The listing of the aims of education is an activity with a long and partly honorable history, ranging at least from Plato’s Republic right down to what must be a sizable number of faculty curriculum committees now meeting and discovering anew that they must first of all address themselves to desired goals in order to justify their requirements and electives. Sometimes the goals have been found to be numerous and specific, sometimes few and broad: The Educational Policies Commission in The (...) Purposes of Education in American Democracy, published in 1938, discovered some forty-three such purposes, whereas the same Commission in 1961 uncovered The Central Purpose of American Education. To be sure, R. S. Peters has asked “Must an Educator Have an Aim?” and has seemed to answer that he need not; but what he means is that listing aims is a pretty empty rhetorical exercise unless something is said about procedures, and that indeed more can be learned about real aims from examining actual or proposed procedures than from the abstract formulation of aims themselves, an idea which very much warrants a fresh statement, for all of the lifetime of effort that John Dewey devoted to its espousal. (shrink)

Nietzsche's infamous work Thus Spake Zarathustra is filled with a strange sense of religiosity that seems to run counter to the philosopher's usual polemics against religious faith. For some scholars, this book marks little but a mental decline in the great philosopher; for C. G. Jung, Zarathustra was an invaluable demonstration of the unconscious at work, one that illuminated both Nietzsche's psychology and spirituality and that of the modern world in general. The original two-volume edition of Jung's lively seminar on (...) Nietzsche's Zarathustra has been an important source for specialists in depth psychology. This new abridged paperback edition allows interested readers to participate with Jung as he probes the underlying meaning of Nietzsche's great work. (shrink)

As a young man growing up near Basel, Jung was fascinated and disturbed by tales of Nietzsche's brilliance, eccentricity, and eventual decline into permanent psychosis. These volumes, the transcript of a previously unpublished private seminar, reveal the fruits of his initial curiosity: Nietzsche's works, which he read as a student at the University of Basel, had moved him profoundly and had a lifelong influence on his thought. During the sessions the mature Jung spoke informally to members of his inner circle (...) about a thinker whose works had not only overwhelmed him with the depth of their understanding of human nature but also provided the philosophical sources of many of his own psychological and metapsychological ideas. Above all, he demonstrated how the remarkable book Thus Spake Zarathustra illustrates both Nietzsche's genius and his neurotic and prepsychotic tendencies.Since there was at that time no thought of the seminar notes being published, Jung felt free to joke, to lash out at people and events that irritated or angered him, and to comment unreservedly on political, economic, and other public concerns of the time. This seminar and others, including the one recorded in Dream Analysis, were given in English in Zurich during the 1920s and 1930s. (shrink)

First published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.