Birnbacher D
Heinrich Heine Universität, Philosophisches Institut, Dusseldorf, Germany.
Med Health Care Philos. 1999;2(3):219-24. doi: 10.1023/a:1009999523468.
The Socratic method has a long history in teaching philosophy and mathematics, marked by such names as Karl Weierstrass, Leonard Nelson and Gustav Heckmann. Its basic idea is to encourage the participants of a learning group (of pupils, students, or practitioners) to work on a conceptual, ethical or psychological problem by their own collective intellectual effort, without a textual basis and without substantial help from the teacher whose part it is mainly to enforce the rigid procedural rules designed to ensure a fruitful, diversified, open and consensus-oriented thought process. Several features of the Socratic procedure, especially in the canonical form given to it by Heckmann, are highly attractive for the teaching of medical ethics in small groups: the strategy of starting from relevant singular individual experiences, interpreting and cautiously generalizing them in a process of inter-subjective confrontation and confirmation, the duty of non-directivity on the part of the teacher in regard to the contents of the discussion, the necessity, on the part of the participants, to make explicit both their own thinking and the way they understand the thought of others, the strict separation of content level and meta level discussion and, not least, the wise use made of the emotional and motivational resources developing in the group process. Experience shows, however, that the canonical form of the Socratic group suffers from a number of drawbacks which may be overcome by loosening the rigidity of some of the rules. These concern mainly the injunction against substantial interventions on the part of the teacher and the insistence on consensus formation rooted in Leonard Nelson's Neo-Kantian Apriorism.
苏格拉底方法在哲学和数学教学中有着悠久的历史，以卡尔·魏尔斯特拉斯、伦纳德·尼尔森和古斯塔夫·黑克曼等人为代表。其基本理念是鼓励学习小组（小学生、学生或从业者）的参与者通过自己的集体智力努力来解决概念、伦理或心理问题，无需文本依据，也无需教师提供大量帮助，教师的主要职责是执行严格的程序规则，以确保形成富有成效、多样化、开放且以达成共识为导向的思维过程。苏格拉底程序的几个特点，尤其是黑克曼赋予它的经典形式，对小组医学伦理学教学极具吸引力：从相关的个别独特经历出发，在主体间对抗与确认的过程中对其进行解释并谨慎归纳的策略；教师在讨论内容方面不直接引导的职责；参与者有必要明确自己的思维方式以及他们理解他人思想的方式；严格区分内容层面和元层面的讨论；以及，尤其是明智地利用小组过程中产生的情感和动机资源。然而，经验表明，苏格拉底小组的经典形式存在一些缺陷，通过放宽某些规则的严格性可以克服这些缺陷。这些缺陷主要涉及禁止教师进行实质性干预的禁令，以及源于伦纳德·尼尔森新康德主义先验论的对达成共识的坚持。
