The ethos of educational philosophy

Abstract

With this article, I would like to refer to ethics as ethos and, at the same time, as conduct of life. Considered as the “conduct of life,” ethics has its original representative in Socrates, whose influence has determined specially through Plato’s dialogues the history of Western philosophy. Considered as ethos, any philosophical education, or the performance of a true philosophy of education, has to do with the development of the personality from the first appearance of consciousness. What I propose here is a philosophical education, starting from a moral reading of The Apology of Socrates, which aspires to integrate the of each individual in particular into the general conduct of life. This constitutive unit already implies a relationship of equality in the terms, but not of identity. In that sense, both in the city and within the classroom, a philosophical education should be the result of a complete, integral, and inclusive but no totalitarian experience. Therefore, it is necessary to re-examine the conditions of possibility of the teaching of philosophy from the approach to the elaboration of a more or less systematic concept of education related to the experience of citizenship without which philosophy would not exist.