On September 11-12, 2015 a conference was held
at Amsterdam University College (NL) entitled “Liberal Arts and Sciences and Core
Texts in the European Context.” Just the language on the announcement was
enough to make me wistful—it was like a breath of fresh pedagogical air blowing
in from the homeland of liberal higher education, carrying along with it the
fragrances of other, richer, liberal
ideas about teaching and learning and knowledge – greater ideas grounded in greater
texts.
According
to the AUC conference program, the European higher educational environment is
in need of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
“Over the
last century, European universities have evolved to become advanced research
institutions, mainly offering academic training in specialized disciplines. The
Bologna process that started in the late nineties encouraged European
institutions of higher education to broaden their curricula and to commit to
undergraduate education with increased vigor. One of the results of this
development is that Europe is currently witnessing a proliferation of Liberal
Arts and Sciences colleges and broad bachelor degrees.
Within
this approach to undergraduate education, courses that involve core texts –
i.e. classic texts from philosophical, historical, literary or cultural traditions
– are gaining significance. Core texts, involving “the best that has been
written” meet the challenges of modern higher education in a unique way. They
not only develop the student’s philosophical, analytical, literary, and general
reading skills, but they also suspend the concerns of the moment while opening
up new normative, literary, psychological, philosophical, or political
horizons. Core texts have the potential to draw students out of their
intellectual comfort zone, challenging their own beliefs and opinions. As such,
these texts constitute an important part of a genuinely liberal education.”
The first presentation at this AUC conference was entitled, “The
Spirit of Liberal Learning: A Reflection on the Cowan Method of Teaching the Liberal Arts,” a title that
probably left more than one attendee initially scratching the proverbial pate. I
was not in attendance at the conference, so I can only suppose that this
panelist’s reflection was based at least partially on the work of Donald Cowan,
professor of physics and past president of the University of Dallas (TX), whose
ideas about education are concisely reflected in his short text, “Unbinding Prometheus: Education for the Coming Age.” But any
reflection “on the Cowan Method of
Teaching the Liberal Arts” should certainly not have bypassed Dr. Louise Cowan, who
was the Dean of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts at the University
of Dallas (TX), the interdisciplinary graduate school alma mater for both this Phrontisterion philosopher and DAW.
Caveat
lector: The Reader will discover in this reflection a clear preference for the
interdisciplinary humanities curriculum
as the best corrector to the more mechanical (less “liberal”) examples of Liberal
Arts & Sciences (LA&S) curricula normally on offer in undergraduate
education, both in Europe and in America.
Donald
and Louise Cowan were the intellectual and dynamic impetus behind the rather
exceptional educational initiative embodied by the interdisciplinary graduate
program at the University of Dallas. As it says on the website for the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts:
“From the beginning this program has
been deservedly called unique. No other university offers an interdisciplinary
Ph.D. with a core curriculum in which students from the different fields within
the humanities participate as a group. Each semester for three years all the
students in the program share one of six core courses, each devoted to pivotal
texts within Western civilization. Students belong to a true,
cross-disciplinary intellectual community, using insights gained from the study
of each other's disciplines to deepen their knowledge of their own.”
The Cowan vision of interdisciplinary
humanities is akin to a great library full of books. But in this library the
books would not necessarily have to be arranged according to subject, but
instead, perhaps, according to a quasi anti-Dewey decimal system inspired by
both the chrono-linear strands of historical thinking and imagery, and by the constellatory
manner of ideas and values meeting at serendipitous crossroads in the ebb and
flow of human experience. This interdisciplinary library would, perhaps, be
oriented more like and would therefore be more truly similar in organization to
the Synopticon volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western
World.
Like
the simile of this great library, teaching that is inspired by a vision of
interdisciplinarity is, as well, characterized both by an attention to detail
that is intense, particular, and focused, and yet also of enormous breadth and wonderfully
rich in moral compass.
Dr. Louise Cowan interviewed this pre-Phrontisterion student of the
philosophical life in 1977 as part of the admittance process into the
at-that-time young-ish Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts, the graduate
school of Humanities at the University of Dallas. At that time all graduate
students in the Liberal Arts studied Literature –it was Dr. Louise’s area of
study (Southern Literature, e.g., Falkner, Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Alan
Tate, Caroline Gordon); my other two choice areas were Philosophy and Theology.
