Nicholas Maxwell
I have devoted much of my working life to arguing that we need to bring about a revolution in academia so that it promotes wisdom and does not just acquire knowledge. I have published twelve books on this theme: What’s Wrong With Science? (Bran's Head Books, 1976), From Knowledge to Wisdom (Blackwell, 1984), The Comprehensibility of the Universe (OUP, 1998), Is Science Neurotic? (World Scientific, 2004), Cutting God in Half – And Putting the Pieces Together Again: A New Approach to Philosophy (2010), How Universities Can Help Create a Wiser World: The Urgent Need for an Academic Revolution (Imprint Academic, 2014), Global Philosophy (2014), In Praise of Natural Philosophy: A Revolution for Thought and Life (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), Understanding Scientific Progress: Aim-Oriented Empiricism (Paragon House, 2017), Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment (UCL Press, 2017), Science and Enlightenment: Two Great Problems of Learning (Springer, 2019), The Metaphysics of Science and Aim-Oriented Empiricism: A Revolution for Science and Philosophy (Synthese Library, Springer, 2019), Our Fundamental Problem: A Revolutionary Approach to Philosophy (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), The World Crisis - And What To Do About It (World Scientific, Spring 2021).
less
InterestsView All (15)
Uploads
I argue that all these problems have come about because we have solved the first of two great problems of learning-the problem of learning to acquire scientific knowledge and technological know-how-but have so far failed to solve the second great problem of learning-learning to create a civilized world.
Modern science and technology make possible modern industry and agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern power production and travel, modern armaments, which in turn make possible much that is good, but also all the above global problems. Science as such is not the problem; it is, rather, science without wisdom. All the above problems have arisen because we have modern science without wisdom. Now that we have solved the first great problem of learning, we must discover, urgently, how to solve the second one. We can do that if we learn from how we solved the first great problem of learning how to solve the second one. That requires that we bring about a radical transformation in universities all over the world. At present they are devoted to the pursuit of specialized knowledge and technology. They need to be transformed so that the basic task becomes to help humanity tackle problems of living, including global problems, in increasingly cooperatively rational ways.
The book spells out in detail the changes that need to be made to academic inquiry, why they need to be made, and how they would enable universities to help humanity actively and effectively tackle and solve current global problems.
The book is intended to be a fresh, unorthodox introduction to philosophy - an introduction which will, I hope, interest and even excite an intelligent 16 year old, as well as any adult half-way interested in intellectual, social, political or environmental issues. Scientists and professional philosophers should find it of interest as well. The idea of the book is to bring philosophy down to earth, demonstrate its vital importance, when done properly, for science, for scholarship, for education, for life, for the fate of the world.
If everything is made up of fundamental physical entities, electrons and quarks, interacting in accordance with precise physical law, what becomes of the world we experience – the colours, sounds, smells and tactile qualities of things? What becomes of our inner experiences? How can we have free will, and be responsible for what we do, if everything occurs in accordance with physical law, including our bodies and brains? How can anything be of value if everything in the universe is, ultimately, just physics? These are some of the questions we will be tackling in this book.
These questions arise because of this great fissure in our thinking about the world. Our scientific thinking about the physical universe clashes in all sorts of ways with our thinking about our human world. The task is to discover how we can adjust our ideas about both the physical universe, and our human world, so that we can resolve clashes between the two in such a way that justice is done both to what science tells us about the universe, and to all that is of value in our human world – the miracle of our life here on earth – and the heart-ache and tragedy.
It is all-but inevitable that even the smallest adjustments to what we take science to tell us about the universe, or to what we hold to be the nature and value of our human world, will have all sorts of repercussions, potentially, for all sorts of fields outside philosophy – for science, for thought, for life. And indeed revolutionary ideas do emerge in this book from the exploration of our fundamental problem.
