Education and the Homo Ludens Hypothesis | Daniel Dombrowski
Event Type:
- Discussion, Presentation
- (Online)
Program:
- Process Explorations
Theme:
- Building Alternative Futures
Featuring:
- Dan Dombrowski
Organizers:
- Center for Process Studies
Johan Huizinga is famous for his Homo Ludens hypothesis. In contrast to the familiar designation Homo Sapiens (the human knower), Huizinga defended the theses that human beings are playful and that play is not so much part of culture but rather human culture itself is played.
The philosopher George Allan—in three well-written books in philosophy of education—applies the Homo Ludens hypothesis to education, especially to higher education. College education at its best is a type of dynamic play. Allan’s contribution to the Homo Ludens hypothesis has been underappreciated. Allan often relies on the process thought found in Alfred North Whitehead’s classic Aims of Education. The goal of the present presentation is to explore the important contribution Allan can make toward the understanding of the contemporary crumbling of the walls of the cathedral of learning, to use his dramatic metaphor.
In Rethinking College Education Allan examines three sorts of college that have existed historically. But missions, methods, and outcomes (respectively) are all extrinsic to what a college is all about. These purposes have a tendency to instrumentalize education or, to use Allan’s startling but not hyperbolic phrase, to engage in educational prostitution. A college should be a place where intrinsic value flourishes.
In Higher Education in the Making (an allusion to Whitehead’s Religion in the Making) Allan makes a persuasive case against content canonists, procedural canonists, and anti-canonists and in favor of a processual and (Dewey-inspired) pragmatic reconstructed canon. And in Modes of Learning (an allusion to Whitehead’s Modes of Thought) Allan explores insightfully Whitehead’s three stages (or better, concurrent facets) of education: romance, precision, and generalization. The prime function of both reason and education is to promote the art (or game) of life.
Featuring
Dan Dombrowski
Daniel A. Dombrowski is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of twenty-three books and over two-hundred articles in scholarly journals in philosophy, theology, classics, and literature. Among his books are Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Response (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism: Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). His latest book is The Way of Reason in Religion and Politics: The Philosophy of Franklin I. Gamwell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2026). He is the Editor of the journal Process Studies and is Past-President of the Metaphysical Society of America.
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