How Universities Can Help Create a Wiser World PDF Download

Author: Nicholas Maxwell
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1845407482
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
In order to make progress towards a better world we need to learn how to do it. And for that we need institutions of learning rationally designed and devoted to helping us solve our global problems, make progress towards a better world. It is just this that we lack at present. Our universities pursue knowledge. They are neither designed nor devoted to helping humanity learn how to tackle global problems - problems of living - in more intelligent, humane and effective ways. That, this book argues, is the key disaster of our times, the crisis behind all the others: our failure to have developed our institutions of learning so that they are rationally organized to help us solve our problems of living - above all, our global problems. Having universities devoted almost exclusively to the pursuit of knowledge is a recipe for disaster. Scientific knowledge and technological know-how have unquestionably brought great benefits to humanity. But they have also made possible - even caused - our current global crises, above all the impending crisis of global warming. In this lucid and provocative book, Nicholas Maxwell argues convincingly that we need urgently to bring about a revolution in universities round the world so that their basic aim becomes wisdom, and not just knowledge.

Author: Robert J. Sternberg
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030202879
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
This book presents perspectives from world experts in the field of wisdom studies to propose how wisdom can provide the foundation upon which solutions to social and global problems can be grounded. The authors argue that where society has come to rely on leaders with skills relating to knowledge and intelligence; instead we should focus on wisdom-based acumen for our leaders in government, business, and the military. In this book the authors offer evidence-based definitions of wisdom and apply these to world problems they believe could potentially be solved using wise solutions. Among the case studies confronted are terrorism and war, poverty and economic disparity, climate change, increasing antibiotic resistance and political corruption. Focusing on the cognitive, social and emotional processes involved in everyday decision-making, this book presents a compelling argument for the application of wise problem-solving to complex world issues that will appeal in particular to those in leadership, teaching and policy roles, and open new pathways in the fields of wisdom-studies, psychology, sociology and political theory.

Author: Stephanie Chitpin
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1801173605
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Divided into three sections, this volume firstly seeks to explore social contexts of educational leadership. The second section explores the experiences of educational leaders in various contexts, while the third section of this volume looks at the consequences, unintended and otherwise, of the neoliberal commodification of education.

Author: Robert Troschitz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131544822X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
As one of the pioneers and leading advocates of neoliberalism, Britain, and in particular England, has radically transformed its higher education system over the last decades. Universities have increasingly been required to act like businesses, and students are frequently referred to as customers nowadays. Higher Education and the Student investigates precisely this relation between the changing function of higher education and what we consider the term ‘student’ to stand for. Based on a detailed analysis of government papers, reports, and speeches as well as publications by academics and students, the book explores how the student has been conceptualised within the debate on higher education from the birth of the British welfare state in the 1940s until today. It thus offers a novel assessment of the history of higher education and shows how closely the concept of the student and the way we comprehend higher education are intertwined. Higher Education and the Student opens up a new perspective that can critically inform public debate and future policy – in Britain and beyond. The book should be of great interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education; educational policy and politics; and the philosophy, sociology, and history of higher education.

Author: Nicholas Maxwell
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1845407784
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book is about education, learning, rational inquiry, philosophy, science studies, problem solving, academic inquiry, global problems, wisdom and, above all, the urgent need for an academic revolution. Despite this range and diversity of topics, there is a common underlying theme. Education ought to be devoted, much more than it is, to the exploration real-life, open problems; it ought not to be restricted to learning up solutions to already solved problems - especially if nothing is said about the problems that provoked the solutions in the first place. A central task of philosophy ought to be to keep alive awareness of our unsolved fundamental problems - especially our most fundamental problem of all, encompassing all others: How can our human world - and the world of sentient life more generally - imbued with the experiential, consciousness, free will, meaning and value, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? This is both our fundamental intellectual problem and our fundamental problem of living. The essays in this volume seek to provoke a concerted effort to transform our institutions of learning so that they become rationally and effectively devoted to helping us learn how to create a wiser world. Our most serious problems of living are so grim, so imbued with suffering, wasted lives and unnecessary death, that the idea of approaching them in a playful spirit seems sacrilegious. We need to keep alive tackling of intellectual problems so that playful capacities can be exercised - if for no other reason (and other reasons there are, of course, aplenty). There are two really worthy impulses behind all rational inquiry: delight and compassion.

