In this essay Angelo Caranfa maintains that what education should be engaging in is a ceaseless effort of cultivating in the students attention to the things of the spirit--that is, the world of aesthetic apprehension as described by such figures as Plato and Simone Weil. Caranfa attempts to show that in Plato and in Weil, we receive a vision of…

The article attempts to clarify the appeal to the Benedictine ideal that Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) makes in "The Aims of Education and Other Essays" as a way to renew the life of the spirit in education. In particular, the essay will consider St. Benedict's three central themes of Whitehead's philosophy: freedom and discipline, the…

This essay attempts to set out the fundamental notions--attention, detachment, silence, solitude, prayer, and apprenticeship--of Weil's educational method, claiming that such a pedagogy expresses a vision of learning in which the moral, the aesthetic, and the spiritual life are harmoniously balanced. Simone Weil's approach to education is not only…

This article draws on the conclusion of the Commission on the Humanities in "The Humanities in American Life" that the aim of a liberal arts education is to foster critical reasoning through the use of language or discourse. This paper maintains that the "critical method" is in itself insufficient to achieve its purpose. Its failure is in its…

This essay addresses the education of intelligence or the word in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), and the instruction of the spirit in the art of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), so as to clarify human existence in its wholeness or totality. Jaspers and Matisse reject the split between the word and the spirit, and instruct that the way to…

In this article, the author explores the aesthetic harmony of how life should be lived through the unity of exchange between feeling and thinking, and in so doing attempts to show the importance of art or "aesthetics" as a category of philosophical instruction. His interest in this approach flows directly from his works in nineteenth- and…