Background
Verene, Donald Phillip was born on October 24, 1937 in Galesburg, Illinois, United States. Son of Phillip Nelson and Eleanor Louise (Grant) Verene.
(In The Art of Humane Education, Donald Phillip Verene pre...)
In The Art of Humane Education, Donald Phillip Verene presents a new statement of the classical and humanist ideals that he believes should guide education in the liberal arts and sciences. These ideals are lost, he contends, in the corporate atmosphere of the contemporary university, with its emphasis on administration, faculty careerism, and student performance. Verene addresses questions of how and what to teach and offers practical suggestions for the conduct of class sessions, the relationship between teacher and student, the interpretation of texts, and the meaning and use of a canon of great books.In sharp contrast to the current tendency toward specialization, Verene considers the aim of college education to be self-knowledge pursued through study of all fields of thought. Education, in his view, must be based on acquisition of the arts of reading, writing, and thinking. He regards the class lecture as a form of oratory that should be presented in accordance with the well-known principles of rhetoric. The Art of Humane Education, styled as a series of letters, makes the author's original and practical ideas very clear. In this elegant book, Verene explores the full range of issues surrounding humane education.On the humanities: "Despite Descartes, the study of humane letters has remained, but it is always in danger of passing out of the curriculum. It remains a beggar who will not quite leave the premises."On teaching: "Like oratory, teaching requires a natural gift, but it is also an art which, like all the other humane arts, can be learned only mimetically. . . . As some are born tone-deaf and cannot be musical, there are those who can never teach. But most if they wish have some aptitude for it, and this aptitude can be developed into an art."On teachers: "Teachers motivated by eloquence attempt to speak wholly on a subject, since the whole is where its life is. Teachers not motivated by eloquence tend to be either dull or comedic. The dull teacher may have knowledge but have no true language for it. . . . The comedic teacher is shallow and a menace to the subject matter."On administrators: "Administration is never content simply to concern itself with the pure business of the university, paying its bills, maintaining its buildings. It sees itself as necessary in order for the process between teacher and student to go on. But it is a process that it constantly interrupts. . . . Administrators, however, should not be taken too seriously."Although sharply critical of many aspects of the modern university and of many currents within the humanities, The Art of Humane Education remains at heart a ringing endorsement of the high humanist tradition and its continuing relevance to the institutions of teaching and learning.
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(This book contends that both Anglo-American analytic phil...)
This book contends that both Anglo-American analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy have lost their vitality, and it offers an alternative in their place. Donald Phillip Verene advocates a renewal of contemporary philosophy through a return to its origins in Socratic humanism and to the notions of civil wisdom, eloquence, and prudence as guides to human action. Focusing in particular on the traditions of some of the late Greeks and the Romans, Renaissance humanism, and the thought of Giambattista Vico, this book's concern is to revive the ancient Delphic injunction "know thyself, " an idea of civil wisdom that Verene finds has been missing since Descartes. The author recovers the meaning of the vital relations that poetry, myth, and rhetoric had with philosophy in thinkers like Cicero, Quintilian, Isocrates, Pico, Vives, and Vico. He arrives at a conception of philosophy as a form of memory that requires both rhetoric and poetry to accomplish self-knowledge.
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(In this original and illuminating work, the reader is inv...)
In this original and illuminating work, the reader is invited to approach philosophy as an activity that can instruct, delight, and move. On this view, philosophy can be seen as a key to human education, a mastery of humane letters, and a part of the repulic of the liberal arts. Embracing this approach to philosophy, Verene argues, involves moving beyond modern philosophy's analytical encounter with experience, one that emphasizes argument and criticism at the expense of the Socratic search for self-knowledge. Relying on insights from Vico and Hegel, Verene introduces a new sense of reason, one that sees the True as the whole and that connects reason to the ancient sense of speculation. Reflection and criticism are given their due, but the reorientation of philosophy toward the speculative grasp of the whole of things allows memory, imagination, and dialectical ingenuity to take on philosophical form. In the end, this work show how speculation, symbolic form, metaphor, poetry, and rhetoric are natural parts of philosophical thinking.
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(The High Road of Humanity is a cultural ethics. It is an ...)
The High Road of Humanity is a cultural ethics. It is an exposition of the moral positions of the West, intended to accompany the intellectual positions of Western philosophy and society formulated in Levi's earlier Philosophy as Social Expression. In opposition to the nearly complete abstraction from actual moral life that is the common stance of the works in ethics in our time from positivism to applied ethics, Levi's aim is to take the process of moral thought back one step further from moral inquiry to its basis in the moral imagination. For Levi the moral life and moral discourse requires first of all an ideal that is shaped in the imagination, an image of the human. The seven ethical ages he discusses are the Greek aristocrat, Stoic sage, Christian saint, Renaissance prince, Enlightenment gentleman, the nineteenth-century merchant prince, and the professional man and women of today. He gathered the details of each historical figure or moral ideal and selected sculpture, paintings, and portraits to illustrate them. Levi's approach to moral philosophy is based on his lifelong study in the philosophy of culture. The foreword is by Donald Phillip Verene.
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historian philosopher university professor
Verene, Donald Phillip was born on October 24, 1937 in Galesburg, Illinois, United States. Son of Phillip Nelson and Eleanor Louise (Grant) Verene.
AB cum laude, Knox College, Galesburg, 1959. Master of Arts in Philosophy, Washington University, St. Louis, 1962. Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy, Washington University, St. Louis, 1964.
Doctor of Humane Letters, Knox College, 1990.
He is the Charles Howard Chandler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University. He earned his doctorate in philosophy at Washington University in 1964. He is the father of the photographer Chris Verene.
Doctor Verene is a lecturing academic at Emory University.
He was Editor of Philosophy and Rhetoric from 1976 to 1987. From 1982 to 1988, he was the Chair of Emory"s Department of Philosophy.
Considered a worldwide authority on Giambattista Vico, he leads Emory"s Center for Vico Studies. He also serves as a Visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college in Savannah.
Verene was a Visiting Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford in 1988.
He was a Visiting Scholar at Louisiana Sapienza University of Rome in 1996. He is also a Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
(In The Art of Humane Education, Donald Phillip Verene pre...)
(This book contends that both Anglo-American analytic phil...)
(In this original and illuminating work, the reader is inv...)
(The High Road of Humanity is a cultural ethics. It is an ...)
President Hegel Society America, 1992—1994, Metaphysical Society America, 2008—2009.
Married Molly Katherine Black, October 13, 1960. 1 child Christopher Phillip.