Plan
I wrote previously about the limitations of my formal education under Taylorism. But I would also like to reconsider everything I have learnt autodidactically, principally because it has been so scattershot. There needs to be a rationale, a basis for knowledge. As John Maynard Keynes once said, those who do not follow a theory are in the grip of a hundred discredited theories. Sometimes it’s best to start as if from scratch.
Two more recent influences on my thinking are the science communicator and philosopher Jacob “Bruno” Bronowski and the art critic John Berger. The latter’s Ways of Seeing (1972) and Bronowski’s lavish documentary, The Ascent of Man (1974), were commissioned by David Attenborough at BBC2 to follow the success of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969). Although Clark’s documentary was wonderfully produced, both Berger and Bronowski saw it as fundamentally flawed in its wilful ignorance of history, science and economics in favour of mere taste to define ‘civilisation’. While Berger revealed that portraiture (from the renaissance onwards), photography and film are inherently propagandistic media, Bronowski reasserted the importance of the accumulation of knowledge and physical assets to civilisation. Both documentaries were accompanied by works of popular non-fiction. It is the underlying materialism and natural philosophy in their approaches that has the potential to re-explain the world to me, bringing together all that there is to learn about the sciences, philosophy, mathematics, anthropology, archaeology, political economy, geography, history (including natural history), literature, art and linguistics.
To rebuild knowledge in this way, information needs to be structured both chronologically and thematically. No good can come from collecting random facts - I’m not preparing for quiz night, memorising dates to overwhelm people or setting out to be a know it all. Similarly, the aim is not to experience human history anew. I want to understand how it is a fur covered bipedal ape transformed into a species capable of genome editing, deliberate interplanetary transportation and harnessing the energy of atomic fusion. Finding an answer will, I believe, provide greater clarity about our own time and the seemingly uncertain future. To know the world is to change the world.
So, here are the topics for my education plan as it currently stands:
Human evolution (10mya - 12th millennia BCE)
The neolithic & urban revolutions (10th - 2nd millennia BCE)
The Late bronze age collapse (12th century BCE)
The Hebrew bible (9th - 3rd centuries BCE)
The ancient world before Socrates (6th - 2nd centuries BCE)
Ancient Greek classical philosophy (4th - 3rd centuries BCE)
Hellenistic & Roman philosophy (3rd century BCE - 5th century CE)
Medieval Christianity (5th - 15th century CE)
Medieval Islam (6th - 14th centuries CE)
Modern philosophy (15th - 18th centuries CE)
Nineteenth century philosophy & science
Twentieth century philosophy & science
I’ll provide a list of references with links to content that can be accessed freely and with minimal geographical exclusion. Any important texts that are not free will be detailed in the body of the text for you to request from your local public or university library, although I acknowledge that this is becoming hard to succeed at with all the budget cuts. A lot of it may be old, but I’ve found age to be a winning attribute in terms of quality of scholarship. However, I will be at pains to provide up-to-date information in the text.
Reading list (free access)
