paideia3.gif (8894 bytes)

Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 3: Philosophy of Education

Introduction

David M. Steiner

Where might one start? Of "education," the Latinate etymology is evocative: to draw out, draw away from, draw forth. The echoes are linear. Ex tenebras lux, from the shadows of ignorance to the luminosity of knowing, a path towards experience out of innocence. That path has its symbolic origin in the library of third and second century B.C. Alexandria, where Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace first coined the word canon, ("a straight rod" or "ruler") as the mark of a standard of excellence. In that library we would have found the Aristotelian texts summoning the human race to immortality, through an education that alone can lead us from the conditions of bestiality to those of divinity. Political order rests on an education in harmony with the constitutional structure of the city state; ultimately however eudaimonia, the highest joy known to man, lies in the educated exercise of the soul's faculties in conformity with the most perfect virtue through philosophical contemplation. Here is the telos of the pedagogic journey.

Amongst these Hellenic and Latinate echoes still audible in our sense of education, however, resound so many others. From China, the language of Confucius also evokes the simile of the path or the "Way." Truth is open only to the one who arduously undertakes the road to knowledge. We read in book sixteen of the Record on the Subject of Education: "The jade uncut will not form a vessel for use; and if men do not learn, they do not know the way in which they should go." And in Confucius' Great Learning, "Things have their root and their completion, affairs have their end and their beginning. To know what is first and what is last will lead near to what is taught in the Great Learning."

But even in ancient China and Greece, we find critical counter motions. In the former, the contemplative and mystical strain of Chinese Taoism suggest a method very different from that of Confucianism. Embodied most powerfully in the sixth century writings of Lao-Tse, the direction of learning cannot be understood as outward trajectory: "The further one goes out from oneself, the less he knows." While the language of the path-the Tao-is central, the direction is non-linear. Lao-Tse writes of learning how to keep still.

Engaging still in vast oversimplification, one might suggest that Plato's writings offer at least three powerful conceptions of the pedagogic path. In the early texts, most especially of course in the Meno, we are asked to consider education as the recovery or remembrance of earlier, now forgotten journeys of the soul: illumination points us back in time. In the Republic, by contrast, the central conceit suggests not a linear, but a circular motion, the turning of the soul from that which is becoming to that which is. Still more familiar is Plato's third teaching, that spiraling method of dialectical argument in such texts as the Theaetetus and the Phaedrus, dramatizing so distinctly the arduous motion from illusion to aletheia, the truth as revelation of the Good.

In the modern era, Heidegger rethinks this Platonic legacy. He urges us to confront the forgetting of Being, to renew our encounter with the structure of an existence which is necessarily at issue for itself. Only the recovery of a primordial wonder at the centrality of Dasein makes possible serious thought. For Heidegger, education becomes a learned unlearning of the path of Western philosophy. It is through the poetry of Trakl and Hölderlin and the fragmentary works of the pre-Socratic philosophers that the student of thought can think against thought to the lost presence of Being.

Other pedagogic traditions were born in fifth-century Greece. Gorgias, Protagoras and their disciples oppose the relativities of political grammar and juridical power to the metaphysical core of Plato's paideia. Education was less a path to sophos, understood as the achievement of knowledge of the absolute, than to eristic, the art of argument. Although they were ironized by Plato's Socrates as the replacement of true learning by verbal gymnastics, the Sophists's teachings were to have a profound effect on pedagogy and philosophy in the Western world. This legacy would stretch from Quintilian's teachings of rhetoric, to Nietzsche, who wrote that every important advance in ethical thought had been indebted to the Sophists, and to Wittgenstein, whose investigations of language sought to undercut the very possibility of metaphysical truth claims. Analytic philosophy was torn from its ancient moorings in matters ethical and ontological.

From Athens to Jerusalem. Within the haunting specter of the primordial fall from grace, the Christian sense of education carries a central ambivalence: belief as an act of will wrestles with the hermeneutic skills required to read the word of God. The pilgrims progress is less one of intellection, than of humility. The Christian author Tatian, speaking of the Greeks, proudly proclaimed in the second century AD that "we no longer concern ourselves with your tenets, but follow the word of God." Uneasily, Saint Basil would counter a century later in his Address to Young Men that a Christian might profitably "trace the silhouette of virtue in Pagan authors" such as Homer and Plato. The high canons of Jesuitical training, or of Hans Kung's philosophically complex homilies co-exist uneasily with the pietistic summons of the flock to the passion. Christian sectarian schools wrestle today with the inescapable questions posed by this double legacy.

