The Problem of Mind and Reason and Its Philosophical and Educational Solution by V.V. Davydov

Abstract

The article considers the philosophical and educational solution to the problem of mind and reason in the work of V.V. Davydov. The authors’ attention is focused on the dialectic of the correlation of the categories of ‘reason’ and ‘mind’. It is argued that reason and mind appear not just as levels, but also as ways of thinking, ways of human world-relation. The basis for distinguishing between mind and reason is the presence in human activity of two levels: adaptive-using and creative-transformative. Reason works in opposition to the subject-object, while the mind has an attitude towards reality as a ‘subject’. External reason applies its scheme to the object, while mind transforms the form of its movement so that it corresponds to the essence of the matter. Reason is a formal culture of thinking, mind is entirely substantial. Reason as a way of thinking is generated by a practice that does not need to master its substantial (primarily social-historical, human) content — the practice of adaptation and use. It flourishes most magnificently in the conditions of reification of social relations, when they are separated from individuals and confront them as an external, alien, formal reality. V.V. Davydov’s achievment is the allocation of two types of generalization in educational activity: rational-empirical and reasonablе-theoretical, and the justification of the possibility and necessity of such a transformation of all didactics so that the teaching would contribute to the development of theoretical thinking. Only in this case can one seriously talk about developmental education.

Keywords

• thinking
• pedagogical thinking
• mind
• reason
• empirical generalization
• theoretical generalization
• didactics