Plato's Socrates, Philosophy and Education e-bog

This book develops for the readers Plato's Socrates' non-formalized "e;philosophical practice"e; of learning-through-questioning in the company of others. In doing so, the writer confronts Plato's Socrates, in the words of John Dewey, as the "e;dramatic, restless, cooperatively inquiring philosopher"e; of the dialogues, whose view of education and learning is unique: (1) It is focused on actively pursuing a form of philosophical understanding irreducible to truth of a propositional nature, which defies "e;transfer"e; from practitioner to pupil; (2) It embraces the perennial "e;on-the-wayness"e; of education and learning in that to interrogate the virtues, or the "e;good life,"e; through the practice of the dialectic, is to continually renew the quest for a deeper understanding of things by returning to, reevaluating and modifying the questions originally posed regarding the "e;good life."e; Indeed Socratic philosophy is a life of questioning those aspects of existence that are most question-worthy; and (3) It accepts that learning is a process guided and structured by dialectic inquiry, and is already immanent within and possible only because of the unfolding of the process itself, i.e., learning is not a goal that somehow stands outside the dialectic as its end product, which indicates erroneously that the method or practice is disposable. For learning occurs only through continued, sustained communal dialogue.