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Speaker 1

00:00

Are you in college? The Thomistic Institute's Study Abroad Program is now accepting applications for the spring semester of 2024.

Speaker 2

00:08

This unique and exciting Study Abroad Program offers you the opportunity to spend a semester in Rome at the Dominican Order's Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. You'll study the ancient and medieval intellectual tradition of Rome, live with like-minded young men and women steps from the Colosseum, and participate in weekly cultural and intellectual events, regular day trips, and multi-day excursions.

Speaker 2

00:35

To learn more about this life-changing opportunity, go to thomisticinstitute.org. That's thomisticinstitute.org. Welcome to the Thomistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

Speaker 2

00:57

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Thomistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at ThomisticInstitute.org.

Speaker 3

01:11

I'll get started in just a minute. I have a written lecture to read. I always feel a little bit awkward about that because I'd actually like to engage in conversation.

Speaker 3

01:19

But I'm going to read the lecture. The Thomistic Institute likes to record these and many of them turn into podcasts for people to listen to. We'll have a chance to do some question and answer afterwards. So I look forward to that conversation afterwards.

Speaker 3

01:34

And if you can come tomorrow morning, I'm happy to continue the conversation. The title, I will be talking about the title in the talk, but I'm grateful for the title. I don't know who wrote the title. I might have written the title, but if I didn't write the title someone else That I need to thank wrote the title, but I was assigned this title and so I wrote a new lecture I have a couple of different lectures that I've given But this is a new lecture for you and so you also can help me like refine it you can tell me if it made any sense or if it connected with other things that you've been thinking about in liberal education.

Speaker 3

02:12

Sound good? You ready? This could be like 45 minutes maybe almost 50 minutes. I know that's a lot to ask, so buckle up, alright?

Speaker 3

02:22

Is integrated learning still possible? The role of philosophy in liberal education. My main title asks, is integrated learning still possible? In its surface structure, this is a theoretical question, which can receive an answer, yes or no, and either way could be defended with reasons, Explained and perhaps qualified or unqualified with further details.

Speaker 3

02:49

Why and under what conditions is or isn't integrated learning possible? I say this is a theoretical question, but rhetorically it also implies a practical question. On the assumption that we want integrated learning, what can we do to get it? What steps are available to us to achieve integrated learning?

Speaker 3

03:09

Or if it is not possible, what then? What are the implications for the choices of non-integrated learning still available to us? I will in fact try to give some practical advice by the end of this talk, but the practical advice, even if rooted in other practical concerns, will have to draw from answers to the theoretical questions. A suggestion of an answer to the question in the title is already provided in the subtitle.

Speaker 3

03:36

It seems we regard liberal education as that kind of education in and through which integrated learning is possible. But about liberal education, there is another implicit question. What role does philosophy, if any, play in integrating the learning of liberal education? There are other questions embedded in the title.

Speaker 3

04:00

It invites us to clarify terms. The word integrated is in quotation marks. Perhaps it is an authoritative or somehow formal word which needs interpretation. Or perhaps it is a word so often repeated in different contexts that it is subject to confusion or has lost its meaning.

Speaker 3

04:19

In any case, we need to clarify what concept it is supposed to capture. And for that matter, we may need to clarify what the words liberal education and philosophy mean as well. And perhaps we will do so precisely by clarifying what integration means. I've just spent a long time belaboring some very simple points.

Speaker 3

04:37

When I shared the title of this talk with my teenage daughter and asked her what she thought I was going to say, she could infer immediately that integrated learning is possible thanks to the role of philosophy in liberal education. My daughter is perceptive. That would be a reasonable thesis for me to defend. But if it is my thesis, and I suppose in a way it is, what does it mean?

Speaker 3

05:00

And how should I defend it? Why should 1 believe such a claim? And what are its implications? So my opening questions have, I hope, disposed you not to take too much for granted and to appreciate the network of questions implied by the title.

Speaker 3

05:15

A classical rhetorician might wonder if this extended prologue has made you docile and interested, if I have fostered my audience's humility and courage. My opening reflections also serve another purpose. They exhibit the utility of the most basic tools of liberal education. Consider them tools of interpretation, or what Aristotle and the Scholastic tradition which learned from him called dialectic, or sometimes simply logic.

