Symposium introduction: Minding the modern: Human agency, intellectual traditions, and responsible knowledge by Thomas Pfau

• Main Author: TSE, Justin Kh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3381; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4638/viewcontent/Minding_the_Modern_2015_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Pfau opens with the point that the concepts in the book aren’t tools to be used. For Pfau, a concept is like a person. You can’t use concepts; you have to engage them. You have to know their histories, the way they passed on their traditions and their stories, because concepts are a remembrance of the past. They also grow—or, as John Henry Newman put it—they develop. You have to let a concept breathe, talk, walk. To use a concept—indeed, to be complicit in the modern academic culture’s practices of applying theories and skimming books—is what (for Pfau) is paralyzing the humanities.