Enlightenment empiricism as precedent of the modern body pedagogy

Abstract

This work studies the first precedent of the modern body pedagogy, which is related to the empirist thought of John Locke. It is delved into Locke's main pedagogical ideas about the body, contextualizing them in the social and scientific context of the seventeenth century. His corporal pedagogy, based on the control of the Reason over a vigorous and autonomous body, will be explicit in numerous physical rearing councils aimed at male children of rich families. These orientations will influence the concern towards sensitivity, the corporal, and the aesthetic in the eighteenth century in authors such as Ballexerd, Basedow, Rousseau, Jovellanos and Kant.