Speaker 3

05:43

I'm not going to say much about Aristotle or Aquinas in this talk, but I assure you that what I say draws on study of what they say, especially about the nature of reasoning. I will only note here that simply by reflecting thoughtfully on my title, by engaging in what I hope is a propagandic and not pedantic exercise of interpretation. So far I have employed at least 3 sets of distinctions fundamental to the traditional Aristotelian approach to the art of reasoning. First, my reflections draw from the division of acts of intellect into 3 types.

Speaker 3

06:20

The formation of concepts as when we reflect on the meaning of terms or define and distinguish key notions. The making of judgments as when we give or refuse assent to statements, assessing the truth or falsehood of claims. And discursive reasoning, that is, connecting or running together multiple judgments, giving reasons supporting the truth of 1 claim in light of another, and illuminating inferences and forming arguments. Second, I've been drawing on the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning.

Speaker 3

06:55

Sometimes we use our rational powers for the sake of knowing, and sometimes we use them for the sake of doing. These are of course connected. We can act in order to seek truth and we can use the truths we know in order to discern what actions to choose. Philosophers even argue sometimes about whether or not or in what sense different specialties like ethics or theology, sometimes even logic, in what sense they count as practical or theoretical.

Speaker 3

07:21

But such contested or mixed cases only confirm that the distinction is helpful for us to clarify exactly how and why we are exercising our minds and better understand the relation between our knowing and our doing. Third, I've employed the distinction that constitutes 3 of the traditional 7 liberal arts, the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. For when evaluating language, it is 1 thing to look at the external structure of expressions, grammar, in order to evaluate their correctness and function in terms of linguistic conventions. It is another thing to discern the intelligible content of what is expressed, to evaluate the adequacy of concepts, the truth of propositions, and the reasonableness of inferences.

Speaker 3

08:09

And it is yet another thing to consider the social influence of those expressions as contextualized acts of communication in order to appreciate and evaluate the persuasive effect of expressions as distinct from their grammatical correctness or logical strength. For language has an undeniable power to stir imagination and emotion, the effective energy of words to soothe or disturb, to activate a memory or arouse a sense of dignity, to provoke wonder or sow doubt, to divide by fear or bind by love. Enough preliminaries. Let's get to the issues.

Speaker 3

08:49

Is integrated learning possible? What is the role of philosophy in liberal education? My plan is to proceed by a via negativa, the negative way. I will seek to clarify terms indirectly by noticing first some errors or pitfalls.

Speaker 3

09:04

To gain a better understanding of what integration, liberal education, and philosophy are, and how they are related, and why they are valuable, and how we might achieve them, let us consider in turn what they are not. So the first main section is what integration is not. In some contexts, integrating can simply mean mixing or combining. Even if we understand parts as integrated into a whole, we might think of the whole as simply the sum of the parts, as if integration is merely aggregation or accumulation.

Speaker 3

09:39

To have fully integrated knowledge in this sense would only mean to acquire all the parts of knowledge, and in that sense, to know everything. There may have been a time when this was thought to be achievable. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who died in 1832, and Alexander von Humboldt, who died in 1859, are sometimes offered as candidates for the title of the last man to know everything. The 18th and early 19th centuries boast a class of scientific and literary polymaths who knew multiple languages, practiced various arts, and contributed to science and culture.

Speaker 3

10:18

What disciplines they did not directly participate in they could keep abreast of through reading, correspondence, joining philosophical and scientific societies, attending lectures, and keeping the right society. It tells us something about the history of knowledge that it even seemed possible to know everything and desirable to compile all knowledge, the encyclopedic ideal also a phenomenon of the 18th and 19th centuries. We still have resources that call themselves encyclopedias, but they are not in fact, and they do not pretend to be truly encyclopedic, offering a comprehensive account of all branches of knowledge. The aggregative or accumulative notion of comprehensive knowledge, what I'm calling the encyclopedic ideal, expired, breathing its final breath perhaps in 1889 with the publication of the 9th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Speaker 3

11:17

Why is comprehensive knowledge in this sense not possible anymore? The sheer quantity of knowledge is surely too great, but a stronger factor is the proliferation of disciplines, and specialization within the disciplines. Goethe could master many disciplines, but today the most intelligent person can rarely claim to have mastered even 1. Take a single field with a clear standard of mastery—mathematics.

Speaker 3

11:42

Can 1 and the same person be an expert in all the branches of mathematics—number theory and probability, and topology and game theory and non-Euclidean geometries. I won't list them all. Or take a discipline where 1 might expect a common set of commitments and principles, like Catholic theology. Different methods and assumptions and scholarly authorities make a biblical scholar unlikely to teach systematic theology, a canon lawyer unlikely to teach liturgy, and a moral theologian unlikely to teach patristics.

