In book 1.11-20 of De Officiis, Cicero draws on the work of Panaetius to give an account of how the most basic, in-built features of human nature provide a foundation for the cardinal virtues. His account begins from the basic drive for self-preservation which is the usual starting point for the canonical Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis. The developments that Cicero claims follow from this fundamental starting point are, however, quite different from those which ensue on the other preserved accounts of oikeiōsis, such as that reported for Chrysippus in Diogenes Laërtius 7.85-86, the account in Cicero’s De Finibus 3.16-25 and the one in letter 121 of Seneca. It is also importantly different from the more complex account attributed to Posidonius by Galen in On the Doctrines of Plato and Hippocrates 5.5.8-9. By comparing and contrasting Cicero’s theory in the De Officiis with these other accounts, this chapter will explore important facets of Cicero’s philosophical method, his originality in adapting Panaetius’ theory to his own purposes, and the merits of the novel doctrine he embraced in his final philosophical work.

This chapter focuses on how children’s everyday knowledge when entering school is different from subject matter knowledge and argues that children’s emotional imagination and motive orientation is a foundation for their acquisition of subject matter knowledge. We discuss how imagination supports children’s generalizations of experience, so that it becomes possible for them to move between the general and the concrete in analyzing and using knowledge about the world. We also argue for a dialectical relationship between the culturally developed content the children’s encounters in their interactions in the world and the formation of mind. Within the cultural-historical approach to learning and development Davydov was the first to clarify how concepts, within a subject matter system, that are related through the historical development of its content may become the foundation for children learning in school. Supporting the development of theoretical thinking among school pupils serves both to develop thinking with subject matter knowledge, and support children’s person formation.

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.

According to Aristotle, a technê is both a productive power and a kind of epistêmê. In so far as it is a kind of epistêmê, it deals with universals, involves grasping explanations and does not concern itself with the accidental. But a puzzle arises about how something can both be an epistêmê in this sense and at the same time be a power for producing things. Successful production requires the ability to make adjustments to take account of indefinitely variable circumstances. In this chapter, Coope argues that this essential flexibility of technê marks an important difference between it and theoretical epistêmê. Whereas a theoretical epistêmê is potentially complete (in the sense that it is possible in principle to possess all the explanations of the epistêmê), a technê is indefinitely improvable (however many explanations one grasps, there will always be further explanations to be worked out). Because of this, even an expert in a technê needs to have the capacity for working out new explanations. It is possible for Aristotle to think of technê in this way just because he (unlike, for instance, later Christian authors) does not think there is such a thing as a divine technê.

This chapter offers a fresh account of Aristotle's contribution to the long debate in antiquity among philosophers, rhetoricians and medical writers concerning the relative merits, or demerits, of accumulated experience (empeiria) and of theoretical know-how (technê) as powers for successful practical action. In pursuing this topic, Bolton offers an extensive investigation of the relation between the account of these powers offered by Aristotle in Metaphysics I.1 and that found in the Nicomachean Ethics. He carefully distinguishes the different notion of universal that are available to Aristotle in characterizing the object of technê, arguing that the notion of universal underlying Aristotle’s account of technê in Metaphysics I.1 is the one we find in the Posterior Analytics, thereby giving us a theoretically flavoured notion of technê. However, this notion is not generally presupposed by the accounts we find elsewhere in the Aristotelian corpus. Particularly, in the Topics a different conception of technê emerges as empeiria or experience, an account which coincides with those defended by the later medical empiricists.