It was a successful first interview, obviously, because I was admitted to the
PhD program, although I left the program with an MA after three semesters and moved
on to other adventures in European universities. But it was an odd interview
right from the beginning, following Dr. Louise’s observation that it was, in
her experience, unusual for students to mix Literature, Philosophy, and
Theology at UD. Southern Literature, Phenomenological Philosophy, and
conservative Catholic Theology: I would only grasp well after the fact what
could be so unusual about that interdisciplinary constellation.
Be that as it may, however,
and leaving behind for the nonce the AUC conference ideas of Interdisciplinarity and
Core Courses and Core Texts, the European incarnations of the
LA&S model of undergraduate education seem, in the main, to resemble many
of their North American counterparts, which means that either they do not
address, or they address inadequately, the nature of interdisciplinarity in liberal education. This is to say that while
the European models of LA&S education still focus on essential academic
skills specific to the various academic disciplines of the Arts and the
Sciences, as do the vast majority of all universities, the way in which curricula
is presented in these LA&S models generally fail either to
deliver or to adequately frame those academic skills within a philosophically expanded
frame of liberal values. The go-to website
for the general mission of LA&S programs in Europe is ECOLAS, the consortium of European Colleges of
Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The site topuniversities.com
defines the liberal arts degree program as “interdisciplinary, covering topics
with the humanities, as well as social, natural and formal sciences. […] In general, … the term refers to degree programs that aim to provide a
broader spectrum of knowledge and skills.” By and large, however, the most common
model for a LA&S education in undergraduate
universities looks in structure a lot like academic warehousing, without any
meaningful connection between the academic disciplines. It is as if one had the
idea that, just because an institution gives office space to a philosopher
among the scientists and social scientists, this proximity somehow implies an intellectual,
or even simply an academic connection between the different academic players
and their academic subjects. Nothing could be further from the truth, or from
real practice.
It
is accurate to say, in general, that proponents of the LA&S model of
undergraduate education, both American and their European counterparts (e.g., Erasmus University Rotterdam, University College Freiburg, University College Utrecht and University College Roosevelt), claim
a certain degree of distinction for this undergraduate model by virtue of its
curriculum being different from (read: broader than) the classical monodisciplinarity (UCR
coinage) of the more traditional non-LA&S university programs. However,
notwithstanding the regular occurrence of the concept of “interdisciplinarity” on
their various websites, it is easy enough to discover that, by and large,
traditional curricular monodisciplinarity has really only been replaced with
some version of serial monodisciplinarity in these LA&S instantiations –the
mechanical juxtaposition of otherwise traditionally insular
academic disciplines, where possible subjects for study are simply housed
together in one location.
Reasonably, therefore,
this all-too common version of the LA&S educational model is still often challenged
to make its case to the European educational community at large, that its
warehouse educational model in fact offers some prima fascia educational advantage in a world environment that is
in dire need of true interdisciplinarity.
According to guidelines from the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (US), the undergraduate LA&S model is not
inherently interdisciplinary, but simply multi-disciplinary. An LA&S program,
therefore, does not guarantee any unifying thematic among the academic subjects
unless some additional pedagogical mechanism is deliberately introduced into
the curriculum to tease out intellectual links, and through their articulation,
to integrate those links among and between the various academic disciplines
(i.e., Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Formal Sciences). “Multidisciplinary activities draw
upon insights from two or more disciplines. Unlike interdisciplinary and
transdisciplinary activities, though, multidisciplinarity simply juxtaposes
these insights and does not attempt to integrate them.”
It follows, then,
that an undergraduate LA&S program structured around the concept of serial
monodisciplinarity is, pedagogically speaking, no more intrinsically
advantageous than housing a classical philosopher among scientists and social
scientists, or shopping at the local grocery story where one can buy any number
of unrelated products, from canned foods to children’s toys.
There are,
however, curricular mechanisms to help overcome structural insularity among
academic disciplines and to encourage institutional interdisciplinarity in
undergraduate LA&S teaching schemes. Among these curricular “fixes” could
be 1) for an institution to employ faculty who have themselves received their
education and training in an interdisciplinary LA&S program; 2) for an
institution to encourage interdisciplinarity during the process of course/curricular
creation, and in faculty interaction and intellectual cooperation, which might
look like the establishment of a core curriculum or, as in the case of Bard
College, a First-Year Seminar in The Language and Thinking Program; or 3) for an
institution to implement some kind of capstone concept (or in the case of Bard
College, a pre-enrollment seminar) in order for the student to be encouraged to
reflect upon, not the specific discipline-specific content actually learned and
studied during the undergraduate education, but rather on the conceptual (hence interdisciplinary and liberal) link between the various
academic disciplines in the undergraduate LA&S learning experience. It
should be noted that many of these curricular mechanisms are essentially band-aid
fixes, however, each of which has some strengths, but also significant learning-outcomes
based weaknesses.