Speaker 3

12:15

I say unlikely. There may be exceptions, but they prove the rule. Modern disciplinary specialists are as likely to feel actually as separated by their specialties as they are nominally united by a general discipline. We aspire to integrated knowledge because we experience modern disciplines not only as proliferated and specialized but as fragmented.

Speaker 3

12:39

We don't want or need to know everything, but it would surely be beneficial to know how everything is connected, how to grasp the various parts not in their separate detail, but as parts constituting a whole. To speak of the integration of knowledge, then, we aren't aiming for an encyclopedic or comprehensive accumulation of knowledge, not knowing everything in the sense of mastering all the disciplines. That polymathic aspiration was probably never really possible, even 200 years ago. But today, it seems not only quaint, but unhelpful.

Speaker 3

13:13

What, then, could integrated learning be? It would be comprehensive in a different sense, as capable of ordering and relating all knowledge. It would be like the knowledge of an architect who coordinates all of the arts serving the building project

Speaker 1

13:28

–

Speaker 3

13:29

the stone carvers and carpenters, the toolmakers and wood millers, the iron smelters and mortar mixers, without needing to practice these skills himself. He appreciates them, orders them, and supports them, actually helps them to perfect their individual dignity and find opportunity for their fulfillment as ordered towards a common, noble project. The architect's understanding of the crafts draws on and contributes to, without seeking to replace or fully master each individual craft.

Speaker 3

14:01

Integrated knowledge would be architectonic in this sense, and integrated learning would be a learning that even in the act of studying parts would be seeking to relate them to wholes. Integration after all usually does not mean mere aggregation or conjunction, but something more like incorporation. To take something and make it a part of a whole, not simply count as a part of something, but help it to actualize it as something that participates in something else. To integrate a part into a whole thus makes the part a part, a member of something greater.

Speaker 3

14:38

And in a way it also changes the whole. If something is an integral part of a whole, it somehow helps to constitute or fulfill or realize that whole as a whole, and so the whole would not be complete without the part, it would not be fully the whole that it is. For parts to be integrated is for them to be ordered to a common end, to be made part of a system that depends on them and yet cannot be reduced to any set of parts, even the whole set of parts, considered as parts. The whole, or system, or community, is the interrelation of the parts.

Speaker 3

15:15

Integrated knowledge would be knowledge whose parts form an ensemble, a harmony, as musicians making up an orchestra. The poet, storyteller, and essayist Wendell Berry, in his 1984 essay, The Loss of the University, chooses an appropriately organic example of the precondition of integrated knowledge, an openness to different ways of reflecting on the concept of a tree. Here's Wendell Berry. It is necessary, for example, that the word tree evoke memories that are both personal and cultural.

Speaker 3

15:49

In order to understand fully what a tree is, we must remember much of our experience with trees and much that we have heard and read about them. We destroy those memories by reducing trees to facts, by thinking of tree as a mere word, or by treating our memory of trees as cultural history. When we call a tree a tree, we are not isolated among words and facts, but we are at once in the company of the tree itself and surrounded by ancestral voices calling out to us all that trees have been and meant. This is simply the condition of being human in this world, and there is nothing that art and science can do about it except get used to it.

Speaker 3

16:32

But of course, only specialized professional arts and sciences would propose or wish to do something about it. Berry specifically takes this example to represent an ideal for university education, to speak of things in a way that captures their true nature, which requires that specialized disciplines recognize themselves as specialized, that is, as partial and limited in their view of the whole. Here is Berry again. This necessity for words and facts to return to their objects in the world describes 1 of the boundaries of a university, 1 of the boundaries of book learning anywhere, and it describes the need for humility, restraint, exacting discipline, and high standards within that boundary.

Speaker 3

17:22

Berry proposes this ideal of humble submission to reality specifically as a response to the experience of fragmentation. 1 of the things that 1 might know about a tree, for instance, is how powerfully it has served as an image of an ordered whole. So Barry's tree becomes, for integrated knowing, not only an example, but a metaphor. Dr.

