ABSTRACT
Debates about the nature of higher education have been going on in American universities for decades. There is nothing new about passionate controversies over the curriculum, over academic requirements, and even over the aims of higher education itself. But the current debates are in certain respects unusual. There really is not much in the way of explicit debate going on between these two cultures over the central philosophical issues concerning the mission of the university and its epistemic and ontological underpinnings. There is a conception of reality, and of the relationships between reality on the one hand and thought and language on the other, that has a long history in the Western intellectual tradition. Indeed, this conception is so fundamental that to some extent it defines that tradition. The Western Rationalistic Tradition is not a unified tradition in either its history or in its present application.
