Show Notes
Universities, long celebrated as sanctuaries of free thought and intellectual rigour, have for centuries been regarded as the best way to educate and conduct research. But increasingly, this assumption is being questioned. A recent study found that two-thirds of academics feel their freedom to teach and study is being curtailed. In 2022 alone, over 1,000 instances of content warnings or text removals were documented across UK universities. While some academics now criticise PhD programmes as a way to extract "fees and cheap labour" from students, reports suggest that most academic papers are read by an average of just ten people. More than half of respondents now say that going to university is not worth it. And in the US, graduate student debt averages over $71,000, while similar information is often freely available online. Should we call time on the age of the university and find new, innovative ways to educate people? Should we leave research and innovation to the business sector and free-market forces? Or are universities still vital to our education and culture and can a radical overhaul restore them to their original purpose? Yaron Brook is a political scientist, and chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute. He’s a bestselling author and the host of The Yaron Brook Show. Catherine Liu is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She’s the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class. Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham. He’s the author of Taboo and Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities. Jay Shapiro hosts.
Email us at [email protected] with your thoughts on the episode!
To see your favourite thinkers tackle philosophy's most current issues, buy tickets for our upcoming festival: https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/ And visit our website for many more articles, videos, and podcasts like this one: https://iai.tv/ You can find everything we referenced here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimes See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
More from Philosophy For Our Times
Description Does the left really need to be more conservative? What is the difference between capital C and lowercase c conservatism? Is the Blue Labour movement the best tool against the MAGA agenda and right wing nationalism?
Should we give up seeing evidence as the truth and instead see it as a persuasive argument? Does evidence settle the matter or is a counter-narrative always possible? And if evidence is not the truth, how are we to choose between competing perspectives and models of the world? We turn to evidence to settle the matter. And we imagine it is evidence that confirms a scientific theory, or the guilt of an accused. But perspective can result in evidence being interpreted radically differently. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. More broadly some argue all so-called 'facts' are context or theory dependent. And if evidence depends on perspective, it is no longer clear what counts as evidence in the first place. Unlike the French legal system, that assumes evidence determines truth, the English system embeds opposing narratives, each employing their own 'evidence' to support a case. The same is true when physicists operate with different models of reality, recognising that alternative frameworks can be used.
Are homo sapiens the only organisms capable of creating and experiencing beauty? Can we find beauty in God? Why do we see the hand of an Artist in the Natural, if God does not exist?
What does it mean for rationality to be ‘permissive’? Is rationality more limited than we would like to admit? Does the idea that ‘truth is the aim of belief’ still stand?
What makes humans different from nature? What do Confucianism and Daoism have to do with physics? Is science too realist? In part 2 of our interview with Carlo Rovelli, we help unpick the history of the philosophy of science. From uncovering how millennia old Chinese philosophers were debating Enlightenment philosophical principles, to finding whether the self and consciousness are functionally identical, Rovelli's argument finds a home in a single statement: we must rehumanise science.