Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
On October 20, Prime Minister François Legault reaffirmed his desire to make education the top priority and appointed two new ministers, Pascale Déry for Higher Education and Bernard Drainville for Education. There is no shortage of challenges: renovating buildings, supporting staff, identifying best practices, pursuing democratization.
Will Minister Drainville have to arbitrate all the debates, including the one initiated by Grégory Charles and Normand Baillargeon, the musician drawing our attention to boys dropping out of school and the education philosopher to the need to support our educational choices based on evidence? Or, what will Minister Déry do with the two recent reports devoted to the university institution, the first dealing with its future? The Quebec university of the future (September 2020) —, the other, of academic freedom — Recognize, protect and promote academic freedom (December 2021)?
But that’s not all ! The two ministers take up their duties in the midst of a crisis of knowledge, because everyone is convinced that the school is now crossed by power relations. The equation is simple: since science and technology will ensure the production of wealth, it seems inevitable that political or economic interests will try to set the direction. In this societal context, everything happens as if we were no longer able to distinguish the general interest from particular interests. The consequence seems catastrophic for education: has the sharing of knowledge become a chimera, a miserable illusion?
Seeking an answer to this questioning, I think back to the teaching of the philosopher of science Yvon Gauthier (1941-2022), who passed away recently, he who was a professor at the University of Montreal for 42 years, author of more than 200 scientific articles and lecturer in Great Britain, Russia, China, and so on.
Yes, I think back to Yvon Gauthier’s class. His teaching was the expression of a living and incisive thought. He filled the board with a concept, its etymology, its ramifications in modern German philosophy, its interest in formal logic, and finally a critique of a contemporary theory. The teacher attacked us on all fronts! But immediately, as a good player, the philosopher of science disarmed himself with a joke or a joke, before giving us an admirable lesson in didactics and pedagogy: “The philosophy teacher must be less severe than his subject. »
Yvon Gauthier was part of this select group of philosophers, mathematicians or general scholars from around the world who enjoyed discussing the latest advances in formal logic and the foundations of knowledge, illustrious strangers one might say, ignored by most of us, even by the shrewd anthropologist that was the late Serge Bouchard.
But now, if we are serious about pursuing the democratization of school, the question of the foundations of knowledge, formerly reserved for a small group, will now have to be part of the educational project. Because today, there is neither natural order of things nor consensus to support the school and the teachers. Nothing is going the way it used to. Even the hope of sharing an ethic of discussion has faded. Even appealing to the facts is no longer enough to calm things down. Rather, what seems to prevail is relativism, or even the following thesis: everything is subject to interpretation. Because we are obsessed with a new form of freedom of expression: that of being able to detach ourselves at leisure from any constraint, allowing us, without apparent damage, to withdraw from the discussion and do what we like at home.
Faced with such an intellectual vacuum, the task of class teachers, teachers, masters or pedagogues can only become heavier. How can you transmit the taste for learning and the pleasure of sharing knowledge?
The positive side of knowledge
If he were still alive, Yvon Gauthier would not abandon us to our fate, he would encourage us to develop a flourishing intellectual life and invite us to participate in contemporary debate.
We too often forget that knowledge has a positive side: “knowledge is a plan, a design”, wrote Gauthier in Foundations of Mathematics. Introduction to a constructivist philosophy (PUM, 1976). Knowledge is the surveyor’s plan, the geographer’s map, the elementary structures of kinship described by anthropologists or even the models of today’s scientists.
All these examples have one thing in common: a formatting, a form completed and created by humans. We see it in an exemplary way with mathematics and geometry, these disciplines “construct the pure forms of the possible” (Theoretical, PUM, 1982, p. 78). In this, as his friend Jean Leroux, himself a philosopher of science who had made a career at the University of Ottawa, pointed out, Gauthier had understood the famous lesson of Galileo, for whom the book of nature “is written in the language mathematics”, itself presented using the letters of the alphabet (Galileo, the tester, 1623). Without minimal formatting, there will be no shared experience.
Linguistic turn of philosophy
But still, you will ask, where does this confidence in the forms come from, which inhabits, moreover, artists as well as scholars? In his doctoral thesis published in 1969, the young Quebec philosopher took the famous “linguistic turn” which was to become the common thread of contemporary philosophy: “The question of language is, more deeply and more intimately than the question of being , the question where “we” are in question” (arc and circle, Bellarmine and Desclée de Brouwer, 1969). The young researcher had understood, like the philosophers of his generation, that language is the form of forms, by which humans establish their understanding and orient the least of their actions.
The horizon of knowledge
Then, the philosopher would return to the horizon drawn by the dialogue of the sciences. This is a constant theme in his writings. The culmination of scientific dialogue, “is not supreme wisdom or science, but the anxiety of knowledge” (Between science and culturePUM, 2005; New interviews on the plurality of worldsPUL, 2017; Limit crossings and critical thresholdsPUL, 2020).
What did he mean? Worry does not mean uncertainty. Science gives results that are universally recognized (the principle of non-contradiction; the four fundamental forces) or in the process of being universalized (personal rights, democracy). Worry, here, designates rather the critical spirit: the problem of knowledge is not ignorance, but ignorance, that is to say what one thinks one knows, what one believes true, but turns out to be false.
The essential debate
Finally, Gauthier would invite teachers to test this concern by taking part in the “debate between realism and non-realism or anti-realism which occupies the central place in contemporary philosophy of science” (between science and culturePUM, 2005).
On what basis should knowledge ultimately be founded? Like the question of the meaning of life, that of knowledge cannot be excluded from school either. On the one hand, the idealists absolutize the spirit; on the other hand, realistic or naturalist thinkers bring humans back to their state of living beings, products of evolution and adapted to their environment. Certainly, the controversy is not in the lace. Elephant memories will remember the fierce confrontation between Yvon Gauthier and Laurent-Michel Vacher (1944-2005). A great silence ensued. Will we have their courage to, thirty years later, relaunch the discussion that these two thinkers had dared to initiate?
For his part, Gauthier was looking for a middle way between the realistic thesis, according to which the truth is the adequacy to an outside world already there, and the idealist option, based on the a priori of the understanding. In his eyes, we would be wrong to give precedence to our senses or to the Cosmos to justify scientific objectivity. Similarly, it would be illusory to think that it suffices to express one’s opinion or subjectivity for it to be automatically accepted as true by our interlocutors.
In this sense, the unity of knowledge emanates neither from a natural source nor from an omniscient mind. Knowledge is more simply the result of an act, that of thinking (from the Latin think, to weigh, to weigh), the act of differentiating beings and things, or of counting them formally, which means one by one. Isn’t this our way, properly human (universal), of sharing our experience of the world: precisely by producing the forms or the mediations necessary for this sharing? For those who walk the paths of knowledge, power will always prove to be only a lamentable parasite.
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