For some time now, certain theorists have been urging us to move beyond text-based understandings of culture to consider the impact of new media on the structure and organization of knowledge. This article, however, reconsiders the usual priority given to digital media by comparing Wikipedia, the free, user-led online Encyclopedia, with Diderot and D'Alembert's eighteenth-century Encyclopédie. It begins by suggesting that the dichotomy between information system and text is not sufficient for describing the differences between the two. It then considers (...) more closely the type of critical thinking presupposed by the Encyclopédie. It concludes by raising the question of the role of judgement in making sense of any encyclopedia in a modern world in which knowledge systems only coexist on the condition of being partially blind to one another. (shrink)

A new and complete translation of Gadamers public lectures and essays of the late 1970s and early 1980s, this volume continues his examination of the predominance of scientific rationality in modern culture. Each essay develops a different perspective of Gadamers view that human reason originates not in abstract rationality but in our participation and practical knowledge of the world. They remain faithful to the tenets of Gadamers philosophy as developed in Truth and Method: that there is no external viewpoint from (...) which to judge our beliefs and that the scientific method is not a privileged access to truth since truth arises from discourse rather than from a set of propositions about the world. (shrink)