An interdisciplinary programme concerned with the ways knowledge, techniques, texts, images, objects and practices have travelled between regions and disciplines. It seeks to make visible both the diversity of contributions to human knowledge and the coherence of a common human inheritance.
Project Leads: Minhyong Kim and Robin Osborne
Academic Advisory Board: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Lorraine Daston, Peter Frankopan, Mark Jarzombek, Glenn Most, Reviel Netz, Reinhard Strohm, Neil Turok, Marina Warner
With the collaboration of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, King's College Cambridge will host a constellation of activities with the goal of building awareness of world knowledge as a common heritage of humanity.
Mission Statement: Diversity and Unity
Human knowledge exhibits unity without uniformity, and diversity without separateness. Across the world, people have developed an extraordinary variety of languages, stories, sciences, arts, technologies and forms of life. These differences are real and worth understanding in their historical specificity. Yet traditions have never been self-contained islands. Knowledge has always travelled—through trade, migration, translation, imitation and collaboration, in spite of conquest, displacement, and destruction. What humanity has inherited is therefore not a mosaic of sealed civilisations, but a changing field of connections, borrowings and transformations.
An illuminating analogy comes from human biology. Our species displays enormous genetic and visible variation, patterned in part by geography and ancestry. Nevertheless, contemporary genetics and biological anthropology do not divide humanity into a small number of natural races. The issue is not whether differences exist, but whether they form discrete clusters separated by stable boundaries. A clustering procedure can almost always produce groups when instructed to do so; the substantive question is whether the same groups appear robustly across different traits, samples, methods and scales. In human populations they generally do not. Much variation is gradual or clinal, neighbouring populations overlap, and migration has repeatedly mixed previously separated histories. Genetic structure and ancestry are real, but they do not amount to a unique partition of humanity into natural racial kinds.
The case of culture is more intricate still. Language, religion, music, mathematics, visual forms, technologies and political institutions each travel along different routes and change at different rates. Their boundaries seldom coincide. Terms such as 'Greek', 'Chinese', 'Islamic', 'Western', or 'Indian', can identify meaningful historical formations, but they are classifications made for particular purposes—not permanent containers within which knowledge originated and remained. Cultural classification is likewise a problem of clustering, and different choices of features, period and scale generate different maps.
The aim of World Knowledge, Past and Present is therefore neither to dissolve the world’s diversity into a homogeneous universal culture nor to arrange it into mutually exclusive civilisations. It is to understand how distinctive traditions emerged within a connected human world, and to make visible both the remarkable plurality of contributions to knowledge and the coherence of their common inheritance.
[AI Disclosure (by Minhyong Kim): The mission statement resulted (mostly) from running a draft through ChatGPT, the first time I have used an LLM for writing. I did this after struggling to put together in a balanced manner the key issues, which led me to experiment. I was somewhat shocked to find the result quite satisfactory. Changes may be made after the writing of these lines in response to feedback.]