twentieth century. Behaviorists tended to hold either that
statements about the mind were equivalent to statements about behavior and dispositions to behave in
particular ways or that mental states were directly equivalent to behavior and dispositions to behave.
Behaviorism later became far less popular, in favor of type physicalism or functionalism, theories that identified
mental states with brain states. During this period, topics in the philosophy of mind were often in close contact
with issues in cognitive science such as modularity or innateness. Finally, analytic philosophy has featured a few
philosophers who were dualists, and recently forms of property dualism have had a resurgence, with David
Chalmers as the most prominent representative.[27]

John Searle suggests that the obsession with linguistic philosophy of the last century has been superseded by an
emphasis on the philosophy of mind,[28] in which functionalism is currently the dominant theory. In recent years,
a central focus for research in the philosophy of mind has been consciousness. And while there is a general
consensus for the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness,[29] there are many views as to how the
specifics work out. The best known theories are Daniel Dennett's heterophenomenology, Fred
Dretske and Michael Tye's representationalism, and the higher-order theories of either David M. Rosenthal—
who advocates a higher-order thought (HOT) model—or David Armstrong and William Lycan—who advocate a
higher-order perception (HOP) model. An alternative higher-order theory, the higher-order global states (HOGS)
model, is offered by Robert van Gulick.[30]

Ethics in analytic philosophy

Philosophers working in the analytic tradition have gradually come to distinguish three major branches of moral
philosophy.

 normative ethics whose function is the examination and production of normative ethical judgments
 meta-ethics whose function is the investigation of moral terms and concepts,
 applied ethics whose function is the investigation of how existing normative principles should be applied in
difficult or borderline cases, often cases created by the appearance of new technologies or new scientific
knowledge.
Normative Ethics

The first half of the twentieth century was marked by skepticism toward, and neglect of, normative ethics.
Related subjects, such as social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of history, moved to the
fringes of English-language philosophy during this period.

During this time, utilitarianism was the only non-skeptical approach to ethics to remain popular. However, as the
influence of logical positivism began to wane mid-century, contemporary analytic philosophers began to have a
renewed interest in ethics. G.E.M. Anscombe’s 1958 Modern Moral Philosophy sparked a revival
of Aristotle's virtue ethical approach and John Rawls’s 1971 A Theory of Justice restored interest
in Kantian ethical philosophy. At present, contemporary normative ethics is dominated by three schools:
utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and deontology.

Meta-Ethics

Twentieth-century meta-ethics has two roots. The first is G. E. Moore's investigation into the nature of ethical
terms (e.g. good) in his Principia Ethica (1903), which identified the naturalistic fallacy. Along with Hume's
famous is/ought distinction, the naturalistic fallacy was a central point of investigation for analytical
philosophers.

The second is in logical positivism and its attitude that statements which are unverifiable are meaningless.
Although that attitude was adopted originally as a means to promote scientific investigation of the world by
rejecting grand metaphysical systems, it had the side effect of making (ethical and aesthetic) value judgments
(as well as religious statements and beliefs) meaningless. But since value judgments are obviously of major
importance in human life, it became incumbent on logical positivism to develop an explanation of the nature
and meaning of value judgements. As a result, analytic philosophers avoided normative ethics, and instead
began meta-ethical investigations into the nature of moral terms, statements, and judgments.

The logical positivists held that statements about value—including all ethical and aesthetic judgments—are non-
cognitive; that is, they make no statements that can be objectively verified or falsified. Instead, the logical
positivists adopted an emotivist position, which held that value judgments expressed the attitude of the
speaker. Saying, "Killing is wrong", they thought, was equivalent to saying, "Boo to murder", or saying the word
"murder" with a particular tone of disapproval.

While non-cognitivism was generally accepted by analytic philosophers, emotivism had many deficiencies, and
evolved into more sophisticated non-cognitivist positions such as the expressivism of Charles Stevenson, and
the universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare, which had its foundations in J. L. Austin's philosophy of speech acts.

These positions were not without their critics. Phillipa Foot contributed several essays attacking all these
positions. J. O. Urmson's article "On Grading" called the is/ought distinction into question.

As non-cognitivism, the is/ought distinction, and the naturalistic fallacy began to be called into question, analytic
philosophers began to show a renewed interest in the traditional questions of moral philosophy. Perhaps most
influential in this area was Elizabeth Anscombe, whose landmark monograph "Intention" was called by Donald
Davidson "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle", and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of
moral psychology. A favorite student and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein, her 1958 article "Modern Moral
Philosophy" introduced the term "consequentialism" into the philosophical lexicon, declared the "is-ought"
impasse to be a dead end, and led to a revival in virtue ethics.

Applied Ethics

A significant feature of analytic philosophy since approximately 1970 has been the emergence of applied ethics -
- an interest in the application of moral principles to specific practical issues.

Areas of special interest for applied ethics include environmental issues, animal rights issues, and the many
challenges created by advancing medical science.[31][32][33]

Analytic philosophy of religion

As with the study of ethics, early analytic philosophy tended to avoid the study of philosophy of religion, largely
dismissing (as per the logical positivists view) the subject as part of metaphysics and therefore
meaningless.[34] The collapse of logical positivism renewed interest in philosophy of religion, prompting
philosophers like William Alston, John Mackie, Alvin Plantinga, Robert Merrihew Adams, Richard Swinburne,
and Antony Flew not only to introduce new problems, but to re-open classical topics such as the nature
ofmiracles, theistic arguments, the problem of evil, (see existence of God) the rationality of belief in God,
concepts of the nature of God, and many more.[35]

Plantinga, Mackie and Flew debated the logical validity of the free will defense as a way to solve the problem of
evil.[36] Alston, grappling with the consequences of analytic philosophy of language, worked on the nature of
religious language. Adams worked on the relationship of faith and morality.[37] Analytic epistemology and
metaphysics has formed the basis for a number of philosophically-sophisticated theistic arguments, like those of
the reformed epistemologists like Plantinga.

Analytic philosophy of religion has also been preoccupied with Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as his interpretation
of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy of religion.[38] Using first-hand remarks (which was later published
in Philosophical Investigations, Culture and Value, and other works), philosophers such as Peter
Winch and Norman Malcolm developed what has come to be known as contemplative philosophy, a
Wittgensteinian school of thought rooted in the "Swansea tradition," and which includes Wittgensteinians such
as Rush Rhees, Peter Winch and D. Z. Phillips, among others. The name "contemplative philosophy" was first
coined by D. Z. Phillips in Philosophy's Cool Place, which rests on an interpretation of a passage from
Wittgenstein's "Culture and Value."[39] This interpretation was first labeled, "Wittgensteinian Fideism," by Kai
Nielsen but those who consider themselves Wittgensteinians in the Swansea tradition have relentlessly and
repeatedly rejected this construal as caricature of Wittgenstein's considered position; this is especially true of D.
Z. Phillips.[40] Responding to this interpretation, Kai Nielsen and D.Z. Phillips became two of the most prominent
philosophers on Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion.[41]

Political philosophy
Liberalism

Current analytic political philosophy owes much to John Rawls, who, in a series of papers from the 1950s
onward (most notably "Two Concepts of Rules" and "Justice as Fairness") and his 1971 book A Theory of Justice,
produced a sophisticated and closely argued defence of a liberalism in politics. This was followed in short order
by Rawls's colleague Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a defence of free-
market libertarianism. Isaiah Berlin has had a notable influence on both analytic political philosophy and
Liberalism with his lecture the Two Concepts of Liberty.

Recent decades have also seen the rise of several critiques of liberalism, including the feminist critiques
of Catharine MacKinnon andAndrea Dworkin, the communitarian critiques of Michael Sandel and Alasdair
MacIntyre (though it should be noted both shy away from the term), and the multiculturalist critiques of Amy
Gutmann and Charles Taylor. Although not an analytic philosopher, Jürgen Habermas is another important—if
controversial—figure in contemporary analytic political philosophy, whose social theory is a blend of social
science, Marxism, neo-Kantianism, and American pragmatism.

Consequentialist libertarianism also derives from the analytic tradition.

Analytical Marxism

Another development in the area of political philosophy has been the emergence of a school known
as Analytical Marxism. Members of this school seek to apply the techniques of analytic philosophy, along with
tools of modern social science such as rational choice theory to the elucidation of the theories of Karl Marx and
his successors. The best-known member of this school is Oxford University philosopher G.A. Cohen, whose 1978
work, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence is generally taken as representing the genesis of this school. In
that book, Cohen attempted to apply the tools of logical and linguistic analysis to the elucidation and defense of
Marx's materialist conception of history. Other prominent Analytical Marxists include the economist John
Roemer, the social scientist Jon Elster, and the sociologist Erik Olin Wright. All these people have attempted to
build upon Cohen's work by bringing to bear modern social science methods, such as rational choice theory, to
supplement Cohen's use of analytic philosophical techniques in the interpretation of Marxian theory.

Cohen himself would later engage directly with Rawlsian political philosophy in attempt to advance
a socialist theory of justice that stands in contrast to both traditional Marxism and the theories advanced by
Rawls and Nozick. In particular, he points to Marx's principle of from each according to his ability, to each
according to his need.

Communitarianism
Communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel advance a
critique of Liberalism that uses analytic techniques to isolate the key assumptions of Liberal individualists, such
as Rawls, and then challenges these assumptions. In particular, Communitarians challenge the Liberal
assumption that the individual can be viewed as fully autonomous from the community in which he lives and is
brought up. Instead, they push for a conception of the individual that emphasizes the role that the community
plays in shaping his or her values, thought processes and opinions.

Analytic metaphysics

One striking break with early analytic philosophy was the revival of metaphysical theorizing in the second half of
the twentieth century. Philosophers such as David Kellogg Lewis and David Armstrong developed elaborate
theories on a range of topics such as universals, causation, possibility and necessity, and abstract objects.

Among the developments that led to the revival of metaphysical theorizing were Quine's attack on the analytic-
synthetic distinction, which was generally taken to undermine Carnap's distinction between existence questions
internal to a framework and those external to it.[42]

Metaphysics remains a fertile area for research, having recovered from the attacks of A.J. Ayer and the logical
positivists. And though many were inherited from previous decades, the debate remains fierce. The philosophy
of fiction, the problem of empty names, and the debate over existence's status as a property have all risen out
of relative obscurity to become central concerns, while perennial issues such as free will, possible worlds, and
the philosophy of time have had new life breathed into them.[43][44]

Science has also played an increasingly significant role in metaphysics. The theory of special relativity has had a
profound effect on the philosophy of time, and quantum physics is routinely discussed in the free will
debate.[45] The weight given to scientific evidence is largely due to widespread commitments among
philosophers to scientific realism and naturalism.

Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is another area that has slowed down over the course of the last four decades, as
evidenced by the fact that few major figures in contemporary philosophy treat it as a primary research area.
Indeed, while the debate remains fierce, it is still strongly under the influence of those figures from the first half
of the century: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Alfred Tarski, and W.V.O.
Quine.

In Naming and Necessity, Kripke influentially argued that flaws in common theories of proper names are
indicative of larger misunderstandings of the metaphysics of necessity and possibility. By wedding the tools of
modal logic to a causal theory of reference, Kripke was widely regarded as reviving theories of essence and
identity as respectable topics of philosophical discussion.

Philosophy of science

Reacting against the earlier philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper, who had suggested the falsifiability criterion
on which to judge the demarcation between science and non-science, discussions in philosophy of science in the
last forty years were dominated by social constructivist and cognitive relativist theories of science.[dubious –
discuss]
Thomas Samuel Kuhn is one of the major philosophers of science representative of the former theory,
while Paul Feyerabend is representative of the latter theory. Philosophy of biology has also undergone
considerable growth, particularly due to the considerable debate in recent years over evolution. Here again,
Daniel Dennett and his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea stand at the foreground of this debate.[dubious – discuss]
 Epistemology

Owing largely to Gettier's 1963 paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", epistemology saw a resurgence in
analytic philosophy over the last 50 years. A large portion of current epistemological research aims to resolve
the problems that Gettier's examples presented to the traditional justified true belief model of knowledge.
Other areas of contemporary research include basic knowledge, the nature of evidence, the value of knowledge,
epistemic luck, virtue epistemology, the role of intuitions in justification, and treating knowledge as a primitive
concept.

Aesthetics

In the wake of attacks on the traditional aesthetic notions of beauty and sublimity from post-modern thinkers,
analytic philosophers were slow in taking on analyses of art and aesthetic judgment. Susanne
Langer[46] and Nelson Goodman[47] addressed these problems in an analytic style in the 1950s and 60s. Rigorous
efforts to pursue analyses of traditional aesthetic concepts were undertaken by Guy Sircello in the 1970s and
80s, resulting in new analytic theories of love[48], sublimity[49], and beauty[50].

EXISTENTIALISM
Existentialism is generally considered to be the philosophical and cultural movement which holds that the
starting point of philosophical thinking must be the individual and the experiences of the individual, that moral
thinking and scientific thinking together do not suffice to understand human existence, and, therefore, that a
further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to understand human
existence.[1][2][3](Authenticity, in the context of existentialism, is the degree to which one is true to one's own
personality, spirit, or character.)[4]
Existentialism began in the mid-19th century as a reaction against then-dominant systematic philosophies,
with Søren Kierkegaard generally considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.[3][5][6] Opposed
to Hegelianism and Kantianism,[3][6] he posited that it is the individual who is solely responsible for
giving meaning to life and for living life passionately and sincerely,[7][8] even in view of its many existential
obstacles and distractions.[9]
After World War II, existentialism became a popular movement, attracting supporters and influencing a range of
disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology.[10]
Existentialists generally regard traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too
abstract and remote from concrete human experience.[11][12] Scholars generally consider the views of
existentialist philosophers to be profoundly different from one another relative to other
philosophies.[3][13][14] Criticisms of existentialist philosophers include the assertions that they confuse their use of
terminology and contradict themselves.[15][16]

