Ivory Tower Academics ( Liberal Art as opposed to the liberal arts)L

Dear Colleagues Across the Curriculum.I

I don't usually quote other people in large chunks to stand for me
or slap bumper stickers on the  rear end of my car, but when I do
it's because it's really self-serving and I hope to gain validatioin
if not applause and likes, really likes for "sharing" it.

((forwarded to me in Linguistics Class by David Morales)

Talk with me

Philosophy should be conversation, not dogma – face-to-face talk
about our place in the cosmos and how we should live

Nigel Warburton 

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/without-conversation-philosophy-is-no-better-than-dogma/

Whenever philosophical education lapses into learning facts about history and texts, regurgitating
an instructor’s views, or learning from a textbook, it moves away from its Socratic roots in conversation.
Then it becomes so much the worse for philosophy and for the students on the receiving end of what
the radical educationalist Paolo Freire referred to pejoratively in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)
as the ‘banking’ of knowledge. The point of philosophy is not to have a range of facts at your disposal,
though that might be useful, nor to become a walking Wikipedia or ambulant data bank: rather, it is to
develop the skills and sensitivity to be able to argue about some of the most significant questions we
\ can ask ourselves, questions about reality and appearance, life and death, god and society. As
Plato’s Socrates tells us, ‘These are not trivial questions we are discussing here, we are discussing
how to live.’