Geographically scattered, the Judaic peoples, for their part, would come to prize the skills of commentary, the fold on fold of exegesis and argumentation that form the heart of their teachings. The Talmud is simply the Hebrew rendering of "teaching" and "learning." God summons his people not only to obey the commandments, but, as we are told in Isaiah, to "reason together." The Talmuds of Jerusalem and Babylon, the multiple rabbinical courts throughout the Ashkenaze communities of Eastern Europe, the contemporary debates within orthodox communities of faith, all render textual exegesis central to learning. As Maimonides suggests, study is the path to belief. As he reminds his readers in The Guide for the Perplexed, "the goal is the possession of such notions which lead to true metaphysical opinions as regards God."

"Education." The ambivalence of the concept informs yet another important intellectual tradition in the philosophy of pedagogy. The educated path from the shadows to the light, so unforgettably evoked in the opening lines of book three of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things), points not to metaphysical discovery, or textual hermeneutics, but to the bright light of materialism and natural science. From Epicurus-to whom Lucretius was so self-consciously indebted-through Francis Bacon and Descartes to John Dewey and his modern disciples, the educational enterprise leads to the celebration of empiricism-to its capacity to overcome superstition-and to its aesthetic value. Some unusually lyrical moments of Lucretius, in his poetry, and Dewey, in Art as Experience, each insist that experiencing the universe as known and ever more fully knowable can fuse delight, discovery, and didactics.

Dewey leads us back to the tradition of romanticism anchored in Rousseau's Émile, and sustained through the work of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and ultimately Piaget. For Rousseau, the path of man has always already gone astray: the recovery of the natural haunts the pedagogic project. Dewey's delight in the open horizon of human possibility stands in sharp contrast with Rousseau's anguished lament against the hubris of the Enlightenment. Unable infinitely to expand the possibilities of human attainment, man must learn again to limit his desires so as to reestablish psychological harmony. Rousseau's dark foreboding about his age-to be ruled, he was sure, by bloody revolution and trivializing social fashion-did not prevent the fusion of his celebration of nature with the pragmatic futurism of Dewey in a process of immense consequence for American educational practice.

Such a brief index of broad currents in the philosophy of education, even focused as it is on those bodies of thought that have most directly influenced the American experience, can offer but a suggestion of the extraordinary richness of the field, now increasingly neglected in the academy. A fuller review would have to take in the deep relationship between moral philosophy and pedagogics so manifest in the writings of Immanuel Kant, and evident in such contemporary Kantians as John Rawls. One would need to trace the influence of dialectical materialism, which underpins the work of Paulo Freire and many others in Latin America, and review the postmodern variants of Marxism paramount in the writings of Bourdieu, Gintis, and Giroux. Here pedagogical theory focuses not only on the overdetermination of educational outcomes by economic and social structures, but produces meditations on the role of language, gender and ethnic identity in sustaining what these writers came to call cultural hegemony.

The story of paideia in the United States adds its own important chapter. Jefferson and Rush, Webster and Madison together fused the tradition of natural law, Enlightenment rationalism, and American exceptionalism into a conception of public education where free citizens would come to celebrate both the liberating constraints of Republican law and the individualism without which that Republic could not flourish. The virtual eclipse of that body of thought in contemporary curricula of social studies is damaging testimony to the power of intellectual fashion to marginalize a vital historical legacy.

Other intellectual traditions still less evident in our current debates offer instruction. The writings of Plutarch, Montaigne, and Locke, to Matthew Arnold and beyond, point to the cultivations of habits of mind and of cultural literacy now in eclipse. But the silencing through dismissal of such work may be less a testament to its weakness than a symptom of critical losses to our educational vision. While those in the academy insist with an almost exaggerated earnestness that pluralism and eclecticism must represent the fashion of the day, their students often stubbornly give evidence that the best that has been thought and written can transcend time, space, and language in a manner that more simplistic works selected on grounds of political expediency constantly fail to do.