There is, first, a revolution for philosophy. A new kind of philosophy emerges which I call Critical Fundamentalism. This tackles our fundamental problem, and in doing so seeks to resolve the fundamental fissure in the way we think about the universe and ourselves in such a way that this resolution has multiple, fruitful implications for thought and life. Second, there is a revolution in what we take science to tell us about the world: it is concerned, not with everything about everything, but only with a highly specialized aspect of everything. This is the subject of chapter 3. Third, there is a revolution in our whole conception of science, and the kind of science we should seek to develop – the subject of chapter 4. Fourth, there is a revolution in biology, in Darwin’s theory of evolution, so that the theory does better justice to helping us understand how life of value has evolved. This is the subject of chapter 5. Fifth, there is a revolution in the social sciences. These are not sciences; rather, their proper basic task is to promote the cooperatively rational solving of conflicts and problems of living in the social world. In addition, they have the task of discovering how progress-achieving methods, generalized from those of natural science (as these ought to be conceived) can be got into social life, into all our other social endeavours, government, industry, the economy and so on, so that social progress towards a more enlightened world may be made in a way that is somewhat comparable to the intellectual progress in knowledge made by science. Social inquiry emerges as social methodology or philosophy and not, fundamentally, social science. Sixth, there is a much broader revolution in academic inquiry as a whole. We need a new kind of academic enterprise rationally designed and devoted to helping us resolve the grave global conflicts and problems that confront us: habitat destruction, loss of wild life, extinction of species, the menace of nuclear weapons, the lethal character of modern war, gross inequality, pollution of earth, sea and air, and above all the impending disasters of climate change. These problems have arisen in part because of the gross structural irrationality of our institutions of learning devoted as they are to the pursuit of knowledge instead of taking, as their basic task, to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, thus making progress towards as good, as wise, a world as possible. Seventh, there is the all-important social revolution that might gradually emerge if humanity has the wit to develop what it so urgently needs: academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping us make progress towards a better, more civilized world. These fifth, sixth and seventh revolutions are the subject of chapter 7.
Academic philosophy, whether so-called analytic or Continental philosophy, is not noted for its fruitful implications for other areas of thought and life. How come, then, that philosophy as done here, Critical Fundamentalism, has these dramatic revolutionary implications for science, for academic inquiry, for our capacity to solve the global problems that menace our future? I do what I can to answer this question in chapters 2 and 9.
Why has academic philosophy, lost its way so drastically that it has failed to put the richly fruitful conception of philosophy, as done here, into practice? What caused academic philosophy to lose its way? I give my answer to this question in the appendix.
My chief hope, in writing this book, however, is that the reader will be beguiled or provoked into thinking imaginatively and critically – that is, rationally – about our fundamental problem, not obsessively, but from time to time.
Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings are, how it needs to be improved to overcome these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The book dramatically develops Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems.
Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a new philosophy of science, which I call aim-oriented empiricism. This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for science itself.
Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of political and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsificationism.
Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a new conception of rationality – aim-oriented rationalism – which has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim-oriented rationalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with Popper’s conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions.
The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. That there is indeed much to be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress was the big idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. This was immensely influential. But the philosophes of the Enlightenment made mistakes, and these mistakes, inherited from the Enlightenment, are built into the institutional and intellectual structure of academic inquiry today. In his two great works, The Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper corrected some of the mistakes of the Enlightenment – mistakes about the nature of scientific method and rationality. But Popper left other mistakes undetected and uncorrected. The present book seeks to push the Popperian research programme further, and correct what Popper left uncorrected.
The fundamental idea that emerges is that there is an urgent need to bring about a revolution in academic inquiry so that it takes up its proper task of promoting wisdom and not just acquiring knowledge – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides.
These essays are about education, learning, rational inquiry, philosophy, science studies, problem solving, academic inquiry, global problems, wisdom and, above all, the urgent need for an academic revolution.