Concepts
Existence precedes essence
A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the actual life of the
individual is what constitutes what could be called his or her "essence" instead of there being a predetermined
essence that defines what it is to be a human. Thus, human beings – through their own consciousness – create
their own values and determine a meaning to their life.[18]Although it was Sartre who explicitly coined the
phrase, similar notions can be found in the thought of many existentialist philosophers from Kierkegaard to
Heidegger.
It is often claimed in this context that a person defines himself or herself, which is often perceived as stating that
they can wish to be something — anything, a bird, for instance — and then be it. According to most existentialist
philosophers, however, this would constitute an inauthentic existence. Instead, the phrase should be taken to
say that the person is (1) defined only insofar as he or she acts and (2) that he or she is responsible for his or her
actions. For example, someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person.
Furthermore, by this action of cruelty, such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (a cruel
person). This is as opposed to their genes, or 'human nature', bearing the blame.
As Sartre puts it in his Existentialism is a Humanism: "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the
world – and defines himself afterwards." Of course, the more positive, therapeutic aspect of this is also implied:
A person can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also
clear that since humans can choose to be either cruel or good, they are, in fact, neither of these things
essentially. [19]
The Absurd
The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world beyond what
meaning we give to it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world. This
contrasts with "karmic" ways of thinking in which "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world,
metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad thing; what happens happens, and it
may just as well happen to a "good" person as to a "bad" person.
Because of the world's absurdity, at any point in time, anything can happen to anyone, and a tragic event could
plummet someone into direct confrontation with the Absurd. The notion of the absurd has been prominent in
literature throughout history. Many of the literary works of Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus contain descriptions of people who encounter the absurdity of
the world.
It is in relation to the concept of the devastating awareness of meaninglessness that Albert Camus claimed that
"there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" in his The Myth of Sisyphus. Although
"prescriptions" against the possibly deleterious consequences of these kinds of encounters vary, from
Kierkegaard's religious "stage" to Camus' insistence on persevering in spite of absurdity, the concern with
helping people avoid living their lives in ways that put them in the perpetual danger of having everything
meaningful break down is common to most existentialist philosophers. The possibility of having everything
meaningful break down poses a threat of quietism, which is inherently against the existentialist philosophy.[20] It
has been said that the possibility of suicide makes all humans existentialists.[21]
Facticity
Facticity is a concept defined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness as that "in-itself" of which humans are in the
mode of not being. This can be more easily understood when considering it in relation to the temporal
dimension of past: One's past is what one is in the sense that it co-constitutes oneself. However, to say that one
is only one's past would be to ignore a large part of reality (the present and the future), while saying that one's
past is only what one was would entirely detach it from them now. A denial of one's own concrete past
constitutes an inauthentic lifestyle, and the same goes for all other kinds of facticity (having a body (e.g. one
that doesn't allow a person to run faster than the speed of sound), identity, values, etc.).
Facticity is both a limitation and a condition of freedom. It is a limitation in that a large part of one's facticity
consists of things one couldn't have chosen (birthplace, etc.), but a condition in the sense that one's values most
likely will depend on it. However, even though one's facticity is "set in stone" (as being past, for instance), it
cannot determine a person: The value ascribed to one's facticity is still ascribed to it freely by that person. As an
example, consider two men, one of whom has no memory of his past and the other remembers everything. They
have both committed many crimes, but the first man, knowing nothing about this, leads a rather normal life
while the second man, feeling trapped by his own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for
"trapping" him in this life. There is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he ascribes this meaning
to his past.
However, to disregard one's facticity when one, in the continual process of self-making, projects oneself into the
future, would be to put oneself in denial of oneself, and would thus be inauthentic. In other words, the origin of
one's projection will still have to be one's facticity, although in the mode of not being it (essentially). Another
aspect of facticity is that it entails angst, both in the sense that freedom "produces" angst when limited by
facticity, and in the sense that the lack of the possibility of having facticity to "step in" for one to take
responsibility for something one has done also produces angst.
What is not implied in this account of existential freedom, however, is that one's values are immutable; a
consideration of one's values may cause one to reconsider and change them. A consequence of this fact is that
one is responsible for not only one's actions, but also the values one holds. This entails that a reference to
common values doesn't excuse the individual's actions: Even though these are the values of the society of which
the individual is part, they are also her/his own in the sense that she/he could choose them to be different at
any time. Thus, the focus on freedom in existentialism is related to the limits of the responsibility one bears as a
result of one's freedom: the relationship between freedom and responsibility is one of interdependency, and a
clarification of freedom also clarifies that for which one is responsible.
The existentialist concept of freedom is often misunderstood as meaning that anything is possible and where
values are inconsequential to choice and action. This interpretation of the concept is often related to the
insistence on the absurdity of the world and the assumption that there exist no relevant or absolutely good or
bad values. However, that there are no values to be found in the world in-itself does not mean that there are no
values: We are usually brought up with certain values, and even though we cannot justify them ultimately, they
will be "our" values.
Authenticity
The theme of authentic existence is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is often taken to mean that one
has to "find oneself" and then live in accordance with this self.
What is meant by authenticity is that in acting, one should act as oneself, not as One acts or as one's genes or
any other essence requires. The authentic act is one that is in accordance with one's freedom. Of course, as a
condition of freedom is facticity, this includes one's facticity, but not to the degree that this facticity can in any
way determine one's choices (in the sense that one could then blame one's background for making the choice
one made). The role of facticity in relation to authenticity involves letting one's actual values come into play
when one makes a choice (instead of, like Kierkegaard's Aesthete, "choosing" randomly), so that one also takes
responsibility for the act instead of choosing either-or without allowing the options to have different values.
In contrast to this, the inauthentic is the denial to live in accordance with one's freedom. This can take many
forms, from pretending choices are meaningless or random, through convincing oneself that some form
of determinism is true, to a sort of "mimicry" where one acts as "One should." How "One" should act is often
determined by an image one has of how one such as oneself (say, a bank manager, lion tamer, prostitute, etc.)
acts. This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm, but this does not mean that all acting in
accordance with social norms is inauthentic: The main point is the attitude one takes to one's own freedom and
responsibility, and the extent to which one acts in accordance with this freedom.
The Other and the Look
The Other (when written with a capital "o") is a concept more properly belonging to phenomenology and its
account of intersubjectivity. However, the concept has seen widespread use in existentialist writings, and the
conclusions drawn from it differ slightly from the phenomenological accounts. The experience of the Other is
the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does. In its most basic form, it is
this experience of the Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences
someone else, and this Other person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences), only
from "over there", the world itself is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical
for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same as he or she does. This
experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look (sometimes the Gaze).
While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective, and oneself as
objectively existing subjectivity (one experiences oneself as seen in the Other's Look in precisely the same way
that one experiences the Other as seen by him, as subjectivity), in existentialism, it also acts as a kind of
limitation of one's freedom. This is because the Look tends to objectify what it sees. As such, when one
experiences oneself in the Look, one doesn't experience oneself as nothing (no thing), but as something. Sartre's
own example of a man peeping at someone through a keyhole can help clarify this: at first, this man is entirely
caught up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what
goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as
seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else
doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. The Look is then co-constitutive of one's facticity.
Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is quite possible
that the creaking floorboard was nothing but the movement of an old house; the Look isn't some kind of
mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the other sees one (there may also have been someone there,
but he could have not noticed that the person was there). It is only one'sperception of the way another might
perceive him.
The concept of the 'Other' has been most comprehensively used by feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir.
She used this concept in great detail in her feminist book "The Second Sex" to show how, despite women's
sincere efforts at proving themselves as human beings firmly established in their own rights, men continue to
relegate to them a status of a lower, inferior "other". It is in this context that this feminist-existential term has to
be understood.
Angst
"Existential angst", sometimes called dread, anxiety or even anguish, is a term that is common to many
existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom
and responsibility. The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not
only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that "nothing is
holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand
still, and one experiences one's own freedom.
It can also be seen in relation to the previous point how angst is before nothing, and this is what sets it apart
from fear which has an object. While in the case of fear, one can take definitive measures to remove the object
of fear, in the case of angst, no such "constructive" measures are possible. The use of the word "nothing" in this
context relates both to the inherent insecurity about the consequences of one's actions, and to the fact that, in
experiencing one's freedom as angst, one also realizes that one will be fully responsible for these consequences;
there is nothing in a person (his or her genes, for instance) that acts in her or his stead, and that he or she can
"blame" if something goes wrong.
Not every choice is perceived as having dreadful possible consequences (and, it can be claimed, human lives
would be unbearable if every choice facilitated dread), but that doesn't change the fact that freedom remains a
condition of every action. One of the most extensive treatments of the existentialist notion of Angst is found
in Søren Kierkegaard's monumental work Begrebet Angest.
Despair
Commonly defined as a loss of hope,[22] Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to the reaction to a
breakdown in one or more of the defining qualities of one's self or identity. If a person is invested in being a
particular thing, such as a bus driver or an upstanding citizen, and then finds his being-thing compromised, he
would normally be found in state of despair—a hopeless state. For example, a singer who loses her ability to sing
may despair if she has nothing else to fall back on, nothing on which to rely for her identity. Such a person finds
himself or herself unable to be that which defined his or her being.
What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the conventional definition is that existentialist despair
is a state one is in even when he isn't overtly in despair. So long as a person's identity depends on qualities that
can crumble, he is considered to be in perpetual despair. And as there is, in Sartrean terms, no human essence
found in conventional reality on which to constitute the individual's sense of identity, despair is a universal
human condition. As Kierkegaard defines it in his Either/or: "Any life-view with a condition outside it is
despair."[23] In other words, it is possible to be in despair without despairing.
Theological and Atheistic existentialism

Although Søren Kierkegaard was personally a Christian philosopher and Lutheran theologian, his existential
philosophy appeals to many other thinkers of different religious and atheistic beliefs.[24] Jewish existentialism
applies the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard to analyze concepts and stories in the Hebrew Bible. One of the
most prominent Jewish existential thinkers was the philosopher Martin Buber.
An existentialist reading of the Bible would demand that the reader recognize that he is an
existing subject studying the words more as a recollection of possible events. This is in contrast to looking at a
collection of "truths" which are outside and unrelated to the reader, but may develop a sense of
reality/God.[25] Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing
them upon him, but as though they are inside him and guiding him from inside. This is the task Kierkegaard takes
up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's
distance from everyday life-or the learner who should put it to use?"[26] From an existentialist perspective, the
Bible would not become an authority in an individual's life until that individual authorizes the Bible to be such.
Existentialism has had a significant influence on theology, notably on postmodern Christianity and on
theologians and religious thinkers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Wilfrid Desan and John
Macquarrie.
The works of atheistic existential thought intend to reveal that the purpose of one's life on Earth is a concept
that only the individual could determine through his or her experiences. Individuals are thus defined by their
choices alone. Jean-Paul Sartre's principle thatexistence precedes essence, as he explains in "Existentialism is a
Humanism", provides a popular theme for many existentialist writers.
Relation to nihilism

Although nihilism and existentialism are distinct philosophies, they are often confused with one another. A
primary cause of confusion is that Friedrich Nietzsche is an important philosopher in both fields, but also the
existentialist insistence on the absurd and the inherent meaninglessness of the world. Existentialist philosophers
often stress the importance of Angst as signifying the absolute lack of any objective ground for action, a move
that is often reduced to a moral or an existential nihilism. A pervasive theme in the works of existentialist
philosophy, however, is to persist through encounters with the absurd, as seen in Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus
("One must imagine Sisyphus happy"),[27] and it is only very rarely that existentialist philosophers dismiss
morality or one's self-created meaning: Kierkegaard regained a sort of morality in the religious (although he
wouldn't himself agree that it was ethical; the religious suspends the ethical), and Sartre's final words in Being
and Nothingness are "All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory (or impure) reflection,
can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future work."[28]
Opposition to positivism and rationalism

Emphasizing action, freedom, and decision as fundamental, existentialists oppose positivism and rationalism.
That is, they argue against definitions of human beings as primarily rational. Rather, existentialists look at where
people find meaning. Existentialism asserts that people actually make decisions based on the meaning to them
rather than rationally. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist
thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own
radical freedom and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard advocated rationality as means to interact with the
objective world (e.g. in the natural sciences), but when it comes to existential problems, reason is insufficient:
"Human reason has boundaries".[29]
Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to
impose structure on a world of phenomena — "the Other" — that is fundamentally irrational and random.
According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom. To
try to suppress their feelings of anxiety and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience,
Sartre asserts, thereby relinquishing their freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another
by "the Look" of "the Other" (i.e. possessed by another person — or at least one's idea of that other person).
Etymology