In the collection of essays that follow, the reader will find many that take their bearings from one or more aspects of the philosophy of education touched on above. Confucius, Plato, Protagoras, Rousseau, and Dewey are recurrent subjects, and the legacy of Dewey's pragmatism forms the unstated premise of the majority of further contributions. Indeed, neither the Platonist, Aristotelian, Augustinian, Marxist, Arnoldian nor Jeffersonian philosopher of education will find much resonance here. To a remarkable degree the collection as a whole has embraced an often vaguely articulated synthesis of Protagoras, Dewey, John Stuart Mill, and the ideal speech community evoked two decades ago in the work of Jürgen Habermas. To summarize the credo, philosophy and education, or rather philosophy as education, should make the world safe for pluralism, open ended communication and experimentation, and the quest for an inclusive social consensus.

Drawn as they are from several symposia and different panels of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, these texts show a striking convergence across very different perspectives. Two themes stand out: First, the manner in which philosophy can, once correctly understood, contribute to some larger project of paideia, or of social amelioration; second, the way in which philosophy, once again properly understood, should best be "packaged" for transmission to specific audiences, from children to students of newly industrializing nations. The themes are often mutually reinforcing; that is, the test of whether one is philosophizing correctly is a pragmatic matter, to be determined by assessing the potential contribution of the methodology to a predetermined set of social outcomes. Education through philosophy is in this sense quite a different enterprise than the unsuspecting reader might expect. It is not so much a question of learning how to interrogate the questions of the summum bonum, but of helping to achieve it, where it has already been (unproblematically) defined (by inferred consensus) as a liberal, pluralistic, "world community." León Olivé writes for many fellow contributors when he advocates a "global culture" made up of the "sum of particular cultures communicating with each other and making a common effort for the well-being of all of them and of its members, cooperating with each other and respecting the peculiarities of each one."

To find oneself wishing to take issue with one or more authors is the mark of a properly provocative collection. Let me offer two such moments from my own readings. The first has to do with the use of the terms "relativism," "objectivism," and "rationalism." Given the pressing concern so many contributors express with regard to achieving consensus or justice in situations of social and even ethical pluralism, such terms become critical. Strikingly, a plurality of philosophers writing in this volume want to retain the epithet "rational" for their varied recommendations, implying irrationality on the part of their critics. While this suggests the word offers little beyond rhetorical reassurance, such is not the case with "relativism," where contributors use the term in substantive but very different ways.

One finds at least three meanings not clearly distinguished. The first we might term vulgar relativism-"moral statements are understood to be autobiographical reports of how the speaker or writer is feeling." Since, clearly, no statement one person makes about such matters can be contradicted by anyone else, moral disagreement becomes impossible, and thus moral argument too, since without disagreement there can be no argument. Since however as a matter of fact we do disagree on moral issues, an analysis which makes such disagreements impossible must be fallacious. What remains however, as the ancient sophists well knew, is the task of persuading one's interlocutor that he or she can come to feel differently about an issue once arguments are persuasively introduced into the discussion

The second "moral relativist" position offers us the familiar fact/value distinction. Here the argument is that since moral statements do not make factual statements, moral argument will be (or at least consistently should be) about the nature of justification for an ethical claim, not about the empirical facts that underlie it. Thus transcendental claims are non-objectivist moral arguments: to take the example from Habermas, if one seeks a political consensus free from the distortions of unequal access, uneven power, and distorted strategic authority, then one can infer certain moral norms that will constitute the ideal speech situation. The critic of Habermas is free to argue that such a (counter-factual) situation is a poor normative standard for any number of reasons, or that it can in fact be stipulated under different ethical premises. But there is much confusion here: some authors appear to argue that justification claims of certain kinds are factual, while others argue that certain factual situations self-evidently mandate a certain set of moral prescriptions.

The third moral relativist position is the view that our "global" society is so pluralistic that all we can do is agree to disagree without evoking violence or engaging in egregious acts of social injustice. Factually, it seems undeniable that such moral disagreement is ubiquitous: while we might agree that killing is wrong, specifying the circumstances (killing a fetus, a criminal, the incurably sick) immediately evidences disagreement. Here the key question is the view philosophers and governments should take of such a situation. Should they try to impose moral agreement-or rather try to maintain a minimalist social order and structure of law without which citizens would be unable to live according to their moral choices? Repeated claims that we want to make the world safe for plurality actually side-steps the hard work of suggesting where one draws ethical and juridical boundaries between such a foundational structure of law and an arena of individual and group autonomies.

