Augustine, Wittgenstein, and “the Call” in Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Augustine’s autobiographical Confessions (1909) contains one of the first accounts of a child learning to speak. This account, in turn, is central to Klaus Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing (1983/in press), a book internationally regarded as one of the most important German contributions to philosophy of education and curriculum theory in the 20th century. This book’s interpretation of Augustine’s description, as well as its divergence from an earlier interpretation by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) form the initial focus of this paper, which undertakes close readings of both approaches to Augustine. We argue that Wittgenstein’s account, while quite similar to that of Mollenhauer, arrives at an impasse, particularly insofar as training (Abrichtung), education and upbringing is concerned. In his subsequent attempt to “rescue” Augustine from Wittgenstein’s critique, Mollenhauer develops three highly original notions that are central to his own understanding of upbringing: presentation, representation and Bildsamkeit. Significantly, the divergence of Mollenhauer’s and Wittgenstein’s interpretations also throws into sharp relief Mollenhauer’s particular, dialogical and pedagogical interpretation of “the call,” as it is originally articulated in Augustine.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".