General aspects of technical rationality in education from the perspective of Hans G. Gadamer

Abstract

Thinking about ethics in the 21st century is a matter of profound complexity, since the transformation of phenomenology opened a new way of understanding the human being. Knowledge, as Gadamer argues, is not prevented from carrying out its task even when its ontological foundations remain unknown. The sciences can thus operate without grasping their own foundations — and it is worth noting that philosophy itself has not managed to define them either. In this way, human beings move through the world without knowing their foundations, yet this very condition makes them strange to themselves. Gadamer's critique suggests that knowledge proves unreliable for understanding the surrounding world, although theory is responsible only for constructing arguments, while pragmatics takes charge of validating them.