Feature image: Second-year students with Bishop Rozario Menezes SMM and the rector of the Good Shepherd Seminary, Banz, PNG.
By Charles Dufour
In January 2019 Charles Dufour began his Palms placement as Philosophy Lecturer at the Good Shepherd Seminary teaching first year philosophy students.
On World Philosophy Day 2020 Charles writes:
According to Aristotle (384-322 BCE), truth is “to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true”. In other words, truth is that which conforms to reality. Philosophy of education entails the epistemic judgment that values truths and the reality of the educational system in every institution. Papua New Guinea’s educational system exhibits specific criteria that evaluate, foster, and enhance a moral standard of life that is both localized and universalized. In this sense, the cultivation and promotion of philosophical terms and concepts are the fertile grounds in a pedagogical environment. Both teachers and pupils in the classrooms are agents for critical thinking vis-à-vis the realities of life and the truths that face the world. The question for each subject is then not limited to what is the importance of science, but more fundamentally the why of the study of science and its essence, the “whatness”?
Students and teachers are confronted with new realities and their statements are subject to the truths. The clarity of statements is vital to both teachers and students in order to understand a given argument. One should be able to systematically distinguish what are synthetic statements from analytic statements in arguments. While synthetic statement is ampliative, analytic statement is explicative. For instance, the curiosity to study metaphysics or the questions one asks to understand categories from Aristotle’s view in contrast to Immanuel Kant’s approach is a field of wonder. These are some of the significant aspects of the philosophy of language, and logic to comprehend the validity/invalidity and soundness/unsoundness of the learning process in life. cf. Kant in his book entitled The Critique of Pure Reason.
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