EDUCATION, HUMAN EXCELLENCE AND THE GOOD: THE PROBLEM OF MORAL EDUCATION AND ITS ORIGINS IN ANCIENT GREEK THOUGHT

This dissertation is an examination from a methodological standpoint of the problem of moral education both in its modern general formulation and in its genesis in Ancient Greek thought. The main thesis defended and substantiated is that the problem of moral education is one of metaethics, this latter field understood as extending beyond the epistemology of moral statements into a complete ontological examination of the place of morals in the natural, historical, political, social world. A second thesis of the essay is a strong defense of the methodological adequacy of the ancient formulation of the problem of moral education contained in the Socratic question "Can virtue be taught?". With respect to both theses my inquiry is sharply distinguished from most modern approaches which view the ancient problem as dated and which favor a methodological reduction of the problem of moral education to the two disciplines of ethics and psychology.;Having argued for the two theses in the first part, I proceed to substantiate them in the second part with a conceptual and historical reconstruction of the genesis and development of the ancient problem of the teachability of virtue. Beginning with an examination of the early conceptions of virtue and justice in the world of the Homeric epics in which there is no problem of moral education perceived as such, I proceed to later stages in which the problem of moral education is perceived successively as a political problem during the period of the establishment of the Greek city-states, as a technical problem in the hands of the fifth century Sophists, as a philosophical problem in the moral theory of Socrates in the Protagoras, and finally as a metaethical problem in Plato's theories of moral education. This first metaethical treatment of moral education is contained in the recollection theory of learning in the Meno and in the problem of the rational justification of morality in the Republic.;The theoretical defense of the two theses is contained in the first part entitled "Moral Development and Moral Education". Beginning with a systematization and critical examination of the different approaches to the problem in the fields of Cognitive Psychology and Moral Philosophy, I argue that the two main approaches, Naturalism and Moral Autonomism, fail to take into account the essential and irreducible complexity of moral education. Moreover, I argue that more recent approaches, like L. Kohlberg's, which seek to develop a middle course between the two traditional schools are similarly guilty of the same methodological error.