Kontekst filozoficzny dydaktyki przyrodoznawstwa w szkołach Komisji Edukacji Narodowej

Abstract

The humanistic school completed with a course of philosophy, treated as synonymous with real knowledge, is in the 18th century gradually replaced by an education that stresses the importance of teaching mathematics and natural science; the latter elements become either parts of the course of philosophy, or substitute it. The latter approach appeared in the schools of the Commission of National Education, for contrary to the practice dominant in the European school the didactic of philosophy was practically eliminated from university education. Now in the enlightenment European schooling modern Christian Aristotelianism, comprehended as a system, was replaced by philosophia recentiorum , a philosophy that from the 1750s onwards had eclectically assimilated modern philosophical and scientific (natural) culture. In this context natural science still functions within certain modest limits; despite the pressure of phenomenalism stimulated by modern empiricism it manages to retain some elements of its philosophical and religious approach. This traditional perspective is then manifested in the form of some elements of substantialism, and in relation to animate nature also in the form in which the category of the soul is preserved, the soul that is proper not only to man but also to animals. Therefore even if in the curriculum postulates of the Commission of National Education there were some manifestations of peculiar pre-positivism, the manuals used in this system of education sustained a more traditional and eclectic form natural philosophy, indeed in a manner typical of the then European schooling.