We heard, from a historian of science, a strong argument for the difference between the humanities and the sciences, based in a distinction between knowledge and understanding, and I would just flag a couple of questions—already raised in those great reports—that we might want to keep after.
1) To our dyad of knowledge and experience, Graham added the term “understanding,” and he gave a great definition: being surprised together. We’ll want to think about the disciplinary (or is it antidisciplinary?) situation of this account of what it is to understand, and we may have ask too about surprise and its intellectual value.
2) The project of phenomenology came up as well, and the so-called phenomenological epoche or bracketing: inquiry into the present situation by way of the senses, of what is available to experience, temporarily suspending the conceptual frameworks within which we tend to think (and perhaps more importantly, within and through which we tend to look, also hear, smell, taste, touch). This appeal to experience, to what it is like to be in a situation (including the situation of a discipline), is a way of renewing our acquaintance with what we thought we already knew. Perhaps it is a strategy of surprise. I’d love to think about when and how we might have recourse to such strategic naivete.
I’d also like to come back to Graham’s great account of star observation and the personal equation, and the physical difficulty of making those measurements. What about the aspect of a discipline that reforms or controls the body and desires, that trains you to forgo things that you want to do and to do things that you do not? (Perhaps changing the structure of your desires in the process.)
Big questions! which we can try to bring down to earth on Tuesday.
