Abstract
Lecturing is the only educational form inherited from the universities of the middle ages that is still in use today. However, it seems that lecturing is under threat, as recent calls to do away with lecturing in favour of more dynamic settings, such as the flipped classroom or pre-recorded talks, have found many adherents. In line with the post-critical approach of this book, this chapter argues that there is something in the university lecture that needs to be affirmed: at its best, the university lecture functions as a technique for thinking together or for making collective thinking happen in a lecture hall. The lecture offers the set-up, both technological and architectural, to forge a common experience that binds together the listeners and the speakers; that experience can be characterised as visualising ideas or seeing things as if they had taken on a ‘bodily form’. By looking at several examples of lecturing moments experienced by Gadamer as a student and later recounted in his autobiography, we can better understand the paradigmatic experience that characterises the lecture – as an ideal to be sought, even if, perhaps, not always actualised in everyday lectures.
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Notes
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‘In this habitually unary space, occasionally (but alas all too rarely) a “detail” attracts me. I feel that its mere presence changes my reading, that I am looking at a new photograph, marked in my eyes with a higher value. This “detail” is the punctum’ (Barthes 1981, p. 42).
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [grant number G059414N] and Onderzoeksraad, KU Leuven [grant number 3H130076].
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Marin, L. (2020). University Lecturing as a Technique of Collective Imagination: On Seeing Things as If They Had Taken a Bodily Form. In: Hodgson, N., Vlieghe, J., Zamojski, P. (eds) Post-critical Perspectives on Higher Education. Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45019-9_6
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