WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO KNOW SOMETHING?
We live in a world full of information, facts, and data. From the moment we wake up to the moment we sleep we are bombarded by information. How much lunch at school will cost, how many pages to read for homework, what an integer is, what the three branches of government are, when your favorite sports team is going to be playing next or when your favorite television show airs. These are but a few of the myriad of information that comes our way and somehow, we have to manage this information.
Yet, in spite of all of our ways of managing information and organizing data, we still have not answered this apparently simple question. What does it mean to know something? This question has been asked and discussed since before the time of Socrates and more than likely this question will be asked long after us. Still, the question of what counts as knowledge is always an important one. Is it simply an opinion believed by a lot of people? Is it only scientifically verifiable? Must knowledge conform to objects? Can we know the limits of the knowable? These are but a few of the questions that we will look into over the course of this term.
As a class we will be inquiring into the question of knowledge together, asking questions not only of our own assumptions about what it means to know but also asking questions of each other. Philosophers are not mere curmudgeonly hermits thinking about odd questions that nobody else cares about. Rather, philosophers have asked questions in community; in classrooms such as ours or even in the marketplace, wandering amongst friends as Socrates did. With this tradition of communal inquiry in mind we will open up our classroom queries to voices from the outside; to voices from the history of western philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche and beyond. We should also keep in mind the idea that we do not need to follow the same path as these thinkers but we do need to pay attention to what they have to say.
Yet, in spite of all of our ways of managing information and organizing data, we still have not answered this apparently simple question. What does it mean to know something? This question has been asked and discussed since before the time of Socrates and more than likely this question will be asked long after us. Still, the question of what counts as knowledge is always an important one. Is it simply an opinion believed by a lot of people? Is it only scientifically verifiable? Must knowledge conform to objects? Can we know the limits of the knowable? These are but a few of the questions that we will look into over the course of this term.
As a class we will be inquiring into the question of knowledge together, asking questions not only of our own assumptions about what it means to know but also asking questions of each other. Philosophers are not mere curmudgeonly hermits thinking about odd questions that nobody else cares about. Rather, philosophers have asked questions in community; in classrooms such as ours or even in the marketplace, wandering amongst friends as Socrates did. With this tradition of communal inquiry in mind we will open up our classroom queries to voices from the outside; to voices from the history of western philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche and beyond. We should also keep in mind the idea that we do not need to follow the same path as these thinkers but we do need to pay attention to what they have to say.