Reading Grayling's Frontiers of Knowledge

A few hints...

This book was chosen for the Williamstown U3A Non fiction Book group for April 2023.

The book is quite dense in detail of how our knowledge of certain fields has developed over the past few millennia, and in fact has accelerated during the first decade of the current one.

It is not a particularly easy read. Here is one way to avoid getting bogged down in the detail.

There are lots of facts and discussions about how ideas and knowledge has developed, but the value of the book really is seeing how we find things out and how ideas change.

Grayling lists twelve problems that arise when we are studying the world around us. These need to be considered when we are investigating the world, but also in evaluating what people are saying about these areas of enquiry. So if you get no further reading the book than pages 7, 8 and 9 in the introduction you will get value as these twelve problems are enumerated. These problems could become your mental tools for evaluating what you hear and read in fields much wider than those discussed in the book.

Now you can skip to page 340, in the conclusion.

Enquiry is exhilarating…

…The great thing about a frontier … is that it is an invitation to cross it, and travel onwards. Add to travel prepared.

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