Dimensione cognitiva e dimensione etica nel processo educativo: il confronto Dewey-Catalfamo tra fiducia empirica e speranza metafisica

Abstract

Pedagogy, in its dimension of philosophy of education, investigates the ethical-knowledge relationship using a retrospective gaze able to grasp its philosophical roots from the Presocratics to Plato, up to Aristotle, in a diachronic excursus that arrives at the twentieth century with the birth of the empirical-experimental sciences and the development of the scientific-technological paradigm also in the human sciences. But it is the comparison between the philosophical- pedagogical conception of Dewey's pragmatism and of the critical personalism of Catalfamo the core of the analysis of this contribution with particular reference to the criticism that Catalfamo moves to Dewey in his taking away from any metaphysical horizon in the philosophical field with the consequent division between pedagogy and eschatology. The exclusion of any metaphysical engagement clearly distances the Deweyan thought from other pedagogical perspectives such as pedagogical personalism of Christian inspiration which, from an actualizing and critical point of view, still reveals in the yearning for the Universal the ontologically human need of overstep the contingent and complex cultural horizon.