Speaker 3

17:47

Johnson, he relates, told Mrs. Thrail that his cousin, Cornelius Ford, advised him to study the principles of everything, that a general acquaintance with life might be the consequence of his inquiries. Learn, said he, the leading precognita of all things. Grasp the trunk hard only, and you will shake all the branches." The soundness of this advice seems indisputable, and the metaphor entirely apt.

Speaker 3

18:14

From the trunk, it is possible to branch out. 1 can begin, continues Berry, with a trunk and develop a single branch or any number of branches. Although it may be possible to begin with a branch and develop a trunk, that is neither so probable nor so promising. As Berry applies the metaphor, a healthy university would be a living tree whose many branches are nourished by a strong trunk rooted in deep soil.

Speaker 3

18:44

Against this standard, Berry argues, the modern university more and more resembles a loose collection of locked branches waving about randomly in the air. Modern knowledge is departmentalized, H. J. Massingham wrote in 1943, while the essence of culture is initiation into wholeness, so that all the divisions of knowledge are considered as the branches of 1 tree, the tree of life whose roots went deep into earth and whose top was in heaven.

Speaker 3

19:18

And so for Berry, the metaphor is not only useful for its strong biological association, but for its lofty theological associations, elevating the mind to awareness of all things in relation to God. I have 1 more quote from Barry, is it alright if I keep doing this? This tree, for many hundreds of years, seems to have come almost naturally to mind when we have sought to describe the form of knowledge. In Western tradition, it is at least as old as Genesis, and the form it gives us for all that we know is organic, unified, comprehensive, connective, and moral.

Speaker 3

19:57

The tree at the beginning was 2 trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Later, in our understanding of them, the 2 trees seem to have become 1, or each seems to stand for the other, for in the world after the fall, how can the 2 be separated? To know life is to know good and evil. To prepare young people for life is to prepare them to know the difference between good and evil.

Speaker 3

20:24

If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree. The history of modern education may be the history of the loss of this image and of its replacement by the pattern of the industrial machine, which subsists upon division, and by industrial economics, publish or perish, which is meaningless apart from division. That was all Berry.

Speaker 3

21:00

By reflecting on false conceptions of integration, by articulating the felt problem of fragmentation to which authentic integration must answer, and by drawing insight from Wendell Berry, we come to this. Integration is tracing things to their origins and ends. It is knowing parts as ordered to wholes, and grasping the whole as ordering the parts, and the parts as related to and complementing each other in their ordering to the whole. Integration doesn't only connect, it organizes.

Speaker 3

21:29

It grasps, beyond the conjunction of parts, the unity of the whole. It doesn't enumerate each branch, each leaf, each cell, or each molecule of the tree, but comprehends them all in the sense of grasping them all as elements of the tree. The second main part, what liberal education is not. Surely you have heard at least some of the following popular but misleading half-truths about what is meant by liberal education.

Speaker 3

22:02

People say that it aims at producing students who are well-rounded, as if liberal education is a little of this and a little of that, wide coverage with no depth. Like a piece of material subjected to the action of an abrasive file. Well-rounded suggests raw rough spots smoothed off through broad but shallow exposure. Or we hear that liberal education fosters cultural appreciation.

Speaker 3

22:30

With some history in literature and art, the student learns to recognize and value what counts as culturally significant, and spares embarrassment when such topics arise at the proverbial cocktail party. At best, the goal is not wisdom, but maybe erudition. Perhaps liberal education is about self-discovery, although 1 of the first things we need to know is whether that phrase is heard as a kind of Socratic invitation, know thyself, or a narcissistic excuse, find yourself in whatever you want. Liberal education surely should have profound personal significance, but such a subjectivist phrase does not illuminate the nature of liberal education.

Speaker 3

23:15

Related to this, I've been disappointed to notice a trend in describing liberal education as about exploring meaning, even worse if meaning is characterized as something made or created. Presumably, this is supposed to position liberal education in contrast with science, which treats meaningless facts. But does that mean that liberal education is about non-factual meanings? I'm sure you've heard liberal education described as useless.

Speaker 3

23:42

This description even has the power to unify its critics and champions. Why engage in useless studies, sneer the pragmatists who recommend engineering or nursing. Precisely because it has a value beyond utility, respond the liberal educators, embracing uselessness as a badge of honor. In fact the uselessness of liberal education has been greatly exaggerated.

