Lehrman American Studies Center

Concluding thoughts on the nature of true philosophy and authentic liberal arts at a Christian school.

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Most of the foregoing discussion in this series has focused on the nature of the good philosopher. Now it is time to examine more closely how the same principles can be applied to a Christian liberal arts institution.

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With the previous three posts as background, I am now prepared to claim that postmodernist non-foundationalism needs to be adopted, at least to some extent, by the Christian philosopher, though in a thoroughly realist and theologically robust mode. . . .

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By way of continuing my discussion of a philosophically honest approach to the search for truth, it can be said that partial nature of postmodernism's insight into the inescapably contextualized human condition, if approached in the wrong existential condition, often leads either to a wholesale rejection of that partial truth or a fanatical acceptance of it as the whole truth.

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In Part I, I introduced a line of thinking that rejected Enlightenment-variety philosophical certainty in favor of MacIntyre's contextualized rationality. Now, the reader might be thinking that all this sounds suspiciously like a warmed over version of theological, philosophical, and cultural relativism. If we cannot know absolute truth in an absolute manner, what is the use of philosophizing anyway?

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"Knowledge is produced in response to questions; and new knowledge results from the asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old questions. Here is the point: Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know."

– Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

   Teaching as a Subversive Activity

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Beyond Secular Reason

There was a time when liberals would decry liberalism's transformation into a tradition as a betrayal of liberalism, a reversal of the Enlightenment, a corruption of pure reason by irrational belief. Well, as Mr. DeHart points out in his excellent post, "Doing Political Philosophy after the Enlightenment's End," things have changed. We have moved “beyond secular reason.” The era of Enlightenment, modern, foundationalist, universalist, idealist liberalism has been displaced by post-Enlightenment, postmodern, anti-foundationalist, particularist, pragmatic liberalism. The most sophisticated and honest of contemporary liberal theorists have not only admitted liberalism’s traditionalist identity, but have defended it precisely as such. Tom Bridges summarizes the raison d’etre of the traditionalist liberal project:

If liberalism is to survive the collapse of Enlightenment culture, liberals must now attempt to de-universalize or contextualize their poli…

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How to evaluate a liberal-arts college's teaching excellence? As I see it, it must strike the right balance between philosophical questioning and the existentially open mindset this requires, and religious and metaphysical truth, which must constitute the institutionally embodied telos of the college, for truth is the telos of the mind, and truth about God is the telos of this telos, as it were.

The first criterion for evaluation is the rigor and sophistication with which the college trains the student in the liberal arts. How well does the particular college teach, and not just give the appearance of teaching, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and dialectic; history, mathematics, and philosophy? The second is the rightness of the end, purpose, or telos for which the liberal arts are taught, around which they are hierarchically integrated, and in the light of which the pedagogy is ordered.

Excellence or rightness in either of these criteria by itself does not make fo…

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