While it is important for those who would advocate a pedagogy grounded in an ethics of consensus to be clear about such matters, I was more disturbed by a certain anodyne quality of some of the contributions. No doubt it is important that in a philosophical education students become adept at seeing both sides of an argument, or proficient in identifying stronger or weaker associations between premise and conclusion. That such skills have been advocated in Eastern and Western civilizations for twenty five centuries does not make them less important, but it does mute the force of the message. Socrates taught through harnessing the eros of yearning; Augustine and Calvin evoked the power of grace and the horror of separation from the Divine; early liberalism made inescapable the authority of violent death, and set up against it the absolute reassurance of the natural law, that law which would in turn anchor the paideia of the founding fathers of the United States. Rousseau shamed the hubris of bourgeois man with the portrait of his own vanity and grounded his philosophy of education in a manipulation of the all consuming poison of self-love. While the turgid quality of too much of Dewey's prose can conceal the fact, a burning sense of social iniquity and a Hegelian delight in the aesthetics of the cosmos animate the whole.

If the liberal project of a pedagogy for the fair minded is to flourish it will need to re-engage with the wellsprings of human thought and the human condition. At their best, the essays below take up that challenge, and remind us forcefully of what is at stake in our capacity to meet it. While issues of space and expertise place limits on an introduction to every contribution, let me conclude by saying a few words about some of the essays below, and for the rationale for the order of their appearance.

As an overture to the collection, Gareth Matthews's essay on teaching philosophy finds a natural place. Matthews's instructive story of the encounter between his students and the work of Lucretius takes us to the core of the matter. Be it Plato or Heidegger, Augustine or Wittgenstein, the great philosophers of education remind us that starting-point and destination alike are anchored in wonder: in our delighted shock, always näive even when deeply tutored, before the mystery of existence. The questions that haunt humanity through the ages are so close to hand, so immediate to existence, that sometimes we can only rediscover them through a spontaneous recognition too easily dismissed as childish. What harder task is there for the teacher than to enable the student to retain that wonder, while adding to it the precision of thought, the recognition of a community of fellow thinkers, and the moral responsibility of the mature adult.

The two essays that follow discuss different aspects of that difficulty as they comment on the challenge of teaching philosophy to children and young students. Katalin Havas discusses how stories can enable children to enjoy and learn from logic games, and reminds us of the important work of many Hungarian writers in providing material along such lines. Matthew Lipman offers us a report from the field on the progress of instituting instruction in philosophy for children world-wide.

Teaching philosophy to children raises at once the foundational questions of what one understands by philosophy, and why it is important to teach it. In short we are led to the heart of our concerns. Here I have placed two groups of essays. The first are treatments of canonical works in the philosophy of education-those of Confucius, Rousseau, and Dewey. The second are pieces that defend in depth a normative case for the teaching of a particular philosophy or philosophical method. To a considerable degree, the division is artificial: the scholars of Confucius and Dewey are also advocates, while the normative second order accounts rest to some degree on familiar canonical foundations, in this case Protagoras and Kant respectively.

Tu Wei-ming introduces us to a reading of Confucianism-to the path of learning through which the individual self becomes the fully socialized human being. Citing Mencius's ethical teaching that commiseration and sympathy are the beginning of happiness, Tu suggests how ancient Chinese instruction locates in this moral core of humanity the path whereby the "Scylla of internal individuation and the Charybdis of external socialization" are transcended. No such transcendence is to be expected in the darker annals of Rousseau's writings, as Mark Gedney elegantly reminds us. For Rousseau, the growth in modern man of a sense of conscience is a poisoned gift. Untutored, it will sustain the corrupting amour de propre, a self-love assessed only in the debased currency of public opinion.

Reading Gedney's article on Rousseau in juxtaposition to Tu's on Confucius and Mencius is thought provoking. While direct translation of such disparate metaphysics should be resisted, the central question of the relationship of education to the possibility of the synthesis of self, community and world is common to both. What follows however diverges utterly: From his earliest essays on human inequality to his last anguished treatise of self-judgment, Rousseau never believed that "an autonomous and independent individual[ism] need not be in conflict with one's integrity as a . . . responsible member of the community." The citizen, Rousseau argued, was of necessity a "denatured self" while the solitary being who resisted the lure of socialization was apt to end up in a madness of loneliness and despair. Rousseau's profound questions about the relationship between self-reliance, social mores, ethics and education deserve more considered reflection by liberal theorists than is common today.

