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There are surely few writers who have had a more profound impact on European culture, and in the broadest range of fields, than St. Augustine, and this despite the fact that he was North African. Nonetheless, while Augustine is still called upon in debates on interfaith dialogue and in theological and philosophical disputes, one area of his large corpus has received scant attention—his philosophy of education. Although there are references throughout Augustine's writings to his philosophy of education, he devotes only a single text to its elaboration—De Magistro—On the Teacher. The fact that this work has been largely overlooked by scholars is disappointing, because the De Magistro, despite its use of theological language, retains a very modern and contemporary thematic with interesting insights for any contemporary theory of education. In this article we provide a primer in reading Augustine's De Magistro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relation between Aquinas’ metaphysical, epistemological and theological ideas and his theory of education as presented in the De Magistro and other writings. Aquinas’ theory of education is based on a theological metaphysics of human nature and an account of human rationality that is grounded in human nature. In the first section after the introduction we provide a synopsis of Aquinas’ metaphysical narrative, but in a contemporary key that draws upon the resources of Analytical Thomism. However, this theologically inspired metaphysics leads to a somewhat neglected epistemology that is crucial to his understanding of teaching and learning in the De Magistro – the notion of connatural knowledge that we explore in the second section. Our exposition of the Thomistic ontology of the human person together with the notion of connatural knowledge, provide the context for understanding the De Magistro in the third section. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Various proponents of Cultural Theory (CT) have claimed that CT's Impossibility Theorem, namely that there are precisely five viable ways of life, has been formally proved. In this paper, I (a) show that the Impossibility Theorem has not been formally proved and (b) present a refutation of the Impossibility Theorem. With regard to (a), the problem areas identified include a failure to take into account the analogical nature of their theory and also a failure to carefully consider the nature of the relationship between mathematical models and the empirical phenomena that they are supposed to model. With regard to (b), an empirically grounded description of a distinct, sixth viable way of life, here called the Philosophical way of life, is presented. Second, a general argument is presented that demonstrates the necessity of positing a sixth form of rationality and a sixth viable way of life in addition to the five rationalities and five ways of life recognized by CT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]