Despite this range and diversity of topics, there is a common underlying theme. Education ought to be devoted, much more than it is, to the exploration of real-life, open problems; it ought not to be restricted to learning up solutions to already solved problems - especially if nothing is said about the problems that provoked the solutions in the first place. There should be much more emphasis on learning how to engage in cooperatively rational exploration of problems: even five year olds could begin to learn how to do this. A central task of philosophy ought to be to keep alive awareness of our unsolved fundamental problems - especially our most fundamental problem of all, encompassing all others: How can our human world - and the world of sentient life more generally - imbued with the experiential, consciousness, free will, meaning and value, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? This is both our fundamental intellectual problem and our fundamental problem of living.
As far as the latter is concerned, we are at present heading towards disaster - as our immense, unsolved global problems tell us: population growth, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, vast inequalities of wealth and power around the world, pollution of earth, sea and air, our proclivity for war, and above all global warming. If we are to resolve our conflicts and global problems more intelligently, effectively and humanely than we have managed to do so far, then we have to learn how to do it. That, in turn, requires that our institutions of learning, our universities and schools, are rationally designed and devoted to the task. At present they are not. That is the crisis behind all the others. From the past we have inherited the idea that the basic intellectual aim of inquiry ought to be to acquire knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; then, secondarily, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this is dangerously and damagingly irrational, and it is this irrationality that is, in part, responsible for the genesis of our current global problems, and our current incapacity to solve them. As a matter of supreme urgency, we need to transform academia so that it becomes rationally devoted to helping humanity learn how to make progress towards as good and wise a world as possible. This would involve putting problems of living - including global problems - at the heart of academia, problems of knowledge and technological know-how emerging out of, and feeding back into, the central task to help people tackle problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. Almost every department and aspect of academia needs to change. We need a new kind of academic inquiry devoted, not just to knowledge, but rather to wisdom - wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, wisdom including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides.
So, this is what these essays seek to provoke: a concerted effort to transform our institutions of learning so that they become rationally and effectively devoted to helping us learn how to create a wiser world.
With these essays before me, I can see that there is one crucial element of learning about which they say nothing - or nothing explicit. The vital role of play in learning. All mammals - or at any rate almost all mammals - learn by means of play. Cats, tigers, foxes and other predators learn to hunt by means of endless mock fights when kittens and cubs. Deer, sheep and antelope learn to escape by means of playful leaps and bounds when young. We are mammals too. Almost certainly, we learnt how to be adult human beings by means of play during the millions of years we evolved into homo sapiens living in hunting and gathering tribes. Children today, out of school, learn by means of play. Learning by means of play is almost certainly fundamental to our makeup. Education needs to exploit it. Schools and universities need to become places of play. Successful problem solving is often likely to be playful in character. The youthful Einstein called doing physics "getting up to mischief".
But our most serious problems of living are so grim, so imbued with suffering, wasted lives and unnecessary death that the idea of approaching them in a playful spirit seems sacrilegious. We need to keep alive tackling of intellectual problems so that playful capacities can be exercised - if for no other reason (and other reasons there are, of course, aplenty). There are two really worthy impulses behind all rational inquiry: delight and compassion.
Endorsements on the back cover of the book.
Thirty years ago, Nicholas Maxwell first argued that our universities must be rationally designed and devoted to helping us learn how to solve our problems of living. In the intervening years it has become more, not less, urgent that we take up his challenge.
Julian Baggini, editor-in-chief The Philosophers’ Magazine
This book begins by acknowledging that today most people lead longer and healthier lives than previous generations, primarily as a result of “knowledge-inquiry”, mainly in universities. Perversely, the result is ever-expanding populations, pressing against the limits to growth on a finite planet. Maxwell gives a good case for addressing these problems by universities putting much greater emphasis on “wisdom-inquiry”. It is a timely and interesting idea. I think the book deserves a wide readership.
Professor Lord Robert May, Oxford University
Which ideal matters more to us, knowledge or wisdom? Nicholas Maxwell has long fought staunchly for wisdom in this debate, and in this book he once more points out shrewdly how much our universities need to learn this lesson. It's to be hoped that this time they are listening!