The term "existentialism" was coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s.[30][31][32] It was
adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre who, on October 29, 1945, discussed his own existentialist position in a lecture to
the Club Maintenant in Paris. The lecture was published as L'existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is
a Humanism), a short book which did much to popularize existentialist thought.[33]
Some scholars argue that the term should be used only to refer to the cultural movement in Europe in the 1940s
and 1950s associated with the works of the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus.[3] Other scholars extend the term to Kierkegaard, and yet others extend it as
far back as Socrates.[34] However, the term is often identified with the philosophical views of Jean-Paul Sartre.[3]
History
 19th century Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered fundamental to the
existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism" and it is unclear whether they would
have supported the existentialism of the 20th century. They focused on subjective human experience rather
than the objective truths of mathematics and science, which they believed were too detached or observational
to truly get at the human experience. Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the
apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom. Unlike Pascal, Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche also considered the role of making free choices, particularly regarding fundamental values and
beliefs, and how such choices change the nature and identity of the chooser.[35] Kierkegaard's knight of faith and
Nietzsche's Übermensch are representative of people who exhibit Freedom, in that they define the nature of
their own existence. Nietzsche's idealized individual invents his or her own values and creates the very terms
under which they excel. By contrast, Kierkegaard, opposed to the level of abstraction in Hegel, and not nearly as
hostile (actually welcoming) to Christianity as Nietzsche, argues through a pseudonym that the objective
certainty of religious truths (specifically Christian) is not only impossible, but even founded on logical paradoxes.
Yet he continues to imply that a leap of faith is a possible means for an individual to reach a higher stage of
existence which transcends and contains both an aesthetic and ethical value of life. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
were also precursors to other intellectual movements, including postmodernism, and various strands
of psychology. However, Kierkegaard believed that an individual should live in accordance with his or her
thinking. This point of view is forced upon religious individuals much more often than
upon philosophers, psychologists or scientists.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The first important literary author also important to existentialism was the Russian Fyodor
Dostoyevsky.[36] Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground portrays a man unable to fit into society and unhappy
with the identities he creates for himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book on existentialism Existentialism is a
Humanism, quoted Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an example of existential crisis. Sartre attributes
Ivan Karamazov's claim, "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"[37] to Dostoyevsky himself. Other
Dostoyevsky novels covered issues raised in existentialist philosophy while presenting story lines divergent from
secular existentialism: for example, in Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov experiences an
existential crisis and then moves toward a Christian Orthodox worldview similar to that advocated by
Dostoyevsky himself.[citation needed]
Early 20th century
In the first decades of the 20th century, a number of philosophers and writers explored existentialist ideas. The
Spanish philosopherMiguel de Unamuno y Jugo, in his 1913 book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations,
emphasized the life of "flesh and bone" as opposed to that of abstract rationalism. Unamuno rejected
systematic philosophy in favor of the individual's quest for faith. He retained a sense of the tragic, even absurd
nature of the quest, symbolized by his enduring interest in Cervantes' fictional character Don Quixote. A
novelist, poet and dramatist as well as philosophy professor at the University of Salamanca, Unamuno wrote a
short story about a priest's crisis of faith, "Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr", which has been collected in
anthologies of existentialist fiction. Another Spanish thinker, Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1914, held that human
existence must always be defined as the individual person combined with the concrete circumstances of his life:
"Yo soy yo y mis circunstancias" ("I am myself and my circumstances"). Sartre likewise believed that human
existence is not an abstract matter, but is always situated, also many thought his plays were absurd ("en
situación").
Although Martin Buber wrote his major philosophical works in German, and studied and taught at the
Universities of Berlin andFrankfurt, he stands apart from the mainstream of German philosophy. Born into a
Jewish family in Vienna in 1878, he was also a scholar of Jewish culture and involved at various times
in Zionism and Hasidism. In 1938, he moved permanently to Jerusalem. His best-known philosophical work was
the short book I and Thou, published in 1922. For Buber, the fundamental fact of human existence, too readily
overlooked by scientific rationalism and abstract philosophical thought, is "man with man", a dialogue which
takes place in the so-called "sphere of between" ("das Zwischenmenschliche").[38]
Two Ukrainian/Russian thinkers, Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev, became well known as existentialist thinkers
during their post-Revolutionary exiles in Paris. Shestov, born into a Ukrainian-Jewish family in Kiev, had launched
an attack on rationalism and systematization in philosophy as early as 1905 in his book of aphorisms All Things
Are Possible.
Berdyaev, also from Kiev but with a background in the Eastern Orthodox Church, drew a radical distinction
between the world of spirit and the everyday world of objects. Human freedom, for Berdyaev, is rooted in the
realm of spirit, a realm independent of scientific notions of causation. To the extent the individual human being
lives in the objective world, he is estranged from authentic spiritual freedom. "Man" is not to be interpreted
naturalistically, but as a being created in God's image, an originator of free, creative acts.[39] He published a
major work on these themes, The Destiny of Man, in 1931.
Gabriel Marcel, long before coining the term "existentialism", introduced important existentialist themes to a
French audience in his early essay "Existence and Objectivity" (1925) and in his Metaphysical Journal (1927).[40] A
dramatist as well as a philosopher, Marcel found his philosophical starting point in a condition of metaphysical
alienation: the human individual searching for harmony in a transient life. Harmony, for Marcel, was to be
sought through "secondary reflection", a "dialogical" rather than "dialectical" approach to the world,
characterized by "wonder and astonishment" and open to the "presence" of other people and of God rather
than merely to "information" about them. For Marcel, such presence implied more than simply being there (as
one thing might be in the presence of another thing); it connoted "extravagant" availability, and the willingness
to put oneself at the disposal of the other.[41]
Marcel contrasted "secondary reflection" with abstract, scientific-technical "primary reflection" which he
associated with the activity of the abstract Cartesian ego. For Marcel, philosophy was a concrete activity
undertaken by a sensing, feeling human being incarnate — embodied — in a concrete
world.[40][42] Although Jean-Paul Sartre adopted the term "existentialism" for his own philosophy in the 1940s,
Marcel's thought has been described as "almost diametrically opposed" to that of Sartre.[40] Unlike Sartre,
Marcel was a Christian, and became a Catholic convert in 1929.
In Germany, the psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers — who later described existentialism as a "phantom"
created by the public[43] — called his own thought, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche, Existenzphilosophie. For Jaspers, "Existenz-philosophy is the way of thought by means of which man
seeks to become himself...This way of thought does not cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the
being of the thinker."[44]
Jaspers, a professor at the University of Heidelberg, was acquainted with Martin Heidegger, who held a
professorship at Marburg before acceding to Husserl's chair at Freiburg in 1928. They held many philosophical
discussions, but later became estranged over Heidegger's support of National Socialism. They shared an
admiration for Kierkegaard,[45] and in the 1930s, Heidegger lectured extensively on Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the
extent to which Heidegger should be considered an existentialist is debatable. In Being and Time he presented a
method of rooting philosophical explanations in human existence (Dasein) to be analysed in terms of existential
categories (existentiale); and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure in the
existentialist movement.
After the Second World War
Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant philosophical and cultural
movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus,
who wrote best-selling novels, plays and widely read journalism as well as theoretical texts. These years also saw
the growing reputation of Heidegger's book Being and Timeoutside of Germany.[citation needed]
Sartre dealt with existentialist themes in his 1938 novel Nausea and the short stories in his 1939 collection The
Wall, and had published his treatise on existentialism, Being and Nothingness, in 1943, but it was in the two
years following the liberation of Paris from the German occupying forces that he and his close associates —
Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others — became internationally famous as the
leading figures of a movement known as existentialism.[46]In a very short space of time, Camus and Sartre in
particular became the leading public intellectuals of post-war France, achieving by the end of 1945 "a fame that
reached across all audiences."[47]Camus was an editor of the most popular leftist (former French Resistance)
newspaper Combat; Sartre launched his journal of leftist thought, Les Temps Modernes, and two weeks later
gave the widely reported lecture on existentialism and secular humanism to a packed meeting of the Club
Maintenant. Beauvoir wrote that "not a week passed without the newspapers discussing us";[48]existentialism
became "the first media craze of the postwar era."[49]
By the end of 1947, Camus' earlier fiction and plays had been reprinted, his new play Caligula had been
performed and his novel The Plague published; the first two novels of Sartre's The Roads to Freedom trilogy had
appeared, as had Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others. Works by Camus and Sartre were already appearing in
foreign editions. The Paris-based existentialists had become famous.[46]
Sartre had traveled to Germany in 1930 to study the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin
Heidegger,[50] and he included critical comments on their work in his major treatise Being and Nothingness.
Heidegger's thought had also become known in French philosophical circles through its use by Alexandre
Kojève in explicating Hegel in a series of lectures given in Paris in the 1930s.[51] The lectures were highly
influential; members of the audience included not only Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but Raymond
Queneau, Georges Bataille, Louis Althusser, André Breton and Jacques Lacan.[52] A selection from
Heidegger's Being and Time was published in French in 1938, and his essays began to appear in French
philosophy journals.
Heidegger read Sartre's work and was initially impressed, commenting: "Here for the first time I encountered an
independent thinker who, from the foundations up, has experienced the area out of which I think. Your work
shows such an immediate comprehension of my philosophy as I have never before encountered."[53] Later,
however, in response to a question posed by his French follower Jean Beaufret,[54] Heidegger distanced himself
from Sartre's position and existentialism in general in hisLetter on Humanism.[55] Heidegger's reputation
continued to grow in France during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s, Sartre attempted to reconcile
existentialism and Marxism in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason. A major theme throughout his writings
was freedom and responsibility.
Camus was a friend of Sartre, until their falling-out, and wrote several works with existential themes
including The Rebel, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Summer in Algiers. Camus, like many others,
rejected the existentialist label, and considered his works to be concerned with facing the absurd. In the titular
book, Camus uses the analogy of the Greek myth of Sisyphus to demonstrate the futility of existence. In the
myth, Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will
roll to the bottom again. Camus believes that this existence is pointless but that Sisyphus ultimately finds
meaning and purpose in his task, simply by continually applying himself to it. The first half of the book contains
an extended rebuttal of what Camus took to be existentialist philosophy in the works of Kierkegaard, Shestov,
Heidegger, and Jaspers.
Simone de Beauvoir, an important existentialist who spent much of her life as Sartre's partner, wrote about
feminist and existentialist ethics in her works, including The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity. Although
often overlooked due to her relationship with Sartre[citation needed], de Beauvoir integrated existentialism with other
forms of thinking such as feminism, unheard of at the time, resulting in alienation from fellow writers such as
Camus[citation needed].
Paul Tillich, an important existentialist theologian following Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, applied existentialist
concepts to Christian theology, and helped introduce existential theology to the general public. His seminal
work The Courage to Be follows Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety and life's absurdity, but puts forward the thesis
that modern humans must, via God, achieve selfhood in spite of life's absurdity. Rudolf Bultmann used
Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's philosophy of existence to demythologize Christianity by interpreting Christian
mythical concepts into existentialist concepts.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an existential phenomenologist, was for a time a companion of Sartre. His
understanding of Husserl'sphenomenology was far greater than that of Merleau-Ponty's fellow
existentialists.[vague] It has been said that his work Humanism and Terror greatly influenced Sartre. However, in
later years they were to disagree irreparably, dividing many existentialists such as de Beauvoir[citation needed], who
sided with Sartre.
Colin Wilson, an English writer, published his study The Outsider in 1956, initially to critical acclaim. In this book
and others (e.g.Introduction to the New Existentialism), he attempted to reinvigorate what he perceived as a
pessimistic philosophy and bring it to a wider audience. He was not, however, academically trained, and his
work was attacked by professional philosophers for lack of rigor and critical standards.[56]
]Influence outside philosophy
Art, Film and television
The French director Jean Genet's 1950 fantasy-erotic film Un chant d'amour shows two inmates in solitary cells
whose only contact is through a hole in their cell wall, who are spied on by the prison warden. Reviewer James
Travers calls the film a "...visual poem evoking homosexual desire and existentialist suffering" which "... conveys
the bleakness of an existence in a godless universe with painful believability"; he calls it "... probably the most
effective fusion of existentialist philosophy and cinema."[57]
Stanley Kubrick's 1957 anti-war film Paths of Glory "illustrates, and even illuminates...existentialism" by
examining the "necessary absurdity of the human condition" and the "horror of war".[58] The film tells the story
of a fictional World War I French army regiment which is ordered to attack an impregnable German stronghold;
when the attack fails, three soldiers are chosen at random, court-martialed by a "kangaroo court", and executed
by firing squad. The film examines existentialist ethics, such as the issue of whether objectivity is possible and
the "problem of authenticity".[58]
On the lighter side, the British comedy troupe Monty Python have explored existentialist themes throughout
their works, from many of the sketches in their original television show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, to their
1983 film Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.[59] Of the many adjectives (some listed in the introduction above)
that might indicate an existential tone, the one utilized the most by the group is that of the absurd. Another
related comedy would be Office Space.
Some contemporary films dealing with existentialist issues include Fight Club, I ♥ Huckabees, Waking Life, The
Matrix, Ordinary People and Life in a Day.[60] Likewise, films throughout the 20th century such as The Seventh
Seal, Ikiru, Taxi Driver, High Noon, Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Clockwork Orange, Groundhog
Day, Apocalypse Now, Badlands, and Blade Runner also have existentialist qualities.[61] Notable directors known
for their existentialist films include Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa, Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Hideaki Anno, Wes Anderson,
and Woody Allen.[62] Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York focuses on the protagonist's desire to find
existential meaning.[63]
Literature
Existentialist perspectives are also found in literature to varying degrees. Jean-Paul Sartre's 1938
novel Nausea[64] was "steeped in Existential ideas", and is considered an accessible way of grasping his
philosophical stance.[65] Since 1970, much cultural activity in art, cinema, and literature
contains postmodernist and existentialist elements. Books such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?(1968)
(now republished as Blade Runner) by Philip K. Dick and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk all distort the line
between reality and appearance while simultaneously espousing strong existentialist themes. Ideas from such
thinkers as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Michel Foucault, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert Marcuse, Gilles
Deleuze, and Eduard von Hartmann permeate the works of artists such as Chuck Palahniuk, David Lynch, Crispin
Glover, and Charles Bukowski, and one often finds in their works a delicate balance between distastefulness and
beauty.
Theatre
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote No Exit in 1944, an existentialist play originally published in French as Huis
Clos (meaning In Camera or "behind closed doors") which is the source of the popular quote, "Hell is other
people." (In French, "L'enfer, c'est les autres"). The play begins with a Valet leading a man into a room that the
audience soon realizes is in hell. Eventually he is joined by two women. After their entry, the Valet leaves and
the door is shut and locked. All three expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize they are
there to torture each other, which they do effectively, by probing each other's sins, desires, and unpleasant
memories.
Existentialist themes are displayed in the Theatre of the Absurd, notably in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot,
in which two men divert themselves while they wait expectantly for someone (or something) named Godot who
never arrives. They claim Godot to be an acquaintance, but in fact hardly know him, admitting they would not
recognize him if they saw him. Samuel Beckett, once asked who or what Godot is, replied, "If I knew, I would
have said so in the play." To occupy themselves, the men eat, sleep, talk, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap
hats, and contemplate suicide—anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay".[66] The play "exploits several
archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy and pathos."[67] The play also
illustrates an attitude toward human experience on earth: the poignancy, oppression, camaraderie, hope,
corruption, and bewilderment of human experience that can be reconciled only in the mind and art of the
absurdist. The play examines questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in
human existence.
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist tragicomedy first staged at the Edinburgh
Festival Fringe in 1966.[68] The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters
from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Comparisons have also been drawn to Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, for the
presence of two central characters who almost appear to be two halves of a single character. Many plot features
are similar as well: the characters pass time by playing Questions, impersonating other characters, and
interrupting each other or remaining silent for long periods of time. The two characters are portrayed as two
clowns or fools in a world that is beyond their understanding. They stumble through philosophical arguments
while not realizing the implications, and muse on the irrationality and randomness of the world.
Jean Anouilh's Antigone also presents arguments founded on existentialist ideas.[69] It is a tragedy inspired by
Greek mythology and the play of the same name (Antigone, by Sophocles) from the 5th century B.C. In English, it
is often distinguished from its antecedent by being pronounced in its original French form, approximately "Ante-
GŌN." The play was first performed in Paris on 6 February 1944, during the Nazi occupation of France. Produced
under Nazi censorship, the play is purposefully ambiguous with regards to the rejection of authority
(represented by Antigone) and the acceptance of it (represented by Creon). The parallels to the French
Resistance and the Nazi occupation have been drawn. Antigone rejects life as desperately meaningless but
without affirmatively choosing a noble death. The crux of the play is the lengthy dialogue concerning the nature
of power, fate, and choice, during which Antigone says that she is "... disgusted with [the]...promise of a
humdrum happiness"; she states that she would rather die than live a mediocre existence.
Critic Martin Esslin in his book Theatre of the Absurd pointed out how many contemporary playwrights such
as Samuel Beckett,Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov wove into their plays the existentialist belief
that we are absurd beings loose in a universe empty of real meaning. Esslin noted that many of these
playwrights demonstrated the philosophy better than did the plays by Sartre and Camus. Though most of such
playwrights, subsequently labeled "Absurdist" (based on Esslin's book), denied affiliations with existentialism
and were often staunchly anti-philosophical (for example Ionesco often claimed he identified more
with 'Pataphysics or with Surrealism than with existentialism), the playwrights are often linked to existentialism
based on Esslin's observation.[70]
Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
Existential therapy
A major offshoot of existentialism as a philosophy is existentialist psychology and psychoanalysis, which first
crystallized in the work of Otto Rank, Freud's closest associate for 20 years. Without awareness of the writings of
Rank, Ludwig Binswanger was influenced byFreud, Edmund Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. A later figure
was Viktor Frankl, who briefly met Freud and studied with Jung as a young man.[71] His logotherapy can be
regarded as a form of existentialist therapy. The existentialists would also influence social psychology,
antipositivist micro-sociology, symbolic interactionism, and post-structuralism, with the work of thinkers such
as Georg Simmel[72] andMichel Foucault. Foucault was a great reader of Kierkegaard even though he almost
never refers this author, who nonetheless had for him an importance as secret as it was decisive.[73]
An early contributor to existentialist psychology in the United States was Rollo May, who was strongly
influenced by Kierkegaard andOtto Rank. One of the most prolific writers on techniques and theory of
existentialist psychology in the USA is Irvin D. Yalom. Yalom states that

Aside from their reaction against Freud's mechanistic, deterministic model of the mind and their assumption of
a phenomenological approach in therapy, the existentialist analysts have little in common and have never been
regarded as a cohesive ideological school. These thinkers - who include Ludwig Binswanger, Medard
 Boss, Eugène Minkowski, V.E. Gebsattel, Roland Kuhn, G. Caruso, F.T. Buytendijk, G. Bally and Victor Frankl -
were almost entirely unknown to the American psychotherapeutic community until Rollo May's highly influential
1985 book Existence - and especially his introductory essay - introduced their work into this country.[74]
A more recent contributor to the development of a European version of existentialist psychotherapy is the
British-based Emmy van Deurzen.
Anxiety's importance in existentialism makes it a popular topic in psychotherapy. Therapists often offer
existentialist philosophy as an explanation for anxiety. The assertion is that anxiety is manifested of an
individual's complete freedom to decide, and complete responsibility for the outcome of such decisions.
Psychotherapists using an existentialist approach believe that a patient can harness his anxiety and use it
constructively. Instead of suppressing anxiety, patients are advised to use it as grounds for change. By
embracing anxiety as inevitable, a person can use it to achieve his full potential in life. Humanistic
psychology also had major impetus from existentialist psychology and shares many of the fundamental
tenets. Terror management theory, based on the writings of Ernest Becker and Otto Rank, is a developing area
of study within the academic study of psychology. It looks at what researchers claim to be the implicit emotional
reactions of people confronted with the knowledge that they will eventually die.
Criticisms

General criticisms
Logical positivists, such as Carnap and Ayer, say existentialists frequently are confused about the verb "to be" in
their analyses of "being".[15] They argue that the verb is transitive and pre-fixed to a predicate (e.g., an apple is
red): without a predicate, the word is meaningless.
Sartre's philosophy
Many critics argue Sartre's philosophy is contradictory. Specifically, they argue that Sartre makes metaphysical
arguments despite his claiming that his philosophical views ignore metaphysics. Herbert
Marcuse criticized Being and Nothingness (1943) by Jean-Paul Sartrefor projecting anxiety and meaninglessness
onto the nature of existence itself: "Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic
doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical
characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is
illusory".[16] In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger criticized Sartre's existentialism:

Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to
their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses
this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays
with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.
Critical Theory
Paulo Freire
Date: 1921-1997

A Brazilian committed to the cause of educating the impoverished peasants of his nation and
collaborating with them in the pursuit of their liberation from what he regarded as "oppression," Freire is best
known for his attack on what he called the "banking concept of education," in which the student was viewed
as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. Freire also suggests that a deep reciprocity be inserted into
our notions of teacher and student; he comes close to suggesting that the teacher-student dichotomy be
completely abolished, instead promoting the roles of the participants in the classroom as the teacher-student
(a teacher who learns) and the student-teacher (a learner who teaches). In its early, strong form this kind of
classroom has sometimes been criticized on the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's
authority.
Aspects of the Freirian philosophy have been highly influential in academic debates over "participatory
development" and development more generally. Freire's emphasis on what he describes as "emancipation"
through interactive participation has been used as a rationale for the participatory focus of development, as it
is held that 'participation' in any form can lead to empowerment of poor or marginalized groups. Freire was a
proponent of critical pedagogy.

Postmodernism
Martin Heidegger
Date: 1889-1976

Heidegger's philosophizing about education was primarily related to higher education. He believed that
teaching and research in the university should be unified and aim towards testing and interrogating the
"ontological assumptions presuppositions which implicitly guide research in each domain of knowledge."[16]

Normative Educational Philosophies

"Normative philosophies or theories of education may make use of the results of [philosophical thought] and
of factual inquiries about human beings and the psychology of learning, but in any case they propound views
about what education should be, what dispositions it should cultivate, why it ought to cultivate them, how
and in whom it should do so, and what forms it should take. In a full-fledged philosophical normative theory
of education, besides analysis of the sorts described, there will normally be propositions of the following
kinds: 1. Basic normative premises about what is good or right; 2. Basic factual premises about humanity and
the world; 3. Conclusions, based on these two kinds of premises, about the dispositions education should
foster; 4. Further factual premises about such things as the psychology of learning and methods of teaching;
and 5. Further conclusions about such things as the methods that education should use."[2]

Perennialism
Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that one deems to be of everlasting importance to all
people everywhere. They believe that the most important topics develop a person. Since details of fact
change constantly, these cannot be the most important. Therefore, one should teach principles, not facts.
Since people are human, one should teach first about humans, not machines or techniques. Since people are
people first, and workers second if at all, one should teach liberal topics first, not vocational topics. The
focus is primarily on teaching reasoning and wisdom rather than facts, the liberal arts rather than vocational
training.

Allan Bloom
Alexander Sutherland Neill

Date: 1930-1992

Bloom, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, argued for a traditionalGreat Books-
based liberal education in his lengthy essay The Closing of the American Mind.

Progressivism
Educational progressivism is the belief that education must be based on the principle that humans are social
animals who learn best in real-life activities with other people. Progressivists, like proponents of most
educational theories, claim to rely on the best available scientific theories of learning. Most progressive
educators believe that children learn as if they were scientists, following a process similar to John Dewey's
model of learning: 1) Become aware of the problem. 2) Define the problem. 3) Propose hypotheses to solve
it. 4) Evaluate the consequences of the hypotheses from one's past experience. 5) Test the likeliest solution.

Jean Piaget
Date: 1896-1980

Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist known for his epistemological studies with children.
His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of
Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse,
whether violent, or gradual."[17] Piaget created the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in
Geneva in 1955 and directed it until 1980. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great
pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing."[18]

Jean Piaget defined himself as an epistemologist, interested in the process of the qualitative development of
knowledge. As he says in the introduction of his book "Genetic Epistemology" (ISBN 978-0-393-00596-7):
"What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge,
since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge."

Jerome Bruner
Date: 1915-

Another important contributor to the inquiry method in education is Bruner. His books The Process of
Education and Toward a Theory of Instruction are landmarks in conceptualizing learning and curriculum
development. He argued that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any
stage of development. This notion was an underpinning for his concept of the spiral curriculum which
posited the idea that a curriculum should revisit basic ideas, building on them until the student had grasped
the full formal concept. He emphasized intuition as a neglected but essential feature of productive thinking.
He felt that interest in the material being learned was the best stimulus for learning rather than external
motivation such as grades. Bruner developed the concept of discovery learning which promoted learning as a
process of constructing new ideas based on current or past knowledge. Students are encouraged to discover
facts and relationships and continually build on what they already know.

Essentialism
Educational essentialism is an educational philosophy whose adherents believe that children should learn the
traditional basic subjects and that these should be learned thoroughly and rigorously. An essentialist program
normally teaches children progressively, from less complex skills to more complex.

William Chandler Bagley

Date: 1874-1946

William Chandler Bagley taught in elementary schools before becoming a professor of education at the
University of Illinois, where he served as the Director of the School of Education from 1908 until 1917. He
was a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia, from 1917 to 1940. An opponent of pragmatism
and progressive education, Bagley insisted on the value of knowledge for its own sake, not merely as an
instrument, and he criticized his colleagues for their failure to emphasize systematic study of academic
subjects. Bagley was a proponent of educational essentialism.
Social Reconstructionism and Critical Pedagogy
Critical pedagogy is an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students
develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and
the ability to take constructive action." Based in Marxist theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical
democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other movements for social justice.

