A reader’s introduction
This collection places theories of knowing beside practical systems for arranging and circulating what is known. The three starting points compare an Enlightenment map of the arts and sciences, a shelf-and-subject classification, and a proposal for a continuously revised world encyclopedia.
Start here: three works
- Jean le Rond d'Alembert — Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia — Examine how memory, reason, and imagination are used to relate branches of knowledge and justify an encyclopedic plan.
- Melvil Dewey — A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing — See a compact numerical scheme turn subject relationships into actionable decisions about shelving and retrieval.
- H. G. Wells — World Brain — Consider a 1930s editorial program for expert collaboration, continual revision, education, and broad access to reference knowledge.
Treat every map or classification as a historical argument about what belongs together: test what its categories omit, and do not recast Wells’s editorial institution as a technical blueprint for the internet.
What Knowledge Itself 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 Knowledge Itself (11)
- Francis Bacon — The Advancement of Learning (1605) — Book · read the full text
- Francis Bacon — Novum Organum (1620) — Book · read the full text
- John Locke — An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) — Book · read the full text
- Jean le Rond d'Alembert — Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia (1751) — Book · read the full text
- Melvil Dewey — A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing (1876) — Book · read the full text
- Charles Sanders Peirce — How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) — Paper · view citation
- J. E. Quibell — The Ramesseum (1898) — Book · read the full text
- H. G. Wells — World Brain (1938) — Book · read the full text
- Callimachus — Pinakes (c. 250 BCE) — Reference · read the full text
- Paul Otlet — Traité de documentation (1934) — Book · read the full text
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Monadology (1714) — Book · read the full text
Chambers connected to Knowledge Itself
- 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.
Reading Trails through Knowledge Itself
- From Wonder to Method Reading Trail — How looking up at the sky slowly became the scientific method.