Speaker 3

24:04

Liberal learning is incredibly useful. Yes, its utility arises from the fact that some kinds of knowledge are more valuable for their own sake and not instrumentally, but that does not mean that liberal learning has no instrumental value or utility. A particularly dangerous characterization of liberal education is that it teaches the art of critical thinking. In a very classical sense, where criticism means active intellectual engagement, it is true that this is an aspect of liberal education.

Speaker 3

24:34

But in the modern ethos, critical thinking too easily suggests suspicion and doubt, rejection of tradition and authority, and corrosive skepticism. Liberal education should make 1 free but not lawlessly independent. It requires discipline, conformity to standards, and a grasping of things for what they are. So on the other hand, perhaps we should think of liberal education as a kind of civic education or education for responsible citizenship.

Speaker 3

25:04

Am I right? Have you heard a lot of these? These are common phrases. They're on all the websites and all the colleges that try to say that they're liberal arts institutions.

Speaker 3

25:13

Does civic education mean that liberal studies are a tool of politicians, or a shield against them. Leo Strauss said that liberal education is counterpoison to mass culture. A liberally educated mind being less prone to fads and temptations, harder to mislead, perhaps not eliminating confusion and ignorance but providing the power to overcome confusion and ignorance. I have no doubt that authentic liberal education can make 1 a more responsible citizen, at least in being less susceptible to propaganda and manipulation.

Speaker 3

25:45

But that is a side effect of liberal education, not the defining purpose. The great American contribution to the conception and renewal of liberal education is the invention of great books education. In a moment I will speak about its greatest promoter, Mortimer Adler, and I agree that books, great ones, are essential to liberal education, but the notion of great books carries a risk of several misconceptions. That liberal education introduces you to a coherent conversation.

Speaker 3

26:15

That it is a conversation of questions with no answers. That education is a matter of authorities and a mastery of a canon. That liberal education only prepares you to be a certain kind of reader or scholar with no relevance at all to the real world. There are in fact many different kinds of great books initiatives, and no 1 of them is guilty of fostering all of these mistakes, but they are common criticisms.

Speaker 3

26:39

Having reviewed these inadequate conceptions of liberal education, let us give a further hearing to Mortimer Adler, who is more subtle on the topic of liberal education than the great book's label suggests. In a

Speaker 1

26:51

1937

Speaker 3

26:52

article, Tradition and Communication, Adler argued that the liberal arts of the trivium—that is, grammar, rhetoric, and logic—are primarily and essentially the arts of teaching and being taught. Logic, broadly construed, is a crucial animating theme for Adler. Dialectic was the subject and title of his first book in

Speaker 1

27:15

1927

Speaker 3

27:16

and informed his reflections on collegiate curricular reform. For the Thomist philosopher Charles Deconnick, Adler's 1937 article emphasized too strongly the utility of logic. Deconnick wrote Adler a long letter criticizing the implication that logic was a practical art.

Speaker 3

27:36

De Connick distinguished between speculative and practical arts, and said that while grammar and rhetoric may be practical, logic was speculative. The 2 men exchanged another set of letters but a few years later in 1941 Adler took the opportunity of a visit to the University of Laval in Quebec to carefully refine his position on a generous in a generous response to Deconnick's criticism. In a lecture on logic and liberal education, which is unpublished, Adler is quite deferent to De Connick as an expert in scholastic philosophy and seeks agreement by clarifying the kind of practical utility that he meant to attribute to logic. So in this lecture Adler says, the liberal arts are not arts of thinking if that word be used to name the acts of intellect as an isolated faculty.

Speaker 3

28:30

Not even logic is an art of thinking in this sense of thinking. But of course there is no truth in this particular sense of thinking, for the intellect never operates in isolation from the sensitive powers, the will, and the passions. If by human thinking we mean the functioning of the intellect in conjunction with other powers, in various conditions of interdependence functionally, then the liberal arts are the arts of human thinking. Adler is arguing that while logic is often described as the art of reasoning, for real live human beings thinking is never separated from its embodied and affective dimension, and so is only understood with attention to its grammatical and rhetorical implications.

Speaker 3

29:15

We might keep in mind that between 1937 and 1941, Adler had published, in 1940, the book that would make him famous and rich. Rare for a philosopher. How to Read a Book, subtitled The Art of Getting a Liberal Education. In that book, Adler described a liberal education as 1 that prepared students to read great books.

Speaker 3

29:38

And he promoted the effort of St. John's, the college in Annapolis, Maryland, which Adler had helped to re-found on the great books model. But less appreciated about how to read a book was how Adler designed it to convey the classical trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which is highlighted in Adler's clarification on the liberal arts. Logic, he says, by itself is not the art of thinking.

