What a hoot, an essay on a website largely funded by the IPA lamenting the absence of Wisdom in the academy!

The author of the references below made this comment re his stufy of philosophy at Columbia university in the late 50's.

"There was no real academy at Columbia. There was simply an acadamic reduction of philosophy, a departure from the academy situation suggested in the tradition of Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, and such, where the pursuit of Wisdom, or some higher ultimate Realization, was what it was all about, and where the manifestation of the philosophical state as a disposition transcending opposites was what it was all for."

Commenting on a recent essay Zero Point Education he made the observations:
"Education without right life is nonsense. What is the point of elaborate exercises of the verbal mind if they do not allpy to life-change.
If you look at how education works in larger societal circumstance, it is a kind of corporate or propaganda industry. Conventional education is put to the services of political and social results of one kind or another that are all bound up with econimics, corporate life, and government institutions. It is simply propaganda that produces the next generation of social and political participants in a programmed life dictated by government, corporations, and conventional "religious" institutions. No right life is purposed in it, no comprehensive transformation of life based on right education. They are not about getting at the "root" of what human existence is about.
Getting to the "root" of what human existence is about is what real education is about. Some rare individuals exercise themselves in that matter, but there is not any collective counterpart to it. I am talking about a "root" educational process that produces comprehensive changes in life, individually and collectively".

Elsewhere he has pointed out that your Real education begins when you are prepared to thoroughly examine at a profound depth level ALL of your unexamined culturally inherited presumptions about the nature of Reality. These references provide the necessary tools: http://www.beezone.com/whiteandorangeproject/index.htm

Part 2
By the way you will not find the education described above in any of the now common "divinity" and/or "theological" departments attached to universities, specifically religious universities, and/or Christian seminaries. Some people propose that a reinvigoration of a "classical" Christian university is the only answer to this conundrum. The "liberal arts" curriculum taught at Campion College in Sydney is an example of this. But such an exercise is a conceit.

Is the nature of Reality objective or subjective? Isnt all human understanding (even of 2+2=4)done or accomplished by a human subject and therefore entirely subjective. Even the presumption that there is a presumed objective world and an objective set of values "out there" is a subjective presumption. A presumption which denies most of what we are as human beings as this essay points out:
http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/asana_of_science/index.html
On the subjective nature of Reality
http://www.aboutadidam.org/nature_of_reality/subjective.html
Have you ever noticed that the word Consciousness either with a capital C or lower case c was not used by the author of this essay. It is seldom if ever used in the academy too. This is quite odd as this essay points out:
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/consciousness-experience
This essay points out that we Westerners have a deep-seated taboo against all forms of higher knowledge and Realization.
http://www.dabase.org/up-1-3.htm
This essay extends the argument re the prejudice against esoteric knowledge:
http://www.firmstand.org/articles/separation_of_church_and_state.html

The chaotic state of our world suggests that Socrates is dead, buried and cremated to quote the immortal, illogical words of that genius of Australian Politics, Tony Abbott.

Universities no longer train people to think, only to consume, regurgitate, and carry out mindless vocational tasks on command. This is partly because Universities need fund and who has the funds? The corporations of course who set the agenda!

Those who are running the world do not want thinkers but human robots who they can manipulate at will thereby further increasing their already considerable fortunes.

The running of Universities is largely undertaken by management types who cannot spell philosophy and have never had an original idea in their boring, empty, money-grubbing lives.

Thanks, Daffy, for your contributions to an important subject which has all but disappeared beneath the ever-thickening, foul layers of materialism, greed, and American imperialism.

Poor Socrates! His pearls were thrown to swine!

It is surprising that the first comment by Daffy would lament that modern education is geared to the demands of private industry. The single common feature to all education is modern science and the very purpose of science is the subjugation of nature; the theory being immediately applicable in practice. Daffy does not distinguish, as the Greeks did, between theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom because modern science abolished or at least purported to abolish that distinction. Despite his protestations, the descent of his argument to the question of 'consciousness' shows the desperation of modern philosophy that having discovered the self suddenly must use the disputed faculty to determine itself. The subjectivity that that assumption brings in would lead to nothingness (as Niezsche shows in his argument against Kant) unless one takes the commonsense approach of Aristotle. Sensation or feeling may indeed be subjective but the evidence of ordinary speech and the objective knowledge that it conveys about the opinions of people demonstrates that opbjective knowledge of human opinions is possible. One can, therefore, understand the thoughts of people as they understood themselves. Heidegger denies that is possible; but then Heidegger had already accepted the modern premise that reason was not natural to man.

What percentage of ancient Greeks were philosophers, as opposed to the majority of people who just had to labour hard, never having time and energy to ask the big questions?

Isn't it the same today, where everyone feels they must attend university in order to make a decent living? This necessarily waters down the search for truth within universities, but doesn't necessarily diminish it in the overall population.

<<that having been indoctrinated to believe that he is merely an animal that he should behave like one.>>

Man IS merely an animal. The missing dimension is the understanding, as well as the direct experience, that WE are not humans, that while objectively our human is merely an animal, subjectively we need not come down to its level and succumb to its fate.

Daffy by name, daffy by nature it would appear. Where did you ever get the idea that we were funded, let alone "largely funded" by the IPA? We did get money from them at one time, as we did from the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, but neither contribute these days.

Ad hom argument really riles the moderator!