ED4001 Why what you know is wrong

1. ED4001 Why what you know is wrong

26. Enough… to make a philosopher despair

29. A mature student discovering the light

30. G. W. F. Hegel

31. 1. Natural consciousness Takes the world or itself to be exactly as it immediately appears. 2. Philosophical consciousness Philosophical consciousness is always the destruction of one of the appearances of natural consciousness.

32. Natural consciousness (or common sense) • ‘lifeless indifference’ • ‘thoughtless rambling’ • …is unstable • ‘unhappy consciousness’ starts to recognise that ‘this contradiction between the universal and contingent exists within itself’ • ‘Unhappy Consciousness isthe gazing of one self-consciousness into another, itself isboth the unity of both, is also its essential nature. But it is not as yet explicitly aware that this is its essential nature, or that it is the unity of both’ • (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit)

33. Philosophical consciousness • highly ‘negative’ • is ‘the pathway of doubt, or more precisely the way of despair’ • ‘the conscious insight into the untruth of (its) phenomenal knowledge’ • a dialectical process • ‘aufhebung’ (lifting up/abolishing/sublatingone ‘position’ with another) • often wisdom arrives retrospectively: ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’. • (Hegel, Philosophy of Right)

36. That is why what you know is wrong.That is why you will know less having completed your degree. • Common sense (‘natural consciousness’) used above is a term for a set of unacknowledged political, social and ethical preferences (about the horrors of an over-indulgent state, family values, the benefits of discipline, self-reliance and conservative politics). • Common sense doesn’t ask what non-common sense might be like nor whether this might be preferable (‘truer’) knowledge. • Philosophy is about the distrustful habit of looking at knowledge and conventional wisdom, a sense that ‘one is at the beginning of the disciplined, critical and reflective thinking is the mark of educational research’. • It is an epistemological position that would place critical reasoning at the fore: ‘…a questioning and critical approach to what was accepted uncritically, a refusal to accept as self-evident what is generally believed to be true, a reflective and analytic attitude towards the fund of inherited wisdom’(Prof Richard Pring). • Thus as you grow academically expect to find contradictions, know you know less than you thought you knew, grow accustomed to arguing (not only with yourself). • BUT… even philosophers, espousing the negation of the negation, trust! Besides, when would a philosopher choose to ‘act’ in the world knowing the inevitability of their partiality?

39. next time • Why arguing is important • What argument is • Why we don’t do it well • Aristotle on rhetoric • Toulmin on argument • Practices of argument in educational contexts (‘pupil voice’ ‘school councils’ ‘reps’)