The Enigmatic Figure of Socrates in Heidegger: A Pure Vision of Education as Attuned Event of Learning

This paper explores Heidegger’s analysis of Plato’s Socrates and discuss how the metaphysics that can be drawn from Plato’s philosophy influences our conception and practice of education. Uniquely, it offers a reading of pure thinking, truth, and dialectic method in relation to “Heidegger’s Socrates,” which includes insights on how this view might be clarified and enhanced by turning to interpretations of Plato’s Socrates emerging from the recent phenomenological tradition in Continental tradition. The turn to Continental Platonic scholarship will elucidate key ideas emerging from Heidegger’s reading of Socrates in relation to similar writings embracing Socrates, as does Heidegger, as a radically non-systematic thinker. Ultimately, I synthesize these elements into a view of learning or education as an attuned ontological occurrence or event, which lives beyond the understanding of philosophy akin to a science and education understood as a standardized, controllable, and predictable technological achievement. Against the academic trend found in many variations of the popular Socratic Teaching Method, I avoid “systematizing” Socratic learning