Speaker 3

30:04

I stress the word the here. It is rather an art of thinking or learning. By itself it is an inadequate art. The adequate art of thinking or learning is the trivium, has a triune unity.

Speaker 3

30:17

None of the liberal arts, in separation from the other 2, is adequate. For Adler, the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic constitute the art of liberal education, that is, an education in how to learn. Another passage from Adler. It may not be possible for a student to become learned in all fields of subject matter, but he is not truly a liberal artist unless he is trained to be competent as a learner in all fields.

Speaker 3

30:44

For, as a matter of fact, if his training in the liberal arts is exclusively in the scientific or the philosophical dimension. His ability to think in the other field will not only be lacking, but he will tend to try to think in 1 field as he learns to think in the other. It is a sin against intelligence, says St. Thomas, to try to proceed in the same way in diverse subject matters.

Speaker 3

31:07

A liberal artist, in the true sense, is 1 who is competent as a learner, hence as a thinker, in any field of subject matter, and as a learner both by instruction and by unaided discovery. So Adlerian Omnicompetence is not acquired by dabbling and acquiring a taste in each different methodology, but by recognizing each methodology as a specialized methodology, an application of reason to a specific field, with inherent limitations and implicit connections. This requires the student to seek and participate in communication among the disciplines, and it is this mode of communication that is fostered by the Trivium. Without the disciplines of the liberal arts, there is no communication of the disciplines.

Speaker 3

32:01

This communication is what allows the institution dedicated to liberal education to count as a university. The unity of the university, he says, must be an ordered diversity, including science, philosophy, and theology. The work of the university must be a fruitful discussion of fundamental issues arising from the cross-play of the diverse subject matters. This is not possible without communication, and communication is impossible without liberal discipline.

Speaker 3

32:32

Some might be tempted to translate Adler's point as a claim about how and why we should seek to be interdisciplinary, but that word could imply simply juxtaposing or relating disciplines, not integrating them. A better word might be transdisciplinary, meta-disciplinary, super-disciplinary, or even pre-disciplinary. Adler is arguing that if there is going to be a genuine conversation between and about the disciplines, there must be an art that practices such conversations. But he is also arguing that if 1 is even going to learn a discipline as a discipline and not as indoctrination, 1 needs this art.

Speaker 3

33:13

In the absence of the liberal arts on the part of the student, he says, only passive memory, not intellectual habit, can be formed. If you learn a specialty without knowing the liberal arts, you're being indoctrinated, you're not thinking. The art that is presumed by any other study, the liberal art or dialectic broadly construed, includes grammar, logic, and rhetoric. It can be studied on its own, but that is advanced philosophical work.

Speaker 3

33:43

It is acquired first by practicing it, and because it transcends each discipline, and that is why it is crucial to the possibility of conversation among the disciplines and about the common enterprise the different disciplines serve. So with Adler's help, we can say that liberal education is training in the liberal arts, that is, training in the art of learning. It does not fill the mind with particular content, so much as habituate the mind to be capable of a certain kind of inquiry. And that inquiry takes place not within a discipline, but between, across, or among the disciplines.

Speaker 3

34:20

The trivium is valuable here insofar as every discipline has its own discourse, its own modes of using language, and the trivium is the art of discourse in general. Only with an art of communication and interpretation that transcends any 1 given discipline is an integrating discourse among discourses possible. So the main part 3, what philosophy is not. In a positivist age, it is common to think of philosophy as a domain of defective knowledge, as an aspiring but deprived science.

Speaker 3

34:54

Positivists describe philosophy as the domain of inquiry into questions that have not yet been answered. All the other questions that can be answered are arranged into the real and proper sciences. Philosophy in this view is not so much knowledge, and certainly not integrative or integrating knowledge, as awareness of a lack of knowledge. It is at best an ability to raise questions it has no power to answer, and at worst a domain of mere opinions and fruitless speculation, sharply separated from verifiable facts.

Speaker 3

35:29

Is this definition of philosophy a scientific 1 or a philosophical 1? I raise that question as an exercise for my audience, but it is an implicit objection to the positivist conception of philosophy. Another common misunderstanding is that philosophy is constituted by the rejection of and refusal to entertain supernatural explanations. This is the self-flattery of the materialist atheist, a completely unhistorical distortion of the story of philosophy originating in the critical questioning of Greek myth.

