The Main Enterprise of the World (Walter A. Strauss Lectures in the Humanities) - Softcover

Kitcher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0197799337 ISBN 13: 9780197799338

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Philip Kitcher's The Main Enterprise of the World offers a sweeping vision of the goals of education. Kitcher considers the ways in which schools and universities should advance their goals, explores the social changes required to make high-quality education available to all, and argues that these reforms are economically sustainable.

Kitcher build his arguments from three broad goals of education as an institution: career development and professionalization, civic participation, and human fulfilment. He shows that shifts in the workplace provide opportunities to focus on the latter two goals, and to liberate education from supposed economic constraints. By tying education to the strengthening of both individual lives and the foundations of democracy, he offers a humanistic rethinking of what education should try to achieve.

Drawing on figures like Dewey, Mill, Atkinson, and others who have written deeply on education, both in theory and in practice, Kitcher offers an extensive reconsideration of how we might change our educational institutions to respond not just to the twenty-first century economy, but to the deeper need for lifelong human flourishing. The Main Enterprise of the World renews classical Pragmatism: with one eye on the ideal, and the other on the world, it presents a picture of education appropriate for our century.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Columbia University, and an Honorary Fellow of Christ's College Cambridge. His philosophical work ranges from the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology to ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and philosophy in literature and music. His books include The Advancement of Science; Science, Truth and Democracy; The Ethical Project; The Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education; and What's the Use of Philosophy? The Rich and the Poor will be published in the spring of 2025. Dr. Kitcher is a Past President of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the British Academy, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Among his awards are the Prometheus Prize (given by the American Philosophical Association for work expanding the fields of science and philosophy), the Rescher Medal (for systematic philosophy), and the Hempel Award (for lifetime achievement in the philosophy of science).

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0197799337
• ISBN 13: 9780197799338
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 440