Maria Montessori
Date: 1870-1952

The Montessori method arose from Dr. Maria Montessori's discovery of what she referred to as "the child's
true normal nature" in 1907,[19] which happened in the process of her experimental observation of young
children given freedom in an environment prepared with materials designed for their self-directed learning
activity.[20] The method itself aims to duplicate this experimental observation of children to bring about,
sustain and support their true natural way of being.[21]

Waldorf
Waldorf education (also known as Steiner or Steiner-Waldorf education) is a humanistic approach to
pedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder
of anthroposophy. Learning is interdisciplinary, integrating practical, artistic, and conceptual elements. The
approach emphasizes the role of the imagination in learning, developing thinking that includes a creative as
well as an analytic component. The educational philosophy's overarching goals are to provide young people
the basis on which to develop into free, morally responsible and integrated individuals, and to help every
child fulfill his or her unique destiny, the existence of which anthroposophy posits. Schools and teachers are
given considerable freedom to define curricula within collegial structures.

Rudolf Steiner
Date: 1861-1925

Steiner founded a holistic educational impulse on the basis of his spiritual philosophy (anthroposophy). Now
known as Steiner or Waldorf education, his pedagogy emphasizes a balanced development
of cognitive, affective/artistic, and practical skills (head, heart, and hands). Schools are normally self-
administered by faculty; emphasis is placed upon giving individual teachers the freedom to develop creative
methods.

Steiner's theory of child development divides education into three discrete developmental stages predating
but with close similarities to the stages of development described by Piaget. Early childhood education
occurs through imitation; teachers provide practical activities and a healthy environment. Steiner believed
that young children should meet only goodness. Elementary education is strongly arts-based, centered on the
teacher's creative authority; the elementary school-age child should meet beauty. Secondary education seeks
to develop the judgment, intellect, and practical idealism; the adolescent should meet truth.

Democratic Education
Democratic education is a theory of learning and school governance in which students and staff participate
freely and equally in a school democracy. In a democratic school, there is typically shared decision-making
among students and staff on matters concerning living, working, and learning together.
A. S. Neill
Date: 1883-1973

Neill founded Summerhill School, the oldest existing democratic school in Suffolk, England in 1921. He
wrote a number of books that now define much of contemporary democratic education philosophy. Neill
believed that the happiness of the child should be the paramount consideration in decisions about the child's
upbringing, and that this happiness grew from a sense of personal freedom. He felt that deprivation of this
sense of freedom during childhood, and the consequent unhappiness experienced by the repressed child, was
responsible for many of the psychological disorders of adulthood.

Classical Education
The Classical education movement advocates a form of education based in the traditions of Western culture,
with a particular focus on education as understood and taught in the Middle Ages. The term "classical
education" has been used in English for several centuries, with each era modifying the definition and adding
its own selection of topics. By the end of the 18th century, in addition to the trivium and quadrivium of the
Middle Ages, the definition of a classical education embraced study of literature, poetry, drama, philosophy,
history, art, and languages. In the 20th and 21st centuries it is used to refer to a broad-based study of the
liberal arts and sciences, as opposed to a practical or pre-professional program. Classical Education can be
described as rigorous and systematic, separating children and their learning into three rigid categories,
Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric.

Charlotte Mason
Date: 1842-1923

Mason was a British educator who invested her life in improving the quality of children's education. Her
ideas led to a method used by some homeschoolers. Mason's philosophy of education is probably best
summarized by the principles given at the beginning of each of her books. Two key mottos taken from those
principles are "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life" and "Education is the science of relations."
She believed that children were born persons and should be respected as such; they should also be taught the
Way of the Will and the Way of Reason. Her motto for students was "I am, I can, I ought, I will." Charlotte
Mason believed that children should be introduced to subjects through living books, not through the use of
"compendiums, abstracts, or selections." She used abridged books only when the content was deemed
inappropriate for children. She preferred that parents or teachers read aloud those texts (such as Plutarch and
the Old Testament), making omissions only where necessary.

Unschooling
Unschooling is a range of educational philosophies and practices centered on
allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child
directed play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than
through a more traditional school curriculum. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities led by the
children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in
the thesis that standard curricula and conventional gradingmethods, as well as other features of traditional
schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.

John Holt
In 1964 Holt published his first book, How Children Fail, asserting that the academic failure of
schoolchildren was not despite the efforts of the schools, but actually because of the schools. Not
surprisingly, How Children Fail ignited a firestorm of controversy. Holt was catapulted into the American
national consciousness to the extent that he made appearances on major TV talk shows, wrote book reviews
for Life magazine, and was a guest on the To Tell The Truth TV game show.[22] In his follow-up work, How
Children Learn, published in 1967, Holt tried to elucidate the learning process of children and why he
believed school short circuits that process.

Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people
lives on from one generation to the next.[1] Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative
effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts. In its narrow, technical sense, education is the formal process by
which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, customs and values from one
generation to another, e.g., instruction in schools.

A right to education has been created and recognized by some jurisdictions: Since 1952, Article 2 of the first
Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights obliges all signatory parties to guarantee the right to
education. At the global level, the United Nations'International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights of 1966 guarantees this right under its Article 13.

Etymology

Etymologically, the word education is derived from the Latin ēducātiō (“A breeding, a bringing up, a
rearing) from ēdūcō (“I educate, I train”) which is related to the homonym ēdūcō (“I lead forth, I take out; I
raise up, I erect”) from ē- (“from, out of”) and dūcō (“I lead, I conduct”).[2]

Systems of schooling

Systems of schooling involve institutionalized teaching and learning in relation to a curriculum, which itself
is established according to a predetermined purpose of the schools in the system.

Purpose of Schools
Examples of the purpose of schools include:[3] develop reasoning about perennial questions, master the
methods of scientific inquiry, cultivate the intellect, create positive change agents. The purpose and goal of
the school is to teach pupils how to think.

Curriculum
In formal education, a curriculum is the set of courses, and their content, offered at a school or university. As
an idea, curriculum stems from the Latin word for race course, referring to the course of deeds and
experiences through which children grow to become mature adults. A curriculum is prescriptive, and is based
on a more general syllabus which merely specifies what topics must be understood and to what level to
achieve a particular grade or standard.

An academic discipline is a branch of knowledge which is formally taught, either at the university, or via
some other such method. Each discipline usually has several sub-disciplines or branches, and distinguishing
lines are often both arbitrary and ambiguous. Examples of broad areas of academic disciplines include
the natural sciences, mathematics, computer science, social sciences, humanities and applied sciences.[4]

Educational institutions may incorporate fine arts as part of K-12 grade curriculums or within majors at
colleges and universities as electives. The various types of fine arts are music, dance, and theater.[5]
 Learning Modalities

There has been work on learning styles over the last two decades. Dunn and Dunn[13] focused on identifying
relevant stimuli that may influence learning and manipulating the school environment, at about the same time
as Joseph Renzulli[14] recommended varying teaching strategies. Howard Gardner[15] identified individual
talents or aptitudes in his Multiple Intelligences theories. Based on the works of Jung, the Myers-Briggs
Type Indicator and Keirsey Temperament Sorter[16] focused on understanding how people's personality
affects the way they interact personally, and how this affects the way individuals respond to each other
within the learning environment. The work of David Kolb and Anthony Gregorc's Type
Delineator[17] follows a similar but more simplified approach.

It is currently fashionable to divide education into different learning "modes". The learning modalities [18] are
probably the most common:

 Visual: learning based on observation and seeing what is being learned.

 Auditory: learning based on listening to instructions/information.
 Kinesthetic: learning based on hands-on work and engaging in activities.
Although it is claimed that, depending on their preferred learning modality, different teaching techniques
have different levels of effectiveness,[19] recent research has argued "there is no adequate evidence base to
justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice."[20]

A consequence of this theory is that effective teaching should present a variety of teaching methods which
cover all three learning modalities so that different students have equal opportunities to learn in a way that is
effective for them.[21] Guy Claxton has questioned the extent that learning styles such as VAK are helpful,
particularly as they can have a tendency to label children and therefore restrict learning.[22][23]

Instruction

Instruction is the facilitation of another's learning. Instructors in primary and secondary institutions are often
called teachers, and they direct the education of students and might draw on
many subjects like reading, writing, mathematics, science and history. Instructors in post-secondary
institutions might be called teachers, instructors, or professors, depending on the type of institution; and they
primarily teach only their specific discipline. Studies from the United States suggest that the quality of
teachers is the single most important factor affecting student performance, and that countries which score
highly on international tests have multiple policies in place to ensure that the teachers they employ are as
effective as possible.[24][25] With the passing of NCLB in the United States (No Child Left Behind), teachers
must be highly qualified. A popular way to gauge teaching performance is to use student evaluations of
teachers (SETS), but these evaluations have been criticized for being counterproductive to learning and
inaccurate due to student bias.[26]

Technology

One of the most substantial uses in education is the use of technology. Also technology is an increasingly
influential factor in education. Computers and mobile phones are used in developed countries both to
complement established education practices and develop new ways of learning such as online education (a
type of distance education). This gives students the opportunity to choose what they are interested in learning.
The proliferation of computers also means the increase of programming and blogging. Technology offers
powerful learning tools that demand new skills and understandings of students, including Multimedia, and
provides new ways to engage students, such as Virtual learning environments. One such tool are virtual
manipulatives, which are an "interactive, Web-based visual representation of a dynamic object that presents
opportunities for constructing mathematical knowledge" (Moyer, Bolyard, & Spikell, 2002). In short, virtual
manipulatives are dynamic visual/pictorial replicas of physical mathematical manipulatives, which have long
been used to demonstrate and teach various mathematical concepts. Virtual manipulatives can be easily
accessed on the Internet as stand-alone applets, allowing for easy access and use in a variety of educational
settings. Emerging research into the effectiveness of virtual manipulatives as a teaching tool have yielded
promising results, suggesting comparable, and in many cases superior overall concept-teaching effectiveness
compared to standard teaching methods.[citation needed] Technology is being used more not only in administrative
duties in education but also in the instruction of students. The use of technologies such
as PowerPoint and interactive whiteboard is capturing the attention of students in the classroom. Technology
is also being used in the assessment of students. One example is the Audience Response System (ARS), which
allows immediate feedback tests and classroom discussions.[27]

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are a “diverse set of tools and resources used to
communicate, create, disseminate, store, and manage information.”[28] These technologies include computers,
the Internet, broadcasting technologies (radio and television), and telephony. There is increasing interest in
how computers and the Internet can improve education at all levels, in both formal and non-formal
settings.[29] Older ICT technologies, such as radio and television, have for over forty years been used for open
and distance learning, although print remains the cheapest, most accessible and therefore most dominant
delivery mechanism in both developed and developing countries.[30] In addition to classroom application and
growth of e-learning opportunities for knowledge attainment, educators involved in student affairs
programming have recognized the increasing importance of computer usage with data generation for and
about students. Motivation and retention counselors, along with faculty and administrators, can impact the
potential academic success of students by provision of technology based experiences in the University
setting.[31]

The use of computers and the Internet is in its infancy in developing countries, if these are used at all, due to
limited infrastructure and the attendant high costs of access. Usually, various technologies are used in
combination rather than as the sole delivery mechanism. For example, the Kothmale Community Radio
Internet uses both radio broadcasts and computer and Internet technologies to facilitate the sharing of
information and provide educational opportunities in a rural community in Sri Lanka.[32] The Open University
of the United Kingdom (UKOU), established in 1969 as the first educational institution in the world wholly
dedicated to open and distance learning, still relies heavily on print-based materials supplemented by radio,
television and, in recent years, online programming.[33] Similarly, the Indira Gandhi National Open University
in India combines the use of print, recorded audio and video, broadcast radio and television, and audio
conferencing technologies.[34]

The term "computer-assisted learning" (CAL) has been increasingly used to describe the use of technology in
teaching. Classrooms of the 21st century contain interactive white boards, tablets, mp3 players, laptops,
etc. Wiki sites are another tool teachers can implement into CAL curriculums for students to understand
communication and collaboration efforts of group work through electronic means.[citation needed] Teachers are
encouraged to embed these technological devices and services in the curriculum in order to enhance students
learning and meet the needs of various types of learners.
 Education Theory

Education theory can refer to either a normative or a descriptive theory of education. In the first case, a theory
means a postulation about what ought to be. It provides the "goals, norms, and standards for conducting the
process of education."[35] In the second case, it means "an hypothesis or set of hypotheses that have been
verified by observation and experiment."[36] A descriptive theory of education can be thought of as a
conceptual scheme that ties together various "otherwise discrete particulars . . .For example, a cultural theory
of education shows how the concept of culture can be used to organize and unify the variety of facts about
how and what people learn."[37]Likewise, for example, there is the behaviorist theory of education that comes
from educational psychology and the functionalist theory of education that comes from sociology of
education.[38]

Economics and Education

It has been argued that high rates of education are essential for countries to be able to achieve high levels
of economic growth.[39] Empirical analyses tend to support the theoretical prediction that poor countries
should grow faster than rich countries because they can adopt cutting edge technologies already tried and
tested by rich countries. However, technology transfer requires knowledgeable managers and engineers who
are able to operate new machines or production practices borrowed from the leader in order to close the gap
through imitation. Therefore, a country's ability to learn from the leader is a function of its stock of "human
capital". Recent study of the determinants of aggregate economic growth have stressed the importance of
fundamental economic institutions[40] and the role of cognitive skills.[41]

At the individual level, there is a large literature, generally related back to the work of Jacob Mincer,[42] on
how earnings are related to the schooling and other human capital of the individual. This work has motivated
a large number of studies, but is also controversial. The chief controversies revolve around how to interpret
the impact of schooling.[43][44]

Economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis famously argued in 1976 that there was a fundamental conflict
in American schooling between the egalitarian goal of democratic participation and the inequalities implied
by the continued profitability of capitalist production on the other.[45]

History of Education

The history of education according to Dieter Lenzen, president of the Freie Universität Berlin1994, "began
either millions of years ago or at the end of 1770". Education as a science cannot be separated from the
educational traditions that existed before. Adults trained the young of their society in the knowledge and skills
they would need to master and eventually pass on. The evolution of culture, and human beings as a species
depended on this practice of transmitting knowledge. In pre-literate societies this was achieved orally and
through imitation. Story-telling continued from one generation to the next. Oral language developed into
written symbols and letters. The depth and breadth of knowledge that could be preserved and passed soon
increased exponentially. When cultures began to extend their knowledge beyond the basic skills of
communicating, trading, gathering food, religious practices, etc., formal education, and schooling, eventually
followed. Schooling in this sense was already in place in Egypt between 3000 and 500BC.
Nowadays some kind of education is compulsory to all people in most countries. Due to population growth
and the proliferation of compulsory education, UNESCO has calculated that in the next 30 years more people
will receive formal education than in all of human history thus far.[46]

Philosophy

John Locke's work Some Thoughts Concerning Education was written in 1693 and still reflects traditional
education priorities in the Western world.

As an academic field, philosophy of education is a "the philosophical study of education and its problems...its
central subject matter is education, and its methods are those of philosophy".[47] "The philosophy of education
may be either the philosophy of the process of education or the philosophy of the discipline of education. That
is, it may be part of the discipline in the sense of being concerned with the aims, forms, methods, or results of
the process of educating or being educated; or it may be metadisciplinary in the sense of being concerned with
the concepts, aims, and methods of the discipline."[48] As such, it is both part of the field of education and a
field of applied philosophy, drawing from fields of metaphysics, epistemology, axiology and the philosophical
approaches (speculative, prescriptive, and/oranalytic) to address questions in and about pedagogy, education
policy, and curriculum, as well as the process of learning, to name a few.[49] For example, it might study what
constitutes upbringing and education, the values and norms revealed through upbringing and educational
practices, the limits and legitimization of education as an academic discipline, and the relation
between education theory and practice.

Educational Psychology

A class size experiment in the United States found that attending small classes for 3 or more years in the early
grades increased high school graduation rates of students from low income families.[50]

Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of
educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations.
Although the terms "educational psychology" and "school psychology" are often used interchangeably,
researchers and theorists are likely to be identified as educational psychologists, whereas practitioners in
schools or school-related settings are identified as school psychologists. Educational psychology is concerned
with the processes of educational attainment in the general population and in sub-populations such
as gifted children and those with specific disabilities.

Educational psychology can in part be understood through its relationship with other disciplines. It is
informed primarily by psychology, bearing a relationship to that discipline analogous to the relationship
between medicine and biology. Educational psychology in turn informs a wide range of specialities within
educational studies, including instructional design, educational technology, curriculum
development, organizational learning, special education and classroom management. Educational psychology
both draws from and contributes to cognitive science and the learning sciences. In universities, departments of
educational psychology are usually housed within faculties of education, possibly accounting for the lack of
representation of educational psychology content in introductory psychology textbooks (Lucas, Blazek, &
Raley, 2006).

Sociology of Education

The sociology of education is the study of how social institutions and forces affect educational processes and
outcomes, and vice versa. By many, education is understood to be a means of overcoming handicaps,
achieving greater equality and acquiring wealth and status for all (Sargent 1994). Learners may be motivated
by aspirations for progress and betterment. Learners can also be motivated by their interest in the subject area
or specific skill they are trying to learn. In fact, learner-responsibility education models are driven by the
interest of the learner in the topic to be studied.[51]

Education is perceived as a place where children can develop according to their unique needs and
potentialities.[52] The purpose of education can be to develop every individual to their full potential. The
understanding of the goals and means of educational socialization processes differs according to
the sociological paradigm used.

