Philosophy, Reason, and Literacy

Abstract

Educational philosophers today, often from different vantage points, speak of rationality as fundamental to the literacy sought by means of education. Some place their emphasis on reason as displayed in the making of critical judgments; some, on reason as expressed in the conceptualizing or symbolic structuring of experience; still others, on reason as it plays a part in the constructing of social realities. There are those who direct particular attention to the regulative role of reason: They concern themselves with rule-governed or principled thought and action on the assumption that rules and principles either define or are created by human rationality. There are those, too, who stress the centrality of critical reflection in lived situations. For them, this type of reflection constitutes the most productive mode of rational action; they view it as a way of transforming the lived world. The philosophic interest in reason has long roots, reaching back into the classical past. In the western world, philosophy preceded by 2,000 years the growth of what we now conceive of as the natural and social sciences. Indeed, philosophy was long thought to be the queen of the sciences, especially in the years when science was identified with mathematical and logical thought. The paradigm was found in a reasoning process that involved no interventions in the phenomenal world. reason was to take the stance of the contemplative spectator and see with the eyes of the mind. For Plato, the man who achieved the status of philosopher-king had the capacity to know the formal features of things and to trace the connections between the forms or that constituted true reality (The Republic, n.d., pp. 277-290). gain such absolute and universal knowledge, the philosopher had to detach himself from his temporal being as a participant in the transient, imperfect material world. So detached, his rational faculty would disclose the objective patternings, the meanings of all appearances. This concern for disclosure can be found in Aristotle as well, for all his abandonment of dualism and detachment. For him, human rationality entailed the ability to grasp the design or the telos of reality. But reason now was given both a theoretical and a deliberative dimension. It could not only make possible knowledge of the truth for its own sake; it could enable rational beings to make useful or beautiful things and to guide their conduct according to an idea of the good. Granting the importance of theoretical knowledge, Aristotle said, To know what excellence is, is not enough; we must endeavor to acquire it and to act accordingly (Nichomachean Ethics, Book 10, chap. 9, 1179b). Here too, however, and throughout antiquity, the mind, in the right use of reason, was oriented not to the understanding of experience but to knowing the essential nature of things. As late as the 16th century, Francis Bacon, in his preoccupation with the idols or the false ideas that blinded human beings to the truth (Novum Organum, pp. 38-68), retained the notion that reason unassisted could come to know the truth if reason could be freed from error. Bacon tried to develop an inductive logic that would replace Aristotle's deductive logic; but he expected to use induction to