Rambling

James Wood writes about the way characters speak their minds

In the Theaetetus, Socrates is puzzled about how we make use of what we already know. Take a mathematician, he says. Such a person must already have in his head all the numbers he will work with. Yet when he counts, he sets out, as it were, to learn from himself things that he already knows, and the same is true of a scholar, starting to read the same book for the umpteenth time. This is a paradox of redundancy, in which we have unnaturally to forget what we would naturally remember in order to learn something ‘new’.

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Vol. 22 No. 11 · 1 June 2000 » James Wood » Rambling (print version)
Pages 36-37 | 3220 words