Mary Midgley, Philosopher
Nicholas Maxwell argues that in order to address the problems of global society, we must transform our universities. At UCL we fully agree and we have already made such changes central to our 2011 Research Strategy "Delivering a Culture of Wisdom". Our UCL Grand Challenges programme, which has so far involved more than 250 academics, is putting these ideas into practice.
David Price, Vice-Provost of Research, University College London
This second edition has been revised throughout, has additional material, a new introduction and three new chapters.
What one critic has said about the second edition
“Any philosopher or other person who seeks wisdom should read this book. Any educator who loves education--especially those in leadership positions--should read this book. Anyone who wants to understand an important source of modern human malaise should read this book. And anyone trying to figure out why, in a world that produces so many technical wonders, there is such an immense "wisdom gap" should read this book. In From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities, Second Edition . . . Nicholas Maxwell presents a compelling, wise, humane, and timely argument for a shift in our fundamental "aim of inquiry" from that of knowledge to that of wisdom.”
Jeff Huggins Metapsychology
What three critics said about the first edition of From Knowledge to Wisdom
“Maxwell is advocating nothing less than a revolution (based on reason, not on religious or Marxist doctrine) in our intellectual goals and methods of inquiry ... There are altogether too many symptoms of malaise in our science-based society for Nicholas Maxwell's diagnosis to be ignored."
Professor Christopher Longuet-Higgins, Nature.
“a strong effort is needed if one is to stand back and clearly state the objections to the whole enormous tangle of misconceptions which surround the notion of science to-day. Maxwell has made that effort in this powerful, profound and important book.”
Dr. Mary Midgley, University Quarterly.
“The essential idea is really so simple, so transparently right ... It is a profound book, refreshingly unpretentious, and deserves to be read, refined and implemented.”
Dr. Stewart Richards, Annals of Science.
For further quotations from reviews, see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom/reviews/#from
Readership: Scientists, philosophers, historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, educationalists, science policy experts, science journalists, undergraduate and graduate level students, and general readers interested in science, or concerned about problems confronting humanity.
Key Features
• Has dramatic implications for social science and the humanities, for philosophy, for education, and for the long-term capacity of humanity to learn how to make progress towards a better world
• Written in an informal, accessible way
• Sets out to solve basic philosophical problems concerning science
Published by Pentire Press and distributed by Amazon, Ingram and Baker & Taylor
I argue that all these problems have come about because we have solved the first of two great problems of learning-the problem of learning to acquire scientific knowledge and technological know-how-but have so far failed to solve the second great problem of learning-learning to create a civilized world.
Modern science and technology make possible modern industry and agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern power production and travel, modern armaments, which in turn make possible much that is good, but also all the above global problems. Science as such is not the problem; it is, rather, science without wisdom. All the above problems have arisen because we have modern science without wisdom. Now that we have solved the first great problem of learning, we must discover, urgently, how to solve the second one. We can do that if we learn from how we solved the first great problem of learning how to solve the second one. That requires that we bring about a radical transformation in universities all over the world. At present they are devoted to the pursuit of specialized knowledge and technology. They need to be transformed so that the basic task becomes to help humanity tackle problems of living, including global problems, in increasingly cooperatively rational ways.
The book spells out in detail the changes that need to be made to academic inquiry, why they need to be made, and how they would enable universities to help humanity actively and effectively tackle and solve current global problems.
The book is intended to be a fresh, unorthodox introduction to philosophy - an introduction which will, I hope, interest and even excite an intelligent 16 year old, as well as any adult half-way interested in intellectual, social, political or environmental issues. Scientists and professional philosophers should find it of interest as well. The idea of the book is to bring philosophy down to earth, demonstrate its vital importance, when done properly, for science, for scholarship, for education, for life, for the fate of the world.
