Research, Skills & Autonomy; God, Sex & Death: Practicalized Pedagogy as a Philosophy of Science

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Public policy debate in higher education is dominated by planning for and reviews of macro trends. This paper adopts the alternative approach of viewing the process emanating out of the Roberts Review from the developing practitioner’s perspective.

The theoretical background is John McDowell’s project to rescue the place of Reason in the fundamental conception of the World, a place which is threatened by the advancement of science and technology conceived as the domain purely of experts who might be tempted to assume a value-free environment, and a place which is beyond the horizon of, for instance, Richard Dawkins’s understanding of the “public understanding of science” and, for instance, Quine’s “naturalized epistemology”.

Part of the account of the practice of novice researchers will need to be articulated in the form of its place in society and human values but we shall explore further the real implications of this, in particular for true autonomy for the individual practitioner. This autonomy needs to be understood in the positive, Kantian sense, so including this sense of value as well as freedom to explore new avenues of scientific, and by analogy other academic, enquiry. This also emphasises the place of consciousness in the development process, once the anti-Enlightenment challenge is met from the protagonist in Heinrich von Kleist’s “Über Das Marionettentheater”.