The treatment of emotions in Richard Stanley Peters’ theory of education and 20th century Anglo-Saxon tradition

Abstract

The article proposes to retrieve the work that R. S. Peters developed in the field of analytical philosophy during the 60s and 70s in the 20th century in order to consider their relevance in the current educational analysis of emotions. Emotions are nowadays a central issue in education, partly due to the contributions of Emotional Intelligence and the educational versions regarding social and emotional learning (SEL and
SEAL). Although these proposals have been, on the whole, warmly received, some critical voices have arisen from Anglo-Saxon tradition in recent years which, from the Philosophy of Education, question their conceptual rigour and point out the lack of consideration of the moral character of affective experience. The analyses of Peters enable us to approach the two shortcomings in the current educational treatment of emotions: the precise definition of the phenomenon, an aspect which Peters deals with through the activity–passivity dichotomy; and the relationship of emotions with what is moral, which Peters reflected by differentiating between emotion and motive. The development of the article aims to reveal the validity of these distinctions. In order to do this, the contributions of Peters are presented in relation to some current studies on emotional education, especially the ones by David Carr, who also stresses
the importance of considering emotions in relation to cognitive and moral dimensions. The article ends by emphasizing the need to integrate the new postulations regarding emotional education with the analyses which, since the middle of the 20th
century, have been conducted on the emotional phenomenon.

Key words: emotional education, David Carr, Richard S. Peters, history of education, moral development, cognitive development.