The philosophical distance from Rousseau's pessimism to Dewey's naturalistic faith is well captured in James Garrison's finely compressed introduction to Dewey's thought. Shorn of overt theism, and suffused throughout with a Hegelian sense of what he would call "meaningful" nature, Dewey argued that it was only through the free flow of educated public opinion that the aesthetic promise of natural existence could be humanly realized. Where Confucius could speak of "the Way," Dewey would speak of "experience," properly understood. In my view, Garrison rightly stresses the interplay between art, poetry and thoughtful social experimentation that lies at the heart of Dewey's vision of paideia. As I have argued elsewhere, what emerges on a close reading of Dewey is a vision at considerable odds from Rousseau's: for the latter, only a Roman stoicism that, through education, disciplines the imagination in the face of modernity could preserve some modicum of social ethics. For Dewey, it is the open-ended imagination, accepting the invitation to partake in the finally aesthetic promise of the natural order, that creates the liberating Aufhebung of self and society.

Paul Woodruff's provocative article defending the Protagorian teachings on the cultivation of judgment honors this volume. I place it with John Silber's equally forceful and ultimately moving meditation on the ethics of education, for both essays address the status of knowledge in circumstances of uncertainty-circumstances they each accept as central to life. While Woodruff's Protagoras would have us master the habits of assessing complex situation in which "knowledge" is not available, Silber argues that teaching for eudaimonia rests on something more secure: a conviction in the possibility of knowing what constitutes rational discourse and objective moral principles. Only such a foundation can instruct us with the principles we will require when faced by the vicissitudes of life.

These essays are amongst the most searching of the collection because the critique each invites would have in itself to be exacting and sustained. Silber's argument is overtly transcendental: if you would attain certain possibilities of human flourishing, you must respect and teach certain basic moral principles. Silber terms such principles "objective," but the term, which he uses in contradistinction with "relative" is given an unusual provenance. What counts as objective are not principles derived from a metaphysics of morals (which by definition are independent of empirical experience), nor a Platonic conception of the Good, still less a theological foundation. They are "amassed through centuries of experience." This gives Silber's argument a pragmatic quality, most especially when the pedagogy he carefully derives from the argument is to be delivered as much through action and lived example as through academic instruction.

Woodruff stresses the "messy" quality of lived experience, and seeks an education that would impart eikos, or the capacity to develop a reasonable expectation of the course of events and judge the quality of (always provisional) judgments. Thus the educated citizen will have "the ability to negotiate defeasible arguments successfully" or, to use the Greek term, will possess euboulia. Provocatively, Woodruff finds such a conception of paideia in the writings of the ancient sophists. Like Silber, Woodruff uses the term "rational" for decisions in which good judgment is employed. Once again, he ties rationality not to situations of metaphysical knowledge, nor even to the knowledge of a certain techne. "Good judgment . . . takes time to consider the long term consequences of each possible course of action." Here, Woodruff's vocabulary is Dewey's.

Perhaps the majority of the other essays in this volume explore the philosophical and pedagogical consequences of such a pragmatic conviction, almost always tempered by a liberal allegiance to educating for tolerance. While Woodruff makes explicit the linkage between the development of good judgment and the powers of argumentation so central to the work of Protagoras, other contributors to this volume discuss more technical aspects of teaching students to acquire such judgment and to develop such powers.

Thus Richard Feldman offers "an epistemological account, spelling out reasons to believe a conclusion" to an argument. Such an account represents the bedrock of an education in the assessment of argument that is in Feldman's view vital to the education of all citizens. What connects Feldman's essay to many others is his conviction that one can offer powerful justifications for arguments in the absence of knowledge conditions, and without thereby embracing a destructive relativism. León Olivé's essay, which follows Feldman's, likewise affirms the importance of achieving "critical thinking and argumentation." While Olivé argues for a form of relativism-"there is no set of moral norms and values or standards for moral evaluation which are absolute"-he maintains that "the rejection of absolutism . . . does not lead to any strong form of relativism." Whereas Feldman offers a technical account of the epistemology of "good" argumentation, Olivé protects his paideia from the risk of relativism by grounding it in the "regulative idea of establishing agreed on standards for moral and epistemological evaluations." Indeed, Olivé goes on to say that "agreement as to what is to be respected individually and collectively is required" for the new "global community."