Pedagogy ( /ˈpɛdəɡɒdʒi/ or /ˈpɛdəɡoʊdʒi/[1][2]) is the holistic science of education. It may be implemented

in practice as a personal, and holistic approach of socialising and upbringing children and young people. The
term is not to be confused with social pedagogy, where society (represented by social pedagogues) holds a
bigger part of the responsibility of the citizen's (often
with mental or physical disabilities) well-being.[5] [6]
Pedagogy is also occasionally referred to as the correct use of instructive strategies (see instructional theory).
For example, Paulo Freire referred to his method of teaching adult humans as "critical pedagogy". In
correlation with those instructive strategies the instructor's own philosophical beliefs of instruction are
harbored and governed by the pupil's background knowledge and experience, situation, and environment, as
well as learning goals set by the student and teacher. One example would be the Socratic schools of thought.[7]

Etymology and Generalizations

The word comes from the Greek παιδαγωγέω (paidagōgeō); in which παῖς (país, genitive
παιδός, paidos) means "child" and άγω (ágō) means "lead"; so it literally means "to lead the child". The Greek
παιδαγωγός (pedagogue)[8] ; in which παιδί (ped) means "child” and άγω (ago)[8] means "lead"; would also
mean "to lead the child." Other relevant roots from Greek include μικρό παιδί [8] or toddler; αγόρι [8] or boy
child; κοριτσιών[8] or girl child; μικρό παιδί [8] or young child, indicating that παιδί is used with very young
children of both sexes.

An instructor develops conceptual knowledge and manages the content of learning activities in pedagogical
settings. This is consistent with the Cognitivism of Piaget, 1926, 1936/1975; Bruner, 1960, 1966, 1971, 1986;
and Vygotsky, 1962 where sequential development of individual mental processes such as recognize, recall,
analyze, reflect, apply, create, understand, and evaluate are scaffolded. The learning technique is adoptive
learning of procedures, organization, and structure to develop an internal cognitive structure that strengthens
synapses in the brain. The learner requires assistance to develop prior knowledge and integrate new
knowledge using Verbal/Linguistic and Logical/Mathematical intelligences. The learner must learn how to
learn while developing existing schema and adopting knowledge from both people and the environment. This
is low order learning of conceptual knowledge, techniques, procedures, and algorithmic problem solving.[9]
Education Policy refers to the collection of laws and rules that govern the operation of education systems.
Education occurs in many forms for many purposes through many institutions. Examples include early
childhood education, kindergarten through to 12th grade, two and four year colleges or universities, graduate
and professional education, adult education and job training. Therefore, education policy can directly affect the
education people engage in at all ages.
Examples of areas subject to debate in education policy, specifically from the field of schools, include school
size, class size, school choice, school privatization, tracking, teacher education and certification, teacher pay,
teaching methods, curricular content, graduation requirements, school infrastructure investment, and the
values that schools are expected to uphold and model.

Education policy analysis is the scholarly study of education policy. It seeks to answer questions about the
purpose of education, the objectives (societal and personal) that it is designed to attain, the methods for
attaining them and the tools for measuring their success or failure. Research intended to inform education
policy is carried out in a wide variety of institutions and in many academic disciplines. Important researchers
are affiliated with departments of psychology, economics, sociology, and human development, in addition to
schools and departments of education or public policy. Examples of education policy analysis may be found
in such academic journalsas Education Policy Analysis Archives.
Curriculum
In formal education, a curriculum ( /kəˈrɪkjʉləm/; plural: curricula /kəˈrɪkjʉlə/ or curriculums) is the set
of courses, and their content, offered at a school or university. As an idea, curriculum stems from
the Latin word for race course, referring to the course of deeds and experiences through which children grow
to become mature adults. A curriculum is prescriptive, and is based on a more general syllabus which merely
specifies what topics must be understood and to what level to achieve a particular grade or standard.
Curriculum has numerous definitions, which can be slightly confusing. In its broadest sense a curriculum may
refer to all courses offered at a school. This is particularly true of schools at the university level, where the
diversity of a curriculum might be an attractive point to a potential student.
A curriculum may also refer to a defined and prescribed course of studies, which students must fulfill in order
to pass a certain level of education. For example, an elementary school might discuss how its curriculum, or
its entire sum of lessons and teachings, is designed to improve national testing scores or help students learn
the basics. An individual teacher might also refer to his or her curriculum, meaning all the subjects that will be
taught during a school year.
On the other hand, a high school might refer to a curriculum as the courses required in order to receive one’s
diploma. They might also refer to curriculum in exactly the same way as the elementary school, and use
curriculum to mean both individual courses needed to pass, and the overall offering of courses, which help
prepare a student for life after high school.

Curriculum in formal schooling

In formal education or schooling (cf. education), a curriculum is the set of courses, course work, and content
offered at a school oruniversity. A curriculum may be partly or entirely determined by an external,
authoritative body (i.e. the National Curriculum for Englandin English schools). In the U.S., each state, with
the individual school districts, establishes the curricula taught.[4] Each state, however, builds its curriculum
with great participation of national[5] academic subject groups selected by the United States Department of
Education, e.g. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)[6] for mathematical instruction.
In Australia each state's Education Department establishes curricula with plans for a National Curriculum in
2011. UNESCO's International Bureau of Education[7] has the primary mission of studying curricula and their
implementation worldwide.

Curriculum[8] means two things: (i) the range of courses from which students choose what subject matters to
study, and (ii) a specific learning program. In the latter case, the curriculum collectively describes
the teaching, learning, and assessment materials available for a given course of study.
Currently, a spiral curriculum is promoted as allowing students to revisit a subject matter's content at the
different levels of development of the subject matter being studied. The constructivist approach, of the tycoil
curriculum, proposes that children learn best via active engagement with the educational environment, i.e.
discovery learning.

Crucial to the curriculum is the definition of the course objectives that usually are expressed as learning
outcomes' and normally include the program's assessment strategy. These outcomes and assessments are
grouped as units (or modules), and, therefore, the curriculum comprises a collection of such units, each, in
turn, comprising a specialised, specific part of the curriculum. So, a typical curriculum includes
communications, numeracy, information technology, and social skills units, with specific, specialized
teaching of each.
Core curriculum has typically been highly emphasized in Soviet and Russian universities and technical
institutes. In this photo, a student has come to the university's main class schedule board on the first day of
classes to find what classes he – and all students in his specialization (sub-major) – will attend this semester.

Many educational institutions are currently trying to balance two opposing forces. On the one hand, some
believe students should have a common knowledge foundation, often in the form of a core curriculum; on the
other hand, others want students to be able to pursue their own educational interests, often through early
specialty in a major, however, other times through the free choice of courses. This tension has received a large
amount of coverage due to Harvard University's reorganization of its core requirements.

An essential feature of curriculum design, seen in every college catalog and at every other level of schooling,
is the identification of prerequisites for each course. These prerequisites can be satisfied by taking particular
courses, and in some cases by examination, or by other means, such as work experience. In general, more
advanced courses in any subject require some foundation in basic courses, but some coursework requires
study in other departments, as in the sequence of math classes required for a physics major, or the language
requirements for students preparing in literature, music, or scientific research. A more detailed curriculum
design must deal with prerequisites within a course for each topic taken up. This in turn leads to the problems
of course organization and scheduling once the dependencies between topics are known.

In education, a core curriculum is a curriculum, or course of study, which is deemed central and usually
made mandatory for all students of a school or school system. However, this is not always the case. For
example, a school might mandate a music appreciation class, but students may opt out if they take a
performing musical class, such as orchestra, band, chorus, etc. Core curricula are often instituted, at
the primary and secondary levels, by school boards, Departments of Education, or other administrative
agencies charged with overseeing education.

Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Education

Theoretical questions concerning the teaching of philosophy in school have been debated at least
since Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The modern debate in Germany in the 1970s gave
rise to two competing approaches: the more traditional,text-oriented approach by Wulff D. Rehfus and the
more modern, dialogue-oriented approach by Ekkehard Martens. Newer approaches have been developed
by Karel van der Leeuw and Pieter Mostert as well as Roland W. Henke. A similar divide
between traditionalistsand modernists is to be found in France, with the proponents Jacques
Muglioni and Jacqueline Russ on the one side and France Rollinand Michel Tozzi on the other. In Italy,
philosophy education is traditionally historically oriented in the sense of history of ideas.[3]Theoretical
problems of philosophy education at college and university level are discussed in articles in the
journal Teaching Philosophy.

Didactic methods

Among the didactic methods in philosophy are the Socratic method and Hermeneutics. The pedagogic side of
philosophy teaching is also of note to researchers in the field and philosophers of education
Socratic method
The Socratic method (also known as method of elenchus, elenctic method, Socratic irony, or Socratic
debate), named after the classical Greek philosopher Socrates, is a form of inquiry and debate between
individuals with opposing viewpoints based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical
thinking and to illuminate ideas. It is a dialectical method, often involving an oppositional discussion in which
the defense of one point of view is pitted against the defense of another; one participant may lead another to
contradict himself in some way, thus strengthening the inquirer's own point.

The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by
steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions. The Socratic method searches for
general, commonly held truths that shape opinion, and scrutinizes them to determine their consistency with
other beliefs. The basic form is a series of questions formulated as tests of logic and fact intended to help a
person or group discover their beliefs about some topic, exploring the definitions or logoi(singular logos),
seeking to characterize the general characteristics shared by various particular instances. The extent to which
this method is employed to bring out definitions implicit in the interlocutors' beliefs, or to help them further
their understanding, is called the method of maieutics. Aristotle attributed to Socrates the discovery of the
method of definition and induction, which he regarded as the essence of the scientific method.

Socrates began to engage in such discussions with his fellow Athenians after his friend from
youth, Chaerephon, visited the Oracle of Delphi, which confirmed that no man inGreece was wiser than
Socrates. Socrates saw this as a paradox, and began using the Socratic method to answer his
conundrum. Diogenes Laërtius, however, wrote that Protagoras invented the “Socratic” method.[1][2]

Plato famously formalized the Socratic elenctic style in prose—presenting Socrates as the curious questioner
of some prominent Athenian interlocutor—in some of his early dialogues, such as Euthyphro and Ion, and the
method is most commonly found within the so-called "Socratic dialogues", which generally portray Socrates
engaging in the method and questioning his fellow citizens about moral and epistemological issues.

The term Socratic questioning is used to describe a kind of questioning in which an original question is
responded to as though it were an answer. This in turn forces the first questioner to reformulate a new
question in light of the progress of the discourse.

Method

Elenchus (Ancient Greek: ἔλεγχος elengkhos "argument of disproof or refutation; cross-examining, testing,
scrutiny esp. for purposes of refutation"[3]) is the central technique of the Socratic method. The Latin
form elenchus (plural elenchi ) is used in English as the technical philosophical term.[4]

In Plato's early dialogues, the elenchus is the technique Socrates uses to investigate, for example, the nature or
definition of ethical concepts such as justice or virtue. According to one general characterization, [5] it has the
following steps:
1. Socrates' interlocutor asserts a thesis, for example "Courage is endurance of the soul", which Socrates
considers false and targets for refutation.
2. Socrates secures his interlocutor's agreement to further premises, for example "Courage is a fine thing" and
"Ignorant endurance is not a fine thing".
3. Socrates then argues, and the interlocutor agrees, that these further premises imply the contrary of the original
thesis, in this case it leads to: "courage is not endurance of the soul".
4. Socrates then claims that he has shown that his interlocutor's thesis is false and that its negation is true.
One elenctic examination can lead to a new, more refined, examination of the concept being considered, in
this case it invites an examination of the claim: "Courage is wise endurance of the soul". Most Socratic
inquiries consist of a series of elenchi and typically end in aporia.

Frede[6] insists that step #4 above makes nonsense of the aporetic nature of the early dialogues. If any claim
has been shown to be true then it cannot be the case that the interlocutors are in aporia, a state where they no
longer know what to say about the subject under discussion.

The exact nature of the elenchus is subject to a great deal of debate, in particular concerning whether it is a
positive method, leading to knowledge, or a negative method used solely to refute false claims to knowledge.

According to W. K. C. Guthrie's The Greek Philosophers, while sometimes erroneously believed to be a

method by which one seeks the answer to a problem, or knowledge, the Socratic method was actually
intended to demonstrate one's ignorance. Socrates, unlike the Sophists, did believe that knowledge was
possible, but believed that the first step to knowledge was recognition of one's ignorance. Guthrie writes,
"[Socrates] was accustomed to say that he did not himself know anything, and that the only way in which he
was wiser than other men was that he was conscious of his own ignorance, while they were not. The essence
of the Socratic method is to convince the interlocutor that whereas he thought he knew something, in fact he
does not."

Application

Socrates generally applied his method of examination to concepts that seem to lack any concrete definition;
e.g., the key moral concepts at the time, the virtues of piety, wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. Such
an examination challenged the implicit moral beliefs of the interlocutors, bringing out inadequacies and
inconsistencies in their beliefs, and usually resulting in puzzlement known asaporia. In view of such
inadequacies, Socrates himself professed his ignorance, but others still claimed to have knowledge. Socrates
believed that his awareness of his ignorance made him wiser than those who, though ignorant, still claimed
knowledge. While this belief seems paradoxical at first glance, it in fact allowed Socrates to discover his own
errors where others might assume they were correct. This claim was known by the anecdote of the Delphic
oracular pronouncement that Socrates was the wisest of all men. (Or, rather, that no man was wiser than
Socrates.)

Socrates used this claim of wisdom as the basis of his moral exhortation. Accordingly, he claimed that the
chief goodness consists in the caring of the soul concerned with moral truth and moral understanding, that
"wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual
and to the state", and that "life without examination [dialogue] is not worth living". It is with this in mind that
the Socratic method is employed.
 The motive for the modern usage of this method and Socrates' use are not necessarily equivalent. Socrates
rarely used the method to actually develop consistent theories, instead using myth to explain them.
The Parmenides shows Parmenides using the Socratic method to point out the flaws in the Platonic theory of
the Forms, as presented by Socrates; it is not the only dialogue in which theories normally expounded by
Plato/Socrates are broken down through dialectic. Instead of arriving at answers, the method was used to
break down the theories we hold, to go "beyond" the axioms and postulates we take for granted. Therefore,
myth and the Socratic method are not meant by Plato to be incompatible; they have different purposes, and are
often described as the "left hand" and "right hand" paths to the good and wisdom.

Psychotherapy
The Socratic method, in the form of Socratic questioning, has been adapted for psychotherapy, most
prominently in Classical Adlerian Psychotherapy, Cognitive Therapy[7][8][9][10] and Reality Therapy. It can be
used to clarify meaning, feeling, and consequences, as well as to gradually unfold insight, or explore
alternative actions.

Lesson plan elements for teachers in classrooms

This is a classical method of teaching that was designed to create autonomous thinkers.

There are some crucial lesson plan elements to this form of teaching:

Planning methodology

 Plan and build the main course of thought through the material.
 Build in potential fallacies (errors) for discovery and discussion.
 Know common fallacies.
 It may help to start or check with the conclusion and work backwards.
Methodology in operation
 The teacher and student agree on the topic of instruction.
 The student agrees to attempt to answer questions from the teacher.
 The teacher and student are willing to accept any correctly-reasoned answer. That is, the reasoning process
must be considered more important than pre-conceived facts or beliefs.[11]
 The teacher's questions should expose errors in the students' reasoning or beliefs, then formulate questions
that the students cannot answer except by a correct reasoning process. The teacher has prior knowledge about
the classical fallacies (errors) in reasoning.
 Where the teacher makes an error of logic or fact, it is acceptable for a student to draw attention to the error.
An informal discussion or similar vehicle of communication may not strictly be a (Socratic) dialogue.
Therefore it is only suitable as a medium for the Socratic method where the principles are known by teachers
and likely to be known by students. Additionally, the teacher is knowledgeable and proficient enough to
spontaneously ask questions in order to draw conclusions and principles etc. from the students.

Within such a discussion it is preferable pedagogically,[citation needed] because the method encourages students to
reason critically rather than appeal to authority or use other fallacies.

Learning Theory of Education

No topic is closer to the heart of psychology than learning, a relatively permanent change in an organisms
behavior due to experience[1]. In psychology and education, learning is commonly defined as a process that
brings together cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences and experiences for acquiring, enhancing,
or making changes in one's knowledge, skills, values, and world views (Illeris, 2004; Ormrod, 1995). It is also
thought of as the way in which information is absorbed, processed, and retained. "Learning Theories" are
elaborate hypotheses that describe how exactly this procedure occurs. Learning theories have two chief values
according to Hill (2002). One is in providing us with vocabulary and a conceptual framework for interpreting
the examples of learning that we observe. The other is in suggesting where to look for solutions to practical
problems. The theories do not give us solutions, but they do direct our attention to those variables that are
crucial in finding solutions.
There are three main categories or philosophical frameworks under which learning theories
fall: behaviorism, cognitivism, andconstructivism. Behaviorism focuses only on the objectively observable
aspects of learning. Cognitive theories look beyond behavior to explain brain-based learning. And
constructivism views learning as a process in which the learner actively constructs or builds new ideas or
concepts.

