Francis Bacon insisted we must question everything and arrive at our knowledge through our grappling with first principles built on experience and engagement of the ‘thing itself’ – a commons which we all draw upon.
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This is a philosophical exploration of common sense and a theory of inherent knowledge, such that learning can be understood as universal. ‘What can I come to know ?’. As a starting point I have chosen ‘to look to the teacher of the thinker you admire’ as a place to evolve new perspectives and utilise convenient frameworks to create scaffoldings in my attempt to formulate this thesis of common sense. Admiring the stories written about Socrates, I thought it would be interesting to take the peers and teachers of Socrates as pivot points to generate thinking.
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There are other methods of discovering and learning knowledge about nature, but science is the only method that results in the acquisition of reliable knowledge.
Reliable knowledge is knowledge that has a high probability of being true because its veracity has been justified by a reliable method. Reliable knowledge is sometimes called justified true belief, to distinguish reliable knowledge from belief that is false and unjustified or even true but unjustified. Read more…
I have been thinking about the nature of education and how necessary inclusive education is to a healthy society. Education involves a social behaviour which is built significantly from the dialogue of learning. Francis Bacon is often attributed with having said ‘Knowledge is Power’. Regardless of who first said this, what is obvious is that it has become common currency as a phrase.
A famous quote is that of Thomas Carlyle stating economics as the dismal science. Thomas Carlyle complained that society had become mechanical and lost much of its humanity because of the abstraction of ‘real things’ into monetary terms. Read more…
So, what’s the Ragged University all about then ? Well, sometime back, whilst sitting in the pub in Hackney with four friends, we realised that was we shared information to socialise; swapped stories, compared facts, related things as entertainment. What is the nature of knowledge ? First hand experience is a good place to start. Read more…
I have been thinking about the technology available today in context with the libraries available. It makes me wonder about what some of the people of the past would make of it all.
If we consider Voltaire who was a champion of the French Enlightenment, or Erasmus who wrote over seventeen million words in his lifetime, or the remarkable range of works created by the likes of Aristotle, what would they have managed with a personal computer. Everything was painstakingly done by hand, often through many drafts. Read more…