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Articles

Is a Judge of Knowledge Shipwrecked by the Laughter of the Gods?

Roger McCann tries to identify some of the attributes of knowledge.

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods” – Albert Einstein

Knowledge is a strange concept. It is used as though its meaning were as well understood as ‘dog’. Even though dogs come in innumerable sizes, shapes, and colors, there is rarely disagreement as to whether something is, or is not, a dog. The same is not true for knowledge. In common usage, ‘knowledge’ can be both transient (It is no longer tenable that the Earth is flat) and eternal (In Euclidean geometry the sum of angles in a triangle is 180°); both irrational (‘Jesus is both God and human’) and rational (the contents of Euclid’s Elements); both confusing (the interdependency of life-forms in nature) and clarifying (Kepler’s laws of planetary motion).

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