How often do we take time out of our day to think about our thinking? Is what we are learning really important? Am I becoming a well rounded person through my classes? These are some serious questions that the philosophy department and the the Hanson-Peterson chair want students at Gustavus to spend more time thinking about.

On Monday Feb. 21 at 7:00 p.m. in room 05 in Old Main,  Thomas Kasulis will give a lecture that addresses some of these questions as he helps us think about our thinking. Kasulis is a professor of comparative philosophy and religion at Ohio State University.

The lecture is titled “From the Love of Wisdom to the Wisdom of Love: Rethinking Thinking” (An argument for a more intimacy-dominant form of thinking in both education and in society). The lecture is sponsored by the Hanson-Peterson chair and supplemented by the philosophy department.

Kasulis is going to urge his audience to change the way they “know” things. “Clearly, there are different kinds of knowing, but I will argue that in the past two centuries or so, we have increasingly placed an emphasis on one kind, what we might call the Wissenschaft or ‘-ology’ model. Originating in the physical sciences, this model is now applied ever more frequently to all our attempts at understanding ourselves and our world ” Kasulis said.

One of Kasulis’s reasons for why society uses the “-ology” model so frequently is because of our education system. Kasulis compared this ‘-ology’ model of learning to how liberal arts colleges educate their students. Kasulis explained how the liberal arts has turned into a postage stamp system.

He said “You take your required courses in the different ‘-ologies’ and you get a stamp to put in your book. We shouldn’t just have one course in each  -ology [subject area], it needs to be more interactive across and between courses. It needs to be more intercultural instead of multicultural. We shouldn’t just accumulate enough of the ‘-ologies’ to say that we understand”.

Chair of the Department of Philosophy and the Hanson-Peterson Chair of  Liberal Studies Deane Curtin hopes that this critiscism of liberal arts colleges helps the Gustavus community become aware of its own liberal arts education and its implications for society. “I invited Kasulisbecause he addresses the issues of the meaning of a liberal arts college. In our culture we have a crisis about liberal arts education. We don’t know what the center is anymore,” he said.

Curtin explained that liberal arts colleges can have great individual departments, but they are not well integrated to focus on the development of the whole person.

Curtin hopes that Kasulis will start a discussion about what a liberal arts education program looks like that integrates all subject areas that students are required to take here at Gustavus.

“We have fallen into a rut with our thinking, we keep doing the same type of thing over and we keep getting the same answers. If we want to find new kinds of solutions, we need to have new ways of thinking,” Kasulis said. This lecture will give students and faculty an opportunity to take time out of their day to think about their thinking and maybe answer some of those questions about what we are learning and why.