午夜剧场

Today, knowledge has been popularized, and we live in an era where we can immediately check information on Wikipedia and other sources just by turning on a smartphone. Furthermore, information is constantly circulating at a dizzying pace through television quiz shows and programs explaining world affairs.

Turning our attention to university education, "liberal arts" and departments advocating multi-disciplinary fields are in "vogue," and general education is being sought after more than specialization. In fact, the form of scholarship during the Renaissance is very similar to this situation.

During the Renaissance, academic genres were ambiguous and had not been established in a clearly separated manner. When discussing one discipline, there were many cases where concepts were borrowed from other disciplines. For example, when explaining the phenomenon of rainbows in an astronomy book, theories and stories would be mixed by stating Peripatetic theories and then using myths. There was a tendency to consider a single problem from multiple perspectives, such as incorporating dialectics into geometric proof methods. This was because there were still various phenomena in nature that had not yet been elucidated. Furthermore, "multiple perspectives" meant that scholars of the time acquired and organized vast amounts of knowledge. Additionally, the form of scholarship changed with the fluctuations of the times. For instance, as erudite people felt the need for "practice" regarding mathematics due to the technical progress of the time, they initiated a movement to review theoretical books. From this review, "mathematics" gradually became separated from other disciplines, but even into the 17th century, scholarship itself continued to be mixed with other fields in an ambiguous state.

Today, we aim for the "fusion" of academic fields and try to achieve "integration," whereas in the Renaissance, various disciplines were "integrated" and the goal was the "separation" of academic fields. Through the work of "fusion" or "separation," how do we gather or detach knowledge? When performing this task, it is necessary to judge which knowledge is correct or incorrect, or which knowledge to keep or discard. In other words, one must cultivate "judgment." This is because the act of "judging" itself is a vital process of human thought.

I believe that by learning this thought process—this way of thinking—from the people of the Renaissance and applying it, we can arrive at a new "form of scholarship."