If everything is made up of fundamental physical entities, electrons and quarks, interacting in accordance with precise physical law, what becomes of the world we experience – the colours, sounds, smells and tactile qualities of things? What becomes of our inner experiences? How can we have free will, and be responsible for what we do, if everything occurs in accordance with physical law, including our bodies and brains? How can anything be of value if everything in the universe is, ultimately, just physics? These are some of the questions we will be tackling in this book.
These questions arise because of this great fissure in our thinking about the world. Our scientific thinking about the physical universe clashes in all sorts of ways with our thinking about our human world. The task is to discover how we can adjust our ideas about both the physical universe, and our human world, so that we can resolve clashes between the two in such a way that justice is done both to what science tells us about the universe, and to all that is of value in our human world – the miracle of our life here on earth – and the heart-ache and tragedy.
It is all-but inevitable that even the smallest adjustments to what we take science to tell us about the universe, or to what we hold to be the nature and value of our human world, will have all sorts of repercussions, potentially, for all sorts of fields outside philosophy – for science, for thought, for life. And indeed revolutionary ideas do emerge in this book from the exploration of our fundamental problem.
There is, first, a revolution for philosophy. A new kind of philosophy emerges which I call Critical Fundamentalism. This tackles our fundamental problem, and in doing so seeks to resolve the fundamental fissure in the way we think about the universe and ourselves in such a way that this resolution has multiple, fruitful implications for thought and life. Second, there is a revolution in what we take science to tell us about the world: it is concerned, not with everything about everything, but only with a highly specialized aspect of everything. This is the subject of chapter 3. Third, there is a revolution in our whole conception of science, and the kind of science we should seek to develop – the subject of chapter 4. Fourth, there is a revolution in biology, in Darwin’s theory of evolution, so that the theory does better justice to helping us understand how life of value has evolved. This is the subject of chapter 5. Fifth, there is a revolution in the social sciences. These are not sciences; rather, their proper basic task is to promote the cooperatively rational solving of conflicts and problems of living in the social world. In addition, they have the task of discovering how progress-achieving methods, generalized from those of natural science (as these ought to be conceived) can be got into social life, into all our other social endeavours, government, industry, the economy and so on, so that social progress towards a more enlightened world may be made in a way that is somewhat comparable to the intellectual progress in knowledge made by science. Social inquiry emerges as social methodology or philosophy and not, fundamentally, social science. Sixth, there is a much broader revolution in academic inquiry as a whole. We need a new kind of academic enterprise rationally designed and devoted to helping us resolve the grave global conflicts and problems that confront us: habitat destruction, loss of wild life, extinction of species, the menace of nuclear weapons, the lethal character of modern war, gross inequality, pollution of earth, sea and air, and above all the impending disasters of climate change. These problems have arisen in part because of the gross structural irrationality of our institutions of learning devoted as they are to the pursuit of knowledge instead of taking, as their basic task, to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, thus making progress towards as good, as wise, a world as possible. Seventh, there is the all-important social revolution that might gradually emerge if humanity has the wit to develop what it so urgently needs: academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping us make progress towards a better, more civilized world. These fifth, sixth and seventh revolutions are the subject of chapter 7.
Academic philosophy, whether so-called analytic or Continental philosophy, is not noted for its fruitful implications for other areas of thought and life. How come, then, that philosophy as done here, Critical Fundamentalism, has these dramatic revolutionary implications for science, for academic inquiry, for our capacity to solve the global problems that menace our future? I do what I can to answer this question in chapters 2 and 9.
Why has academic philosophy, lost its way so drastically that it has failed to put the richly fruitful conception of philosophy, as done here, into practice? What caused academic philosophy to lose its way? I give my answer to this question in the appendix.
My chief hope, in writing this book, however, is that the reader will be beguiled or provoked into thinking imaginatively and critically – that is, rationally – about our fundamental problem, not obsessively, but from time to time.
Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings are, how it needs to be improved to overcome these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The book dramatically develops Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems.
Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a new philosophy of science, which I call aim-oriented empiricism. This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for science itself.
Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of political and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsificationism.
Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a new conception of rationality – aim-oriented rationalism – which has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim-oriented rationalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with Popper’s conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions.
