- How Do You Know That?: A Coda in History

Catalog description

An exploration of the history of knowledge. A library can be filled with shelf after shelf of books, all themselves filled with history and with knowledge. But have you ever asked yourself: does the library itself have a history? Do the shelves have a history? Does the book have a history? How is it that we have come to organize and store knowledge as we do? What is the history of Western ways of knowing that has so defined most of our educational experience? We will study the history of organizational structures like the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the library, and the periodic table of the elements, and will explore the implications they have had for our ways of both understanding and knowing the world. Open to seniors only.