Merriam and Caffarella (1991) highlight four approaches or orientations to learning: Behaviourist,
Cognitivist, Humanist, and Social/Situational. These approaches involve contrasting ideas as to the purpose
and process of learning and education - and the role that educators may take.[2]

Behaviorism

John Watson (1878-1959) coined the term "behaviorism." Critical of Wundt's emphasis on internal states,
Watson insisted that psychology must focus on overt measureable behaviors. Watson believed that theorizing
thoughts, intentions or other subjective experiences was unscientific [3]. Behaviorism as a theory was
primarily developed by B. F. Skinner. It loosely encompasses the work of people like Edward Thorndike,
Tolman, Guthrie, and Hull. What characterizes these investigators are their underlying assumptions about the
process of learning. In essence, three basic assumptions are held to be true.[original research?] First, learning is
manifested by a change in behavior. Second, the environment shapes behavior. And third, the principles of
contiguity (how close in time two events must be for a bond to be formed) and reinforcement (any means of
increasing the likelihood that an event will be repeated) are central to explaining the learning process. For
behaviorism, learning is the acquisition of new behavior through conditioning.

There are two types of possible conditioning:

1) Classical conditioning, where the behavior becomes a reflex response to stimulus as in the case of Pavlov's
Dogs. Pavlov was interested in studying reflexes, when he saw that the dogs drooled without the proper
stimulus. Although no food was in sight, their saliva still dribbled. It turned out that the dogs were reacting to
lab coats. Every time the dogs were served food, the person who served the food was wearing a lab coat.
Therefore, the dogs reacted as if food was on its way whenever they saw a lab coat.In a series of experiments,
Pavlov then tried to figure out how these phenomena were linked. For example, he struck a bell when the dogs
were fed. If the bell was sounded in close association with their meal, the dogs learned to associate the sound
of the bell with food. After a while, at the mere sound of the bell, they responded by drooling. Pavlov's work
laid the foundation for many of psychologist John B. Watson's ideas. Watson and Pavlov shared both a
disdain for "menatlistic" concepts (such as consciousness) and a belief that the basic laws of learning were the
same for all animals whether dogs or humans [4].

2) Operant conditioning where there is reinforcement of the behavior by a reward or a punishment. The theory
of operant conditioning was developed by B.F. Skinner and is known as Radical Behaviorism. The word
‘operant’ refers to the way in which behavior ‘operates on the environment’. Briefly, a behavior may result
either in reinforcement, which increases the likelihood of the behavior recurring, or punishment, which
decreases the likelihood of the behavior recurring. It is important to note that, a punishment is not considered
to be applicable if it does not result in the reduction of the behavior, and so the terms punishment and
reinforcement are determined as a result of the actions. Within this framework, behaviorists are particularly
interested in measurable changes in behavior. In operant conditioning we learn to assoicate a response (our
behavior) and its consequence and thus to repeat acts followed by good results and avoid acts followed by bad
results. [5].

Since behaviorists view the learning process as a change in behavior, educators arrange the environment to
elicit desired responses through such devices as behavioral objectives, competency -based education, and skill
development and training.[2]

Educational approaches such as applied behavior analysis, curriculum based measurement, and direct
instruction have emerged from this model.[6]

Cognitivism

Cognitive theories grew out of Gestalt psychology. Developed in Germany in the early 1900s, it was
transplanted to America in the 1920s. Gestalt is roughly translated as "configuration," or "pattern," and
emphasizes "the whole" of human experience [7]. Over the years, the Gestalt psychologist provided compelling
demonstrations and described principles by which we organize our sensations into perceptions [8]. The earliest
challenge to the behaviorists came in a publication in 1929 by Bode, a gestalt psychologist.[9] He criticized
behaviorists for being too dependent on overt behavior to explain learning. Gestalt psychologists proposed
looking at the patterns rather than isolated events. Gestalt views of learning have been incorporated into what
have come to be labeled cognitive theories. Two key assumptions underlie this cognitive approach: (1) that
the memory system is an active organized processor of information and (2) that prior knowledge plays an
important role in learning. Cognitive theories look beyond behavior to explain brain-based learning.
Cognitivists consider how human memory works to promote learning. For example, the physiological
processes of sorting and encoding information and events into short term memory and long term memory are
important to educators working under the cognitive theory.[10] The major difference between gestaltists and
behaviorists is the locus of control over the learning activity: the individual learner is more key to gestaltists
than the environment that behaviorists emphasize.

Once memory theories like the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model[11] and Baddeley's working
memory model[12] were established as a theoretical framework in cognitive psychology, new cognitive
frameworks of learning began to emerge during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Today, researchers are concentrating
on topics like cognitive load and information processing theory. These theories of learning play a role in
influencing instructional design.[13] Aspects of cognitivism can be found in learning how to learn, social role
acquisition, intelligence, learning, and memory as related to age.

Educators employing a cognitivist approach to learning would view learning as internal mental process
(including insight, information processing, memory, perception) where in order to develop learner capacity
and skills to improve learning, the educator structures content of learning activities to focus on building
intelligence and cognitive and meta-cognitive development.[2]
 Constructivism

Constructivism is a revolution in educational psychology. Built on the work of Piaget and Bruner,
constructivism emphasizes the importance of active involvement of learners in constructing knowledge for
themselves...Constructivism emphasizes top-down processing: begin with complex problems and teach basic
skills while solving these problems [14]. Constructivism explains why students do not learn deeply by listening
to a teacher, or reading from a textbook. Learning sciences research is revealing the deeper underlying bases
of how knowledge construction works. To design effective environments, one needs a very good
understanding of what children know when they come to the classroom. This requires sophisticated research
into childrens cognitive development, and the learning sciences draws heavily on psychological studies of
cognitive development (e.g., Siegler, 1998). The learning theories of John Dewey, Marie Montessori,
and David Kolb serve as the foundation of constructivist learning theory.[15] Constructivism views learning as
a process in which the learner actively constructs or builds new ideas or concepts based upon current and past
knowledge or experience. In other words, "learning involves constructing one's own knowledge from one's
own experiences." Constructivist learning, therefore, is a very personal endeavor, whereby internalized
concepts, rules, and general principles may consequently be applied in a practical real-world
context. Constructivism itself has many variations, such as Active learning, discovery learning,
and knowledge building. Regardless of the variety, constructivism promotes a student's free exploration
within a given framework or structure.[16] The teacher acts as a facilitator who encourages students to discover
principles for themselves and to construct knowledge by working to solve realistic problems. Aspects of
constructivism can be found in self-directed learning, transformational learning, and experiential learning.

Informal and Post-Modern Theories

Informal theories of education breaks down the learning process, learning authentically and with practicality.
One theory deals with whether learning should take place as a building of concepts toward an overall idea, or
the understanding of the overall idea with the details filled in later. In Marzano’s restructuring knowledge the
informal curriculum promotes the use of prior knowledge to help students gain big ideas and concept
understanding.[17] This theory states that new knowledge cannot be told to students, rather student’s current
knowledge must be challenged. By challenging student’s current ideas, students can adjust their ideas to more
closely resemble actual theories or concepts.[17] By using this method students gain the big idea taught and
later are more willing to learn and keep the specifics of the concept or theory taught. This theory further aligns
with the studies of Brown and Ryoo, who support that teaching concepts and the language of a subject should
be split into multiple steps.[18]

Other informal learning concerns regard sources of motivation for learning. Deci argues that intrinsic
motivation creates a more self-regulated learner [19] yet schools undermine intrinsic motivation. This is not
ideal for learning. Critics argue that average students learning in isolation perform significantly lower than
those learning with collaboration and mediation.[20] Students learn through talk, discussion, and
argumentation.[21][22]

Transformative Learning Theory

Transformative learning theory [explains the] process of constructing and appropriating new and revised
interpretations of the meaning of an experience in the world.[23] Transformative learning is the cognitive
process of effecting change in a frame of reference[24] although it is recognized that important emotional
changes are often involved.[25] These frames of reference define our view of the world and we have a tendency
as adults to reject or deem unworthy any ideas that do not ascribe to our particular values, associations,
concepts, etc.[24] Our frames of reference are composed of two dimensions: habits of mind and points of
view.[24] Habits of mind, such as ethnocentrism, are more fixed and influence our point of view and the
resulting thoughts or feelings associated with them, whereas points of view may change over time as a result
of influences such as reflection, appropriation and feedback.[24] Transformative learners utilize discourse as a
means of critically examination and reflection “devoted to assessing reasons presented in support of
competing interpretations, by critically examining evidence, arguments, and alternative points of
view.”[24] When circumstances permit, transformative learners move toward a frame of reference that is more
inclusive, discriminating, self-reflective, and integrative of experience.[24] Transformative learning leads to
autonomous and responsible thinking which is essential for full citizenship in democracy and for moral
decision making in situations of rapid change.[24]

Other Learning Theories

Educational Neuroscience or Neuroeducation is an emerging new learning theory. Prestigious universities

such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, USC and others are now offering programs dedicated to neuroeducation and
are developing majors and degrees in the field. It is founded on connecting what we know about how the brain
processes and stores information with classroom instruction and experiences.[26] Neuroeducation analyzed the
biological change in the brain as new information is processed and looks at what environmental, emotional,
social situations are best in order for the new information to be processed. It further analyzes under what
conditions the brain stores information and links it to other neurons versus simply determining that the
information is non-essential to store and hence reabsorbs the dendrite and dismisses the information. The
1990s were designated "The Decade of the Brain," and advances took place in neuroscience at an especially
rapid pace. The three dominant methods for measuring brain activities are: ERP's, FMRI, MEG [27].

Radin points out that the examination of the art and science of teaching was further accelerated by President
G.H. Bush when he declared the 1990s as the Decade of the Brain. The integration and application of what we
know about the brain was strengthened in 2000 when the American Federation of Teachers stated, It is vital
that we identify what science tells us about how people learn in order to improve the education
curriculum.[28] Rowland discusses that what is exciting about this new field in education is that modern brain
imaging techniques now make it possible, in some sense, to watch the brain as it learns. As academic
language and learning (ALL) educators often work with students on improving their approaches to learning,
the question then arises: can the results of neuro-scientific studies of brains as they are learning usefully
inform practice in this area? [29] Although the field of neuroscience is young, it is expected that with new
technologies and ways of observing learning, the paradigms of what students need and how students learn best
will be further refined with actual scientific evidence. In particular, students who may have learning
disabilities will be taught with strategies that engage their brain and makes the connections needed.

Other learning theories have also been developed for more specific purposes than general learning theories.
For example, andragogy is the art and science to help adults learn.

Connectivism is a recent theory of Networked learning which focuses on learning as making connections.

Multimedia learning theory focuses on principles for the effective use of multimedia in learning.

Criticism
 Criticism of learning theories that underlie traditional educational practices claims there is no need for such a
theory; that the attempt to comprehend the process of learning through theory construction creates more
problems and inhibits personal freedom.[30][31]
Education theory
Educational theory can refer to either speculative educational thought in general or to a theory of education
as something that guides, explains, or describes educational practice.

In terms of speculative thought, its history began with classical Greek philosophers and sophists, and today it
is a term for reflective theorizing about pedagogy, andragogy, curriculum, learning, and
education policy, organization and leadership. Educational thought is informed by various strands
of history, philosophy, sociology, critical theory, and psychology, among other disciplines.

On the other hand, a theory of education can be "normative (or prescriptive) as in philosophy,
or descriptive as in science."[1] In the first case, a theory means a postulation about what ought to be. It
provides the "goals, norms, and standards for conducting the process of education."[2] In the second case, it
means "an hypothesis or set of hypotheses that have been verified by observation and experiment."[1] Whereas
a normative educational theory provided by a philosopher might offer goals of education, descriptive "theory
provides concrete data that will help realize more effectively the goals suggested by the philosopher." [1] A
descriptive theory of education is a conceptual scheme that ties together various "otherwise discrete
particulars. . .For example, a cultural theory of education shows how the concept of culture can be used to
organize and unify the variety of facts about how and what people learn."[3]Likewise, for example, there is
the behaviorist theory of education that comes from educational psychology and the functionalist theory of
education that comes from sociology of education.[4]

In general, there are currently three main ways in which the term "theory" is used in education:

 the obverse of practice--theorizing is thinking and reflecting as opposed to doing;

 a generalizing or explanatory model of some kind, e.g., a specific learning theory like constructivism;
 a body of knowledge--these may or may not be associated with particular explanatory models. To theorize is
to develop these bodies of knowledge.[5]
Educational thought

Educational thought is not necessarily concerned with the construction of theories as much as it is the
"reflective examination of educational issues and problems from the perspective of diverse disciplines."[6]

Normative Theories of Education

Normative theories of education provide the norms, goals, and standards of education.[7]

Educational philosophies
"Normative philosophies or theories of education may make use of the results of [philosophical thought] and
of factual inquiries about human beings and the psychology of learning, but in any case they propound views
about what education should be, what dispositions it should cultivate, why it ought to cultivate them, how and
in whom it should do so, and what forms it should take. In a full-fledged philosophical normative theory of
education, besides analysis of the sorts described, there will normally be propositions of the following kinds:
1. Basic normative premises about what is good or right; 2. Basic factual premises about humanity and the
world; 3. Conclusions, based on these two kinds of premises, about the dispositions education should foster;
4. Further factual premises about such things as the psychology of learning and methods of teaching; and 5.
Further conclusions about such things as the methods that education should use."[8]

Examples of the purpose of schools include:[9] develop reasoning about perennial questions, master the
methods of scientific inquiry, cultivate the intellect, create change agents, develop spirituality, and model a
democratic society

Common educational philosophies include: educational perennialism, educational progressivism, educational

essentialism, critical pedagogy, Montessori education, Waldorf education, and democratic education.

Curriculum theory
Normative theories of curriculum aim to "describe, or set norms, for conditions surrounding many of the
concepts and constructs" that define curriculum.[10] These normative propositions are different than the ones
above in that normative curriculum theory is not necessarily untestable.[11] A central question asked by
normative curriculum theory is: given a particular educational philosophy, what is worth knowing and why?
Some examples are: a deep understanding of the Great Books, direct experiences driven by student interest, a
superficial understanding of a wide range knowledge (e.g., Core knowledge), social and community problems
and issues, knowledge and understanding specific to cultures and their achievements (e.g., African-Centered
Education)

Descriptive Theories of Education

Descriptive theories of education provide descriptions or explanations of the processes of education.

Curriculum theory
Descriptive theories of curriculum explain how curricula "benefit or harm all publics it touches". [12][13] One
descriptive concept from curriculum theory is that of the hidden curriculum, which is “some of the outcomes
or by-products of schools or of non-school settings, particularly those states which are learned but not openly
intended.”[14]

Instructional theory
Instructional theories focus on the methods of instruction for teaching curricula. Theories include the methods
of: autonomous learning, coyote teaching, inquiry-based instruction, lecture, maturationism, socratic
method, outcome-based education, taking children seriously, transformative learning

Philosophical Anthropology
Philosophical anthropology is the philosophical study of human nature. In terms of learning, examples of
descriptive theories of the learner are: a mind, soul, and spirit capable of emulating the Absolute Mind
(Idealism); an orderly, sensing, and rational being capable of understanding the world of things (Realism), a
rational being with a soul modeled after God and who comes to know God through reason and revelation
(Neo-Thomism), an evolving and active being capable of interacting with the environment (Pragmatism), a
fundamentally free and individual being who is capable of being authentic through the making of and taking
responsibility for choices (Existentialism).[15] Philosophical concepts for the process of education
include Bildung and paideia.

Educational Psychology
Educational psychology is an empirical science that provides descriptive theories of how people learn.
Examples of theories of education in psychology are: constructivism, behaviorism, cognitivism,
and motivational theory

Sociology of Education
The sociology of education is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences
affect education and its outcomes. It is most concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial
societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education.[16] Examples of theories
of education from sociology include: functionalism, conflict theory, social efficiency, andsocial mobility.

Educational anthropology
Educational anthropology is a sub-field of anthropology and is widely associated with the pioneering work
of George Spindler. As the name would suggest, the focus of educational anthropology is obviously on
education, although an anthropological approach to education tends to focus on the cultural aspects of
education, including informal as well as formal education. As education involves understandings of who we
are, it is not surprising that the single most recognized dictum of educational anthropology is that the field is
centrally concerned with cultural transmission.[17]. Cultural transmission involves the transfer of a sense of
identity between generations, sometimes known as enculturation[18] and also transfer of identity between
cultures, sometimes known asacculturation.[19] Accordingly thus it is also not surprising that educational
anthropology has become increasingly focussed on ethnic identity and ethnic change.[20][21].
Educational Perennialism

Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that one deems to be of everlasting pertinence to all
people everywhere. They believe that the most important topics develop a person. Since details of fact change
constantly, these cannot be the most important. Therefore, one should teach principles, not facts. Since people
are human, one should teach first about humans, not machines or techniques. Since people are people first,
and workers second if at all, one should teach liberal topics first, not vocational topics.
A particular strategy with modern perennialists is to teach scientific reasoning, not facts. They may illustrate
the reasoning with original accounts of famous experiments. This gives the students a human side to the
science, and shows the reasoning in action. Most importantly, it shows the uncertainty and false steps of real
science.

Although perennialism may appear similar to essentialism, perennialism focuses first on personal
development, while essentialism focuses first on essential skills. Essentialist curricula thus tend to be much
more vocational and fact-based, and far less liberal and principle-based. Both philosophies are typically
considered to be teacher-centered, as opposed to student-centered philosophies of education such
as progressivism. However, since the teachers associated with perennialism are in a sense the authors of the
Western masterpieces themselves, these teachers may be open to student criticism through the
associated Socratic method, which, if carried out as true dialogue, is a balance between students, including the
teacher promoting the discussion.

