Sunday Lecture – The Menace of Science Without Wisdom

Nicholas Maxwell believes we are in a state of impending crisis. And the fault lies in part with academia. For two centuries or so academia has been devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how. This has enormously increased our power to act which has in turn brought us both all the great benefits of the modern world and the crises we now face. Almost all our current global problems have arisen because some of us have acquired unprecedented powers to act via science and technology without also acquiring the capacity to act wisely. For Maxwell then we urgently need to bring about a revolution in universities so that the basic intellectual aim becomes not knowledge merely but rather wisdom – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others thus including knowledge and technological know-how but much else besides. The revolution we require would put problems of living at the heart of the academic enterprise the pursuit of knowledge emerging out of and feeding back into the fundamental intellectual activity of proposing and critically assessing possible actions policies political programmes from the standpoint of their capacity to help solve problems of living.; Nicholas Maxwell is emeritus reader in philosophy of science at University College London and author of From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities; Open to all. No need to book in advance.