Speaker 3

36:03

Anyone who believes this account of philosophy is making a strange leap of faith, imagining a purely mythical version of Xenophones, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Melissa, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, not the real ones who speculated about the divine and posited immaterial causes. Other common misunderstandings of philosophy make it a system or ideology, or a personal theory or a mindset or a life strategy. There is nothing wrong with the word philosophy coming to play such various roles in common discourse, but if we are asking about the role of philosophy in liberal education, we must mean something else. Not that we must mean something recognizable as a modern academic discipline, as if philosophy takes place primarily in doctoral dissertations and scholarly journals.

Speaker 3

36:54

Philosophy can take place outside of such venues, and often what takes place in such venues doesn't merit the most dignified sense of philosophy, the sense that transplanted that Greek word into so many other languages. Philosophy as we know is the love of wisdom. By extension, philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, and not wisdom about 1 or another aspect of reality, but wisdom about the whole. Philosophy not only sees the order of reality, it orders the other disciplines.

Speaker 3

37:25

Aristotle himself, in the Metaphysics, thus describes philosophy as having an inescapably practical, political role, as possessing the architectonic science the wise person's function is to order. As implied by Berry's insight about integration and Adler's reflection on liberal education, If each specialized knowledge discipline treats a part of reality or reality under some specific aspect, then all sciences could be unified only insofar as reality is unified. This implies an overarching science, unifying the particular sciences, which is a science of the whole. Aristotle has many names for it, first philosophy, a science of causes, or simply wisdom.

Speaker 3

38:15

Following in this tradition, St. John Henry Newman calls it, Philosophy. Here is Newman. The comprehension of the bearings of 1 science on another, and the use of each to each, and the location and limitation and adjustment and due appreciation of them all, 1 with another, this belongs, I conceive, to a sort of science distinct from all of them, and in some sense a science of sciences, which is my own conception of what is meant by philosophy in the true sense of the word, and of a philosophical habit of mind.

Speaker 3

38:53

Philosophy then is the architectonic science, which Newman says disposes of the claims and arranges the places of all the departments of knowledge which man is able to master. It provides what he calls a comprehensive view of truth in all its branches, of the relations of science to science, of their mutual bearings, and their respective values. We can already see how philosophy in this sense is liberating or liberal. Not to know the relative disposition of things, says Newman, is the state of slaves or children.

Speaker 3

39:27

To have mapped out the universe is the boast, or at least the ambition, of philosophy. Even as the Enlightenment's encyclopedic ideal had not yet passed, Newman was championing the older conception of liberal education as integrative learning. Part of integrating is making sure everything is included, and a key thesis of his idea of a university is that the discipline of theology must be included among the many sciences constituting a liberal education. However, Newman's defense of philosophy is different, because unlike theology, it is not a specialized discipline.

Speaker 3

40:06

In fact, Newman seemed not to expect that at a healthy university, philosophy would be its own special department. Newman apparently took it for granted that every member of an authentic university, insofar as they were faculty of a university and so part of a shared enterprise in liberal education, would be participating in philosophy, whatever their particular discipline happened to be. Considering philosophy this way, to call it a science, even an architectonic science, could be misleading. For Newman, philosophy does not rule other sciences from the outside, but integrates them from within.

Speaker 3

40:46

Philosophy for Newman is not its own subject matter so much as it is the intellectual disposition that makes possible successful inquiry into any subject matter. He calls it intellectual proficiency or perfection, being to the mind what health is to the body. Newman's description of philosophy in this sense as a general perfection of the intellect, his descriptions of it, are some of the most eloquent I have ever come across. And so I hope you won't mind if I read another quote from him at length.

Speaker 3

41:17

To have even a portion of this illuminative reason and true philosophy is the highest state to which nature can aspire in the way of intellect. It puts the mind above the influences of chance and necessity, above anxiety, suspense, unsettlement, and superstition, which is the lot of the many. Men whose minds are possessed with some 1 object take exaggerated views of its importance, are feverish in the pursuit of it, make it the measure of things which are utterly foreign to it, and are startled and despond if it happens to fail them. They are ever in alarm or in transport.

Speaker 3

41:56

Those, on the other hand, who have no object or principle whatever to hold by, lose their way. Every step they take, They are thrown out and do not know what to think or say at every fresh juncture. They have no view of persons or occurrences or facts which come suddenly upon them, and they hang upon the opinion of others for want of internal resources. But the intellect which has been disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which knows and thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay, because it ever knows where it stands and how its path lies from 1 point to another.