To conclude with our metaphor of learning and shopping: there is
no inherent or necessary link between the various subjects/items the
student/shopper may ultimately select, either to study in LA&S or to
purchase in the store. Most incarnations of the LA&S idea are simply a warehousing of a bunch of different products in
the same building and under one roof: when one enters such a storehouse, one
walks down one aisle to find cereal products, another for meats, another for
beverages. When applied to education, this analogy looks like faculty corridors
filled with academics—scientists housed with scientists, social scientists with
social sciences, and the various humanities folks scattered hither and yon.
The curricular juxtaposition
of courses in the LA&S model is multidisciplinarity, that is to say,
functionally, a serial monodisciplinarity, which does not equate to
interdisciplinarity. True interdisciplinarity among academic subjects implies
the establishment of some kind of meaningful intellectual connection between and among the various disciplines
of the academy—as it were: a Great Conversation following out its various
strands among the academic disciplines. And while the interdisciplinary
curriculum clearly represents the very best embodiment of the LA&S model
for undergraduate education, there is certainly no
doubt that the Liberal Arts & Sciences model of education is a very big curricular
idea, and worthy; and European institutions seeking to discover a more
thoughtful and thought-provoking curriculum for undergraduate education should
definitely commit to the LA&S model if they
are interested in creating future citizens of Europe who will at least have some degree of formal experience and
competence in how to think globally
about themselves in history.
One of the great dark clouds that lingers
heavy-handedly over the Ivory Tower, threatening regularly to bring in with it
rocky weather, has to do with the question of Academic Research. This is, in
essence, a culture war in the academy. And the indisputable winners in the perception
contest are the sciences and social sciences, (irony follows:) which are
obviously of much more value not only to the Academy, but to the world, than
philosophy (and other humanities), as evidenced by that fact that the sciences
are regularly funded and solicited by the Hoity-Toity of industry, the private
sector, and beyond. For the most part, humanities gets funded to whatever
degree it can disguise itself (or its research methods) as one of the sciences,
but it is generally perceived to be an “also ran” in the race for academic recognition
and funding.
RESEARCH
–Ubi desinit
philosophus, ibi incipit medicus.
Once upon a time this Latin adage held sway
in the academy: “Where the philosopher stops, there commences the physician.”
It comes down to us from an original Aristotelian sentiment via the Latinized
philosophers of the Middle Ages & Renaissance, landing with a plop in the
mouth of the alchemist Doctor Faustus, a character translated through the Northern
Humanist world of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). Those were the days of the
academy when the classical perception of the humanist
philosopher, perhaps like the psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik, was at work gnawing on the bone of an
idea with her nose in a book, alone in her shabby digs, or haunting used-book
stores in search of general resources, or even (heaven forefend…), when driven
by necessity, searching through the university library databases—a
philosopher-detective sifting through the diverse worlds of the historians, the
linguists & literati, the religious minds of the East and the West, the
philosophers, critics, and scholars of any ilk, to discover who had left their
scent on that bone. The quality of the published thinking that resulted from
such a winding chase was directly linked to the breadth and depth of the
education, the erudition, as well as to the intuition and luck of the scholar.
Now,
although one would not normally suspect the STANFORD HUMANITIES CENTER of being given to mawkish nostalgia, they continue to
follow along this traditional path of defining research in the Humanities as
often involving “an individual professor researching in a library in order to
write a book. The books that result from this study are part of an ongoing
dialogue about the meaning and possibilities of human existence that reaches
back to ancient times and looks forward to our common future.”
Research in the humanities can take a variety of forms; it might include
studying language, literature, philosophy, religion, culture, and many other
disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. The study of the humanities is often
described as the study of the human experience.
Researchers may interpret texts, films, artworks,
music, language, cultural practices, and many other topics and questions.
