Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

TEACHING IN CIRCLES - AND SEGMENTS -WITH ROEL KAPTEIN

Andrew McKenna

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ABSTRACT

For Roel Kaptein, the explanatory power of mimetic theory, which he abbreviated frequently as “the model,” issued in a steady stream of publications, papers, and conferences in a vast array of fields: pastoral, therapeutic, social-scientific, historical, philosophical, literary, and scriptural. 

Absent from the posthumous compilation of his writings, Op zoek naar Zijn: een antropologie (Corrymeela Press, 1997), are the many schematic diagrams that, in some of his essays, illustrate his analyses. His vivid recourse to triangles and their segmentations bring stunning clarity to nonetheless complex, intricate problems under consideration. A discussion of some of these schemata may suggest pedagogical opportunities for a theory whose winning asset, as Eric Gans has always argued, is its parsimony, the epistemological requirement to explain much with little.