Cogitating in Cambridge

Sean Moran takes a punt on reality

- Seán Moran

On the way to meet my research supervisor at Cambridge University I photographed this idyllic scene. The captain of the punt (gondolier? punter?) was boasting to his international passengers that a single college in Cambridge had produced more Nobel Prize-winners than all of the Oxford colleges put together. I suspect that he was exaggerating, but according to the Times, Cambridge has had 121 Nobel laureates, which is “more than the total for either Germany or France.” (Emma Duncan, 9 July 2021)

Although that young upstart, Harvard, is currently ahead in the Nobel Prize stakes, Cambridge is certainly a formidable knowledge-production center. It has accommodated such luminaries as Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Iris Murdoch. But engaging with the kind of abstract conceptual knowledge that brought those folks worldwide fame is not the only way to open a window on reality. There are other ways of knowing than trading in ‘propositional knowledge’ – sometimes known in colloquial speech as book larnin’ (as in “The mountain clergy, as a general rule, are hostile to book larnin’, for there ain’t no Holy Ghost in it.” Smoky Mountain Voices: A Lexicon of Southern Appalachian Speech, Farwell et al, 1993). Making sense of the world, and of our part in it, is a lifelong mission. It is no easy task and requires more than book larnin’, valuable as that can be. The Pensées (thoughts) of the late British philosopher Bryan Magee was recently published for the first time in New Statesman magazine (July 2021), and Magee’s thoughts on this topic seem correct: