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Philosophy in Our Core Patrick Tully Ph.D Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal Volume 6 | Number 2 Article 27 12-2017 Philosophy in Our Core Patrick Tully Ph.D. University of Scranton, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://epublications.regis.edu/jhe Recommended Citation Tully, Patrick Ph.D. (2017) "Philosophy in Our Core," Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal: Vol. 6 : No. 2 , Article 27. Available at: https://epublications.regis.edu/jhe/vol6/iss2/27 This Praxis is brought to you for free and open access by ePublications at Regis University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal by an authorized administrator of ePublications at Regis University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Tully: Philosophy in Our Core Philosophy in Our Core Patrick Tully Professor of Philosophy University of Scranton [email protected] Abstract The Jesuit (and Catholic) educational tradition is characterized by a number of identity-conferring basic positions that are incompatible with correlative positions on offer in the popular culture. Some of these fundamental differences between the tradition and the culture are philosophical in nature in that they bear on questions of moral truth and philosophical anthropology. Institutions of higher education committed to forming their students in light of these basic and counter-cultural beliefs must ensure that the incompatible cultural alternatives are carefully examined and the reasonableness of the Ignatian (Catholic) alternatives carefully explored. The discipline Philosophy plays an irreplaceable role in this sort of tradition-culture engagement. With this in mind, institutions of higher education that claim the Jesuit and Catholic tradition as their own must ensure that Philosophy remains (or is restored to) a significant part of their core curricula. Not too long ago I had the opportunity to work unprepared to work through the moral quandaries with a cohort of twelve first-year medical students that await them in their chosen field, and to at a local medical school. My task was to deliver to engage the great existential questions that life will these future doctors the ethics component of a sooner or later press upon them. A core year-long course in the profession of medicine; we requirement in this ancient discipline would no would meet three or four times that year and doubt be a step in the right direction for these discuss the field of medical ethics. Although our institutions, and eliminating or reducing such a time together would be short, I was keen on requirement would no doubt be a step in the getting to know these students on a somewhat wrong direction for Jesuit colleges and personal basis. At our initial meeting I asked each universities. of them where they grew up, where they went to college, why they wanted to be a physician, etc. In While it may be the case that decision-makers at the course of that first meeting, in order to gauge Jesuit colleges and universities will continue to their formal preparation for thinking about ensure that exposure to philosophy remains a medical ethics, I also asked them whether they had distinctive mark of the education these institutions any undergraduate coursework in philosophy. offer, a “some Philosophy, any Philosophy” Only three raised a hand. Of these three, two had minimalist approach to executing this a semester-long self-standing course in ethics as commitment would surely leave many students part of their undergraduate degree requirements.1 underserved. Questions about what our students’ These two students, the two whose undergraduate exposure to this discipline should look like must education seemed to have left them better be answered thoughtfully. The breadth of prepared than their peers to navigate the moral Philosophy and the rather common need to fit a dimensions of their chosen field, were Jesuit requirement in this discipline into just one or two educated; one was from the University of courses require difficult decisions to be made. Scranton, the other from Xavier University. I Logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and offer this story both as a point of pride for those social and political philosophy are just a few of the of us engaged in Jesuit higher education and as a areas one might like to cover, and each of these way to emphasize the importance of preserving branches has subdivisions of its own. To sort the study of Philosophy as a distinctive mark of through the multitude of options and make this tradition. It is disturbing to see so many appropriate decisions about what all of their colleges and universities proudly turn out future graduates ought to know, a Jesuit institution physicians, nurses, teachers, attorneys, would do well to ask itself what it seeks to accountants, etc. who are technically proficient yet accomplish by means of this element of its core Jesuit Higher Education 6(2): 155-165 (2017) 155 Tully: Philosophy in Our Core curriculum. Wrestling with that question should There are certain cultural tendencies, perhaps pre- raise two other questions: “What do the Jesuit and critical habits of thought, that bump up against the Catholic traditions—traditions that these foundational, philosophically substantive institutions publicly claim as their own—have to commitments of the Ignatian worldview. A say about the matter?” and “What feature(s) student who has been well grounded in should a Philosophy requirement at Jesuit and Philosophy and who appreciates the philosophical Catholic schools operating in the early 21st- dimensions of these Ignatian commitments will be century first-world share?” Such questions draw prepared to go into the world, challenge these the focus of decision-makers away from their own “errors of the age,” and offer a better alternative. philosophical preferences and specialties and place In doing so these men and women can change the it on two often-clashing outlooks on the human world in ways that others cannot, taking what has being and the world: that offered by the Jesuit and been passed on to them by the Jesuit tradition and Catholic tradition, and that offered by the offering it to their coworkers, their family, their dominant culture from which our students come friends, their neighbors. Indeed, the right kind of and to which they will return. philosophical background can empower these graduates to become links in a chain that stretches If Jesuit institutions of higher education carefully back for centuries and which, through them, will assess and refine the Philosophy component of reach into the future. their respective curricula in the manner described above, it may very well turn out that their alumni, But what are these “errors of the age” and how including the aforementioned medical students do they philosophically bump up against the from Xavier and Scranton, will enjoy a common aforementioned ideas at the heart of Jesuit philosophical foundation, one that will give them education? In what follows, I offer three. There a shared outlook, idiom, and way of proceeding as are no doubt more, and maybe even some that are they—separately and together—respond to the more profound than the three I examine, but the Ignatian challenge to be salt and light in the world. three I identify are at work in our students’ basic What, though, should that shared foundation look outlook and, at the same time, are deeply at odds like? with the basic commitments of the Ignatian tradition that we call our own and promise to pass Cura personalis, magis, finding God in all things, and on to our students. The three ideas that I speak of metanoia are Ignatian terms that are employed in are materialism, individualism, and relativism. much of the serious talk regarding the institutional identity and educational aspirations of Jesuit * colleges and universities. These words express ideas that shape our institutions and are frequently The “materialism” in play here is metaphysical offered as ultimate justifications for policies and materialism. Let this phrase stand for what Thomas practices in all areas of institutional life. These Nagel describes as ideas shape how we seek to shape our students. Yet what sometimes goes unnoticed in this a comprehensive, speculative world Ignatian educational discourse is that these words picture that is reached by extrapolation and phrases are philosophically heavy; heavy in from some of the discoveries of biology, what they presuppose and heavy in what they call chemistry, and physics—a particular those committed to this tradition to do (and not naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates to do). Were they to be evacuated of this deeper a hierarchical relation among the subjects philosophical meaning, these terms might be of those sciences, and the completeness reduced to vague, cost-free clichés that give an in principle of an explanation of Ignatian luster to all sorts of policies and everything in the universe through their proposals that are appealing for any number of unification.2 other reasons, while demanding little of those who invoke them and offering no guidance to students Nagel’s words lay out well the grand idea behind exposed to them. Here is where Philosophy has an what so many students accept as the starting point important role to play. and reasonable parameters for all serious inquiry Jesuit Higher Education 6(2): 155-165 (2017) 156 Tully: Philosophy in Our Core regarding the human person, namely, that It makes them all to be, at best, ennobling cultural everything “really real” about us is fully myth and, at worst, naive nonsense. What exactly explainable by reference to our material is an attitude of “care” in this worldview? What constituents. The belief is that human beings are are aspirations for “the greater” on this account of merely biological creatures, and that the whole of the human being? For that matter, what is the one’s interior life—deliberating, willing, hoping, measure of the good, the greater, the lesser? What loving, wondering, worshipping, etc.—is in reality is a “mind” here, and what does it mean to seek a only a complex nexus of biological phenomena.
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