The last essay in this group of reflections on epistemology and argument is from Jonathan Adler. Adler places the role of "modeling" at the heart of his instruction in good argument. Derived explicitly from John Stuart Mill's powerful defense for the need to preserve a protected status for beliefs held as erroneous by majority view, Adler rests his pedagogic project on teaching students how to role play-to take on a view and to "stick to it as if dogmatically committed to it."

Taken together, the essays of Feldman, Olivé, and Adler should invite important criticism. One line of concern is the overtly political-strategic structure of the whole: pluralism-and the capacity to take on the viewpoint of another party which is seen as sustaining of tolerance-serves as both premise and conclusion. I do not learn to judge arguments so that I might assess the value of a society devoted to open-ended argument, but rather so that I may enact the values of that society. As Richard Lanham suggests enthusiastically elsewhere, "civility requires the acceptance of imposture. That necessary lesson in toleration and self-understanding stands at the center of civic education in a secular democracy." This seems doubtful to me. To take one familiar example, Kant's Categorical Imperative in its various formulations does not ask us to engage in acts of imposture, but rather in understanding what the demands of universalism and the structure of human freedom require of our will. Too much nonsense can result from endless pedagogic exercise in learning to feel each other's pain, as opposed to learning how to judge the universal claims made by strangers on oneself and the polity.

The goal of reaching an overlapping consensus grounds two further essays in the collection. Both make explicit their intellectual debt to John Rawls' model of "reflective equilibrium" as offering the telos of a properly educated capacity for judgment. Catherine Elgin's article defends the view common to the previous three contributions, that what is properly taught is less knowledge than a form of understanding open to refutation and revision. Defining "knowledge" as access to a belief beyond the reach of "outstanding problems" or "anomalies," Elgin suggests, contra Plato, that one must be able to teach what one does not "know" but does "understand." Like Olivé, Elgin faces up to the need to provide "some standard that distinguishes understanding from mere opinion." Her answer is that "we understand a subject when our relevant commitments constitute a system of thought in reflective equilibrium," defined here as a kind of habit of mind open to constant revision, extension, and correction of the "judgments, methods, and approaches we started with." One may be less troubled by what some readers will view as an implausible definition of knowledge (it is within the logic of Elgin's account that one would have to know everything about everything in order to know something about anything) than a certain opaque quality in the underlying epistemology. Since no material, fictional and non-fictional alike, private or public, can be ruled out of court in the construction of one's "equilibrium," the sole criterion that remains is that of equilibrium itself. But in Rawls' case, the counter-vailing forces that made up the equilibrium situation were specified. One would need to turn to Elgin's other writings to discover if she does too.

Adrian Miroiu's fascinating reflections on the circumstances facing educators in Romania should simply be read. To a lesser or greater extent, the problem he poses-how to choose between teaching the canonical texts of the tradition and confronting directly the crises of everyday life (through engaging in what Miroiu calls "philosophy by doing") raises an issue of universal importance. While the reader may well want to endorse Miroiu's answer of trying to synthesize the two approaches, the article suggests the philosophical complexity of that union. Miroiu in the end joins Elgin in striving to foster the "overlapping consensus" grounded in a pluralist democracy, but in so doing, he indicates how politically and pedagogically fraught with difficulty the task can be.

Miroiu's testimony from Romania also serves to introduce the next set of essays which concern the globalization of teaching philosophy. David Evans reflects on the three elements that "characterize the properly philosophical dimensions across all cultures." Evans lists open ended inquiry, respect for the canon of great philosophers, and the importance accorded to matters of value. From these three criteria, Evans suggests, one can read out a pedagogical method that will by now be familiar to the reader: "The application of argument, rational questioning, and dialectical encouragement." While Evans' account, and that of Wu Kuang-ming's ringing endorsement of "global mutuality" are both optimistic, those of Margaret Chatterjee and Lucius Outlaw are not. Chatterjee records a series of fiscal and intellectual pressures, most especially at the university level, which is putting pressure on the very possibility of teaching philosophy worldwide. Caught between the pulls of individualism on the one hand, and economic forces that "fail to be matched by commonality of mind across frontiers" on the other, humanity should find in philosophy a critically important source of analysis. But where job skills represent the criteria for higher education funding-namely almost everywhere-philosophy finds itself on the defensive.

