Engaging Minds, Enriching Lives

This class will explore the prospects for acquiring knowledge in a highly polarized world and the challenges we face in our attempts to do so. We will examine what knowledge is, why polarization threatens it, and how the sources of the threat might be managed. The class will combine areas of philosophy (epistemology, or the theory of knowledge) and cognitive science (cognitive psychology). Above all, we will try to understand why many people think that understanding the nature of and prospects for knowledge is more important today than it has been in decades.