What this chamber argues

• Every other hexagonal gallery asks how to know one thing. This one asks what knowing is.
• From Bacon's method to Wells's World Brain: the long project of making knowledge itself navigable.

Primary works in this chamber (11)

• Francis Bacon — The Advancement of Learning (1605) — Book
• Francis Bacon — Novum Organum (1620) — Book
• John Locke — An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) — Book
• Jean le Rond d'Alembert — Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia (1751) — Book
• Melvil Dewey — A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing (1876) — Book
• Charles Sanders Peirce — How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) — Paper
• J. E. Quibell — The Ramesseum (1898) — Book
• H. G. Wells — World Brain (1937) — Book
• Callimachus — Pinakes (c. 250 BCE) — Reference
• Paul Otlet — Traité de documentation (1934) — Book
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Monadology (1714) — Book

Connected chambers

• Philosophy of Science — Epistemology ↔ method
• Logic — Knowing ↔ reasoning
• Engineering — World Brain → Memex → Web
• Wisdom Literature — The deep prehistory of epistemology — millennia of practical-knowledge codification before philosophy was named.
• Epics — Oral mnemonic tradition is the original technology for preserving knowledge across generations.
• Fiction Set in Libraries — These works are the literary mirror of the meta-epistemology shelf: where Bacon and Wells theorize the navigable archive, France and M. R. James dramatize what it costs to live inside one.