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The Concept of a University

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

D. W. Hamlyn
D. W. Hamlyn
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Extract

To those who think that an institution must be a function of its history it must seem a considerable anomaly that when universities were first set up in the Middle Ages their main aim, apart from being communities of scholars, was to produce theologians, lawyers and doctors of medicine. For arts and what then had some connection with what we now know as science, as incorporated in the traditional seven liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, were thought of as merely propaedeutic to the study of theology, law and medicine. Those seven liberal arts occupied the student during the course for the B.A., which gave the licence to teach, and some students went no further than that. But the main concern of a university lay in what happened after the B.A., in the attainment of a mastership or in what was in effect the doctorate in one of the three areas which I have mentioned before. Indeed, in some universities, particularly those in the south of Europe, the B.A. was given only scant attention and only lip service was given to the idea of liberal arts.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 71 , Issue 276 , April 1996 , pp. 205 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1996

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References

1 For this sort of point and for scepticism on the extent to which the official and generally accepted pattern was conformed to see Fletcher, John F., ‘Some considerations of therole of the teaching of philosophy in the medieval universities’, The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1994, 3–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 See e.g. Russell, Conrad, Academic Freedom (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar

3 Here, as elsewhere, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance on the part of academics, and some instances of that sort of thing have reached the press in recent times.

4 Griffiths, A. Phillips, ‘A deduction of universities’, in Archambault, Reginald D. (ed.), Philosophical Analysis and Education (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 187–207.Google Scholar

5 Cf. e.g., Kripke, S., Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980);Google ScholarPutnam, H., Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1975);Google ScholarWiggins, D., Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).Google Scholar

6 When I was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Birkbeck College I had to take part in the assessment of candidates for a prize for research in arts. The theses of two of the candidates, if I rememberrightly, were concerned with, respectively, the frontiers of Peru and the incidence of Italian words in German literature during a certain period.

7 That ideal and its presumptions came to be accepted initially, as I have indicated, only as embodied in 19th century German universities, and it is possible to accept the ideal without accepting the details of its embodiment. But it is a very different conception from that which governed the institution of the medieval universities. Will different ideals come to be accepted at some time in the future?