On Relevance in Philosophy Education

Substack latest.

Comments

[Joe Odegaard]

One might think that it was very unwise to have embarked on a national course of action that ended in the scenes in the video I link to below (Berlin in July, 1945). And since philosophy means “The use of reason in understanding such things as the nature of the real world and existence, the use and limits of knowledge, and the principles of moral judgment,” (Cambridge Dictionary), perhaps the relevance of philosophy (root meaning is love of wisdom) would be apparent to anyone with common sense who had watched the video below.

But I would like to hear Brother Bill’s assessment of wether such a consideration holds any water, or if it would make any difference in a general requirement philosophy overview class.
Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5i9k7s9X_A

[BV]

Thanks for that link, Joe.

I take you to be saying that to anyone with both common sense and knowledge of history it should be apparent that philosophy (literally, the love of wisdom) is an important component of higher education and highly relevant to human well-being if we are avoid such unwise national courses of action as were embarked upon in Germany 1933-1945.

Ideally speaking, yes. But let's get real: we are becoming more decadent with every passing day. 'We' covers both the masses and the elites who are bent on destroying our institutions. I recently pointed out that mainstream journalism is either dead or moribund. NPR, WaPo, . . . But the same is true of the so-called 'universities.' They are now, with very few exceptions, leftist seminaries and scam operations. There are at least three factors contributing to their corruption. The first factor is students and their parents who stupidly go into deep debt to pay for something of less and less value. The second is greedy admininstrators, who lacking any of the classical values of the university, and are insanely overpaid, abdicate the authority they ought to be exercising and pander to the students, to enrich themselves. No coward like a university admin, to paraphrase Dennis Prager. The third factor is a fiscally irresponsible fed. gov't that underwrites student loans without any vetting of the majors, many of them monetarily useless, that the students choose.

And then, to cap it all off, that morally obtuse POS Joe Biden who out of sheer partisan grifter's self-interest, forgives loans.

There's more to say, but that's a start.

[BV]

Joe,

More here: https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/do-you-really-want-to-teach-at-a