History of Knowledge 2

Course goals

 

1. General knowledge about some main topics in the history of modern knowledge in global context;
2. Critical reflection on the nature and practice of different kinds of knowledge, and how they are related to each other;
3. Using a historical approach to analyze the relation between knowledge and cultural, social, political and practical values;
4. Basic skills in archive research and digital humanities methods;
5. Academic writing and presentation skills;
6. Independent historical research skills, based on relevant literature, resulting in a research paper at Master’s level.

This course contains four assignments which together result in your final grade:

• Participation in the archive and digital humanities workshops: 10% (pass/fail)
• Peer feedback on other student’s work: 10% (pass/fail)
• Group presentation assignment: 20%
• Final paper assignment: 60%

Content

The history of knowledge investigates how people in all historical ages have thought about knowledge, collected and produced it, shared it, and sometimes lost it. This is by no means a linear or progressive process: knowledge does not always 'get better' over time. Sometimes knowledge is forgotten, rejected, or suppressed. To historians, all aspects of these processes are interesting: the way in which knowledge is acquired is as relevant as the way knowledge is lost .
Historians of knowledge ask, for instance: what did people know about a certain subject? How did they get that knowledge? What did they think it meant? How did they share it [or not]? Why did people of a certain time and place consider some kinds of knowledge more important than others? Who was involved in creating, assessing and using different kinds of knowledge, who was not ? How did knowledge get organized? what got included in ‘canons’ and what was rejected? And, importantly: how and why did the answers to these questions change over time?
It will be clear that it is hard to define precisely what constitutes knowledge. One can, for instance, think about ‘scholarly knowledge’, which is what you are usually exposed to at university. However, knowledge does not have to be based on intellectual kinds of learning: knowing how to do things is a form of knowledge too. There are many ways of creating categories of knowledge, for instance in empirical knowledge, heuristic knowledge, ritual knowledge, secret knowledge, dangerous knowledge, forgotten knowledge, classical knowledge, etc. – the list is long. When you start to think about it, history (and, for that matter, our own daily life) is full of knowledge.
It will also be clear that the way we think about knowledge today is just one phase in a very long and complex historical process. The belief in progress is a fairly recent invention, for example, as is the idea that ‘facts’ constitute a specifically important and weighty kind of knowledge.
In History of Knowledge II, we discuss some key issues in the history of knowledge from the eighteenth century to the present day, a period in which ‘modern science’ became an increasingly dominant, but never uncontested, form of knowledge. Of course it is impossible to offer a complete overview of this period, nor can we do justice to these subjects on a global scale. We focus on the history of knowledge in the Western world, but always acknowledging that this is only one part of the story. Knowledge developed in constant interaction with other parts of the world. The themes we have chosen are meant to show you how rich and varied this field of research is, and how much there is to discover.