Strathclyde Institute of Education is delighted to welcome the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Distinguished Lecture Series. As part of the series the Institute will host a distinguished lecture by Professor Catherine Pickstock, Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. The talk will be followed by a drinks reception. All are welcome (registration below).
Poetics and paideia: the transmission of knowledge as production
September 1st 2025, 17.00-19.00
SW105 (Stenhouse Wing), University of Strathclyde
Artificial Intelligence presents education with a crisis, that brings to the surface a deeper cultural problem. All the time we act in public and private life as if the soul, freedom, feeling, beauty and goodness were real, and yet our science seems to cast doubt on that. Indeed, it may cast doubt even on the truth of ‘truth’ which it would itself seem to require. Meanwhile AI seems to be able to mimic or even initiate the ‘creative’ residue of human thought that we might have hoped was unique. But insofar as it does so (imperfectly for now), this does not imply something reductive, but rather the reverse: as with quantum physics, a spontaneous predilection for order apparently beyond the pre-programmed. This does not mean that machines think or are conscious, but perhaps instead that even artificial contrivances can start to reveal that they also belong to an underlying nature that is inventive and teleological, just as it seems to open itself up infinitely to our mental comprehension both theoretical and practical.
In this way and surprisingly, computing itself (as Margaret Masterman intimated) may point us back to the poetic as irreducible. On a reductive view, our thought just ‘represents’ given reality. In that case, we can be replaced by dead machines and there is no point in education. In fact, there is only any point in a humanistic education if we have souls or spirits to which nature and machines only approximate. The knowledge that is irreducible we can now see is always religious, philosophical or poetic knowledge. This is because knowledge always has a practical dimension. Pragmatism is also speculative because to know what to do, as an individual or a society, we have to ask what to aim for, and that involves an ‘impossible’ attempt to ask things like what is real, what is the whole. There are two linked approaches to this: philosophy tries to know how all the many finite things relate to the one infinite thing. That is an impossible question, but without it, there is no philosophy, which has to explain how it is that there is spirit and consciousness as well as matter. Otherwise, if we merely collect data on passing matter and see how we can control it better, we only need a scientific explanation.
Yet because philosophy has to ‘guess’ about the whole to a certain degree, it also needs poetry and something like religion: it needs to recognise how the whole of reality, ultimate truth, discloses itself in instants and a series of instants in the life of individuals and of societies in history. For this reason, humanistic education, in the wake of Plato in the case of the West, requires literary critical reflection on poetry, as well as philosophy. Philosophy is abstract poetry. Poetry is concrete philosophy. In the face of AI, we can only retain a humanistic education if we put philosophy and poetry at its core and see their inseparable nature.