The Very Idea of a University: A Philosophical Anthropology of Higher Education
Ever greater hopes and resources are placed in universities and colleges to meet technological, environmental, social and economic challenges, yet there is relatively little serious philosophical work being done on the principles grounding academic norms and educational values. The "Philosophy of Higher Education" is today conducted mostly by education scholars, often inspired by philosophers, but seldom tied to a more in-depth conceptual analysis and critical assessment of the arguments to which they refer. Further, there are important contributions by thinkers who are often neglected in this context: R.G. Collingwood, Simone Weil, Ortega y Gasset, Wendell Berry and Leo Strauss, to name a few. An element that unites this otherwise disparate array of philosophers is an emphasis on knowledge, thinking, understanding and certainty as essentially human activities, intrinsically connected to distinct human forms of life, and, importantly, place. In this respect, one could say that they all can be described as different kinds of "philosophical anthropology". Too little attention has been paid to the direct connection between the epistemological grounds for differing conceptions of the point and purposes of higher education. This project seeks to correct fill this lacuna by integrating over twenty years of reflection on the history and nature of the very idea of higher education, as well as both practical and theoretical engagement with the question: What is a university?
Final report
Despite the radical transformation of higher education worldwide during the last half century from a primarily scientific, social and cultural institution to a motor of innovation in the new global economic order, the question of how to understand the nature of the “knowledge” that the university is tasked with creating, enhancing, preserving and advancing to meet the demands of the day has not been given much serious attention by a philosopher since Lyotard’s “report on knowledge” in The Postmodern Condition 40 years ago. The consequences of the conception of “knowledge” such as it is used in terms such as “the knowledge economy” have been examined in the main as a socio-economic phenomenon, most often with a focus on research, but there has been little attention paid to the epistemological grounds and implications of this idea of what knowledge is with respect to teaching and learning at the tertiary level. Another way of putting the point is to say that philosophers, as a rule, have not engaged with the philosophy of higher education, which has largely fallen into the remit of scholarship in the social sciences and education studies.
My research as a philosopher falls within a certain conception of the philosophy of mind, in which the philosophical problem of the mind concerns the relationship between the mental and the practical, and the philosophy of mind is inextricable from a philosophy of culture. One might call this approach to philosophical problems “cultural epistemology”. In this holist conception, a walk, for instance, is a mental phenomenon if it is carried out with an objective and a goal; the movements of the walker can be studied as mental phenomena in the intentionalist sense that they are what he has to do to carry out the intention of walking. To understand someone’s intentions, the meaning or content of his actions,is to locate it within the broad network of concepts used by people to explain themselves, do communicate with others and do things together. These concepts, in turn, are subject to a certain systematization and institutionalization in a number of practices. To understand the mind, then, is to understand a certain mentality and the conditions that must hold for an idea, act, artefact or goal to make sense at all, which means that understanding "the mind", on this account, is less dependent on neuroscience and cognitive psychology than it is on the study of jurisprudence, rhetoric, history, sociology, anthropology, political theory etc., in other words the humanities and social sciences.
The university as we know it, including its research and educational programs, its organization, funding mechanisms and so forth, is itself a certain systematization and institutionalization of what a given culture valorizes as knowledge and understanding worth maintaining, propagating and advancing. In that sense, it constitutes a microcosm of the activities of mind, or a mentality. Much of what I have written concerns the formal as well as material conditions of modern science, scholarship and higher education, having to do with our notions of, for instance, universality, autonomous activity and objectivity. Many studies of higher education, while they often have a strong empirical ground, often lack conceptual rigor in this regard. The consequence is that, all too often, the expertise relied upon for making decisions that have direct or indirect consequences on teaching and research are at once too vast and too narrow to form the basis of well-founded deliberation. This is a problem because the effects can be subtle and such that they institutionalize changes in our thinking, our “mentality”, without our noticing, since we see these matters as “merely form” and, as such, more or less extraneous to our intellectual activities. In order to engage in these issues, I have immersed myself in scholarship on the university in history, anthropology, sociology and political theory, as well as in the work of philosophers who have engaged in these issues: Kant, Humboldt, Mill, Arendt, Strauss, Ortega y Gasset and Oakeshott. I’ve also devoted study to works in the sociology of knowledge, especially Weber and Bourdieu.
