Gregory Victor Loewen (born 1966) is a Canadian social philosopher in the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology. The author of over thirty scholarly non-fiction books as well as over twenty works of fiction, he is age-relative one of a number of modern period academic writers to have produced a significant body of work early in their careers, along with Herder, de Bono, Spir, Joad, Aguilera, and Schelling.
Biography
Born in Victoria, January 31, 1966, Loewen was educated at the University of Victoria with a BA and MA in anthropology and at the University of British Columbia, receiving the PhD in anthropology in 1997. He held two tenure stream positions in the United States before taking up his academic position in Saskatoon, Canada, in 2005, where he was chair of the sociology department for five years and from which he retired in 2018.
Ideas
Loewen's work fits squarely in the overlapping traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology, where it is assumed that all human perception is subject to variable comprehension and the coming to a shared understanding of texts, worldviews, and even natural objects and forces is an exercise in the arts and uses of language.
In Hermeneutic Pedagogy, Loewen "aims to expound the educational process in the hermeneutical tradition, but is also an essay on the educational model the author calls the hermeneutical circle of experiential pedagogy. Loewen elaborates a conception of learning which considers the dynamic relations between the conservative, the technical and the moral dimensions of education." The book defines the relationships amongst hexis, or custom, praxis, or applied theory, and phronesis, the Aristotelian understanding of practical wisdom, to which the critical interpretive process of learning ultimately aims. "Custom is only a first step in the dialectical process of learning. Not only do we forget and alter what we are taught, but also come to contest. Customs are reinterpreted, theory adjusted to suit reality, the social reality of tradition is reshaped, and the episteme of the serious business of constructing knowledge takes on its new historical task." The second step of a learning process is praxis applied theory. Its aim is to expand knowledge, to use it for progressive purposes. The institutions, says Loewen, are now the medium through which a paradigm comes into being. While 'repetition' is the key word for hexis and 'extension' for praxis, the process of learning fulfils itself in phronesis or practical knowledge. "While custom presents a ready-made reality for our consumption and oblation, and theory presents to us the revolution of consciousness that overturns that world, practical wisdom shines upon the light of worldliness, the way in which the world worlds itself." Through phronesis the hermeneutical circle of experiential pedagogy, as Loewen calls it, closes and accomplishes itself. It enlightens the other two constitutive dimensions, it puts them into question and reveals the abilities they do not capture, but which are central to the human being as a learning being. Phronesis names the radical learning experience that one individual has, experience which cannot be taught." Loewen's (2003, 2004, 2012) studies of educational processes expose the tacit expectations and latent functions of institutions and discourses, and owe much to the pioneering works of Bourdieu and Passeron. But Loewen balances critique that is found within the dialectic with an attempt at reconstructing learning through the dialogue of hermeneutics.