Speaker 3

43:02

That perfection of the intellect, which is the result of education and its beau ideal, to be imparted to individuals in their respective measures, is the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place and with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history. It is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature. It has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice.

Speaker 3

43:40

It has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it. It has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation. So intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres. Thus St.

Speaker 3

43:59

John Henry Newman on the refined and refining habit of a philosophical mind. Whether we think of philosophy as the discipline that forms this habit, or as the very habit itself, it is the practice and exercise of this habit, and this habit alone, that can grasp the trunk, that orders all the parts of the whole, that makes possible the authentically integrated learning that deserves to be called liberal education. And so now my conclusion. Where liberal education happens.

Speaker 3

44:33

So we can now answer the question of the title, not superficially, but with understanding. Integrated learning is possible if philosophy, as the habit of mind that fosters and is fostered by liberal education, is possible. Liberal education is integrative education, the kind of education that sees connection and unity and order. Liberal education, so conceived, is the only authentically philosophical education and even serves as a reminder of the true nature of philosophy as the discipline that fosters discourse among the disciplines and the habit of mind capable of contributing to and appreciating that discourse.

Speaker 3

45:16

The practical question that remains, then, is how is this possible? Where does liberal education happen? Certainly not in a vision statement or a strategic plan or a set of learning outcomes. It is also not really in a curriculum or a book or a set of books, and it's not in an assignment or a workshop or an assessment exercise.

Speaker 3

45:39

First and foremost, as a habit, wisdom is formed and exercised in the mind. Of course, as embodied social beings communicating with language, we need environments where minds can collaborate and develop these habits together. But even in the healthiest culture and the best-designed school, the habits need to be continually renewed, rediscovered, redeployed, and even redescribed. There must be an ongoing interplay of minds and hearts seeking order.

Speaker 3

46:10

The authors I drew on to explore integrative learning exemplify this creative interplay. Wendell Berry, St. John Henry Newman, and Mortimer Adler are each properly philosophical, passionate, and perceptive wisdom lovers. And note, they are not really, any of them, professional philosophers.

Speaker 3

46:31

And although they renew the classical ideal of wisdom, and even the scholastic ideal of a pre-disciplinary science of discourse, they are more forward-looking renovators than stubborn traditionalists. Wendell Berry is a model of a philosophical thinker uncorrupted by the academic study of philosophy. I see no evidence that he has any sense of allegiance to Aristotle or Aquinas, and yet in his thinking and reading he rediscovers some of the basic insights they theorized about the order of reality and the kind of education that can discern it. St.

Speaker 3

47:03

John Henry Newman was deeply influenced by Aristotle, but not trained in scholasticism. And his wisdom developed in cultures of teaching and preaching, political polemic, and spiritual mentorship, not academic philosophy. Mortimer Adler was largely self-taught. His PhD was in psychology, not philosophy.

Speaker 3

47:22

He drew heavily on scholasticism, but he also criticizes it, and he conceived of his great books model as better suited to practice the arts of dialectic and discovery than the lectures and textbooks of traditional toning. Today the need and opportunity for liberal education is most evident in campus debates about the purpose, shape, and conditions of liberal education. Arguments about what to include in a curriculum or reading list may seem frustrating, but they are not a sign of a problem. They are very valuable, not because of the conclusions of those arguments, as if they will settle the question, but because the shape of the argument itself is sometimes what forces us to practice the kind of discourse and thinking that constitutes integrated learning.

Speaker 3

48:09

Of course, this assumes that discussions about curriculum take the form of genuine conversation and arguments, and not bureaucratic policy battles or catty mind games, but in my experience even the most bitter curriculum battles involve earnest teachers seeking to connect their work to a greater whole, to understand and learn from others, and to create the conditions for students to seek wisdom rather than indoctrination. A more subtle danger to keep in mind is that, with authentic liberal education as rare as it is, a truly integrated vision of the world can make the exercise of the philosophical habit seem less intelligible to others rather than more. As the mocked and persecuted Socrates knew, being able to understand and make sense of things is not the same as being understood by and making sense to others. Even the wisest knowers must continually and generously renew their ability to convey and share what they know, to make sure that their intellectual habits are still capable of being exercised and strengthened in new conditions.