Wisdom as an Aim of Higher Education

Abstract

A central concern of theoretical speculation about education is the kind of epistemic states that education can and should aim to achieve. One such epistemic state, long neglected in both education theory and philosophy, is wisdom. Might wisdom be something that educators should aim for? And might it be something that their students can achieve? My answer will be a qualified yes. One qualification derives from the fact that in the present paper I will only be concerned with the potentiality of wisdom to be an aim of higher education (HE). Because my argument will depend upon some of the particular features of HE, it may not be extendable to primary or secondary education. A second qualification is that I will defend a place for only one kind of wisdom – what I will call epistemic wisdom – as an aim of HE. The limitation to epistemic wisdom, as we will see, derives in large part from the fact that in this paper I am seeking to establish wisdom as an achievable aim of all disciplines in HE. My task is to defend the claim that wisdom can be sought and achieved across all HE settings – natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities. In the next section of this paper, I forward, largely without argument, an account of wisdom. In the third section, I will look at some distinguishing features of HE, those that I will argue are responsible for the generation of wisdom. In Section 4, I will defend my own model of how all disciplines of HE can be the source of epistemic wisdom. I conclude my paper with some comments on the different kinds of epistemic wisdom offered by sciences and humanities disciplines.