La rappresentazione della natura umana “sulla linea di orizzonte” in Tommaso d’Aquino e i suoi riflessi nel personalismo pedagogico del XX secolo

The powerful image of the human soul that stands out on the horizon line between bodily and incorporeal substances, between time and eternity, has the suggestive power of a cultural representation that breaks through the barriers of time and regenerates over the centuries. Thomas Aquinas takes up a Neoplatonic suggestion and rereads it in the light of his anthropology and metaphysics. The image of human nature placed on the borderline between material and spiritual reality takes on new forms in the following centuries, in different disciplinary fields. Very interesting is the way in which this image is taken in the context of the pedagogical personalism of the 20th century. Some authors affirm that this nature, which is both material and spiritual, is the metaphysical foundation of human “educability”. For these reasons, humans are the only educable beings in the whole universe.