All 1 entries tagged History Of Learning Space

Kant's Conflict of the Faculties

A brief research note on Kant's contribution to the development of the modern university.

In thinking about the history of university spaces, Kant provides a good starting point. His The Conflict of the Faculties¹ from 1798 might have acted as a blueprint for the development of the faculty structure and the dramaturgy of the lecture as a site for "legitimitate" conflict (or "academic freedom" to use a more recent expression). Steve Fuller's notion of the university as a space for the "creative destruction of social capital"² echoes Kant - but let's not accuse Fuller of being an undeveloped Kantian!

Kant was the cartographer of Reason - the University and the Individual being different but closely related expressions of Pure Reason (the logic of time) in space - each resulting in distributions of responsibility and capability. It's interesting to speculate on how learning space design might spatially express conceptions of reason and intelligence - that might not necessarily be a good thing.

For more on Kant's conception of the university, see this essay by David Evans of Queens University, Belfast.

Evans, D. The Conflict of the Faculties and the Knowledge Industry, Kant's Diagnosis in His Time and Ours, (2008), 83:483-495 Cambridge University Press.

Fuller, S. and Abbott, T. (interviewer) The Sociology of Intellectual Life [podcasts], http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/festival/podcast/soche/ [Accessed 27/06/09]

Kant, I. and Gregorm M.J. (trans.) The Conflict of the Faculties (Der Streit Der Fakultaten), University of Nebraska, 1992.

Robert O'Toole : 27 Jun 2009 07:04 |  Tags: History Of Learning Space |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem