About Dr. Bill Thompson
Research on the production of a pedagogy for higher education regarding creativity, tradition, politics, and economics.
Dr. Bill Thompson is the son of a factory worker. He trained to become an architect, qualifying in 1978. With an MSc in architecture at UCL in 1996 and candidature for a PhD. In 1999 he was awarded the degree of PhD [at Heriott Watt] for his research about people in life threatening situations [escape in case of fire realising the limitations of machine intelligence and the importance of individual and social knowing]. Since then, he has taught cultural contexts to students in higher architectural education, travelled quite a bit globally, and written about embodied comprehension and the hard problems of infrastructure – calling it MetaPhenomenalism, the need for a pragmatic political and economic philosophy at all levels of comprehension. At present individuals are often encouraged to hold on to an outmoded model of comprehension [transubstantiation] that asks us to be ‘whole individuals’, a contradiction in and of itself when put into the context of the bio-cosmos the comprehension is immersed in, and thus this hubris of transubstantiation must be understood and managed under the rubric of diversity and individuality that aligns with questions regarding human rights as individual aspirations and thus essential issues for those institutions seeking to be democratic as some are and all need to be for commensalist relationships with Earth to work well or at all.
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