Category: Uncategorized

Here is a nice article on liberal education.  It first gives what I take to be a nice summary of what liberal eduction is (couched in terms of “stewardship”).  It strikes a nice balance between the requirement for attentive listening (submission) and later critical judgment in our reading of great books.  Perhaps most interesting are the final points in the article concerning the “cosmopolitan temptation”.  Liberal education can make us lovers of abstractions, people who move so easily through different times and places (through our reading of great western works) that we find ourselves not properly “situated” in a concrete time and place of our own, sacrificing our own particularity and hence our own capacity to really flourish as human beings (the kind of beings for whom flourishing is always “caught up in” the particular time and place of their lives).  Here is a little taste of the article:

“In such a context, stewardship suffers, for the mind given to abstract universal concepts will readily gravitate toward saving “the world” or “ending hunger” but will find it less natural to consider how to preserve a local community or care for the poor widow around the corner. In short, if a liberal arts education makes it more difficult for human beings to live lives suited to human beings, then it has fallen victim to the temptation of abstraction. A properly conceived liberal education must, to be sure, include an appreciation of abstract universal principles, but at the same time, it must include resources that equip the student to return to the particulars better suited than before to engage the local community of which the student is a part.”

Here it is, from the pen of the inimitable Harry Caines. I cannot resist recording a few of my disagreements: phil majors don’t resemble Comic Book Guy, anthropogenic global warming is no myth, and I’m no Zen Humanist (I’m just a timid smartass). But as for Harry’s thesis, that we should have more philosophers in the program: “Yea-Yuh!” I bray.

Kent was the first philosopher at USU, and he retired just this past spring. A retirement party is being held for him this Wednesday, 3:30-5, in the Colony rooms at the TSC. Drop by to celebrate the career of this philosopher, who has done more for the Philosophy program at USU than any other single individual.

What if we don’t, but it’s hard to live with that fact? Read an interesting interview with Galen Strawson here. A representative quote:

No one can be ultimately deserving of praise or blame for anything. It’s not possible. This is very very hard to swallow, but that’s how it is. Ultimately, it all comes down to luck: luck—good or bad—in being born the way we are, luck—good or bad—in what then happens to shape us. We can’t be ultimately responsible for how we are in such a way as to have absolute, buck-stopping responsibility for what we do. At the same time, it seems we can’t help believing that we do have absolute buck-stopping responsibility.

The Carnival is a “web conference” (meaning, some host blog with a lot of links to philosophical postings on the web) which occurs every few weeks. The current one, found here, has some fun and interesting posts.