Quotes from Robert P. Crease

Tacit knowledge is one of the most important concepts of current scholarship in the humanities. Ambitious and important, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge is a well-written and original book.

In the ancient and medieval world, the exploration of physical influences among heavenly bodies, and between the heavenly bodies and objects on earth, was generally called 'astrology.' But we must not confuse this with the current socially acceptable form of bigotry that seems to entitle the human beings who believe in it to prejudge the character of others based solely on their dates of birth.

Conviction, Nietzsche said, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.)

What can we know? How we should act? What might we hope for?

Foucault calculated that the number of degrees through which the pendulum's plane of oscillation would shift in twenty-four hours would be 360 degrees times the sine of the latitude—which thus provided a way to determine the person's north-south location on the globe.

It has the funny kind of incomplete, semiabstract reality that scripts or scores have—they are programs, as it were, for real things in the world (the produced play, the performed music) that require adding a context, and decisions about that context affect the whole of the abstract object.