The aim of the sabbatical was to synthesize over twenty years of engagement with a cluster of political, moral and epistemological problems arising in connection with our conception of what “higher education” amounts to from a philosophical perspective. The close connection between philosophy’s self-understanding and the self-understanding of the university that obtained until the twentieth century is now largely severed. While there are attempts to revive this connection (Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity 1997, Not for Profit 2000) especially comes to mind), they tend not to delve deeply into the most fundamental epistemic issues: What is knowledge? What is certainty? What are the conditions and limits of what can be claimed as “true, justified belief”? How does science progress? What are the ramifications for how science is taught and scientists are trained? What is the relationship between practical understanding and theoretical insight? How are we to understand the relation between the terms “critical” and “thinking” which, taken together, are said to describe one of the central tasks of higher education? To the extent that philosophers engage with higher education, they tend to disregard the vast empirical scholarship produced in the social and educational sciences. But any adequate answer to the question of the point and purpose of universities must first attend to what they in fact are and do, which has changed dramatically, just as the discipline of philosophy has undergone a radical transformation from a broad base of intellectual training to a special science; indeed, there are striking parallels between developments in the history of philosophy and developments in the history of the university that have not been fully worked out, the most conceptually thorough to date still being Bill Readings’ now canonical University in Ruins from 1997.
The two books that have evolved out of the sabbatical are attempts to describe the relationship between philosophy and the university as a set of interrelated historical and contemporary questions: What is the current connection between the activity of philosophy (thinking about thinking) and the university (the institutionalization of thinking)? What role does philosophy as a discipline play in higher education today? What role does the university’s organization and socio-economic function play for philosophy? Is philosophy, like the university, under threat from the weakening of the authority of academic claims to truth and knowledge? How we are we to understand the condition and consequences of what has been termed “epistemic vulnerability”? One book is a monograph in English, The Very Idea of a University: A Philosophical Anthropology, written for the Springer Verlag series Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives, at the invitation of the series editor, Ron Barnett. We have set a preliminary date for the submission of the final manuscript for review at October 2020. The other books is an anthology of essays in Swedish, aimed at a wider audience. The final manuscript, with the working title, Den tveksamme bekännaren och andra essäer has been submitted, and is currently under consideration by a respected Swedish academic publisher.
In October 2019, during work with the manuscripts, I held a series of lectures as a guest of the Center for Higher Education futures at Aarhus University. Under the auspices of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society (PaTHES) and the Higher Education as Research Object network (HERO), I have organized an international conference on the future and present of higher education to be held in Uppsala in October 2020: Universities Under Siege?: https://www.humsam.uu.se/phec2020/
My research as a philosopher falls within a certain conception of the philosophy of mind, in which the philosophical problem of the mind concerns the relationship between the mental and the practical, and the philosophy of mind is inextricable from a philosophy of culture. One might call this approach to philosophical problems “cultural epistemology”. In this holist conception, a walk, for instance, is a mental phenomenon if it is carried out with an objective and a goal; the movements of the walker can be studied as mental phenomena in the intentionalist sense that they are what he has to do to carry out the intention of walking. To understand someone’s intentions, the meaning or content of his actions,is to locate it within the broad network of concepts used by people to explain themselves, do communicate with others and do things together. These concepts, in turn, are subject to a certain systematization and institutionalization in a number of practices. To understand the mind, then, is to understand a certain mentality and the conditions that must hold for an idea, act, artefact or goal to make sense at all, which means that understanding "the mind", on this account, is less dependent on neuroscience and cognitive psychology than it is on the study of jurisprudence, rhetoric, history, sociology, anthropology, political theory etc., in other words the humanities and social sciences.
