Self-funding by Failing Upwards

Scientific education that trains thinkers to stay in their grooves tends to reproduce narrow, uncritical ways of knowing.

šŸŽyour Scholarly Digest 24th April, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Hi Scholar, 

To get you warmed up for this week’s Brain Food, consider this limerick:

ā

There once was a man who said, ā€˜Damn!

It is borne in upon me that I am

An engine that moves

In predestinate grooves,

Not even a bus, I'm a tram.’

Maurice Evan Hare 1886–1967

BRAIN FOOD

Out of The Groove: Rethinking Objectivity

ā€œEach profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove…. The groove prevents straying across country, and the abstraction abstracts from something to which no further attention is given… Of course, no one is merely a mathematician, or merely a lawyer. People have lives outside their professions or their business. But the point is the restraint of serious thought within a groove. The remainder of life is treated superficially, with the imperfect categories of thought derived from one profession.ā€

— A.N. Whitehead

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