Secular perennialism

The word perennial in secular perennialism suggests something that lasts an indefinitely long time, recurs
again and again, or is self-renewing. As promoted primarily by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, a
universal curriculum based upon the common and essential nature of all human beings is recommended. This
form of perennialism comprises the humanist and scientific traditions. Hutchins and Adler implemented these
ideas with great success at the University of Chicago, where they still strongly influence the curriculum in the
form of the undergraduate Common Core. Other notable figures in the movement include Stringfellow
Barr and Scott Buchanan (who together initiated the Great Books program at St. John's College in Annapolis,
Maryland), Mark Van Doren, Alexander Meiklejohn, and Sir Richard Livingstone, an English classicist with
an American following.

Secular perennialists espouse the idea that education should focus on the historical development of a
continually developing common western base of human knowledge and art, the timeless value of classic
thought on central human issues by landmark thinkers, and revolutionary ideas critical to historical
western paradigm shifts or changes in world view. A program of studies which is highly general,
nonspecialized, and nonvocational is advocated.[1] They firmly believe that exposure of all citizens to the
development of thought by those most responsible for the evolution of the Western tradition is integral to the
survival of the freedoms, human rights and responsibilities inherent to a true Democracy.

Adler states:

...our political democracy depends upon the reconstitution of our schools. Our schools are not turning out
young people prepared for the high office and the duties of citizenship in a democratic republic. Our political
institutions cannot thrive, they may not even survive, if we do not produce a greater number of thinking
citizens, from whom some statesmen of the type we had in the 18th century might eventually emerge. We are,
indeed, a nation at risk, and nothing but radical reform of our schools can save us from impending disaster...
Whatever the price... the price we will pay for not doing it will be much greater.[2]

Hutchins writes in the same vein:

The business of saying... that people are not capable of achieving a good education is too strongly reminiscent
of the opposition of every extension of democracy. This opposition has always rested on the allegation that
the people were incapable of exercising the power they demanded. Always the historic statement has been
verified: you cannot expect the slave to show the virtues of the free man unless you first set him free. When
the slave has been set free, he has, in the passage of time, become indistinguishable from those who have
always been free... There appears to be an innate human tendency to underestimate the capacity of those who
do not belong to "our" group. Those who do not share our background cannot have our ability. Foreigners,
people who are in a different economic status, and the young seem invariably to be regarded as intellectually
backward...[3]

As with the essentialists, perennialists are educationally conservative in the requirement of a curriculum
focused upon fundamental subject areas, but stress that the overall aim should be exposure to history's finest
thinkers as models for discovery. The student should be taught such basic subjects as English, languages,
history, mathematics, natural science, philosophy, and fine arts.[4] Adler states: "The three R's, which always
signified the formal disciplines, are the essence of liberal or general education."[5]

Secular perennialists agree with progressivists that memorization of vast amounts of factual information and a
focus on second-hand information in textbooks and lectures does not develop rational thought. They advocate
learning through the development of meaningful conceptual thinking and judgement by means of a directed
reading list of the profound, aesthetic, and meaningful great books of theWestern canon. These books, secular
perennialists argue, are written by the world's finest thinkers, and cumulatively comprise the "Great
Conversation" of mankind with regard to the central human questions. Their basic argument for the use of
original works (abridged translations being acceptable as well) is that these are the products of "genius".
Hutchins remarks:

Great books are great teachers; they are showing us every day what ordinary people are capable of. These
books come out of ignorant, inquiring humanity. They are usually the first announcements for success in
learning. Most of them were written for, and addressed to, ordinary people."[3]

It is important to note that the Great Conversation is not static, which is the impression that one might obtain
from some descriptions of perennialism, a confusion with religious perennialism, or even the term
perennialism itself. The Great Conversation and the set of related great books changes as the representative
thought of man changes or progresses, and is therefore representative of an evolution of thought, but is not
based upon the whim or fancy of the latest cultural fads. Hutchins makes this point very clear:

In the course of history... new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once
thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men
can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what
it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to
the Great Conversation. ...the West needs to recapture and reemphasize and bring to bear upon its present
problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers and in the discussion that they have carried
on.[3]

Perennialism was a solution proposed in response to what was considered by many to be a failing educational
system. Again Hutchins writes:

The products of American high schools are illiterate; and a degree from a famous college or university is no
guarantee that the graduate is in any better case. One of the most remarkable features of American society is
that the difference between the "uneducated" and the "educated" is so slight.[3]

In this regard John Dewey and Hutchins were in agreement. Hutchins's book The Higher Learning in
America deplored the "plight of higher learning" that had turned away from cultivation of the intellect and
toward anti-intellectual practicality due in part, to a lust for money. In a highly negative review of the book,
Dewey wrote a series of articles in The Social Frontier which began by applauding Hutchins' attack on "the
aimlessness of our present educational scheme.[6]

Perennialists believe that reading is to be supplemented with mutual investigations (between the teacher and
the student) and minimally-directed discussions through the Socratic method in order to develop a historically
oriented understanding of concepts. They argue that accurate, independent reasoning distinguishes the
developed or educated mind and they thus stress the development of this faculty. A skilled teacher would keep
discussions on topic and correct errors in reasoning, but it would be the class, not the teacher, who would
reach the conclusions. While not directing or leading the class to a conclusion, the teacher may work to
accurately formulate problems within the scope of the texts being studied.

While the standard argument for utilizing a modern text supports distillation of information into a form
relevant to modern society, perennialists argue that many of the historical debates and the development of
ideas presented by the great books are relevant to any society, at any time, and thus that the suitability of the
great books for instructional use is unaffected by their age.

Perennialists freely acknowledge that any particular selection of great books will disagree on many topics;
however, they see this as an advantage, rather than a detriment. They believe that the student must learn to
recognize such disagreements, which often reflect current debates. The student becomes responsible for
 thinking about the disagreements and reaching a reasoned, defensible conclusion. This is a major goal of the
Socratic discussions. They do not advocate teaching a settled scholarly interpretation of the books, which
would cheat the student of the opportunity to learn rational criticism and to know his own mind.

Religious perennialism

Perennialism was originally religious in nature, developed first by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century
in his work De Magistro(The Teacher).

In the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman presented a detailed defense of educational perennialism
in The Idea of a University. Discourse 5 of that work, "Knowledge Its Own End", is still relevant as a clear
statement of a Christian educational perennialism.
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and
the world,[1] although the term is not easily defined.[2] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic
questions in the broadest possible terms:

1. "What is there?"
2. "What is it like?"[3]
A person who studies metaphysics is called a metaphysicist[4] or a metaphysician.[5] The metaphysician
attempts to clarify the fundamental notions by which people understand the world, e.g.,existence, objects and
their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. A central branch of metaphysics is ontology,
the investigation into the basic categories of being and how they relate to each other. Another central branch
of metaphysics is cosmology, the study of the totality of all phenomena within the universe.

Prior to the modern history of science, scientific questions were addressed as a part of metaphysics known
as natural philosophy. The term science itself meant "knowledge" of, originating fromepistemology.
The scientific method, however, transformed natural philosophy into an empirical activity deriving
from experiment unlike the rest of philosophy. By the end of the 18th century, it had begun to be called
"science" to distinguish it from philosophy. Thereafter, metaphysics denoted philosophical enquiry of a non-
empirical character into the nature of existence.[6]

Etymology

The word "metaphysics" derives from the Greek words μετά (metá) ("beyond", "upon" or "after") and φυσικά
(physiká) ("physics").[7] It was first used as the title for several of Aristotle's works, because they were usually
anthologized after the works on physics in complete editions. The prefix meta- ("beyond") indicates that these
works come "after" the chapters on physics. However, Aristotle himself did not call the subject of these books
"Metaphysics": he referred to it as "first philosophy." The editor of Aristotle's works,Andronicus of Rhodes, is
thought to have placed the books on first philosophy right after another work, Physics, and called them τὰ
μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ βιβλία (ta meta ta physika biblia) or "the books that come after the [books on] physics". This
was misread by Latinscholiasts, who thought it meant "the science of what is beyond the physical".

However, once the name was given, the commentators sought to find intrinsic reasons for its appropriateness.
For instance, it was understood to mean "the science of the world beyond nature (phusis in Greek)," that is,
the science of the immaterial. Again, it was understood to refer to the chronological or pedagogical order
among our philosophical studies, so that the "metaphysical sciences would mean, those that we study after
having mastered the sciences that deal with the physical world" (St. Thomas Aquinas, "In Lib, Boeth. de
Trin.", V, 1).

There is a widespread use of the term in current popular literature, which replicates this error, i.e. that
metaphysical means spiritual non-physical: thus, "metaphysical healing" means healing by means of remedies
that are not physical.[8]

Origins and nature of metaphysics

Although the word "metaphysics" goes back to Aristotelean philosophy, Aristotle himself credited earlier
philosophers with dealing with metaphysical questions. The first known philosopher, according to Aristotle,
is Thales of Miletus, who taught that all things derive from a single first cause or Arche.

Scientific questions in ancient Greece were addressed to metaphysicians, but by the 18th century, the
skeptics' How do you know? led to a new branch of philosophy called epistemology (how we know) to fill-out
the metaphysics (what we know) and this led to science (Latin to know) and to the scientific method.
Skepticism evolved epistemology out of metaphysics. Thereafter, metaphysics denoted philosophical inquiry
of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.[6]

Metaphysics as a discipline was a central part of academic inquiry and scholarly education even before the
age of Aristotle, who considered it "the Queen of Sciences." Its issues were considered[by whom?] no less
important than the other main formal subjects ofphysical science, medicine, mathematics, poetics and music.
Since the beginning of modern philosophy during the seventeenth century, problems that were not originally
considered within the bounds of metaphysics have been added to its purview, while other problems
considered metaphysical for centuries are now typically subjects of their own separate regions in philosophy,
such as philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of language,
and philosophy of science.

In some cases, subjects of metaphysical scholarship have been found to be entirely physical and natural, thus
making them part of science proper (cf. the theory of Relativity).

Aristotle's branching
Aristotle's Metaphysics was divided into three parts, which are now regarded as the proper branches of
traditional Western metaphysics:

Ontology
The study of being and existence; includes the definition and classification of entities, physical or mental, the
nature of their properties, and the nature of change.
Natural Theology
The study of a God or Gods; involves many topics, including among others the nature of religion and the
world, existence of the divine, questions about Creation, and the numerous religious or spiritual issues that
concern humankind in general.
Universal science
The study of first principles, such as the law of non contradiction, which Aristotle believed were the
foundation of all other inquiries.
Universal science or first philosophy treats of "being qua being"—that is, what is basic to all science before
one adds the particular details of any one science. Essentially "being qua being" may be translated as "being
insofar as being goes" or as "being in terms of being." This includes topics such as causality, substance,
species and elements, as well as the notions of relation, interaction, and finitude.
Central questions

Most positions that can be taken with regards to any of the following questions are endorsed by one or another
notable philosopher. It is often difficult to frame the questions in a non-controversial manner.

Being, existence and reality

The nature of Being is a perennial topic in metaphysics. For instance, Parmenides taught that reality was a
single unchanging Being. The 20th century philosopher Heidegger thought previous philosophers have lost
sight of the question of Being (qua Being) in favour of the questions of beings (existing things), so that a
return to the Parmenidean approach was needed. An ontological catalogue is an attempt to list the
fundamental constituents of reality. The question of whether or not existence is a predicate has been discussed
since the Early Modern period, not least in relation to the ontological argument for the existence of God.
Existence, that something is, has been contrasted with essence, the question of what something is. Reflections
on the nature of the connection and distinction between existence and essence dates back
to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and it found one of its later most influential interpretations in the ontology of the
eleventh century metaphysician Avicenna (Ibn Sina).[9] Since existence without essence seems blank, it is
associated with nothingness by philosophers such as Hegel.

Empirical and conceptual objects

Objects and their properties
The world seems to contain many individual things, both physical, like apples, and abstract such as love and
the number 3; the former objects are called particulars. Particulars are said to have attributes, e.g. size, shape,
color, location and two particulars may have some such attributes in common. Such attributes, are also
termed Universals or Properties; the nature of these, and whether they have any real existence and if so of
what kind, is a long-standing issue, realism and nominalism representing opposing views.

Metaphysicians concerned with questions about universals or particulars are interested in the nature
of objects and their properties, and the relationship between the two. Some, e.g. Plato, argue that properties
are abstract objects, existing outside of space and time, to which particular objects bear special relations.
David Armstrong holds that universals exist in time and space but only at their instantiation and their
discovery is a function of science. Others maintain that particulars are a bundle or collection of properties
(specifically, a bundle of properties they have).

Abstract objects and mathematics

Some philosophers endorse views according to which there are abstract objects such as numbers, or
Universals. (Universals are properties that can be instantiated by multiple objects, such as redness or
squareness.) Abstract objects are generally regarded as being outside of space and time, and/or as being
causally inert. Mathematical objects and fictional entities and worlds are often given as examples of abstract
objects. The view that there really are no abstract objects is called nominalism. Realism about such objects is
exemplified by Platonism. Other positions include moderate realism, as espoused by Aristotle, and
conceptualism.
The philosophy of mathematics overlaps with metaphysics because some positions are realistic in the sense
that they hold that mathematical objects really exist, whether transcendentally, physically, or mentally.
 Platonic realism holds that mathematical entities are a transcendent realm of non-physical objects. The
simplest form of mathematical empiricism claims that mathematical objects are just ordinary physical objects,
i.e. that squares and the like physically exist. Plato rejected this view, among other reasons, because
geometrical figures in mathematics have a perfection that no physical instantiation can capture. Modern
mathematicians have developed many strange and complex mathematical structures with no counterparts in
observable reality, further undermining this view. The third main form of realism holds that mathematical
entities exist in the mind. However, given a materialistic conception of the mind, it does not have the capacity
to literally contain the many infinities of objects in mathematics. Intuitionism, inspired by Kant, sticks with
the idea that "there are no non-experienced mathematical truths". This involves rejecting as intuitionistically
unacceptable anything that cannot be held in the mind or explicitly constructed. Intuitionists reject the law of
the excluded middle and are suspicious of infinity, particularly of transfinite numbers.

Other positions such as formalism and fictionalism that do not attribute any existence to mathematical entities
are anti-realist.

Cosmology and cosmogony

Metaphysical Cosmology is the branch of metaphysics that deals with the world as the totality of
all phenomena in space and time. Historically, it has had quite a broad scope, and in many cases was founded
in religion. The ancient Greeks did not draw a distinction between this use and their model for the cosmos.
However, in modern times it addresses questions about the Universe which are beyond the scope of the
physical sciences. It is distinguished from religious cosmology in that it approaches these questions using
philosophical methods (e.g. dialectics). Cosmogony deals specifically with the origin of the universe.

Modern metaphysical cosmology and cosmogony try to address questions such as:

 What is the origin of the Universe? What is its first cause? Is its existence necessary?
(see monism, pantheism, emanationism andcreationism)
 What are the ultimate material components of the Universe?
(see mechanism, dynamism, hylomorphism, atomism)
 What is the ultimate reason for the existence of the Universe? Does the cosmos have a purpose?
(see teleology)
Determinism and free will
Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition, decision and
action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. It holds that
no random, spontaneous, stochastic, mysterious, or miraculous events occur. The principal consequence of the
deterministic claim is that it poses a challenge to the existence of free will.

The problem of free will is the problem of whether rational agents exercise control over their own actions and
decisions. Addressing this problem requires understanding the relation between freedom and causation, and
determining whether the laws of nature are causally deterministic. Some philosophers, known
as Incompatibilists, view determinism and free will as mutually exclusive. If they believe in determinism, they
will therefore believe free will to be an illusion, a position known as Hard Determinism. Proponents range
from Baruch Spinoza to Ted Honderich.

Others, labeled Compatibilists (or "Soft Determinists"), believe that the two ideas can be coherently
reconciled. Adherents of this view include Thomas Hobbes and many modern philosophers.
Incompatibilists who accept free will but reject determinism are called Libertarians, a term not to be confused
with the political sense.Robert Kane is a modern defender of this theory.

Identity and change

The Greeks took some extreme positions on the nature of change: Parmenides denied that change occurs at
all, while Heraclitus thought change was ubiquitous: "[Y]ou cannot step into the same river twice".

Identity, sometimes called Numerical Identity, is the relation that a "thing" bears to itself, and which no
"thing" bears to anything other than itself (cf. sameness). According to Leibniz, if some object x is identical to
some object y, then any property that x has, y will have as well. However, it seems, too, that objects can
change over time. If one were to look at a tree one day, and the tree later lost a leaf, it would seem that one
could still be looking at that same tree. Two rival theories to account for the relationship between change and
identity are Perdurantism, which treats the tree as a series of tree-stages, and Endurantism, which maintains
that the tree—the same tree—is present at every stage in its history.

Mind and matter

The nature of matter was a problem in its own right in early philosophy. Aristotle himself introduced the idea
of matter in general to the Western world, adapting the term hyle, which originally meant "lumber." Early
debates centered on identifying a single underlying principle. Water was claimed by Thales, air
by Anaximenes, Apeiron (the Boundless) by Anaximander, fire by Heraclitus. Democritus, in conjunction
with his mentor, Leucippus, conceived of an atomic theory many centuries before it was accepted by modern
science. It is worth noting, however, that the grounds necessary to ensure validity to the proposed theory's
veridical nature were not scientific, but just as philosophical as those traditions espoused by Thales and
Anaximander.

