The most foundational thing a human person can accept is the existence of things (objects) in the world. Barring any psychological anomalies, a human person, by default, notices that he/she is contained within a physical structure we call “body”. At the same “moment” the human person distinguishes between that “body” and individuated objects in the world. I’m using the term “world” referring to anything that is not a person’s physical body. This is an axiom. Something that is already established and has no need of proof. It is self-evident. Some logicians might claim that there is no such thing as self-evident declarations but this has never been the case in the history of knowledge and learning. From the ancient world, there were certain things that were accepted as true and unable to be challenged in a rigorous sense. Euclid even needed to start somewhere, which is why he laid out his five axioms before he moved to his postulates and propositions. For example, “The whole is greater than its parts.” A baby can tell if one thing is bigger than another.
If one can see the latent and obvious order that exists in the world, one is not far from asking the question, “How do I understand the world?” If there is an order to existence, then an ordered mode by which we encounter the world must exist. Babies and young children encounter their experiences of the world. They receive the things in existence through their senses by picking up and grabbing objects. The desire to know those things seems obvious, even if they may not know why they may have a desire. This never goes away when human beings grow up, it just changes and the encounters with existing things, and thoughts, become more complex.
Starting from Aristotle and moving into the middle ages, there was an understood order of the sciences, which developed throughout those centuries and culminated in the 13th century with Theology as the queen of the sciences, then philosophy, then the practical sciences such as mathematics, medicine etc. Each of the sciences had their particular domain that was termed its “object”. Theology studies the most abstract thing, God. Philosophy the “next” abstract thing, wisdom. Mathematics is the science that deals with quantity. Although Mathematics still deals with quantity, numbers, lines and shapes, it also seems to study and examine the behavior of physical entities. This is why it is the languages and “queen of the physical/empirical sciences”. The medievals considered Logic as part of or fundamental to philosophical inquiry. Nowadays Logic can be studies from within the Mathematical field or the Philosophical field. For more on Mathematics, see a future post.
This medieval/ancient order of the sciences is still relevant today and should be considered in modern pedagogy. The order of the sciences does not intend to communicate the superiority between the various fields, in that one is “better” than the other. It merely gives an appropriate structure for the human mind to encounter Creation. Approaching an understanding of the world, Creation, a human person needs to have an ordered approach. At least an understanding of that order.
In summary, the order of the world automatically structures the order of learning. We distinguish objects in the world and approach them accordingly. This is a fundamental starting point. If we dismantle or approach this foundation with nihilistic world views, there is no moving forward in human formation. For the most part, the division of the fields of knowledge that existed in the ancient and medieval worlds still apply. It is possible to make some adjustments concerning the objects of the various sciences as the collective knowledge of the human race has grown. The main point is that all of the fields of knowledge have an intrinsic order as they relate to one another, and this order must be acknowledged and accepted for the human person to have a good pedagogical formation.
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