This is a group focused on reading: (1) about wisdom, (2) about wisdom-inquiry, and (3) examples of wisdom-inquiry. All are welcome to join.
Wisdom inquiry is a kind of inquiry "devoted, in a genuinely rational way, to promoting human welfare by intellectual means" (Maxwell, 2007). For details, please see Nicholas Maxwell's publications.
Reading group meetups are announced via the "Friends of Wisdom: Toronto" website, the U of T Friends of Wisdom Eventbrite page, and the U of T Friends of Wisdom Google Group.
If you're part of an organization that might be interested in co-presenting or sponsoring (a) meetup(s), please contact uoft.friend...@gmail.com
The reading for our first meetup (on Monday October 28th) is: From Knowledge To Wisdom: The Need for an Academic Revolution, by Maxwell (2007).
Share this event on Facebook and Twitter, and invite your friends/colleagues.
We hope you can make it!
Cheers,
University of Toronto Friends of Wisdom
ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO FRIENDS OF WISDOM
Friends of Wisdom is an association of people sympathetic to the idea that academic inquiry should help humanity acquire more wisdom by rational means. Wisdom is taken to be the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others. It includes knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, and much else besides. Friends of Wisdom try to encourage universities and schools to actively seek and promote wisdom by educational and intellectual means.
The University of Toronto chapter aims to further promote wisdom and to help bring about a revolution needed to save the world from imminent crises. If you feel some sympathy with the above-mentioned idea or either of these objectives, do join. You can join by going to https://groups.google.com/group/u-of-t-friends-of-wisdom and http://www.knowledgetowisdom.org/ (or http://www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom) and signing-up on those sites, or by contacting us.
If you're part of another academic institution, please create a Friends of
Wisdom group for it and spread the word.
Our organization's core argument is that we urgently need a revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry. Instead of giving priority to the search for knowledge, academia needs to devote itself to seeking and promoting wisdom by rational means, wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom thus including knowledge but much else besides. A basic task ought to be to help humanity learn how to create a better world.
Acquiring scientific knowledge dissociated from a more basic concern for wisdom, as we do at present, is dangerously and damagingly irrational.
Natural science has been extraordinarily successful in increasing knowledge. This has been of great benefit to humanity. But new knowledge and technological know-how increase our power to act which, without wisdom, may cause human suffering and death as well as human benefit. All our modern global
problems have arisen in this way: global warming, the lethal character of modern war and terrorism, vast inequalities of wealth and power round the globe, rapid increase in population, rapid extinction of other species, even the aids epidemic (aids being spread by modern travel). All these have been made possible by modern science dissociated from the rational pursuit of wisdom. If we are to avoid in this century the horrors of the last one - wars, death camps, dictatorships, poverty, environmental damage - we urgently need to learn how to acquire more wisdom, which in turn means that our institutions of learning become devoted to that end.
The revolution we need would change every branch and aspect of academic inquiry. A basic intellectual task of academic inquiry would be to articulate our problems of living (personal, social and global) and propose and critically assess possible solutions, possible actions. This would be the task of social inquiry and the
humanities. Tackling problems of knowledge would be secondary. Social inquiry would be at the heart of the academic enterprise, intellectually more fundamental than natural science. On a rather more long-term basis, social inquiry would be concerned to help humanity build cooperatively rational methods of problem-solving into the fabric of social and political life, so that we may gradually acquire the capacity to resolve our conflicts and problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways than at present. Natural science would change to include three domains of discussion: evidence, theory, and aims - the latter including discussion of metaphysics, values and politics. Academic inquiry as a whole would become a kind of people's civil service, doing openly for the public what actual civil services are supposed to do in secret for governments. Academia would actively seek to educate the public by means of discussion and debate, and would not just study the public.
These changes are not arbitrary. They all come from demanding that academia cure its current structural irrationality, so that reason - the authentic article - may be devoted to promoting human welfare.
For more detailed presentations of the above argument, click the links on http://knowledgetowisdom.org/ and http://www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom.