The main mission of
the Institute for Research in the Humanities is to foster research in the
humanities by creating a stimulating, interdisciplinary community in which
fellows can pursue their work, share it with other fellows and members of the
campus, and benefit from intensive discussion with scholars from diverse
disciplinary backgrounds, fields, interests, and perspectives. We also promote
greater understanding of the humanities on campus and build bridges between the
humanities and the arts, social sciences, and sciences. Working closely with
the Center for the Humanities and other campus centers and institutes, we
encourage innovative, broad-ranging, and collaborative research in and thinking
about the humanities for the twenty-first century.
In these different “centers” for the
humanities in North America, which continue to represent the most traditional
aspects of the liberal A&S model
of undergraduate education, it is still possible to discover the older tradition
of the humanist scholar from the artes
liberales. Within the European context of humanities in the LA&S,
however, this type of scholar seems to be ever-more relegated to a closet for species
long extinct; and theory or theoretical knowledge—thinking—is stringently subjugated
to the financial constraints and practical demands and expectations of predominately
empirical, i.e., positivist, research traditions and methods of discovery. The
halcyon days of theoretical research, when humanities scholars pursued their
solitary visions through the highways and byways of erudition and scholarship
within the confines of the Ivory Tower, are rapidly fading away in the schematized
environment of European universities who yield the field and the day to “practical”
research goals and a highly “scientized” vision of University.
Now
in trying to determine what scientism is, and whether it represents a worthwhile
and therefore positive advancement in the academy, Thomas Burnett traces the
history of this idea on the site of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and concludes in favor of philosopher Tom Sorell’s (University of Warwick) rather precise albeit
uncomplimentary definition of this phenomenon: “Scientism is a matter of
putting too high a value on natural science in comparison with other branches
of learning or culture.”
But
for confirmation of the European academy’s commitment to scientism, one need
only look for common characterizations of what it means to do academic research
to discover that positivist research completely eclipses theoretical research.
The website of The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), for example, which is the prime funding organization
in the Netherlands for academic research, stipulates that the product of
research has a value, and is measurable—quantifiable by the usefulness of that
product “outside of academia and/or in other scientific disciplines.” The NWO
website goes on to suggest as viable examples of humanities research projects, those that might “contribute to solutions for
societal and scientific challenges like integration, the ageing population,
healthcare, and security.” These potentially fundable “humanities” projects, of
course, are not humanities at all, but rather social science or even perhaps
science projects in drag.
It
goes without saying that with such a positivist research vision and scheme, the imagination strains to conceive
how the NWO applicant could invent some such practical application for more liberal research, whose titles might range
from "Nietzsche and his Zarathustra: A Western Poet's Transformation of an
Eastern Priest and Prophet," and "Nietzsche's Zarathustra: The
Misreading of a Hero," to "Hermeneia. An Anatomy of History and
Ab-wesenheit." The tone has been set; and it is patently obvious that these
latterly named titles do not constitute academic research in this positivist
academy.
Excursus in the guise of a response to the
academy of positivist scholarship.
Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a
philosopher and scientist, and most scholars are of the opinion that he
established the methodological foundations for scientia broadly conceived. Correctly so. It is in fact for this
rather singular feat that he was eventually placed (twice!) on the index of the
Catholic Church (in the Condemnations of 1210 and reiterated in 1270) – not to
be read on pain of excommunication!
Now while Aristotle definitely
argued that the empirical sciences were certainly the most authoritative means
of gaining knowledge about particulars, i.e., the physical stuff of the world
(Metaphysics 981b13) –at this point quantifying and qualifying colleagues in
the sciences and social sciences should be paying attention—he
concluded that none of these materially or empirically grounded sciences would
lead to wisdom or discernment—(sophia)
latin = sapientia, and that the
knowledge of speculative or theoretical wisdom was of higher worth than the knowledge of observable ‘facts’. So Aristotle held that scientia must be framed by sapientia
in order to have the highest value for men (981a24-25), arguing that “knowledge (εἰδέναι) and understanding (ἐπαΐειν) belong to art (τέχνῃ = in the sense of ‘speculative
thinking’) rather than to experience (empiricism), and we suppose artists (speculative
thinkers) to be wiser than men of experience (material scientists) (which
implies that Wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge).”
