Cogent essays about a topic crucial to the university and to all discourse in a democracy.
Scholars consider threats to free inquiry.
Editors Bilgrami (Philosophy/Columbia Univ.; Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment, 2013, etc.) and Cole (Mason Professor of the University/Columbia Univ.; The Great American University, 2010, etc.) bring together eminent scholars—Stanley Fish, Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, among them—to analyze the vexing and controversial issue of academic freedom. The concept began in the late 19th century, when American colleges no longer aimed to train men for the ministry but rather to become critical thinkers. “To criticize and augment, as well as to preserve the tradition, became an accepted function…,” write the editors. “This was an extraordinary departure for a system that previously had aimed primarily at cultural conservation.” Coincident with internal changes was new funding: private support by prominent businessmen, who assumed they could influence curriculum and hiring. Princeton professor Joan Scott notes that the doctrine of academic freedom was codified in 1915 by the American Association of University Professors to ensure faculty autonomy in newly established research universities. The AAUP held that teaching, research and publications should be evaluated only by professional scholars with relevant expertise. That stipulation still engenders debate, as government funding and Institutional Review Boards weigh in on research parameters. Like other contributors, Columbia philosophy professor Michele Moody-Adams sees the university as a refuge where intellectual diversity, however unsettling to donors, colleagues or even students, must be preserved. Several contributors consider whether academic freedom is guaranteed by the First Amendment or whether it has a special legal status. A final, eye-opening essay summarizes a study conducted at Columbia in which 1,610 faculty members were asked to evaluate 14 vignettes suggesting challenges to academic freedom: research curtailed by IRBs, for example, or faculty making politically unpopular remarks in class. The results showed wide disagreement about what free inquiry means and what academic freedom protects.
Cogent essays about a topic crucial to the university and to all discourse in a democracy.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-231-16880-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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