‘Philosophy – what is the use of it?’ Dutch philosophers about education in philosophy This article gives an overview of the ideas of twentieth-century Dutch philosophers on the use and function of education in philosophy, both in a university context and in secondary schools. In the first half of the twentieth century, there was a very strong emphasis on expanding the place of philosophy in other academic programmes, which was related to the neokantian conception of philosophy as the examination of (...) the fundamental assumptions and the interconnectedness of the sciences. After the Second World War, this view had a unique institutional effect, in the form of the establishment of a ‘centrale interfaculteit’ at all Dutch universities, where philosophy was to be practised in relation to other disciplines. This institutional experiment was brought to an end in the 1980s. Since then, there has been a tendency to regard philosophy as an academic discipline in its own right, and less as a place for creating meaningful connections between other disciplines. From the 1970s onwards, the focus of thinking about philosophy education in the Netherlands has shifted from the universities to the secondary schools. Whereas philosophy was practically non-existent as a secondary-school subject in 1970, nowadays it has a remarkably strong presence as an elective in Dutch upper secondary education. Simultaneously, the didactics of philosophy became a flourishing field in the Netherlands, exploring the way in which secondary-school pupils can learn the skill of philosophical thinking. (shrink)

Humoralism, the view that the human body is composed of a limited number of elementary fluids, is one of the most characteristic aspects of ancient medicine. The psychological dimension of humoral theory in the ancient world has thus far received a relatively small amount of scholarly attention. Medical psychology in the ancient world can only be correctly understood by relating it to psychological thought in other fields, such as ethics and rhetoric. The concept that ties these various domains together is (...) character (êthos), which involves a view of human beings focused on clearly distinguishable psychological types that can be recognized on the basis of external signs. Psychological ideas based on humoral theory remained influential well into the early modern period. Yet, in 17th-century medicine and philosophy, humoral physiology and psychology started to lose ground to other theoretical perspectives on the mind and its relation to the body. This decline of humoralist medical psychology can be related to a broader reorientation of psychological thought in which the traditional concept of character lost its central position. Instead of the focus on types and stable character traits, a perspective emerged that was primarily concerned with individuality and transient passions. (shrink)

An examination of how debates originating in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns informed a broader exploration of the relation between past and present in various realms of eighteenth-century thought.