The "chirurgical logos" and education as hand-werk

Abstract

The present paper addresses the issue of formal knowledge and practical knowledge by assuming a longue durée perspective and deploying an interpretive key based upon philosophy of education and epistemology. In particular, in the wake of some insights of Stephen Toulmin, it is argued that the predominance of formal knowledge is the culmination of the Cartesian turn at the beginning of modernity, which eliminated the bodily-perceptual dimension of knowledge (and devalued, through the same move, the educational moment). In reaction to this outcome and in order to vindicate the epistemic value of practice, the recovery of the pragmatist emphasis upon the education of artisans as a model is proposed and it is read, through a Heideggerian lens, as the cultivation of the logos qua “work of the hand”.