The nature of the mind and its relation to the body has been seen as more of a problem as science has
progressed in its mechanistic understanding of the brain and body. Proposed solutions often have
ramifications about the nature of mind as a whole. René Descartesproposed substance dualism, a theory in
which mind and body are essentially different, with the mind having some of the attributes traditionally
assigned to the soul, in the seventeenth century. This creates a conceptual puzzle about how the two interact
(which has received some strange answers, such as occasionalism). Evidence of a close relationship between
brain and mind, such as thePhineas Gage case, have made this form of dualism increasingly unpopular.

Another proposal discussing the mind-body problem is idealism, in which the material is sweepingly
eliminated in favor of the mental. Idealists, such as George Berkeley, claim that material objects do not exist
unless perceived and only as perceptions. The "German idealists" such
as Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer took Kant as their starting-point, although it is debatable how much of an
idealist Kant himself was. Idealism is also a common theme in Eastern philosophy. Related ideas
are panpsychism and panexperientialism, which say everything has a mind rather than everything exists in a
mind. Alfred North Whitehead was a twentieth-century exponent of this approach.

Idealism is a monistic theory which holds that there is a single universal substance or principle. Neutral
monism, associated in different forms with Baruch Spinoza and Bertrand Russell, seeks to be less extreme
than idealism, and to avoid the problems of substance dualism. It claims that existence consists of a single
substance that in itself is neither mental nor physical, but is capable of mental and physical aspects or
attributes – thus it implies a dual-aspect theory.
For the last one hundred years, the dominant metaphysics has without a doubt been materialistic monism.
Type identity theory, tokenidentity theory, functionalism, reductive physicalism, nonreductive
physicalism, eliminative materialism, anomalous monism, property
dualism, epiphenomenalism and emergence are just some of the candidates for a scientifically informed
account of the mind. (It should be noted that while many of these positions are dualisms, none of them
are substance dualism.)

Prominent recent philosophers of mind include David Armstrong, Ned Block, David
Chalmers, Patricia and Paul Churchland, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, Jerry
Fodor, David Lewis, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, John Smart,Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Fred
Alan Wolf.

Necessity and possibility

Metaphysicians investigate questions about the ways the world could have been. David Lewis, in "On the
Plurality of Worlds," endorsed a view called Concrete Modal realism, according to which facts about how
things could have been are made true by other concrete worlds, just like ours, in which things are different.
Other philosophers, such as Gottfried Leibniz, have dealt with the idea of possible worlds as well. The idea of
necessity is that any necessary fact is true across all possible worlds; that is, we could not imagine it to be
otherwise. A possible fact is true in some possible world, even if not in the actual world. For example, it is
possible that cats could have had two tails, or that any particular apple could have not existed. By contrast,
certain propositions seem necessarily true, such as analytic propositions, e.g. "All bachelors are unmarried."
The particular example of analytic truth being necessary is not universally held among philosophers. A less
controversial view might be that self-identity is necessary, as it seems fundamentally incoherent to claim that
for any x, it is not identical to itself; this is known as the law of identity, a putative "first principle". Aristotle
describes the principle of non-contradiction, "It is impossible that the same quality should both belong and
not belong to the same thing . . . This is the most certain of all principles . . . Wherefore they who demonstrate
refer to this as an ultimate opinion. For it is by nature the source of all the other axioms."

Religion and spirituality

Theology is the study of a god or gods and the nature of the divine. Whether there is a god (monotheism),
many gods (polytheism) or no gods (atheism), or whether it is unknown or unknowable whether any gods
exist (agnosticism), and whether the Divine intervenes directly in the world (theism), or its sole function is to
be the first cause of the universe (deism); these and whether a God or gods and the World are different (as
in panentheism and dualism), or are identical (as in pantheism), are some of the primary metaphysical
questions concerning philosophy of religion.

Within the standard Western philosophical tradition, theology reached its peak under the medieval school of
thought known as scholasticism, which focused primarily on the metaphysical aspects of Christianity. The
work of the scholastics is still an integral part of modern philosophy,[citation needed] with key figures such
as Thomas Aquinas still playing an important role in the philosophy of religion.[10]

Space and time

In Book XI of the Confessions, Saint Augustine of Hippo asked the fundamental question about the nature of
time. A traditional realistposition in ontology is that time and space have existence apart from the human
mind. Idealists, including Kant, claim that space and time are mental constructs used to organize perceptions,
or are otherwise surreal.
 Suppose that one is sitting at a table, with an apple in front of him or her; the apple exists in space and in time,
but what does this statement indicate? Could it be said, for example, that space is like an invisible three-
dimensional grid in which the apple is positioned? Suppose the apple, and all physical objects in the universe,
were removed from existence entirely. Would space as an "invisible grid" still exist? René
Descartes and Leibniz believed it would not, arguing that without physical objects, "space" would be
meaningless because space is the framework upon which we understand how physical objects are related to
each other. Newton, on the other hand, argued for an absolute "container" space. The pendulum swung back
to relational space with Einstein and Ernst Mach.

While the absolute/relative debate, and the realism debate are equally applicable to time and space, time
presents some special problems of its own. The flow of time has been denied in ancient times
by Parmenides and more recently by J. M. E. McTaggart in his paper The Unreality of Time.

The direction of time, also known as "time's arrow", is also a puzzle, although physics is now driving the
debate rather than philosophy. It appears that fundamental laws are time-reversible and the arrow of time must
be an "emergent" phenomenon, perhaps explained by a statistical understanding of thermodynamic entropy.

Common-sense tells us that objects persist across time, that there is some sense in which you are the same
person you were yesterday, in which the oak is the same as the acorn, in which you perhaps even can step into
the same river twice. Philosophers have developed two rival theories for how this happens, called
"endurantism" and "perdurantism". Broadly speaking, endurantists hold that a whole object exists at each
moment of its history, and the same object exists at each moment. Perdurantists believe that objects are four-
dimensional entities made up of a series of temporal parts like the frames of a movie.

Styles and methods of metaphysics

 Rational versus empirical. Rationalism is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not
sensory but intellectual and deductive" (Bourke 263). Rationalist metaphysicians aim to deduce the nature of
reality by armchair, a priori reasoning.Empiricism holds that the senses are the primary source of knowledge
about the world.
 Analytical versus systemic. The "system building" style of metaphysics attempts to answer all the important
questions in a comprehensive and coherent way, providing a theory of everything or complete picture of the
world. The contrasting approach is to deal with problems piecemeal.
 Dogmatic versus critical. Under the scholastic approach of the Middle Ages, a number of themes and ideas
were not open to be challenged. Kant and others thought this "dogmatism" should be replaced by
a critical approach.
 Individual versus collective. Scholasticism and Analytical philosophy are examples of collaborative
approaches to philosophy. Many other philosophers expounded individual visions.
 Parsimonious versus Adequate. Should a metaphysical system posit as little as possible, or as much as
needed?
 Descriptive versus revisionary. Peter Strawson makes the distinction between descriptive metaphysics,
which sets out to investigate our deepest assumptions, and revisionary metaphysics, which sets out to improve
or rectify them.[11]
History and schools of metaphysics

Pre-Socratic metaphysics in Greece

 The first known philosopher, according to Aristotle, is Thales of Miletus. Rejecting mythological and divine
explanations, he sought for a single first cause or Arche (origin or beginning) under which all phenomena
could be explained, and concluded that this first cause was in fact moisture or water. Thales also taught that
the world is harmonious, has a harmonious structure, and thus is intelligible to rational understanding. Other
Miletians, such as Anaximander and Anaximenes, also had a monistic conception of the first cause.

Another school was the Eleatics, Italy. The group was founded in the early fifth century BCE by Parmenides,
and included Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos. Methodologically, the Eleatics were broadly rationalist,
rejecting the epistemological validity of sense experience, and instead took logical standards of clarity and
necessity to be the criteria of truth. Parmenides' chief doctrine was that reality is a single unchanging and
universal Being. Zeno used reductio ad absurdum, to demonstrate the illusory nature of change and time in
his paradoxes.

Heraclitus of Ephesus, in contrast, made change central, teaching that "all things flow". His philosophy,
expressed in brief aphorisms, is quite cryptic. For instance, he also taught the unity of opposites.

Democritus and his teacher Leucippus, are known for formulating an atomic theory for the cosmos.[12] They
are considered forerunners of the scientific method.

Socrates and Plato

Socrates is known for his dialectic or questioning approach to philosophy rather than a positive metaphysical
doctrine. His pupil, Plato is famous for his theory of forms (which he confusingly places in the mouth of
Socrates in the dialogues he wrote to expound it).Platonic realism (also considered a form of idealism[13]) is
considered to be a solution to the problem of universals; i.e, what particular objects have in common is that
they share a specific Form which is universal to all others of their respective kind.

The theory has a number of other aspects:

 Epistemological: knowledge of the Forms is more certain than mere sensory data.
 Ethical: The Form of the Good sets an objective standard for morality.
 Time and Change: The world of the Forms is eternal and unchanging. Time and change belong only to the
lower sensory world. "Time is a moving image of Eternity".
 Abstract objects and mathematics: Numbers, geometrical figures, etc., exist mind-independently in the World
of Forms.
Platonism developed into Neoplatonism, a philosophy with a monotheistic and mystical flavour that survived
well into the early Christian era.

Aristotle
Plato's pupil Aristotle wrote widely on almost every subject, including metaphysics. His solution to the
problem of universals contrasts with Plato's. Whereas Platonic Forms exist in a separate realm, and can exist
uninstantiated in visible things, Aristotelean essences "indwell" in particulars.

Potentiality and Actuality[14] are principles of a dichotomy which Aristotle used throughout his philosophical
works to analyze motion, casuality and other issues.

The Aristotelean theory of change and causality stretches to four causes: the material, formal, efficient and
final. The efficient cause corresponds to what is now known as a cause simpliciter. Final causes are
 explicitly teleological, a concept now regarded as controversial in science. The Matter/Form dichotomy was
to become highly influential in later philosophy as the substance/essence distinction.

Scholasticism and the Middle Ages

Between about 1100 and 1500, philosophy as a discipline took place as part of the Catholic church's teaching
system, known as scholasticism. Scholastic philosophy took place within an established framework blending
Christian theology with Aristotelean teachings. Although fundamental orthodoxies could not be challenged,
there were nonetheless deep metaphysical disagreements, particularly over the problem of universals, which
engaged Duns Scotus and Pierre Abelard. William of Ockham is remembered for his principle of ontological
parsimony.

Continental rationalism
In the early modern period (17th and 18th centuries), the system-building scope of philosophy is often linked
to the rationalist method of philosophy, that is the technique of deducing the nature of the world by pure
reason. The scholastic concepts of substance and accident were employed.

 Leibniz proposed in his Monadology a plurality of non-interacting substances.

 Descartes is famous for his Dualism of material and mental substances.
 Spinoza believed reality was a single substance of God-or-nature.
British empiricism
British empiricism marked something of a reaction to rationalist and system-building philosophy,
or speculative metaphysics as it was pejoratively termed. The sceptic David Hume famously declared that
most metaphysics should be consigned to the flames (see below). Hume was notorious among his
contemporaries as one of the first philosophers to openly doubt religion, but is better known now for his
critique of causality. John Stuart Mill, Thomas Reid and John Locke were less sceptical, embracing a more
cautious style of metaphysics based on realism, common sense and science. Other philosophers,
notably George Berkely were led from empiricism to idealistic metaphysics.

Kant
Immanuel Kant attempted a grand synthesis and revision of the trends already mentioned: scholastic
philosophy, systematic metaphysics, and sceptical empiricism, not to forget the burgeoning science of his day.
Like the systems builders, he had an overarching framework in which all questions were to be addressed. Like
Hume, who famously woke him from his 'dogmatic slumbers', he was suspicious of metaphysical speculation,
and also places much emphasis on the limitations of the human mind.

Kant saw rationalist philosophers as aiming for a kind of metaphysical knowledge he defined as the synthetic
apriori — that is knowledge that does not come from the senses (it is a apriori) but is nonetheless about
reality (synthetic). Inasmuch as it is about reality, it is unlike abstract mathematical propositions (which he
terms analytical apriori), and being apriori it is distinct from empirical, scientific knowledge (which he terms
synthetic aposteriori). The only synthetic apriori knowledge we can have is of how our minds organise the
data of the senses; that organising framework is space and time, which for Kant have no mind-independent
existence, but nonetheless operate uniformly in all humans. Apriori knowledge of space and time is all that
remains of metaphysics as traditionally conceived. There is a reality beyond sensory data or phenomena,
which he calls the realm of noumena; however, we cannot know it as it is in itself, but only as it appears to us.
He allows himself to speculate that the origins of God, morality, and free will might exist in the noumenal
realm, but these possibilities have to be set against its basic unknowability for humans. Although he saw
himself as having disposed of metaphysics, in a sense, he has generally been regarded in retrospect, as having
a metaphysics of his own.

19th Century philosophy was overwhelmingly influenced by Kant and his

successors. Schopenhauer, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel all purveyed their own panoramic versions of German
Idealism, Kant's own caution about metaphysical speculation, and refutation of idealism, having fallen by the
wayside. The idealistic impulse continued into the early 20th century with British idealists such as F. H.
Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart.

Followers of Karl Marx took Hegel's dialectic view of history and re-fashioned it as materialism.

Early analytical philosophy and positivism

During the period when idealism was dominant in philosophy, science had been making great advances. The
arrival of a new generation of scientifically minded philosophers led to a sharp decline in the popularity of
idealism during the 1920s.

Analytical philosophy was spearheaded by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. Russell and William
James tried to compromise between idealism and materialism with the theory of neutral monism.

The early to mid 20th century philosophy also saw a trend to reject metaphysical questions as meaningless.
The driving force behind this tendency was the unabashedly materialist philosophy of Logical Positivism as
espoused by the Vienna Circle. See "The Value and Future of Metaphysics" below.

At around the same time, the American pragmatists were steering a middle course between materialism and
idealism. System-building metaphysics, with a fresh inspiration from science, was revived by A. N.
Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.

Continental philosophy
The forces that shaped analytical philosophy — the break with idealism, and the influence of science — were
much less significant outside the English speaking world, although there was a shared turn toward language.
Continental philosophy continued in a trajectory from post Kantianism.

The phenomenology of Husserl and others was intended as a collaborative project for the investigation of the
features and structure of consciousness common to all humans, in line with Kant's basing his synthetic apriori
on the uniform operation of consciousness. It was officially neutral with regards to ontology, but was
nonetheless to spawn a number of metaphysical systems. Brentano's concept ofintentionality would become
widely influential, including on analytical philosophy.

Heidegger, author of Being and Time, saw himself as re-focusing on Being-qua-being, introducing the novel
concept of Dasein in the process. Classing himself an existentialist, Sartre wrote an extensive study of "Being
and Nothingness.

The speculative realism movement marks a return to full blooded realism.

Later analytical philosophy

While early analytic philosophy tended to reject metaphysical theorizing, under the influence of logical
positivism, it was revived in the second half of the twentieth century. Philosophers such as David Kellogg
Lewis and David Armstrong developed elaborate theories on a range of topics such as universals, causation,
possibility and necessity and abstract objects. However, the focus of analytical philosophy is generally away
from the construction of all-encompassing systems and towards close analysis of individual ideas.

Among the developments that led to the revival of metaphysical theorizing were Quine's attack on
the analytic-synthetic distinction, which was generally taken to undermine Carnap's distinction between
existence questions internal to a framework and those external to it.[15]

The philosophy of fiction, the problem of empty names, and the debate over existence's status as a property
have all risen out of relative obscurity to become central concerns, while perennial issues such as free will,
possible worlds, and the philosophy of time have had new life breathed into them.[16][17]

The value and future of metaphysics

A number of individuals have suggested that metaphysics as a whole should be rejected.

David Hume argued with his empiricist principle that all knowledge involves either relations of ideas or
matters of fact:

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain
any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning
concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but
sophistry and illusion.
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
However, Hume's assertion may be self-defeating if it itself is not self-evident or empirically verifiable.[18]

Immanuel Kant prescribed a limited role to the subject and argued against knowledge progressing beyond the
world of our representations, except to knowledge that the noumena exist:

...though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think
them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be
appearance without anything that appears.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason pp. Bxxvi-xxvii
Proceeding from Kant's statement about antinomy, A.J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic using
the verifiability theory of meaningconcluded that metaphysical propositions were neither true nor false but
strictly meaningless, as were religious views. However, Karl Popper argued that metaphysical statements are
not meaningless statements, but rather not fallible, testable or provablestatements[19] i.e. neither empirical
observations nor logical arguments could falsify metaphysical statements to show them to be true or false.
Hence, a metaphysical statement usually implies an idea about the world or about the universe, which may be
reasonable but is ultimately not empirically testable.

Rudolf Carnap, in his book Philosophy and Logical Syntax, used the concept of verifiability to reject
metaphysics.

Metaphysicians cannot avoid making their statements nonverifiable, because if they made them verifiable, the
decision about the truth or falsehood of their doctrines would depend upon experience and therefore belong to
the region of empirical science. This consequence they wish to avoid, because they pretend to teach
knowledge which is of a higher level than that of empirical science. Thus they are compelled to cut all
connection between their statements and experience; and precisely by this procedure they deprive them of any
sense.
— Rudolf Carnap
John Locke, a founder of empiricism, expressed that most of the doctrine of innate ideas in the metaphysics,
such as Cartesian dualism and the Platonic realm were ridiculous and nonsensical.[20]