As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown, human knowledge is both “tradition-constituted” and “tradition-dependent,” as well as “tradition-transcendent.” And as he suggests in his latest book, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, that institution most indispensable for the preservation, sustenance, and development of human knowledge, or, in MacIntyrean terms, an intellectual tradition, is the college or university. For, as MacIntyre writes,
Read Full Article »Philosophy is not just a matter of propositions affirmed or denied and of arguments advanced and critically evaluated, but of philosophers in particular social and cultural situations interacting with each other in their affirmations and denials, in their argumentative wrangling, so that the social forms and institutionalizations of their interactions are important and none more so than those college settings that have shaped philosophical conversation, both to its benefit and to its detriment.
