.:. WitNit .:.: Great Practical Minds of Philosophy

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February 15, 2005

Great Practical Minds of Philosophy

ichard Mitchell of Underground Grammarian fame is one of the great practical minds of philosophy. Few write with his sharp perception and wit.

Another such mind is Daniel N. Robinson, currently a member of the Philosophy faculty at Oxford University, where he has lectured annually since 1991.

I am now listening to his superb American Ideals: Founding a "Republic of Virtue", a 12-tape lecture series from The Teaching Company. I have devoured all of his Teaching Company tapes (often acquired on eBay) and recommend them highly, including Great Ideas of Philosophy, Great Ideas of Psychology, and Greek Legacy: Classical Origins of the Modern World.

In an age the workshop approach to teaching predominates, where students are expected to review each others work, Daniel N. Robinson reminds us of what a great lecturer can accomplish, compressing more thought and intelligence and inspiration into 30 minutes than an entire semester of workshopping and peer-review feedback.

Here is a 2-minute excerpt from his American Ideals: Founding a "Republic of Virtue":

*****

The great British writers in politics and morals, the great Scottish writers in moral philosophy, and the philosophes in France constituted the community of thought from which the American founders drew inspiration and ideas.

The men who assembled in that room, many of them farmers, were not rustics. And when [Edmund] Burke will address Parliament and say, "Look, these are well-read people. London booksellers do better selling there than they do in all of England, these people know the law, they read the law," Burke knew whereof he spoke.

So you did have this: For all the divisions, for all the argumentation, you had an assembly of the thoughtful, an assembly of instructed minds.

Jefferson's writings outside of politics make clear, abundantly clear, and there's no voice raised to dispute this, that you cannot have this kind of government except with an educated and instructed people, that the core of Republican virtue is education itself.

And if I might reflect briefly on our own times, I would say that the deplorable state of education, particularly in the primary and secondary schools, and the rather trite nature of what we are pleased to call "higher" education, has to be worrisome.

A self-governing people must be particularly adept in weighing arguments and comprehending them, and in uniting their own ideas and contrasting their own ideas with the best that history could produce.

The men assembled in Philadelphia by and large could do that, and could do it with great agility, though not that many of them had degrees of any sort at all.

*****

You can read an excerpt of one of his lectures, Descartes and the Authority of Reason, from Great Ideas of Philosophy.

Here's my favorite picture of Descartes: