Where Have All the Characters Gone? Understanding the Changing Ethos of Higher Education and the Reclaiming of “Being” in Higher Education via an Analytical Matrix

• Authors: Gilder Eric
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Loosely drawing its inspiration from the movie “The Matrix,” the article first walks the reader through the seminal work of two philosophers not usually placed together—Stephen Pepper and Richard Weaver. Specifically, the paper draws from Pepper’s phil-osophical categories of knowledge (formism, mechanism, contextualism and organi-cism) and Weaver’s philosophical categories of argument (argument by definition, ar-gument by analogy and argument by cause-and-effect/ circumstance) to create an ana-lytical matrix of twelve categories by which the varied formative institutions of higher education today, both in structure and exemplars, can be profitably compared both to the ethos of the “classic” university of the past. From within these competing historical models and their present-day reiterations, the locus of the often “disappearing” human being within them can (perhaps) be re-discovered by a reclaiming of a comprehensively self-reflective and critical reconstruction of meaning, a meaning which is often cloaked by a “secret” ideology governed by an unacknowledged worldview.

Keywords

EN

Root metaphors/worldviews (Stephen Pepper); categories of argument (Richard Weaver); idea of the university (John Henry Newman); higher learning in America (Thorstein Veblen)

• Publisher: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk; Fundacja Filozofia Na Rzecz Dialogu
• Journal: Dialogue and Universalism
• Year: 2015
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 256-268

Contributors

author

Gilder Eric

• The Papua New Guinea University of Technology (UNITECH), Lae, Morobe Province, 411, Papua New Guinea