Inframethodology

The university provides a structure for learning. Within it, learning situations arise, all of which are ambiguously related to structure. Indeed, the names we have for situations, like “class” or “task” or “exam,” are also names for the structures in which the situations arise. After all, a situation is a space of freedom within a structure. The structure of a class, which constructs the position of teacher and student, leaves open a space of possibilities, for both teachers and students, that…

“No one has yet determined what the body can do.” (Spinoza) While it has always been thus, today more than ever, higher education consists of helping students find out what their bodies can do. We can, perhaps, limit this learning to their ability to do things with words, or, somewhat more generally, symbols. I stress that these “symbolic” skills are bodily because we have become a little too used to “off-loading” our understanding of the “mental” to machines. (Note, that when I call this a…

One reason to subject students to “exam conditions” is that it offers them an opportunity to experience what they are capable of. Obviously, the conditions must be reasonable and the prompt must be relevant to the course. But this is is easy to ensure by giving students, say, three hours to compose a thousand words of coherent prose that answers a question they have been equipped to understand. The mere fact that (or degree to which) they understand the question gives them an initial indication…

“Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.” (Barthes) “We are faced with the problem of error.” (Quine) The editor of the Philosopher’s Magazine, Daniel Kodsi, recently defended AI-supported writing as not essentially … Continue reading Why Scholars and Students Should Write Their Own Sentences and Paragraphs →

“If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students.” (John Henry Newman, 1852) In the coming years, I expect, the purpose of higher education will be a recurring topic of discussion among academics. What are students supposed to learn at university? How are they to be … Continue reading Higher Learning, Basic Skills →