Alfred North Whitehead

Strikingly, Whitehead chose the modern business school as representative of modern directions in university theory and practice. As a Harvard philosopher, he was in an excellent position to comment on this particular innovation in higher education, since Harvard University was the first school in the United States to have a graduate program in business administration.

Read more: Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) – The Nature of Education, Educational Development and the Rhythm of Growth, Universities and Professional Training http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2548/Whitehead-Alfred-North-1861-1947.html#ixzz0j9VYfyd6

Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Transpersonal business studies – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.”

The great thing about Maslow is his desire to understand a standard of health. Before we start talking about what’s wrong with sick people, we need to know what’s right with healthy ones. He used exemplars like Lincoln and Einstein to attempt to describe universal traits of those who are best among us. Even if you don’t agree with his specific conclusions, you have to admire the attempt he made.

Saving Philosophy from the Philosophers

Is there any reason to believe that what academic philosophers are doing is something other than philosophy? Who has the right to say what philosophy is or isn’t? Aren’t they the ones that should know?

The academic philosophers probably do know best, and that’s where they should feel ashamed for allowing themselves to become so distracted. Philosophy was once a noble art, now it is subordinate even to science. It’s not as if scientists have much respect for philosophers, anyway. Theory-ladenness, falsifiability, verifiability. These ideas may be thought about while in some odd class on the way to the lab, but scientists will probably disregard all of that in favor of the research tradition they have inherited. That’s what everybody respects, after all. That’s what gets results. And by results, we mean research grants and tenure.

Obviously, the tradition of philosophy is vast. It has been many different things to many different thinkers. When looking for a definition of philosophy, there are probably as many or more as there are philosophers. But one thing that is interesting about philosophy is its self-consciousness. It asks itself about itself all the time. One might call it meta-philosophy, if you can stomach another ‘meta’ word. But to ask the question of what philosophy is or isn’t is very much within the tradition to do. Plato defined it as the study of first principles, which I take to mean that it’s the original interdisciplinary program. And under Plato’s definition, it should very much be the centerpiece (or at least very near center) of any university system. Whatever philosophy has become, it is not that.

The war between the analytics and the continentals isn’t helping matters. The best philosophers don’t seem to pay that division any heed. They are willing to gain wisdom where it might be found. It just seems that many philosophers get too narrowly focused on one side or the other. They feel justified in doing so under the directive to specialize. I am certainly not saying that specialization isn’t important, but philosophy, over any other discipline, should be aware of what else is going on. There is a big picture to try to understand. While we each break off into the smaller groups of specialization, hacking away at a certain type of problem, we must remember that the philosophers are here to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. In effect, specialization is exactly what philosophy is not.

Trade union

Trade union – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Trade secret

Trade secret – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Initiation Rites

Fraternities and sororities – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Rite of passage – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Initiation – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The primary purpose of the initiation is to transform youth to adulthood. This transformation is from the androgyny of youth to the gendered adult. It is very much a matter of cultural conditioning. It is the chance for the individual to realize his or her responsibilities in the larger community.

Is Philosophy just a game?

A meatspace friend of mine is in grad school, he thinks of philosophy as a game. A twitter friend doesn’t believe we should take philosophy personally. Can either of these professionals understand why philosophy may have lost relevance in the eyes of the public? But more importantly, would either of them care?

I am honored by my twitter friend referring to me as a philosopher. I don’t have a Ph.D. and probably never will, and I am not accustomed to anyone who has those kinds of credentials taking me seriously enough to call me a philosopher. So thanks for that, but I believe I would prefer to keep philosophy personal. I believe I would rather look at it as if my life depended on it. It reminds me of the story of the buddhist who cut off his arm to prove to his teacher that he was serious. On the other hand, I could be wrong.

I admit that I have a romantic view of the possibilities of higher ed in general, and philosophy in particular. I actually like the idea of a castle in the sky, the cloistered environment for the pursuit of truth where there’s no danger of being tainted by the rabble. But what happens when the university is now in the valley, looking up at the amateurs on the mountain? Up is down, and down is up. The world is in disarray.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

– Einstein

Women’s studies

Women’s studies – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Category:Women’s organizations – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter

Men’s studies

Men’s studies – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Category:Men’s organizations – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husband

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son

Contingency

I assume it as true that we can’t know how to respond to a situation if we don’t understand the situation we’re responding to. But this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Some situations require us to respond immediately. Perhaps we understand some sense of urgency about the moment, without a lot of other kinds of information getting through. In the heat of the moment, we make lots of decisions that we might later regret. But we have to work with what we’ve got. We don’t all have the luxury of being philosophers, smoking our pipes (the good old days) in the halls of the ivory tower.

We have to consider all kinds of things when we make these decisions, too. As Hume said, we have commitments other than reason that need accounted for. There are dangers in living too long in Academia. Maybe you should work the fields with a farmer from time to time to bring it all back home. Maybe it would be healthy for a philosopher to have a day job, like grinding lenses, or maybe to only do philosophy one day a year. I don’t know. We do know that philosophy was born of the leisure class with too much time on their hands. Perhaps as a way to fight off the ennui that only leisured classes experience because they don’t have to face the daily struggle for existence.

To what extent do we need to understand the situation before we can respond to it? How do we even judge what is the necessary degree of understanding? On a practical level, maybe all we need to understand is that amount that enables us to respond somehow. To be frozen without a response is not enough, unless maybe that is in itself the correct response to the situation.

Personally, I find myself reacting against the personality type that just responds somehow. I find it distasteful to act without thinking. I find it crude, and likely to cause more harm than good. However, I can see (faintly) the perspective that these personality types would have of me. All I have to do is think of the way Marx railed against Hegel, looking down his nose at mere philosophers.

What if I were to say,  “It really doesn’t matter if this is the best of all possible worlds. It doesn’t really matter what the ideal world might be. You are in a particular world now. You can forget whatever possible worlds are not this one. Deal with this one, right here and now!” Then you could respond by saying, “How can we know how we should respond if we don’t know what kind of world we’re trying to bring about?” Do we need to understand both the real and the ideal to act correctly?

Since none of us are omnipotent, there’s another limit to consider. There are only so many forms of behavior available to us as types of responses to any given situation. So far, then, there are three things we need to know. 1) What is the situation I am in? 2) What situation would I prefer? 3) What tools do I have at my disposal to turn 1 into 2?

I tend to live in my head. I need to learn how to translate thought into action. I need something of that personality type that just acts without thinking. A small dose of that would probably be good for me. In my defense, however, I believe thinking is a type of action. Thinking is the right thing to do if thinking is what the situation calls for. Sometimes the academics should learn from the farmers, but at the same time the farmers (no I don’t literally mean farmers) should learn from the academics. Since this is the situation I find myself in, this blog is hopefully the best response.