From Critical Thinking to Criticality : A Higher Education for a Troubled World

From Critical Thinking to Criticality argues that universities must renew their commitment to critical thinking. Addressing challenges such as ecological crises, artificial intelligence, political populism, and the post-truth era, the book calls for universities to cultivate deeper critical engagement among students.

From Critical Thinking to Criticality sets out a bold case for renewing critical thinking across the university. It inquires into the need for critical thinking; and it expounds new theories and arguments that are applicable not only across study programmes but also across the university in its wider societal and worldly roles. The book argues that promoting critical thinking means first understanding what it means to be a critical being and that calls for a recognition of the potential of the university’s full critical powers. Against the horizon of the contemporary world, this book notes how critical thinking is in jeopardy partly due to the enormous powers in society that have little interest in critical thinking and are actually thwarting it. It picks up and radically develops the idea of critical thinking into a new idea of criticality in a troubled world. There is not just one criticality that student can acquire but a myriad of modes of criticality, with each student becoming their own critical person. Situated in the contexts of ecological crises, the rise of artificial intelligence, the tense relationship of states and their universities, political populism, the emergence of a post-truth age, and the diminution of reasoned debate in society, this book urges that criticality be re-instated anew as a central feature of the university’s mission. Universities have tremendous, but unrealised, potential in being a critical conscience of society and so nothing less than the fate of society and the world are at stake.