(no subject)
"Maieutics" is a way of teaching based on the idea that truth is naturally found inside a person, their soul waiting to give birth to it, and that philosophy is the midwife who aids in the process.
Thought that was awesome and couldn't google up much about it. Many dictionaries define it as "The art of giving birth to ideas, which are seen as struggling for birth", a direct quote attributed to "Payne". Thanks to the good people at Oxford English, I now know that this is not the only Payne I've ever heard of, the author of Common Sense, but rather William Harold Payne. The words aren't even his own, per se: the quote is from his translation of Frenchman Gabriel Compayré's History of Pedagogy, dated 1886. Wikipedia knows of this text only in a couple of references on pages like "History of Education", where the bibliography states that the original text was published in 1899, Payne's translation was from 2003, and the first publication in English was from... 1885? In any event, the OED has English appearances of the work dating back to 1656, which makes me wonder at whence other dictionaries have chosen to draw their definitions. Etymologically, the source is the Greek word for a midwife.
Thought that was awesome and couldn't google up much about it. Many dictionaries define it as "The art of giving birth to ideas, which are seen as struggling for birth", a direct quote attributed to "Payne". Thanks to the good people at Oxford English, I now know that this is not the only Payne I've ever heard of, the author of Common Sense, but rather William Harold Payne. The words aren't even his own, per se: the quote is from his translation of Frenchman Gabriel Compayré's History of Pedagogy, dated 1886. Wikipedia knows of this text only in a couple of references on pages like "History of Education", where the bibliography states that the original text was published in 1899, Payne's translation was from 2003, and the first publication in English was from... 1885? In any event, the OED has English appearances of the work dating back to 1656, which makes me wonder at whence other dictionaries have chosen to draw their definitions. Etymologically, the source is the Greek word for a midwife.