How Can We Build a Better World?

In Jürgen Mittelstrass (ed.), Einheit der Wissenschaften: Internationales Kolloquium der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 25-27 June 1990. New York: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 388-427 (1991)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In order to build a better world we need to learn how to do it. That in turn requires that our institutions of learning, our schools and universities, are rationally organized for, and devoted to, the task. At present, devoted as they are to the pursuit of knowledge, they are not. We need urgently to bring about a revolution in academia so that the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, construed to be the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, wisdom including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. Priority needs to be given to tackling problems of living, above all our grave global problems. The basic intellectual aim needs to be to help people achieve what is of value in their lives, the scientific pursuit of knowledge and understanding being undertaken as an aspect of that endeavour. A basic task needs to be to help people around the world acquire a good understanding of what our global problem are and what we need to do about them. It needs to be recognized much more widely that the kind of academic inquiry we have inherited from the past, devoted primarily to the pursuit of knowledge, is damagingly irrational, in a wholesale, structural way, when judged from this standpoint. The long-standing, successful pursuit of scientific knowledge and technological know-how dissociated from a more fundamental concern with problems of living is a key factor in the creation of our current global problems, and our current incapacity to resolve them.

Author's Profile

Nicholas Maxwell
University College London

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-03-17

Downloads
254 (#56,441)

6 months
39 (#82,459)

Historical graph of downloads since first upload
This graph includes both downloads from PhilArchive and clicks on external links on PhilPapers.
How can I increase my downloads?