ABSTRACT
This chapter purposes to contrast with pragmatic thinking the more systematic, theoretical approaches by which people have sought to understand the world and society in order to be able to control and direct its development. The crisis of liberal education is a reflection of a crisis at the peaks of learning, an incoherence and incompatibility among the first principles with which people interpret the world, an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of civilization. Liberal education flourished when it prepared the way for the discussion of a unified view of nature and man's place in it, which the best minds debated on the highest level. Rationalism, with its characteristically modern variant, rational–scientific thinking forms a particular type of systematic reasoning that encloses a peculiar paradox. The priorities for enquiry, the shape taken by modes of thinking, and the connections made between ideas, depend upon sets of historical, geographical and sociological circumstances.
