Piece Description

Science has been very successful at producing knowledge. But knowledge without wisdom, or science without civilization, is a dangerous thing, according to Nicholas Maxwell. And the reason we have the one without the other, he believes, is that science, as now practiced, does not question its own purposes or investigate its own presuppositions. It transforms the world but cannot transform itself. Nicholas Maxwell is a philosopher of science, now retired from University College, London, and the author of From Knowledge to Wisdom, first published in 1984 and just reissued in a revised edition. He argues – these are his own words – that: “We need a revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry, so that the basic aim becomes to promote wisdom by rational means, instead of just to acquire knowledge.” Nicholas Maxwell makes his case in the final episode of our series.