Roxane Noël: John of Salisbury on Education and Human Flourishing

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Roxane Noël, Philosophy PhD student, University of Cambridge
• Thursday 31 January 2019, 17:30-18:30
• Roger Needham Room, Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK, CB3 9BB.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Julian M. Siebert.

John of Salisbury is an important figure when it comes to twelfth-century philosophy. Among other things, he is known for his educational philosophy. These views are mostly expounded in his Metalogicon, written as a defense of the arts of the trivium, namely grammar, dialectic (or logic) and rhetoric. His motivation for writing this treatise is to defend the teaching of these classical arts against those who believe that education should have the sole purpose of training people for certain professional occupations; these adversaries he subsumes under the name “Cornificans”. The purpose of this talk is to show how John of Salisbury’s humanistic approach to education is still relevant today, in a context where a classical conception of education as promoting human flourishing is being challenged by a more austere view of education, where the imperative of forming technicians suited to the needs of the market takes precedence.

About the Speaker Roxane Noël is a Gates scholar and PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She specializes in medieval philosophy, with a special interest for the problem of universals. After working on Peter Abelard’s notion of nature for her M.A. thesis, she now focuses her PhD research on twelfth-century nominalism, a project she is undertaking with the supervision of John Marenbon.

This talk is part of the Wolfson College Education Society series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Roger Needham Room, Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK, CB3 9BB
• Wolfson College Education Society
• Wolfson College Talks & Events

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.