History of Philosophy in Nordic Upper Secondary School Curricula: Relating the Past to the Present

Abstract

At a time when educational policies favour skills and competencies that are assumed to be generic and transferable, the role of subject content has become an important question. In the case of upper secondary school philosophy, this is particularly evident regarding the position of the history of philosophy in the construction of the subject. Without aiming to settle this controversy, we recognise that the question of how the philosophical tradition is integrated into current constructions of the subject requires further investigation. In this article, we address this task empirically by examining the role and significance of the history of philosophy in the current philosophy curricula in the five Nordic countries. The study is carried out through a qualitative content analysis of the current curricula, and a subsequent idea analysis, in order to render visible the influences of the main philosophical and didactical traditions on the formulations of the history of philosophy as subject content. The analysis reveals great diversity in how the philosophical tradition is approached. In the final section, the different approaches are identified and discussed as didactical strategies for relating the past to the present.