Aristotle’s
philosophical reasoning is the source both for the ‘artes’ concept behind the artes
liberales, and for the liberales bit
as well. This art or tekne of
understanding, which (spoiler alert) Aristotle defines as the philosophy of
first causes and the
very highest of the sciences, does not derive its status from quantifying and qualifying
data or information (simple empiricism), but rather from thinking specifically about
all knowledge as it is framed by the intelligible world that surrounds it (Wissenschaft broadly conceived). Ecce philosophia, as some variation on
Nietzsche could have said but never did.
Step
I. Metaphysics 981a30-981b2 &
981b13. Aristotle reasons in favor of “arts & sciences” understanding, liberally.
As a method of discovery, empiricism (positivism) is limited; it does not have
the ‘artful’ quality necessary to lead one to understanding or wisdom. Loosely
translated, this means that Science needs Philosophy (speculation of a
theoretical nature) in order to produce comprehension that has value. (Translation by David Ross)
“If, then, a man has the theory without the experience, and
recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he
will often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured.) But yet
we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to
experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience (which implies
that Wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge); and this because the
former know the cause, but the latter do not. For men of experience know that
the thing is so, but do not know why, while the others know the 'why' and the
cause.”
“Again, we do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet
surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do
not tell us the 'why' of anything-e.g., why fire is hot; they only say that it
is hot.”
Step
II. 981b30-982a1 & 982b10.
Theoretical kinds of knowledge have more of the nature
of understanding than productive kinds of knowledge. So, while knowledge that is intended to
create or produce something, such as data, formulae, houses, et al, is
obviously enormously useful, it is a mistake to measure the value of knowledge
strictly, or even primarily, in terms of its practical utility.
“…all men suppose what is called Wisdom to
deal with the first causes and the principles of things; so
that, as has been said before, the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense-perception whatever, the
artist wiser than the men of experience, the masterworker than
the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more
of the nature of Wisdom than the productive.”
ὁ μὲν ἔμπειρος
τῶν ὁποιανοῦν ἐχόντων αἴσθησιν εἶναι δοκεῖ (30)
σοφώτερος, ὁ δὲ
τεχνίτης τῶν ἐμπείρων, χειροτέχνου δὲ ἀρ‑
(982a.) χιτέκτων, αἱ δὲ θεωρητικαὶ τῶν ποιητικῶν μᾶλλον.
"That [the type of knowledge we are looking for] is not
a science of production is clear even from the history of the earliest
philosophers. For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at
first began to philosophize.”
Ὅτι δ’ οὐ ποιητική, δῆλον καὶ ἐκ τῶν
πρώτων φιλοσοφη‑
σάντων· διὰ γὰρ τὸ θαυμάζειν οἱ
ἄνθρωποι καὶ νῦν καὶ
τὸ πρῶτον ἤρξαντο φιλοσοφεῖν,
Conclusion. Aristotle clearly affirms that the
highest form of understanding derives from a cross-fertilizing idea of knowledge,
where practical knowledge is inseparably wed to theoretical understanding, and
indeed, where the practical derives its essential value from the theoretical.
This is precisely the vision that has served as the historical foundation for
the academic tradition of the liberal
Arts & Sciences. Many of the missteps and moral dilemmas created by the
application and mis-application of scientific knowledge, especially in more recent
history, could perhaps have been avoided if the knowledge gleaned by scientists
had also been tempered by the understanding of philosophers, if scientific knowledge in the Ivory Tower had not
been systemically unharnessed from the premise of thinking—from what Aristotle would call, philosophical understanding.
I have argued elsewhere that knowledge, by which I meant knowledge obtained
empirically, is a “neutral quantity,” but that “the applications of all knowledge… are never neutral.”
Hence our various missteps and dilemmas.
Instead of simply teaching insular academic
skills under the cover of LA&S, the best interdisciplinary models for the
LA&S curriculum, such as the Cowan Method of Teaching the Liberal Arts, provide for an education that includes
not only academically essential and discipline specific skills, but which also teaches
those skills in terms of a philosophically enriched environment and a values-oriented intellectual core. Who knows… perhaps the NWO
could adopt a new criterion in its assessment of the value of research: What
would Aristotle think of this scientific project?
Further
Reading:
·
The Nuremberg Code: “The judgment by the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg laid
down 10 standards to which physicians must conform when carrying out
experiments on human subjects in a new code that is now accepted worldwide.”
·
Edwin Black’s IBM and the
Holocaust. The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most
Powerful Corporation (NY: Crown Publishers, 2001)
·
R. J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors.
Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (NY: Basic Books, 1986)