The university as we know it, including its research and educational programs, its organization, funding mechanisms and so forth, is itself a certain systematization and institutionalization of what a given culture valorizes as knowledge and understanding worth maintaining, propagating and advancing. In that sense, it constitutes a microcosm of the activities of mind, or a mentality. Much of what I have written concerns the formal as well as material conditions of modern science, scholarship and higher education, having to do with our notions of, for instance, universality, autonomous activity and objectivity. Many studies of higher education, while they often have a strong empirical ground, often lack conceptual rigor in this regard. The consequence is that, all too often, the expertise relied upon for making decisions that have direct or indirect consequences on teaching and research are at once too vast and too narrow to form the basis of well-founded deliberation. This is a problem because the effects can be subtle and such that they institutionalize changes in our thinking, our “mentality”, without our noticing, since we see these matters as “merely form” and, as such, more or less extraneous to our intellectual activities. In order to engage in these issues, I have immersed myself in scholarship on the university in history, anthropology, sociology and political theory, as well as in the work of philosophers who have engaged in these issues: Kant, Humboldt, Mill, Arendt, Strauss, Ortega y Gasset and Oakeshott. I’ve also devoted study to works in the sociology of knowledge, especially Weber and Bourdieu.
The aim of the sabbatical was to synthesize over twenty years of engagement with a cluster of political, moral and epistemological problems arising in connection with our conception of what “higher education” amounts to from a philosophical perspective. The close connection between philosophy’s self-understanding and the self-understanding of the university that obtained until the twentieth century is now largely severed. While there are attempts to revive this connection (Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity 1997, Not for Profit 2000) especially comes to mind), they tend not to delve deeply into the most fundamental epistemic issues: What is knowledge? What is certainty? What are the conditions and limits of what can be claimed as “true, justified belief”? How does science progress? What are the ramifications for how science is taught and scientists are trained? What is the relationship between practical understanding and theoretical insight? How are we to understand the relation between the terms “critical” and “thinking” which, taken together, are said to describe one of the central tasks of higher education? To the extent that philosophers engage with higher education, they tend to disregard the vast empirical scholarship produced in the social and educational sciences. But any adequate answer to the question of the point and purpose of universities must first attend to what they in fact are and do, which has changed dramatically, just as the discipline of philosophy has undergone a radical transformation from a broad base of intellectual training to a special science; indeed, there are striking parallels between developments in the history of philosophy and developments in the history of the university that have not been fully worked out, the most conceptually thorough to date still being Bill Readings’ now canonical University in Ruins from 1997.
The two books that have evolved out of the sabbatical are attempts to describe the relationship between philosophy and the university as a set of interrelated historical and contemporary questions: What is the current connection between the activity of philosophy (thinking about thinking) and the university (the institutionalization of thinking)? What role does philosophy as a discipline play in higher education today? What role does the university’s organization and socio-economic function play for philosophy? Is philosophy, like the university, under threat from the weakening of the authority of academic claims to truth and knowledge? How we are we to understand the condition and consequences of what has been termed “epistemic vulnerability”? One book is a monograph in English, The Very Idea of a University: A Philosophical Anthropology, written for the Springer Verlag series Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives, at the invitation of the series editor, Ron Barnett. We have set a preliminary date for the submission of the final manuscript for review at October 2020. The other books is an anthology of essays in Swedish, aimed at a wider audience. The final manuscript, with the working title, Den tveksamme bekännaren och andra essäer has been submitted, and is currently under consideration by a respected Swedish academic publisher.
In October 2019, during work with the manuscripts, I held a series of lectures as a guest of the Center for Higher Education futures at Aarhus University. Under the auspices of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society (PaTHES) and the Higher Education as Research Object network (HERO), I have organized an international conference on the future and present of higher education to be held in Uppsala in October 2020: Universities Under Siege?: https://www.humsam.uu.se/phec2020/