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The aim of this paper is to contribute to contemporary debates about postdisciplinarity by exploring how and why research and reflection on the problematic of wisdom can open up a space for freedom, expression, and disobedience in the ways in which we get to know and hold on to what we know. As a starting point in this enquiry, I review existing conceptualizations of wisdom to highlight Alfred Norton Whitehead's undeservingly obscure definition of wisdom as the way in which we hold knowledge. Taking this definition as my working ground, I show how academic disciplines and postdisciplinarity can be discussed as distinct ways in which we can hold knowledge, whereby the former engender obedience to existing institutional imperatives, and the latter promotes disobedience to established protocols of enquiry and norms of " good " research. Contrary to common expectations, wisdom, I show, need not be associated with a conservative, cautious attitude, but instead can be thought of as an epistemic ideal that cultivates creativity, expression, and disobedient ways of thinking and gathering knowledge. I illustrate my theoretical points with biographical details of my own disobedient attempts to transcend my formal affiliation and training as a human geographer and to open up the narrow disciplinary understandings of wisdom emerging from philosophy and psychology.
Abstract: Steven Yates has criticized my claim that we need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry, so that the aim becomes to promote wisdom rather than just acquire knowledge. Yates's main criticism is that the proposed revolution does not have a clear strategy for its implementation, and is, in any case, Utopian, unrealizable and undesirable. It is argued, here, that Yates has misconstrued what the proposed revolution amounts to; in fact it is realizable, urgently needed, and involves exploiting the kind of strategies utilized so effectively by the philosophes of the 18th century French Enlightenment.
2006 •
Philosophia, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 663-704
Arguing for Wisdom in the University: An Intellectual Autobiography2012 •
For forty years I have argued that we urgently need to bring about a revolution in academia so that the basic task becomes to seek and promote wisdom. How did I come to argue for such a preposterously gigantic intellectual revolution? It goes back to my childhood. From an early age, I desired passionately to understand the physical universe. Then, around adolescence, my passion became to understand the heart and soul of people via the novel. But I never discovered how to tell stories in order to tell the truth. So, having failed to become a physicist, and failed to become a novelist, I studied philosophy at Manchester University and then, in six weeks of inspiration, discovered that the riddle of the universe is the riddle of our desires. Philosophy should be about how to live, and should not just do conceptual analysis. I struggled to reconcile the two worlds of my childhood ambitions, the physical universe and the human world. I decided they could be reconciled with one another if one regarded the two accounts of them, physics and common sense, as myths, and not as literal truths. But then I discovered Karl Popper: truth is too important to be discarded. I revised my ideas: physics seeks to depict truly only an aspect of all that there is; in addition, there is the aspect of the experiential features of the world as we experience it. I was immensely impressed with Popper’s view that science makes progress, not by verification, but by ferocious attempted falsification of theories. I was impressed, too, with his generalization of this view to form critical rationalism. Then it dawned on me: Popper’s view of science is untenable because it misrepresents the basic aim of science. This is not truth as such; rather it is explanatory truth – truth presupposed to be unified or physically comprehensible. We need, I realized, a new conception of science, called by me aim-oriented empiricism, which acknowledges the real, problematic aims of science, and seeks to improve them. Then, treading along a path parallel to Popper’s, I realized that aim-oriented empiricism can be generalized to form a new conception of rationality, aim-oriented rationality, with implications for all that we do. This led on to a new conception of academic inquiry. From the Enlightenment we have inherited the view that academia, in order to help promote human welfare, must first acquire knowledge. But this is profoundly and damagingly irrational. If academia really does seek to help promote human welfare, then its primary tasks must be to articulate problems of living, and propose and critically assess possible solutions – possible actions, policies, political programmes, philosophies of life. The pursuit of knowledge is secondary. Academia needs to promote cooperatively rational problem solving in the social world, and needs to help humanity improve individual and institutional aims by exploiting aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the real progress-achieving methods of science. We might, as a result, get into life some of the progressive success that is such a marked feature of science. Thus began my campaign to promote awareness of the urgent need for a new kind of academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping humanity create a wiser world.
Paradigm Explorer, No. 129, April 2019/1, pp. 3-7
From Knowledge-Inquiry to Wisdom-Inquiry: A New Paradigm for Academia2019 •
Harald Walach’s Science Beyond a Materialist World View argues that science cannot proceed without metaphysical presuppositions about the nature of the universe. Wallach argues that if these implicit presuppositions were made explicit, and laid open to critical appraisal and discussion, a broader kind of science might emerge, one that could do better justice to the miracle of consciousness, and to the grave global problems that confront us. Some of this gets things absolutely right; but some of it, in my view, profoundly misses the point. I wholeheartedly agree that science cannot do without metaphysical presuppositions. But when Walach goes on to argue that we need to broaden science I cannot help but think that is missing the point. What we really need, in my view, is a transformation of academic inquiry as a whole so that our problems of living are put at the heart of the enterprise, social inquiry takes up its proper task of promoting cooperatively rational tackling of conflicts and problems of living in the social world, and the basic aim becomes to help people realize what is of value in life – help humanity make social progress towards a good, civilized, enlightened world. The scientific pursuit of knowledge needs to be an integral, subordinate part of academic inquiry devoted to seeking and promoting wisdom – wisdom being the capacity, the active endeavour and the desire to realize (experience and create) what is of value in life, for oneself and others.
Informing Science
Disciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in the Study of Knowledge2014 •
Scholarly inquiry about the nature and significance of knowledge has been shaped by disciplinary traditions and priorities that define “knowledge” differently and result in disconnected literatures. In the mid to late twentieth century, library science educator Jesse Shera sought to bridge the conceptual gap between epistemological and sociological approaches to knowledge in proposing a new discipline he called social epistemology. Around the same time, long-term projects by the economist Fritz Machlup and the physical chemist turned philosopher of science Michael Polanyi did not merely combine existing disciplinary approaches but transcended conventional frame-works for conceptualizing knowledge. These scholars can be viewed in retrospect as bringing to the study of knowledge the germs of a transdisciplinary approach. The concept of transdiscipli-narity gained traction only after these authors produced their works and has been applied mainly to scientific and technological topics such as climate change, nanotechnology, and sustainability. However, such an approach is highly applicable in studying the meanings, uses, and roles of knowledge in an environment that has changed with the advent of computer-enabled communica-tion networks. Transdisciplinary accounts of knowledge ought to foster a dialogue between lib-eral arts and applied, client-oriented disciplines.
Babies and bathwater: revaluing the role of knowledge in the academy, in Barnett, Ron and Gibbs, Paul (eds.) Thinking about higher education, Springer: New York
Wheelahan, Leesa (2013) Babies and bathwater: revaluing the role of knowledge in the academyThe Heythrop Journal
Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn. By Joel Isaac. Pp. 314, Cambridge/London, Harvard University Press, 2012, £36.952013 •
In this paper I outline a contemporary theory of wisdom through examining: modern research on learning, knowledge and thinking; the study of multiple modes of human understanding; the search for enlightenment; the expansion of consciousness; contemporary science and epistemology; and psychological investigations into the holistic nature of wisdom. I conclude with some thoughts on the teaching of wisdom and how the “life of wisdom” may represent a new level in the mental evolution of humanity, capturing and further refining the essence of the idea of the “New Enlightenment. My main argument is that the pursuit and practice of wisdom should be the main focus of education. Wisdom should be the central character trait we practice and model as educators, and the central virtue we attempt to instill and develop in our students.
Constitutional Forum / Forum constitutionnel
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