Dr. Seth M. Holtzman
                                                            ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY
 
 

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PHILOSOPHY AND THE INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE:
The AREA II Course at the Governor's School

Every summer for over thirty-five years, selected gifted and talented high school students from North Carolina have attended a special intellectual summer program called the Governor's School (hereafter "GS"). For a number of summers, I taught an unusual course that was part of the regular curriculum at GS.¹  This so-called AREA II course is unusual in that it uses philosophical thought to integrate knowledge. I will discuss AREA II and the role that philosophy plays in it, for I believe it holds important lessons for philosophical education in particular and liberal education in general.²
 

Unlike the vast majority of courses that stand alone and can be described in isolation from any other courses, the AREA II course is inextricably interwoven with the other courses at GS. Since I cannot effectively discuss the course independently of the rest of the curriculum, I must introduce you briefly to more of the GS curriculum.
 

A student attends GS in one of ten primary subjects: math, English literature, natural science, social science, Spanish, instrumental (orchestral) music, choral music, art, dance, and drama. In each of these subjects, classes focus on theoretical ideas and developments in the vanguard of the subject. For example, orchestra students would play and learn about the latest kinds of music, from atonal to minimalist, not Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Natural science students would learn about quantum theory and chaos theory, not the classical physical theory of the typical high school physics course. These ten subjects are the AREA I classes, which offer students a taste of a given subject at its most developed theoretical point.
 

Each student also attends a course in AREA II, but these classes are composed of students representing a cross section of the AREA I subjects. This composition of students allows the material from each of the AREA I courses to be elicited. The AREA II course takes as its point of departure the theoretical ideas and developments that have emerged in all the varied AREA I courses. What could the AREA II course do with such disparate theoretical material? It works toward an intellectual integration of the theoretical ideas and developments in the AREA I courses. That is, it aims toward an even higher theoretical connection of the AREA I theoretical materials.
 

Now, it should be clear already that AREA II is not one of the established academic disciplines. It employs synthetic thinking or what we might call integrative thinking. At some level of synthetic or integrative thinking, philosophical ideas and concepts come into play. So, this course cannot help but employ genuinely philosophical thought at some points, as I will discuss soon. Still, it is not a philosophy course in any ordinary sense. It is not an introduction to philosophy or to logic or to ethics or to aesthetics. It is not a metaphysics or epistemology course, although it may discuss metaphysics and epistemology. Its most accurate description is a course in the integration of knowledge, or, what is much the same thing, a course in the integration of the culture.
 

Let's begin to discuss integrative thinking by asking what it is. Of course, to integrate is to bring together to unify, to tie together or connect, to make a whole out of parts. Perhaps we are most familiar with racial integration or with psychological integration; but we can also speak of integrating ideas or concepts or knowledge. We can find broader ways of thinking that connect and make meaningful what otherwise seem fragmented or unconnected ideas or concepts or knowledge.
 

No doubt there are many possible levels of integration. Take an ordinary case first. When faced with some confusing idea or experience or concept, we can work toward an understanding or clarification of it. We can make the idea or experience or concept meaningful, clear, intelligible; and this process is one of integrating the confusing item into our overall understanding of things. We have to place or fit the item into a larger framework of intelligibility. This process may be as simple as defining an unfamiliar concept in terms of familiar concepts. Consider another example illustrating a higher level of integration. If scientists become aware of some new physical phenomenon, they will work to fit that fact (or set of facts) into a theoretical framework unifying that fact with our previous knowledge about physics. In such a case, they are integrating new material into an established subject.
 

The AREA II course works toward the highest level of integration or synthesis: integration of theoretical material from the natural sciences and social sciences to the humanities and fine arts. That is, the AREA II course works for an integration of the entire culture or the entire spectrum of knowledge. An example of integrative thought on this level might help. Let's look briefly at some religious theory, political theory, and chemical theory from the early modern era of the 1500s and 1600s.
 

The Protestant Reformation of the 1500s rejected the religious authority of the Pope and the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church. Protestants argued that the authority to interpret the Bible ought to be shifted to the level of the worshippers--or at least to a level of an institutional church more responsive to the worshippers. This idea lies behind the Baptist emphasis on the "priesthood of the believer", for example. For Protestants the authority to interpret religious matters rests more or less in the hands of ordinary religious people.
 

By the 1600s, the movement to strip political authority from kings was well under way. Locke's Second Treatise on Government is a classic account of how political authority resides instead in the lower levels of the State, namely, in the people. Instead of the State being conceived of somewhat like a organism whose parts serve the whole, a new conception of the State emerged: the State as a community of the parts, the people, designed to serve and protect those parts. The people could constitute or dismantle a particular government or an entire political system. People were the basic political units.
 

