The University of Toronto Friends of Wisdom are convening a series of seminars devoted to discussing what our global problems are and how they are to be solved. Everyone in the university community is invited to attend and participate. Come check it out!
About the Seminars Devoted To Solving Global Issues
To see some of the source of inspiration for this seminar series, please read: (pdf) page 324 of this free book, as well as this book, this short list, and this article.
In the aforementioned article, Nicholas Maxwell writes "that sustained thinking about our fundamental problems and how to solve them…" needs to go "…on in an influential way within
academic inquiry. This is, indeed, a basic requirement for academic inquiry to be rational. Four elementary, almost banal, rules of reason are:
(1) Articulate, and seek to improve the articulation of, the basic problem to be solved.
(2) Propose and critically assess possible solutions.
(3) If the basic problem to be solved proves intractable, specialize. Break the basic problem up into subordinate problems. Tackle analogous, easier-to-solve problems, in an attempt to work gradually to the solution to the basic problem to be solved.
(4) But if one engages in specialized problem-solving in this way, make sure that specialized and basic problem-solving interact, so that each influences the other (since otherwise specialized problem-solving is likely to become unrelated to the basic problems we seek to solve).
Sustained thinking about what we may
call 'global' problems - global intellectually, and global in the sense of encompassing the earth and humanity as a whole - must go on in universities in a way that influences, and is influenced by, more specialized research if rules (1), (2) and (4) are to be put into practice, and academic inquiry is to meet elementary requirements for rationality." It should be "…ensure[d], as a bare minimum, that universities are organized in such a way that each university has a big, prestigious Seminar or Symposium, open to all at the university from undergraduate to vice-chancellor, which meets regularly to explore global problems in a sustained way, and in a way that is capable of influencing, and being influenced by, more specialized research.
From what I have said so far, one would expect such global seminars to be commonplace in universities around the world.
I know of no university anywhere that has such a global
seminar."
An aim of this event series is to present such a global seminar.
Join us on Sunday December 1st for the next one! You don't want to miss it.
If you're part of an organization that might be interested in co-presenting or sponsoring (a) seminar(s), please contact uoft.friends.of.wisdom[at]gmail.com.
To stay informed of further global seminars in Toronto, visit (and bookmark) the "Friends of Wisdom: Toronto" website and/or the U of T Friends of Wisdom Eventbrite page, and/or subscribe to the U of T Friends of Wisdom Google Group.
Optionally fill out this poll with your availability so as to help us decide when the best times to schedule seminars are. We'll try to accommodate as many people as possible.
We hope you can make it!
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.
