Doctor, in the sense you covet it, Ken (Doctor Angelicus), is not the
doctor in PhD (philo + sophy: love + wisdom, I think), but the doctor
of ducare: to lead out. Hence, teacher.
We are in a total mess with these titles. Many medical "doctors" have
no doctorate at all, and those that do, when they talk about their
research, talk about nothing more that schoolchild practical science.
Doctor as teacher and doctor as knower/contributor are different. And,
if doctor is teacher, what is professor? In some English universities,
it seems to me professor is the title given to a middle manager. I
think I'm right that any teacher is called professor in France, and
that many teachers are called doctor in Italy.
I can't see the advantage in trying to sort this out. We should just
accept the multiplicity. I think Bologna is quite the worst thing
imaginable, trying to make uniformity out of perfectly acceptable
diversity and chaos. The Bologna results don't seem to help anything
much, certainly not education, research or standards!
I have a medical doctor friend in Australia who has a car number plate
commemorating Supa-doc the magnificent, a perhaps a sort of super
Anselm? Well, he did convert to Catholicism. And the social
affectation I hate most of all is people who confuse their name and
their title, introducing themselves thus: my name is Dr XXXX YYYY.
Specially the medical ones. Grrrrrrrrrrr!
Retreating rapidly into the wings,
Ranulph
On 7 Aug 2009, at 08:43, Ken Friedman wrote:
> Hi, Lubomir,
>
> While I agree with many of the issues you raise, I want to offer one
> correction and a few differences.
>
> The PhD is not an Anglophone invention, but a creation of the German
> Humboldt university reforms of 1805. While Anglophone universities
> adopted
> the PhD for many purposes and many fields, the Anglophone
> universities also
> have a rich history of professional degrees -- MD, JD, ThD, PsyD,
> and so on.
> The Germans and other Europeans also have other professional
> degrees, DIng,
> DTech, and the like.
>
> But "philosophy" in the sense of the award does not refer to
> philosophy as a
> discipline or field. It uses the term philosophy as an organized
> body of
> knowledge -- natural philosophy, for example, being the old term for
> natural
> science. Prior to the PhD, many university systems awarded a degree
> DrPhilos
> much closer to the higher doctorates, using such degrees as
> licensiate or
> magister for the level above MA. The 3-year PhD is roughly
> equivalent to the
> old Norwegian magister or the old Swedish licensiate, and the Germans
> therefore required the habilitation as the higher stage above a PhD
> for
> anyone qualifying for senior academic appointment. This, too, is
> slightly
> different in different nations, as the licensiate qualified one to
> teach at
> university before completing the doctorate.
>
> So please don't blame this entirely on the Anglophones. The ancient
> British
> universities refused to award the PhD until just about the 20th
> century,
> believing that the MA was more than good enough.
>
> For that matter, Kant's Conflict of the Faculties -- the book that
> led to
> the Humboldt reforms -- argued that the lower and fundamental
> faculty of the
> sciences and philosophy was the core faculty of the university,
> while the
> higher faculties of law, medicine, and theology were the specialized
> faculties representing the professions rather than representing
> knowledge.
> It is the lower faculty that awarded the philosophical degrees,
> where the
> higher awarded the doctorates of law, medicine, and theology.
>
> All this being even more confusing the farther back we go, when the
> terms
> "master," "professor," and "doctor," we often somewhat
> interchangeable --
> and at the least, they differed depending on where you studied.
>
> On the key points, of course, I appreciate your note and thank you
> for a
> valued clarification. I hope for the day when I will get my
> honorific title.
> Thomas Aquinas was known as Doctor Angelicus (the Angelic Doctor),
> Duns
> Scotus as Doctor Subtilis (the Subtle Doctor), and Roger Bacon was
> known as
> Doctor Mirabilis (the Wonderful Doctor). Sort of like professional
> wrestlers. My favorite was Anselm of Canterbury -- Doctor Magnificus
> (the
> Magnificent Doctor). I'm quite sad that the title is taken.
>
> Yours,
>
> Ken
>
> Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
> Professor
> Dean
>
> Swinburne Design
> Swinburne University of Technology
> Melbourne, Australia
>
> Telephone +61 3 9214 6755
> www.swinburne.edu.au/design
>
>
> On Thu, 6 Aug 2009 22:28:56 -0400, Lubomir Savov Popov <[log in to unmask]
> > wrote:
>
> --snip--
>
> The whole confusion stems from an Anglophone practice to use the
> term Ph.D.
> (Philosophy Doctor) for everything. It is an anachronism. It has
> made sense
> when it has been used initially. After that, it has been used in so
> many
> areas, that in some areas it sounds strange and in others it is a
> misnomer.
> Another issue is that the Anglophone economies and educations
> systems are so
> strong that they practically wiped out any other competitors,
> different
> conceptualizations, and practices. In such moments, I realize that a
> little
> bit of diversity might be of great help to Anglophone culture, to
> realize
> where it is, where it is going, and why it is going there. All that
> said, I
> want to express my admiration for the achievements of that culture.
> It is so
> powerful that even I oscillate terminologically between several
> conceptual
> systems, as you will notice in this post.
>
> --snip--
>
> Of course, both in engineering and in architecture there is place and
> actually there are a lot of "pure" Ph.D. dissertation situations. For
> example, when studying basic science problems, theoretical problems,
> social
> factors problems, and so forth. The professions have so many aspects
> and
> levels that even in a single profession we can see a multitude of
> dissertation types of different nature and tradition.
>
> Another problem is the insistence of some faculty to accept an
> artifact as a
> research product. The artifact or oeuvre by itself is not research.
> It is
> not even practice-based research. And the artifact by itself doesn't
> produce
> new knowledge. That is one of the logical fallacies that many people
> follow.
> Or, maybe it is not a fallacy, but a deliberate promotion of personal
> interests. The scholarly act is the act of knowledge production. In
> order to
> have a scholarly act, we need to analyze, explicate, and present the
> artifact and the process of making in accordance to particular
> methodological standards and criteria that are developed in the
> discipline/profession.
>
> --snip--
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