Knowledge

Austin Stone

Humanities 1

Dr. Akman

“In a school founded on faith in the unity of knowledge” (712)

This article primarily deals with the idea of general knowledge, and more specifically knowledge across all times and peoples leading up to the collection of things we define as knowledge today. Given my understanding of this article, Allardyce brings up a few questions in relation to this concept that I pondered while reading his analysis. I hope to shed some light on these ideas through my upcoming discussions.

A question that came to mind while reading this article relates to the time frame of knowledge. Is knowledge limited by time? Is knowledge in the past the same as knowledge today? Can past knowledge even be considered useful, or should it be tossed away like yesterday’s news? Allardyce spends so much time talking about the pursuit of knowledge and all the different methods and structures the Universities used in regards to Western Civ. In taking a brief pause to consider the above question, it becomes apparent that all of that is unnecessary. Knowledge is in fact two separate things, what we knew yesterday and what we know today; knowledge changes every second. Western Civ. tried repeatedly to force the two into one container, but it simply cannot work that way. To obtain knowledge, which is what I presume is the goal of any western Civ. class, the two must be looked at separately. Knowledge yesterday is everything that has happened since the beginnings of humanity, and knowledge today is what we can glean from these events. The mentioned institutions came very close to doing so, Chicago with their focus on logic and reason (knowledge today) and Packard’s historical class at Amherst (excerpt from syllabus, 719). Unfortunately, they were also missing the key piece, the pin that holds the whole idea together. The pin I am referring to is the time component of knowledge; the stitching that allows today’s knowledge to be sewn together with everything we understood yesterday. What happens with this understanding, then, is that the knowledge of the past can be analyzed while the knowledge of the present, the present conscious and way of thinking, can be overlaid into this analysis. The result is an up-to-date analysis that stays current with the ever-changing world, never allowing the course to become irrelevant as Western Civ. did. All that must be done is the separation of the two components of knowledge.

Another idea is where we put our faith when it comes to knowledge, similar to the above example of Chicago and Amherst. Chicago believed in the logical definition of knowledge where the human element, history, takes a back seat. Amherst, on the other hand, believed in the historical side when it came to teaching Western Civ., emphasizing the events of the past and how they affected humanity. This, while it may not appear at first, is a very personal question that has consequences in every aspect of an individual’s life. Because of this, there is no right or wrong answer. However this article lead me to think, and consequently, ask myself this question

As a final note, I very much enjoyed the “string of beads” analogy. I do not agree with it how it is used in the article but it encouraged me to think about what I expect from this Humanities course. I think the events of the past as well as the selected canon function as our beads, and the job of this course is to be the string that connects them. The result will be a complete and flowing experience linking the thought of the past with the thinking of today.