Dr. Chris Swanson, Gutenberg president and tutor, will be speaking at the Western Consortium of Classical Education in Sacramento, California. The conference, “The Virtue of Habits,” will take place on July 25-26. Dr. Swanson will be speaking on Habits and Learning: Polanyi’s Synthesis:
In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that “intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching,… while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit.” Aristotle, however, leaves the process of learning and habit formation unexplored. In the groundbreaking work, Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi takes up this challenge by exploring the nature of tacit knowledge. He shows that tacit knowledge forms the basis of both intellectual knowledge and habits. I will discuss this synthesis and its impact on teaching and learning.
