15 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2023
    1. Oakeshott saw educationas part of the ‘conversation of mankind’, wherein teachers induct their studentsinto that conversation by teaching them how to participate in the dialogue—howto hear the ‘voices’ of previous generations while cultivating their own uniquevoices.

      How did Michael Oakeshott's philosophy overlap with the idea of the 'Great Conversation' or 20th century movement of Adler's Great Books of the Western World.

      How does it influence the idea of "having conversations with the text" in the annotation space?

  2. Dec 2022
    1. With medicine, the story was slightly different because of theconstant and urgent need for it. Medical knowledge was alwaysuseful, always relevant, so books on medicine were constantly indemand, and would have been available in the majority of libraries inlate antiquity.

      Transmission of medical knowledge has a more immediate and direct application for people; as a result it may tend to be transmitted more faithfully either in written or oral forms. The written record of medical scrolls from antiquity were in constant demand.

    2. If we narrow the process oftransmission down to a single, hypothetical strand, it is feasible thatPtolemy originally wrote The Almagest on a papyrus scroll insecond-century Alexandria. That scroll would have had to berecopied at least twice for it to survive until the sixth century, at whichpoint it might well have been copied onto parchment and bound intoa book. This, too, would need to be recopied every few hundredyears to ensure that it survived (again assuming that it escaped theusual pests, damage and disasters) and was available to scholars in1500. It is therefore likely that The Almagest had to be recopied atthe very least five times during the period 150–1500.
  3. Aug 2022
    1. This is particularly important in the Dzogchen mengakde (oral pith instruction) transmission lineage. Different levels of meaning are transmitted, mediated by the master’s recognition of the student’s spiritual maturity and by the student’s ability to ‘hear’ the meaning contained in the words. As my Buddhist teacher would endlessly explain to his western students, brought up to expect ‘new information’: the more and more you listen, the more and more you hear.
    2. Through my long immersion as a student-practitioner in the Tibetan Buddhist knowledge system I am familiar with this process of secrecy and deeper meaning. Unlike the Indigenous Knowledge system, Tibetan Buddhism has a rich textual tradition. But it has also kept alive a strong oral tradition, of knowledge passed by a Buddhist master who is recognised as having not only learning but also spiritual realisation, to his/her student. The teachers talk of the outer, inner and secret meaning, and in terms of the provisional versus the absolute meaning gained through realisation.
    3. The strongest clash in values between Indigenous knowledge systems and Western knowledge systems lies in who ‘owns’ the knowledge, who has the right to ‘transmit’ it and who has the right to ‘receive’ it.
  4. Jan 2022
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