[lit-ideas] Re: Whose Trained? Horses Are Trained
- From: John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2007 08:22:27 -0500
Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx wrote:
Who's trained in philosophy. Having now read the books by R. S.
Peters, I've come to realise that 'training' is a bad Americanistic
idiom, sometimes used in England too.
The first 'training colleges' were horsemanship clubs -- and who got
trained where 'horses', never people.
Then there's military training camps, which train soldiers, etc.
But PHILOSOPHIA as Plato conceived it in the Academus grove (if not
Aristotle, the money-collector, in the Lykaeon) was _never_ conceived
as having ANYTHING to do with 'training'.
Unfortunately, there _IS_ training in philosophy. Anybody who has taken
graduate level coursework in philosophy has been trained, whether they
like the idea or not. And also, unfortunately, it's not just an American
problem; I expect that the Brtits are better at training in philosophy
than the Yanks.
How about a more neutral term--"Discipline?"
Each "discipline" in college DOES have its own vocabulary, its own
history, its own authorities. Philosophy included. But a "discipline"
is also a way to approach problems. Give a short story or a case study
or an artifact to an anthropologist or a chemist or a philosopher and
you will get quite different results because they start from different
approaches.
Singers are trained. Dancers are trained. Philosophers (or wizards
of love, as I prefer) cannot and will not be trained -- less so by
_other_ OLDER wizards of love.
Unlike most other "disciplines," the way philosophers are taught to
approach a problem is to immediately try to think of a way to see some
different perspective on it, see how it connects up with other seemingly
unrelated problems, and try to look at as large a picture of the issues
as possible. This is still a "discipline," no?
My favorite way of explaining this is to students is to have a team
taught class with psychology and philosophy where the two teachers
discuss the first chapter of any psychology text. The psychologist wants
to get on with things, to skim over the first chapter as quickly as
possible, assuming that the issues there can be dealt with in order to
get into doing actual research. The philosopher wants to stop and really
examine these basic assumptions because if one skips that step, all the
research in the world may be based on entirely inadequate grounds.
--
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"Never attribute to malice that which can be
explained by incompetence and ignorance."
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John Wager john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx
Lisle, IL, USA
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