Péter Lautner’s chapter ‘Concepts in the Neoplatonist Tradition’ expands the scope of the enquiry by discussing Platonist theories of concept formation in Late Antiquity. Generally speaking, the philosophers belonging to the so-called schools of Athens and Alexandria believe that the articulation of our rational capacity and the acquisition of knowledge somehow derives from the senses as well as the intellect, and they mostly agree that some elements of concept formation, notably generalisation, occur on the basis of sense-perception. They disagree, however, as to whether or not such generalisations are full-blown concepts. While all the philosophers under consideration endorse some version of the view that the main source of concepts is our intellect, which essentially contains fully fledged concepts, their accounts vary in respect of the intellect’s ability to project concepts onto the lower cognitive faculties. The problem of how the two kinds of concepts mentioned above are related to each other occupies the Platonists through the entire period under examination and constitutes the focus of Lautner’s analysis.

Developmental teaching has a long history starting with Vygotsky’s ideas of teaching reaching into the zone of proximal development, an accomplishment that only are possible with the help of qualified teachers. Developmental teaching is oriented both to children’s acquisition of competence and to their formation as persons acquiring theoretical thinking and motive orientation. Central ideas in developmental teaching are that general knowledge in the form of core relations should come before specific and concrete knowledge, and that children through agentic but also teacher-guided exploration should be able to acknowledge these conceptual relations. These ideas have been extended with Hedegaard’s ideas of the double move in teaching and learning. In this process, teaching is a double and moving back to qualify children’s… knowledge to subject matter knowledge and back to quality children’s concept formation. This is illustrated in a project focusing on the subjects of biology, human geography and history working with oppositions, using children’s everyday knowledge and questions to create their activities and motivation for exploration. The Radical-Local approach extends the double move with inclusion of aspects of children’s community as a process of movement from the local to the general and the general to the local. The chapter also addresses assessment challenges through presenting a questionnaire addressing the child’s social situation of development, to capture the child’s perspective on their participation in school practices.