Allan George

George Allan argues that the so-called "culture wars" in higher education are the result of the dogmatic and unyielding certainty that both canonists and anti-canonists bring to any discussion of how best to organize an undergraduate curriculum. He then proposes a middle way. Drawing from William James, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead, he contrasts the absolutist claims of both canonists and anti-canonists with a fallibilist approach and argues for a more pragmatic canon that is normative and always in need of renovation. A wide variety of voices are heard in Allan's conversation about the nature and meaning of an education canon, including philosophers Aristotle, Descartes, Arthur Lovejoy, Hannah Arendt, Spengler, Emerson, Lyotard, and Rorty. Contemporary voices include Eva Brann, Charles Anderson, Francis Oakley, Martha Nussbaum, Gerald Graff, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Bill Readings.

Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) veröffentlichte seine Gifford-Vorlesungen von 1916–18 im Jahr 1920 unter dem Titel Space, Time, and Deity. Seine Kenntnisse übe Whitehead beschränkten sich zu dieser Zeit natürlich auf Whiteheads frühe Arbeiten in der Wissenschaftsphilosophie und Logik. Daher überrascht es nicht, dass Alexander Whitehead als Mathematiker charakterisiert, als jemanden, der „proceeds by means of axioms, definitions, and postulates“ und mit spekulativen Abstraktionen endet (Alexander 1927 I, 157). Mathematisch begründete Theorien wie die von Whitehead, so argumentiert er, verlieren den Bezug zum „stuff of the world“, zur konkreten Natur von Raum und Zeit und zu den qualitativen „ultimates which the sciences leave over“ (Alexander 1927 I, vii). Sie sind wie ein „captive balloon“, [which] „needed to be reminded of the rope which held it to the earth from which it rose“ (Alexander 1927 I, 177).

This chapter argues that the essential task of a university is not teaching students to be experts in some field of endeavor but educating them, so they might learn how to act in accord with the basic moral constraints governing any endeavor. With the help of ideas from Plato, Aristotle, and Michael Oakeshott, this argument is developed by distinguishing actions from practices and prudential from moral practices. Our moral practices, which comprise our character, cannot be taught, but they can be learned—through conversations and similar educational contexts in which possible actions are imaginatively explored and critiqued in an open-ended manner, with the focus not on what we think or do but how. The difficulty for universities, amid so many practical pressures to do otherwise, to keep this essential educational task as their primary concern is acknowledged. Nevertheless it is the right thing for them to do.

Modern philosophy in the West has been haunted since Descartes by his ontological dichotomy between extended unthinking substances and thinking unextended substances, which leads to the epistemological problem of whether perceptions by the mind can be judged as truly representing objects external to it. The typical solution has been to reduce one kind of substance to the other: to fashion some version of either idealism or materialism. Attempts at a solution that affirms real differences between physical bodies and conscious minds but allows for their interaction, for each to have an effect on the other, are a characteristic strategy of analytic philosophers. However, Professor Hedrick finds their proposed...