Robert Boyle, English chemist of the 1600s, was the first to articulate a modern conception of chemistry. The new modern concern in chemistry was to found a "science of discovering the composition of 'mixt' and 'compounded' bodies in such a way that we can produce them at will and foretell their mutual interactions."³ Boyle developed "the [modern] conception of the chemical element: a substance 'perfectly homogeneous' and not, so far as we know, capable of further simplification."⁴ It was Boyle's (and others') work to found the science of chemistry on this theory of chemical elements that led to the atomic theory of chemistry still accepted today. Substances were taken to be composed of amounts of one or more chemical elements. In other words, the elements were the basic substances, out of which everything else was formed. Elements were the basic chemical units.
 

Given this tripartite example, we want to ask if there are any ideas or concepts that could help to integrate these diverse cultural developments. Quite possibly we could find a number of integrating ideas or concepts. One fairly obvious one is the concept of atomism. People were thought of as the religious atoms and as the political atoms; and chemical elements were thought of as the chemical atoms. According to the kind of atomism that arose in early modernity, the most basic reality is at the level of the "atom", whatever the subject. The larger wholes that seem to be a part of our world--a church, a State, or a chair--are composed of and rely on their smallest parts or units or "atoms". The basic doctrine of atomism is that the parts are the basic reality. The idea of extensionality is that the identity of these parts is not essentially affected by their relationships with other parts. Any whole is simply a compound or collection of its parts. The behavior of a whole is a function only of its parts and the law-like behavior of those parts. One could understand and appropriately organize a subject matter by treating the wholes as composed of parts and coming to understand the parts and their laws of behavior. Commitment to extensionalistic atomism leads us to understand a subject analytically, in a bottom-up manner, by looking to the parts that comprise something and that account for its nature and its behavior. In political theory, religious theory, and chemical theory of the early modern era, the idea of extensionalistic atomism governed or organized thought.
 

So, in synthetic or integrative thinking we are looking for ideas and concepts that help to organize or that govern material that might ordinarily seem unrelated and therefore fragmented. As I have pointed out, we search for organizing and governing ideas in lived experience and in theoretical thought within a given discipline. The AREA II course employs this mode of thinking to integrate all the disparate subjects under consideration. Furthermore, AREA II tries to find any ideas and concepts that seem to have integrating power, whether or not the ideas and concepts are genuinely philosophical. (As I have said, AREA II should not be thought of as a philosophy course.) The AREA II course does not simply follow already established integrative thought backed by the credentials of professional scholars. It leads students in a creative and intellectually responsible search using the combined intellectual powers of teachers and students. Of course, some ideas and concepts that a class might settle on have only limited integrating power, and some connections that a class is able to forge surely would not stand the test of more powerful and sustained critical scrutiny. Nevertheless, the AREA II course is a highly successful way of teaching students how to engage in integrative thought, how to think broadly and synthetically in a fruitful and responsible manner.
 

While one might learn integrative thinking by remaining on its lower levels, our intellectual needs and curiosity push us toward higher and higher levels. Indeed, to restrict integrative thinking to lower non-philosophical levels constrains one's thought and stifles one's intellectual powers. In learning integrative thinking well, then, one must work toward a defensible integration of all knowledge. During this work, one confronts ideas and concepts that are genuinely philosophical. At the highest level of organizing and governing ideas in a culture, we find deeply placed assumptions about what powers of knowledge we have and what realities we can possibly know. That is, we find epistemological and metaphysical assumptions and their corollary ideas. These are the basic commitments of a world view.
 

That philosophical ideas should arise in our integrative thinking should not surprise us. We operate within a more or less coherent conceptual system, a system of concepts and assumptions and presuppositions, that determines in advance what form our knowledge and even our experience will take. For example, we would not explain the movement of some object by referring to the action of a ghost. It is not that it is false that a ghost moved the object; rather, it is not even a possibility that a ghost moved the object. Ghosts are not sanctioned under our world view. The concept of a ghost is a superstition, i.e., a pseudo-concept. All our knowledge and thought and experience takes place within a more or less coherent framework of thought. Any apparent knowledge claim must fit into that framework of thought, that conceptual system, or, as in the case of the ghost-explanation, be excluded from the realm of real possibility. Even knowledge generated in different disciplines must fit within this most comprehensive framework of thought; all knowledge must fit together on this highest philosophical level. So, when we carry out this highest kind of integration, eventually we run up against the framework of ideas, the world view, within which we think and experience and have knowledge.
 