Author: Nicholas Maxwell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030041433
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book gives an account of work that I have done over a period of decades that sets out to solve two fundamental problems of philosophy: the mind-body problem and the problem of induction. Remarkably, these revolutionary contributions to philosophy turn out to have dramatic implications for a wide range of issues outside philosophy itself, most notably for the capacity of humanity to resolve current grave global problems and make progress towards a better, wiser world. A key element of the proposed solution to the first problem is that physics is about only a highly specialized aspect of all that there is – the causally efficacious aspect. Once this is understood, it ceases to be a mystery that natural science says nothing about the experiential aspect of reality, the colours we perceive, the inner experiences we are aware of. That natural science is silent about the experiential aspect of reality is no reason whatsoever to hold that the experiential does not objectively exist. A key element of the proposed solution to the second problem is that physics, in persistently accepting unified theories only, thereby makes a substantial metaphysical assumption about the universe: it is such that a unified pattern of physical law runs through all phenomena. We need a new conception, and kind, of physics that acknowledges, and actively seeks to improve, metaphysical presuppositions inherent in the methods of physics. The problematic aims and methods of physics need to be improved as physics proceeds. These are the ideas that have fruitful implications, I set out to show, for a wide range of issues: for philosophy itself, for physics, for natural science more generally, for the social sciences, for education, for the academic enterprise as a whole and, most important of all, for the capacity of humanity to learn how to solve the grave global problems that menace our future, and thus make progress to a better, wiser world. It is not just science that has problematic aims; in life too our aims, whether personal, social or institutional, are all too often profoundly problematic, and in urgent need of improvement. We need a new kind of academic enterprise which helps humanity put aims-and-methods improving meta-methods into practice in personal and social life, so that we may come to do better at achieving what is of value in life, and make progress towards a saner, wiser world. This body of work of mine has met with critical acclaim. Despite that, astonishingly, it has been ignored by mainstream philosophy. In the book I discuss the recent work of over 100 philosophers on the mind-body problem and the metaphysics of science, and show that my earlier, highly relevant work on these issues is universally ignored, the quality of subsequent work suffering as a result. My hope, in publishing this book, is that my fellow philosophers will come to appreciate the intellectual value of my proposed solutions to the mind-body problem and the problem of induction, and will, as a result, join with me in attempting to convince our fellow academics that we need to bring about an intellectual/institutional revolution in academic inquiry so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to solve problems of living, including global problems, and make progress towards as good, as wise and enlightened a world as possible.

Author: Nicholas Maxwell
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228002877
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
How can the world we live in and see, touch, hear, and smell, the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning, and value - how can all of this exist and flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe, made up of nothing but physical entities such as electrons and quarks? How can anything be of value if everything in the universe is, ultimately, just physics? In Our Fundamental Problem Nicholas Maxwell argues that this problem of reconciling the human and physical worlds needs to take centre stage in our thinking, so that our best ideas about it interact with our attempts to solve even more important specialized problems of thought and life. When we explore this fundamental problem, Maxwell argues, revolutionary answers emerge for a wide range of questions arising in philosophy, science, social inquiry, academic inquiry as a whole, and - most important of all - our capacity to solve the global problems that threaten our future: climate change, habitat destruction, extinction of species, inequality, war, pollution of earth, sea, and air. An unorthodox introduction to philosophy, Our Fundamental Problem brings philosophy down to earth and demonstrates its vital importance for science, scholarship, education, life, and the fate of the world.

Author: Ronald Barnett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429824904
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
For hundreds of years, knowledge has been central in understanding the university. Over recent decades, however, it is the economic value of knowledge that has come to the fore. Now, in a post-truth world, knowledge is also treated with suspicion and has become a vehicle for ideologies. Knowledge and the University combats all these ways of thinking. Its central claim is that knowledge is of value because of its connection with life. Knowledge is of life, from life, in life and for life. With an engaging philosophical discussion, and with a consideration of the evolution of higher education institutions, this book: Examines ways in which research, teaching and learning are bound up with life; Looks to breathe new life into the university itself; Widens the idea of the knowledge ecology to embrace the whole world; Suggests new roles for the university towards culture and the public sphere. Knowledge and the University is a radical text that looks to engender nothing less than a new spirit of the university. It offers a fascinating read for policy makers, institutional leaders, academics and all interested in the future of universities.

Author: Nicholas Maxwell
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811234620
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Science and technology have made the modern world possible, but also created all the global problems that threaten our future: the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, mass extinction of species, environmental degradation, overpopulation, lethal modern war, and the menace of nuclear weapons. Nicholas Maxwell, world-renowned philosopher of science and author of 14 books, argues that all these problems have come about because humans have solved only the first of two great problems of learning — how to acquire scientific knowledge and technological know-how — but not the second — how to create a civilized, wise world.The key disaster of our times is that we have science without wisdom. At present, universities all over the world are devoted to the pursuit of specialized knowledge and technology, or 'knowledge-inquiry'. Maxwell contends that they need to be radically transformed so that their basic function becomes to help humanity tackle global problems, with a more rigorous and socially beneficial perspective he calls 'wisdom-inquiry'. The World Crisis — And What to Do About It spells out in detail the changes that need to be made to academic inquiry, why they need to be made, and how they would enable universities to help humanity actively and effectively tackle and solve current global problems.Related Link(s)

Author: Sharon Rider
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811575983
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This open access book focuses on the dimensions of the discourse of 'The World Class University', its alleged characteristics, and its policy expressions. It offers a broad overview of the historical background and current trajectory of the world-class-university construct. It also deepens the theoretical discussion, and points a way forward out of present impasses resulting from the pervasive use and abuse of the notion of "world-class" and related terms in the discourse of quality assessment. The book includes approaches and results from fields of inquiry not otherwise prominent in Higher Education studies, including philosophy and media studies, as well as sociology, anthropology, educational theory. The growing impact of global rankings and their strategic use in the restructuring of higher education systems to increase global competitiveness has led to a ‘reputation race’ and the emergence of the global discourse of world class universities. The discourse of world class universities has rapid uptake in East Asian countries, with China recently refining its strategy. This book provides insights into this process and its future development.