The post-truth world threatens our collective commitment to rationality but must not become the norm. Synthesis of the scholarship on anti-intellectualism and personal attributes informs educational practices to promote development of student's rational mind-set and rationalist identity necessary to combat anti-rationalism and the post-truth world.
Beyond Reason and Tolerance argues that to prepare students to engage political, ethnic, and religious differences, higher education must adopt a developmental model for a formative and liberal undergraduate education as a process of growth involving empathy as well as reasoning, values as well as knowledge, and identity as well as competencies.
In this book Schmid holds that the traditional and cultural ideal of moderation is enough of an established fact that the Charmides can be held up against it to make the distinctions and similarities which will then provide for the necessary reference for interpreting the drama Plato uses in the dialogue. The Preface and section 1 define the “cultural setting in which the ancient Greek ideal of sophrosunê was situated”. Here Schmid defines the complex political and cultural setting of ancient (...) Greece out of which the dialogue is to be interpreted and thereby sets the stage for the drama and speech of the dialogue as a whole. (shrink)