“From His Mouth Cometh Knowledge and Understanding”: On Knowledge and Institutions: Third Annual Spring Symposium

“All men, by nature, desire to know.” So did Aristotle introduce his mighty “Metaphysics.” Knowledge is a natural human good, desirable for its own sake. And human beings fulfill or achieve the natural good of knowledge through a variety of enduring institutions. Institutions are a society’s knowledge repositories, incubators, and transmitters.

But American institutions all suffer from a deepening crisis of trust. Many outside them doubt that they contribute anything true or valuable. Many inside them reject the knowledge with which they have historically been entrusted and would replace it with other functions and projects. The collapsing trust in our institutions is, in fact, part of a broader skepticism, if not an outright rejection, of the knowledge that these institutions have produced, preserved, and handed down across millennia.

This conference examines the nature and value of institutional knowledge. The speakers will examine several institutions—such as courts and constitutions, universities, the press, and churches—that are arenas within which knowledge and its associated human virtues have been developed and transmitted over time, and reflect on the breakdown of these storehouses of knowledge and what may replace them.

Registration coming soon.