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Post by Deleted on Feb 6, 2013 9:20:05 GMT -5
To-day philosophers are mainly to be found in universities: they are salaried and professionally qualified, and their work proceeds in specialist books, periodicals and conferences which circulate on an international scale but with very limited audiences. In the past, philosophy has been conducted in quite different environments: in informal schools that met in corners of the Athenian market-place, or in monasteries under the auspices and intellectual authority of the Church, or as an aspect of salon life in eighteenth-century cities. What effects have these very different environments had on the business of making an argument, criticizing and responding to criticism, and developing a sustained and articulated view on issues which, in their very nature, strain the resources and articulacy of thought and language?
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Post by neilmcgowan on Feb 6, 2013 9:58:10 GMT -5
Confining the work of philosophers to University Departments has had the dual benefit of insulating the philsophers from society, and society from philsophers.
It is my annual fate to go on a country outing with a group of philosophers from the Moscow State University Philosophy Faculty.
As we travelled on the country train, one of the talkative philosophers told me that he had recently been at a seminar at another university, on the topic of tolerance.
Apparently his behaviour - including cutting across the contributions of other speakers, and talking off-topic endlessly - caused some difficulties at the seminar. As a result he was asked not to come back after the break.
He had been banned from a Tolerance seminar.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 6, 2013 10:33:22 GMT -5
I am no philosopher by academic training, Sydney Grew, as you know, but over more recent years, I have found it useful to try and understand the philosophical assumptions we make. BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival, for example, has championed Philosophy In Pubs, and if we are to hold a dialogue in public, a pub is as congenial as anywhere. www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/freethinkingliverpool/2006/08/philosophy_in_pubs_1.shtmlI would argue that philosophy should be ubiquitous. The love of wisdom is too important to be confined to higher education. It is for everyone.
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