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Goethe gets down to business

OVER RECENT YEARS, philosophy has increasingly been

seen as a source of transferable thinking skills, relevant to a

broad range of professions and work needs. Melbourne Business

School has done its bit to substantiate this claim by

appointing John Armstrong in the newly created position of

philosopher-in-residence. The job was created to offer students

and faculty at the business school what the University hopes

will be a useful set of intellectual skills.

The Melbourne school's dean, John Seybolt, said in announcing

the appointment that lessons in leadership can be learned from

CEOs and managers and also from Plato, Goethe and “a

philosopher-in-residence who can transfer knowledge in an

accessible and enjoyable way.” Armstrong, of the University

of Melbourne’s department of philosophy, told tpmthat

philosophers themselves aren’t fully aware of the merits of their

discipline when it comes to asking people to explain what

they really think and why, and asking them to take on board

intelligent disagreement and

John Armstrong

either answer it or adjust their

own positions. He thinks this is something that a lot of

businesses need, and know they need.

He suggests that business should consider the possibilities

of educating desire, not in the sense of stimulating false wants

through advertising, but by asking what it would be

genuinely good for people to want and then to ask how it is

possible to supply that efficiently and effectively – and make a

profit. “The more intelligent you

are, the more likely you are to want to do good in the world.

Talent recruitment in business already faces the problem of

holding onto people who want money andvirtue.”

Armstrong thinks interaction with business is rewarding for philosophy. “Philosophy has a lot to gain when serious thinkers manage to extend their experience of the world and bring that constructively into their understanding. Much of the time philosophy is drawing surreptitiously on experience, and the broader and better digested that experience, the better the philosophy.” Armstrong urges that “because philosophy is a beautiful and noble pursuit it ought to be much more potent in the world. I'm terrified that a certain kind of shyness, dressed up as dignity and aloofness or just professional preoccupation, could rob the world of something it desperately needs. Intellectual grace is in such short supply. But for philosophy to be potent in the world, philosophers need to find ways of getting intellectual grace to speak to the ordinary and messy

3RD QUARTER 2008tpm 3RDQUARTER 2008tpm

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