Outreach: Santa Fe
Tecolote 2006 - 2007
This year, 2006-07 the topic is “Knowing and Believing.” The seminar readings are books from Plato’s Republic. The tutorial readings are the Preface and Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, broken into four short readings. The underlying questions have to do with how knowing is to be distinguished from believing. Kant and Plato offer distinctively different approaches to this question. Though we only obliquely touch on current manifestations of this set of issues, it seems to me that anyone who claims either to “know” or “believe” anything at all is obliged to ask seriously what he or she means by those concepts and explore how they differ.