The Value of Knowledge

What is the value of knowledge?This module questions the value of knowledge and, briefly and tentatively, looks to some of the ways we might approach the nature of knowledge.

Later in your degree you can study epistemology, the logic of knowledge. Epistemologists put forward analyses and definitions of knowledge and test them against particular intuitions. But the aim of this module is more general: to think about the range of cases of knowledge and why we might value it.

• 1. Introduction: what might be the value of knowledge?

  2. Knowledge is intrinsically valuable – Plato

  3. Knowledge is instrumentally valuable – Bacon

  4. Knowledge may corrupt – Rousseau

  5. Knowledge is objective – Williams

  6. Knowledge can be personal – Polanyi on skills

  7. Knowledge is collective #1 – Wittgenstein on background certainty

  8. Knowledge is collective #2 – Kusch on testimony

  9. Knowledge is natural – Hume

  10. The value of philosophy – Russell

Assessment