One of humanity’s oldest questions asks what it is to know. To answer we must identify the historical, philosophical, cultural and linguistic processes guiding our beliefs and values, and develop tools to assess assumptions.
How are our beliefs, values and ideologies generated, expressed, tested, and negotiated? How do we respond to changes in our understanding of ‘knowledge’ across millennia and across continents?
How do we respond to the concept of ‘deep time’ and the ways we engage with ancient, modern and postmodern cultures? How do we locate our social, linguistic, political, and cultural beliefs and navigate our place in the world when that world seems to be in constant flux?
Our researchers illuminate the fundamental nature of human understanding and explore our changing values and beliefs over time, helping us to define how and what we ourselves have come to believe and value.
Our scholars engage philosophical enquiry, historical and contemporary perspectives, interdisciplinary research and a variety of critical tools to study the generation of knowledge, beliefs and values, and to assess the ways we interpret the world and our place in it.
We investigate the ways in which human thought is shaped by language and cultural conventions, explore the intellectual revolutions created by new bodies of evidence, and reveal how the generation of new fields of knowledge and understanding emerge.
