Thompson, Christiane
Senior Fellow: May 2016
Research Project: Education and Scepticism as a Way of Life
During her stay at the Centre, Christiane Thompson would like to carry out a comprehensive study on scepticism as educational and cultural practise—limited to Plato, exemplary text fragments from the (older and middle) Stoic tradition and possibly from Pyrrhonianism. However, rather than treating these school(s) as epistemological endeavour(s) she will focus on the above-mentioned significance of scepticism as a cultural practice of the self. Christiane Thompson will attempt to look out for coherent structures in the dispersed field of educational voices on scepticism today. Since scepticism has not formed a guideline to unravel the educational dimension of self-relations or selfpractices, it is important to compare contributions and to put them in contrast to the limited significance of scepticism in education today. She will devote the major part of her stay to the examination of the original Greek texts. She has chosen Plato’s early dialogues, Protagoras and Charmides, which offer themselves for analysis because they explicitly mention and emphasise the care for the self. From the Hellenistic tradition she will turn toward text fragments from the Stoa, and possibly move on to Pyrrho’s scepticism, which will enable her to formulate initial conclusions.
Christiane Thompson is professor of theory and history of education at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.