By Ronald W. Sousa;Joel Weinsheimer
ISBN-10: 155753117X
ISBN-13: 9781557531179
Disturbed by means of acrimonious arguments concerning the price of humanistic schooling, the authors-former colleagues and university-press board members-embarked on an formidable undertaking to reexamine a few significant literary and philosophical works facing the liberal arts and schooling. With their discussions starting from Plat to Rousseau, from Cicero to Vico, from Erasmus to Matthew Arnold, Sousa and Weinsheimer provide now not a heritage of schooling philosophy yet an exam of the current. They learn those astonishingly diversified works with one query preferable: "Do our predecessors' reflections provide whatever larger in protection of humanities schooling than sleek platitudes approximately broadening one's horizons?"
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Who is getting educatedor, if that's not the right way to put the question, how could it be posed in a less "self"-centered way? Let's get on with it and start thinking about Plato. Page 18 ... The root meaning of liberal [is] that which befits or helps make free men ... The task of modern democracy is to preserve the ancient ideal of liberal education and to extend it as far as possible to all the members of the community... These are the touchstones of the liberated man: first, is he free; that is to say, is he able to judge and plan for himself so that he can truly govern himself?
The question must be asked, "How can someone who observes that he is written in more than one place be characterized as 'autarchic'? " The question is in one sense rhetorical. In another sense, however, it has an answer: only when s/he is so written by someone else, a someone who brings a series of categories that justify that "script" (sorry; occasionally I get carried away). " Is that it? If so, the enabling presumption finds its ground in a simplistic subject-object opposition. No questioning of those categories' adequacy to the issues at hand, no sense that opposition itself is both different and diversely deployed in different circumstances and that in this case one gains some degree of sense of self (presumably, "subject," though I shall not here venture what kind of subjecthood this might be) by seeing oneself as an "object" of multiple stories.
Of the various possibilities that occurred to me, this is not how I envisioned the notion of "dialogue" when we began. As regards your exposition, then, it is not Kafka who has written me, it is Weinsheimer. ") Moreover, that task of writing is carried out according to what are, historically, some of the very categories that you adduce so clearly and seem to reject. In effect, you create a Cartesian Ron Sousa. It would seem, then, that autobiography can be written, as long as its terms follow the dominant.