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Keywords:

philosophy of education

Abstract:

The aim of this investigation is to answer the question “What is the place of the text in the university lecture?” by describing the pedagogical relation between the text and the lecture. It seems that the relation between the text and the university was fundamental ever since the beginnings of the first medieval universities; according to Ivan Illich, the discovery of the text as a certain layout on the page in the 12th century was essential in the emergence of the university as a particular pedagogical form (Illich 1991). How the text functions in the university lecture has been studied extensively, most recently by Norm Friesen through an analysis of the trans-medial character of the lecture. According to Friesen (2011), in the first medieval universities the text was taken to be the source of uncontested knowledge whereas the lecture was a way of orally communicating the knowledge from the book; in this relation the Master was always secondary to the book, superseded by the authority of the text. This relation was inverted during the Enlightenment when the lecturer became more important than the text; the text was merely the pretext of delivering a charismatic, almost dramaturgical performance – as the famous example of Fichte illustrates; finally, in the modern age, the lecture came to be conceived as a "hermeneutic speech act" (Friesen 2011, p.100) through which a "written tradition is brought back [...] into the living present of conversation" (Gadamer 2004, p. 362); in this instance the text is subsumed to the interpretation of the lecturer even if the text remains centre stage. If we take the relation text-lecture as fundamental for the university, the following question arises: what happens when the text is not immediately present in the university lecture? What kind of lecture is enacted when the lecturer is not commenting directly on a text? For example, if we ignore the humanities-oriented lecture and focus instead on the lectures in the hard sciences, in what ways are these types of lectures (still) university events? To find out, we will analyse several historical case studies of non-humanistic lectures: a botany lecture by Karl von Linnaeus, an anatomy lecture by Frederik Ruysch, and a physics lecture by Richard Feynman. These examples are famous enough to have become paradigmatic university events. The final aim is to reconstruct archaeologically the paradigm of the text as a mediatic form of thinking in order to arrive at an educational understanding the university lecture through the specific modes of thinking it makes possible.