Heidegger's quest for *being and the early development of the child.

摘要

We shall not teach effectively in the postmodern environment of the twenty-first century until we have understood Postmodernism. We shall not understand Postmodernism until we have grasped the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's ideation lies at the root of postmodern thought.;Heidegger's controlling aim and lifelong quest was to understand the meaning of being. The question: "What does it mean to be?" is the heart of Heidegger's intellectual journey. Because we seldom ask this question we remain imprisoned within metaphysical ideation and fail to comprehend the fundamental restructuring accomplished through postmodern thought.;Employing Husserl's phenomenological epistemology, Heidegger proceeded to analyse human be-ing, known as Dasein, and arrived at the conclusion that the primary meaning of human be-ing is "Care." Contemporary research into infant neurobiology either serves to confirm or to contradict Heidegger's analytic of Dasein..;Does what we now know about human development and what it means to be human confirm Heidegger's analytic of Dasein and thus support an underlying premise of postmodern thought, or does research into infant neurobiology contradict Heidegger's analytic of Dasein and subsequently the epistemological foundations for Postmodernism? This paper suggest that in some ways Heidegger's analytic of Dasein is reinforced by our knowledge of human development, yet in other ways infant neurobiology stands at odds with the thrust of Heidegger's thought.;Does our inquiry validate or invalidate Heidegger's analytic? What synthesis can we arrive at from the correlation of contemporary neurobiological research and Heidegger's ideation? How does the bringing together of contemporary research and Heidegger's philosophy help to map out the philosophical terrain for the twenty-first century? What is the relevance of this for contemporary Christian Education in an Evangelical context? These are the driving questions behind the enquiry that is broached in this paper as we attempt to feel our way forwards in the praxis of Christian Education in the postmodern era.