In the example offered earlier, commitment to atomism and extensionality in the early modern era followed from modernity's basic epistemological commitment to only a scientistic empiricism. The modern approach to knowledge was first worked out in natural science; it relied on sensory experience for facts about particulars, data suitable to support general laws and theory. This approach naturally aims to find the most fundamental particulars and to establish the most fundamental facts. Furthermore, the alternative to atomism is holism, in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts and can organize and direct its parts. Full-blooded holism, though, seems to carry with it a commitment to teleology and teleological causality: the parts are organized and governed as they are because that is how they ought to be. Sensory perception alone could not justify these metaphysical commitments, and early modern thought systematically rejected them. This brand of empiricist commitment is still dominant in the culture; it is the primary epistemological plank in our modern Western world view. (And, of course, it is a reason why we have no logical room for ghosts in our experience and knowledge.)
 

So, although the AREA II course is not a philosophy course, it nevertheless relies on and explores philosophical thought essentially and not incidentally. Philosophy has an essential role to play in the integration of knowledge or culture. Its role is not an exercise in the history of ideas, as Collingwood claimed. A central task of philosophy is to elicit and critically assess ways of thought that inform our age and our lives, up to and including the dominant world view of our culture. Unfortunately, many philosophers these days have a truncated conception of philosophy that does not acknowledge philosophy's rightful role in integrative thought, and both higher education and philosophical education suffer because of this misconception of the philosophical enterprise.
 

Since GS focuses on the ideas and developments at the forefront of the culture, the AREA II course teases out our basic philosophical commitments, both the ones our culture acknowledges and the ones it denies. While AREA II does not examine those commitments in the rigorous and single-minded manner of a philosophy course, it does examine how those commitments affect the AREA I subjects in similar ways. AREA II shows how common intellectual forces have shaped the distinct areas of the culture. These forces include common philosophical commitments that exert a powerful force on the whole of the culture. Without a grasp of those intellectual forces, one will have difficulty understanding why the culture and its different sectors develop as they do.
 

The AREA II course is important for several reasons. First, it combats our fragmented understanding of knowledge and culture. Education itself has become increasingly fragmented, and people have a more disjointed and impoverished understanding of themselves and their world. A 1991 Association of American Colleges report entitled The Challenge of Connected Learning notes the specialization and isolation of the academic disciplines and calls for students to "develop the capabilities to enter, negotiate, and make connections across communities of discourse both within and without the academy."⁵ The report notes the profound lack of integration in education and in the culture.
 

Second, integrative thinking meets an often ignored need to understand what is learned, a need to place learned material in a context that makes sense of it. In emphasizing the interrelationship of knowledge, AREA II helps students grasp the largest context: the culture and the world view it embodies. Students educated in an integrative fashion find learning deeply meaningful. Indeed, students have reported experiencing an educational epiphany and an intellectual turning point because of this course of study.
 

Third, by its pedagogical approach AREA II encourages students to be intellectually active. Our culture has not generated much widely accepted knowledge about the integration of our culture. The search for integrating ideas is largely uncharted territory, open-ended, which gives students an opportunity to participate actively in the process of producing knowledge. In this way the AREA II course is more like a seminar than a lecture course. The course helps to develop a community of teachers and students engaged together in exciting inquiry, struggling together to find connections across the AREA I subjects. The effect on students is to open them up intellectually, introducing them to genuine intellectual inquiry about important matters not already settled. Students develop a greater awareness of ideas around them and a greater desire to participate in the ongoing culture.
 

Fourth, we need to reinvigorate the traditional conception of philosophy as a metadiscipline responsible for cultural integration. AREA II helps students understand the place of philosophical ideas and the need for a discipline that examines the framework of thought within which the culture develops. We could improve various philosophy courses by incorporating integrative thought.
 

Secondary and post-secondary education should contain AREA II-style courses. Colleges and universities could place these courses within their philosophy departments, treat them as general interdisciplinary courses, or employ them as so-called capstone courses. They even could rather easily be team-taught, as courses in some humanities programs are. Secondary education lacks a natural place for such courses; probably they should be kept separate from the established disciplines. In both secondary and post-secondary education, AREA II-style courses would provide a powerful and appropriate addition to the curriculum. They could help to cure some of the serious problems weakening both philosophical and higher education.
 
 
 

Seth Holtzman
Catawba College
 
 

²First, a brief disclaimer is in order here. The North Carolina Governor's School was the nation's first Governor's School; it was set up as, and remains, an experimental school. There is now an accepted and relatively stable shape and philosophy to the school. My account of the AREA II course, I believe, is true to that accepted educational philosophy. But I am not presenting an official account of AREA II; no official account has been fully formulated and agreed upon. What I have said about North Carolina's Governor's School holds true also for Arkansas' Governor's School, the only other identical program among the many Governor's Schools now found across the country.  Second, I am indebted to Dr. Randolph Foy for the development of some of the ideas in this paper.

³William P.D. Wightman, The Growth of Scientific Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p.171.

⁴Ibid.

⁵In Volume I of Liberal Learning and the Arts and Sciences Major (Washington, D.C.: The Association of American Colleges, 1991), p.14. Note: the organization's name is now The Association of American Colleges and Universities.