If Lucius Outlaw is correct, perhaps that defensiveness is well merited. His article suggests that the philosophical tradition, at least as it is so often transmitted in the academic classroom, is at best an irrelevancy and at worst a contributory factor to global distress. The agonies of the modern age-those often violent affirmations of tribal, ethnic, or cultural identities that must deal with the dislocation and outright destruction which Outlaw finds to be the legacy of imperialism-call for resources far beyond the philosophers' ken. Outlaw will not be surprised that this reader, at least, finds his brush rather broad, and some of the discussion about what constitutes a people to be in need of critical response. Whatever one's reaction to the specifics of the essay, the topics and arguments demand our attention through their very seriousness: there is an urgency of purpose here that is too often absent elsewhere.

The last essays fittingly point us into the unknown future. In a fascinating meditation on the relationship between philosophical content and forms of communication, (speech, writing, print, and the computer), J. C. Nyri argues that philosophy will have to develop an entirely new vocabulary and conceptual core in order to articulate "the logic of multimedia information storage and exchange." Nyri's provocative historical account is full of delights: he reminds us how bound up with the vocabulary of printing is Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. To cite Nyri: "What does the mind see? It sees ideas, forms, 'characters' that are, as it were, 'stamped' upon it. The mind is, originally, like a sheet of 'white paper, void of all characters'." While readers will make their own judgments as to how far this argument can take us, the main response I suspect will be to ask Nyri to say more about how philosophy might respond to the task he now believes is incumbent upon it, namely the development of a multimedia epistemology. What would such a thinking encompass, what would be its normative implications, what questions would it help us to think through?

Israel Scheffler's urbane and thoughtful essay anchors this collection. Scheffler too is concerned with the relationship between philosophy and modernity, but the focus of his attention is on the natural sciences, and the damaging illiteracy through which most of us must attempt to assess the impact of scientific activity on public and private life. "What is urgently needed, by students and public alike," Scheffler argues, "is an insight into the rationale of scientific inquiry." Philosophers have a critical role to play in helping us to develop this insight, to become the translators between the worlds of science, public policy, and public values. Even as he looks forward, however, Scheffler points us back, to the rich history of philosophical inquiry without which our current fixations on computer algorithms and the free-flow of information will remain outside the realm of considered judgment and judicious usage.

Taken as a whole, this volume is a work from the trenches. The authors from around the globe are teaching philosophy, often in adverse circumstances, and asking themselves difficult questions about the purpose of their work and the importance of their calling. Standing on the shoulders of giants, they heed the summons of Hannah Arendt when she reminds us that those who would educate the next generation must take responsibility for their world.

A Note on Editing

Editing a large and diverse volume of this sort has raised particular difficulties most imperfectly met. A number of submissions are from scholars writing outside their mother tongues: one can only admire the linguistic gifts on display. Editing some of these contributions to academic English usage would have made for considerable re-writing and threatened the individual voices of the authors. I have been content to edit lightly for basic sense, and allowed idiosyncrasy of expression to trump guess work as to what exactly one might believe the writer to be saying. Perhaps more problematic has been divergences among native English writers. Here I have tried to edit for obvious typographical error or clear infelicity of syntax, but acknowledge frankly that there are essays in which only re-writing could have brought any consistency of style across the whole collection.

In all of this work I would like to thank Professor Alan Olson, Executive Editor, Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, and Stephen Dawson, Managing Editor of the same, for their editorial assistance and their kind patience with all manner of questions during the editing period.

redblue.gif (1042 bytes)

 

LinkTop.gif (1431 bytes)

paideia3.gif (8894 bytes)

Paideia logo design by Janet L. Olson.
All Rights Reserved.

Managing Editor: Stephen Dawson

Page Created: December 20, 1999
Last Modified: December 20, 1999

 

LinkHome.gif (1151 bytes)