The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. That there is indeed much to be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress was the big idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. This was immensely influential. But the philosophes of the Enlightenment made mistakes, and these mistakes, inherited from the Enlightenment, are built into the institutional and intellectual structure of academic inquiry today. In his two great works, The Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper corrected some of the mistakes of the Enlightenment – mistakes about the nature of scientific method and rationality. But Popper left other mistakes undetected and uncorrected. The present book seeks to push the Popperian research programme further, and correct what Popper left uncorrected.
The fundamental idea that emerges is that there is an urgent need to bring about a revolution in academic inquiry so that it takes up its proper task of promoting wisdom and not just acquiring knowledge – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides.
These essays are about education, learning, rational inquiry, philosophy, science studies, problem solving, academic inquiry, global problems, wisdom and, above all, the urgent need for an academic revolution.
Despite this range and diversity of topics, there is a common underlying theme. Education ought to be devoted, much more than it is, to the exploration of real-life, open problems; it ought not to be restricted to learning up solutions to already solved problems - especially if nothing is said about the problems that provoked the solutions in the first place. There should be much more emphasis on learning how to engage in cooperatively rational exploration of problems: even five year olds could begin to learn how to do this. A central task of philosophy ought to be to keep alive awareness of our unsolved fundamental problems - especially our most fundamental problem of all, encompassing all others: How can our human world - and the world of sentient life more generally - imbued with the experiential, consciousness, free will, meaning and value, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? This is both our fundamental intellectual problem and our fundamental problem of living.
As far as the latter is concerned, we are at present heading towards disaster - as our immense, unsolved global problems tell us: population growth, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, vast inequalities of wealth and power around the world, pollution of earth, sea and air, our proclivity for war, and above all global warming. If we are to resolve our conflicts and global problems more intelligently, effectively and humanely than we have managed to do so far, then we have to learn how to do it. That, in turn, requires that our institutions of learning, our universities and schools, are rationally designed and devoted to the task. At present they are not. That is the crisis behind all the others. From the past we have inherited the idea that the basic intellectual aim of inquiry ought to be to acquire knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; then, secondarily, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this is dangerously and damagingly irrational, and it is this irrationality that is, in part, responsible for the genesis of our current global problems, and our current incapacity to solve them. As a matter of supreme urgency, we need to transform academia so that it becomes rationally devoted to helping humanity learn how to make progress towards as good and wise a world as possible. This would involve putting problems of living - including global problems - at the heart of academia, problems of knowledge and technological know-how emerging out of, and feeding back into, the central task to help people tackle problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. Almost every department and aspect of academia needs to change. We need a new kind of academic inquiry devoted, not just to knowledge, but rather to wisdom - wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, wisdom including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides.
So, this is what these essays seek to provoke: a concerted effort to transform our institutions of learning so that they become rationally and effectively devoted to helping us learn how to create a wiser world.
With these essays before me, I can see that there is one crucial element of learning about which they say nothing - or nothing explicit. The vital role of play in learning. All mammals - or at any rate almost all mammals - learn by means of play. Cats, tigers, foxes and other predators learn to hunt by means of endless mock fights when kittens and cubs. Deer, sheep and antelope learn to escape by means of playful leaps and bounds when young. We are mammals too. Almost certainly, we learnt how to be adult human beings by means of play during the millions of years we evolved into homo sapiens living in hunting and gathering tribes. Children today, out of school, learn by means of play. Learning by means of play is almost certainly fundamental to our makeup. Education needs to exploit it. Schools and universities need to become places of play. Successful problem solving is often likely to be playful in character. The youthful Einstein called doing physics "getting up to mischief".
But our most serious problems of living are so grim, so imbued with suffering, wasted lives and unnecessary death that the idea of approaching them in a playful spirit seems sacrilegious. We need to keep alive tackling of intellectual problems so that playful capacities can be exercised - if for no other reason (and other reasons there are, of course, aplenty). There are two really worthy impulses behind all rational inquiry: delight and compassion.
