The Web of Knowledge

The Web of Knowledge

Great theorist and philosophers such as the stoics, skeptics, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Bertrand Russell, Darwin, Freud, and all of 20th century science have struggled with the question what is knowledge? and can we have knowledge? "To know" and "knowledge" are potent concepts and before taking Text and Critics, I took it for granted that I had knowledge of what knowledge is. Then came a simple question. After reading The American Scholar, I recall the class being asked "how is nature related to knowledge?" I didn't have an answer. But more importantly, before I could answer the former, I realized I didn't "know" what knowledge is. How could it be that I had never considered one of the most important philosophical questions asked of mankind--what can we know and what is knowledge?

There have been many different views about knowledge, but none of the major philosophers, perhaps because knowledge is such a potent concept and its understanding is assumed to be self evident, have explained what knowledge is. For example, I have here some views with knowledge but no definition of knowledge: Chuang-Tzu, the old Chinese sage and poet said: "Once I dreamed I was a butterfly, and now I no longer know whether I am Chuang-Tzu, who dreamed I was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-Tzu." Black Elk, the Lakota moralist, told John Neihardt: "That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see or hear is something like a shadow from that world." So, too, was it for Plato. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in The American Scholar : "We all know, that as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass ...

... middle of paper ...

...rowning in information and starved for knowledge

--Unknown

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

References

Neihardt, John. 1961. Black Elk Speaks . Lincoln and London, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

Confucius. 1989. The Analects of Confucius. New York: Vintage Books, A division of Random House, Inc.

Gaarder, Jostein. 1996. Sophie's World, A Novel About the History of Philosophy. New York: Berkeley Books.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The American Scholar.

Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Custom Course Packet.

Plato.1984. The Great Dialogues of Plato. New York, New York: Mentor.

Quotes not from text T&C text, above, or otherwise mentioned are from: http://www. starlingtech.com/quotes/qsearch.cgi