How do Christian parents combat what the schools teach? Sadly, my parents were not able to persuade three of their five children that the schools were wrong. I have three atheistic siblings to prove that schools do work. (Only in turning children’s hearts away from God.)

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You have good example for this discussion. We still have to argue about censorship today, while we don’t have to prove the calculus. This is because freedom of expression is relative to other goods, such as security, and ownership of information, etc. In each case, we have to persuade each other to what value to adopt, and some of us will disagree, and even contradict ourselves in relation to previous cases.

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Let’s keep using Milton as an example. He wrote Areopagetica, a treatise on freedom of speech and thought in 1600’s England. Now, certainly the professor may touch on the dialetic and teach the students how Milton argued and what made his argument great .

But should he not then move beyond that into what you call–unless I am mistaken–”logos” and discuss the content itself –the freedom that Milton advocated? And would not such a discussion necessarily involve religious, theological–”virtuous”, if you will–ideas?

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Different content too. Sure this means they operate independently. A rhetorician can pretend to be scientific, but not do science. Dialectical reasoning requires training and practice, not just in general, but in a specialty. Only mathematicians and theologians can do logos.

All knowledge exists in the mind of God and you can take, or audit, any course in the university, but that doesn’t begin to solve our problems. The challenge of Aristotle to evangelicals is that most of the important things we talk about, including everything in ethics and politics, are things that we have to talk about interminably because they are matters of judgement, experience, and preference and nobody ever has the last word, except as a matter of convention (an election, for example). If we could determine such questions by dialectic or logos, there would be no point in arguing, but we can’t so we’re stuck in the never-ending arena where combatants change their colors like boxers who end up wearing each others coats (in Lincoln’s famous example). Ideas about ethics and politics are the stage props of desire.

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Having separate purposes, rules, and practitioners does not mean they operate independently of each other. Besides philosophy didn’t lie down in the grave with Aristotle.

Where objectivity is important in avoiding the politicizing of the classroom, true objectivity requires ownership of one’s own presuppositions.

The idea of “University” that was developed by Western European civilation is predicated on a unified version of truth. The piecemeal compartmentalization of knowledge and value that Fish seems to be championing is ultimately untenable and contrary to the mission of the university in which he finds a home.

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http://tinyurl.com/6zoqyb

“[R]esearchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected [the philosophical notion of] free will….”

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HSK often talks as if he knows of and teaches some kind of continuum from the contemplation of God (logos) to the practice of scientific method (dialectic) to the consideration of ethical and political questions (rhetoric). Maybe there is such a continuum and HSK can use his knowledge of the Eternal Word to validate creation science and calculate the appropriate tax cuts for the wealthy. But he hasn’t explained how.

Me, I think Fish is correct in his assessment of rhetoric as the art of persuasion concerning matters that can be stated perpetually otherwise, because the subject of rhetoric is fundamentally ambiguous. And science, in which Fish probably includes criticism, is primarily a training in method.

If you want absolutes, however, they’re all in Augustine.

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Count me among the many.

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