Endorsements on the back cover of the book.
Thirty years ago, Nicholas Maxwell first argued that our universities must be rationally designed and devoted to helping us learn how to solve our problems of living. In the intervening years it has become more, not less, urgent that we take up his challenge.
Julian Baggini, editor-in-chief The Philosophers’ Magazine
This book begins by acknowledging that today most people lead longer and healthier lives than previous generations, primarily as a result of “knowledge-inquiry”, mainly in universities. Perversely, the result is ever-expanding populations, pressing against the limits to growth on a finite planet. Maxwell gives a good case for addressing these problems by universities putting much greater emphasis on “wisdom-inquiry”. It is a timely and interesting idea. I think the book deserves a wide readership.
Professor Lord Robert May, Oxford University
Which ideal matters more to us, knowledge or wisdom? Nicholas Maxwell has long fought staunchly for wisdom in this debate, and in this book he once more points out shrewdly how much our universities need to learn this lesson. It's to be hoped that this time they are listening!
Mary Midgley, Philosopher
Nicholas Maxwell argues that in order to address the problems of global society, we must transform our universities. At UCL we fully agree and we have already made such changes central to our 2011 Research Strategy "Delivering a Culture of Wisdom". Our UCL Grand Challenges programme, which has so far involved more than 250 academics, is putting these ideas into practice.
David Price, Vice-Provost of Research, University College London
This second edition has been revised throughout, has additional material, a new introduction and three new chapters.
What one critic has said about the second edition
“Any philosopher or other person who seeks wisdom should read this book. Any educator who loves education--especially those in leadership positions--should read this book. Anyone who wants to understand an important source of modern human malaise should read this book. And anyone trying to figure out why, in a world that produces so many technical wonders, there is such an immense "wisdom gap" should read this book. In From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities, Second Edition . . . Nicholas Maxwell presents a compelling, wise, humane, and timely argument for a shift in our fundamental "aim of inquiry" from that of knowledge to that of wisdom.”
Jeff Huggins Metapsychology
What three critics said about the first edition of From Knowledge to Wisdom
“Maxwell is advocating nothing less than a revolution (based on reason, not on religious or Marxist doctrine) in our intellectual goals and methods of inquiry ... There are altogether too many symptoms of malaise in our science-based society for Nicholas Maxwell's diagnosis to be ignored."
Professor Christopher Longuet-Higgins, Nature.
“a strong effort is needed if one is to stand back and clearly state the objections to the whole enormous tangle of misconceptions which surround the notion of science to-day. Maxwell has made that effort in this powerful, profound and important book.”
Dr. Mary Midgley, University Quarterly.
“The essential idea is really so simple, so transparently right ... It is a profound book, refreshingly unpretentious, and deserves to be read, refined and implemented.”
Dr. Stewart Richards, Annals of Science.
For further quotations from reviews, see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom/reviews/#from
Readership: Scientists, philosophers, historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, educationalists, science policy experts, science journalists, undergraduate and graduate level students, and general readers interested in science, or concerned about problems confronting humanity.
Key Features
• Has dramatic implications for social science and the humanities, for philosophy, for education, and for the long-term capacity of humanity to learn how to make progress towards a better world
• Written in an informal, accessible way
• Sets out to solve basic philosophical problems concerning science
Published by Pentire Press and distributed by Amazon, Ingram and Baker & Taylor
This new conception has a number of implications for the nature of science. One is that it is part of current scientific knowledge that the universe is comprehensible, even physically comprehensible. Another is that metaphysics and philosophy are central to scientific knowledge. Another is that science possesses a rational, if fallible method of discovery. And another is that the whole picture of scientific method and rationality needs to be changed.
Within this new conception of science, long-standing philosophical problems about science, having to do with simplicity, induction and progress, find a natural resolution.
For quotations from reviews, see http://www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk/Reviews.htm#thecomprehensibility