Abstract
A university is a site of knowledge production. However, this settles hardly anything at all. The construction of knowledge always comes before two other important human activities: ethics and learning. Both supervene on epistemology. This chapter provides an account of a university and its purposes, developed by one of the most significant philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Roy Bhaskar. Though he directed his attention to wider matters than education, and specifically university education, his philosophy has implications for the way we can understand how the world is structured and in turn how we can transform it to accommodate a desire for a better arrangement of resources for human wellbeing. It is thus both a theory of mind and world, and, in addition, a theory, by implication, of the educational purposes of a university.
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Scott, D. (2020). Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014): The Idea of a University. In: Barnett, R., Fulford, A. (eds) Philosophers on the University. Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31061-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31061-5_5
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