Use your imagination to put yourself in the following situation:

You are living in a time of radical change. Only a short time before you were born, there was fairly widespread agreement on the nature of the world. The Earth was the physical and theological center of the Universe. The history of the Earth consisted of a long, slow decline from a Golden Age in the past when there had lived scientists, artists and philosophers whose work far surpassed anything that could be produced today. The chief business of this life was to make one's way from day to day and to prepare oneself for the life of the world to come. The dominant social institution in this world was a religious one which had its fingers in the scientific and commercial pies as well.

However, this situation has been changing. New commercial centers have been forming. New bookkeeping methods and banking practices have led to the production of greater wealth than has been seen in some time. A new device, the printing press, has made widely available a number of the ancient writings as well as the ideas of some of your contemporaries. When some of the ancient texts are compared to contemporary observations, it turns out that the texts have their facts all wrong. Scientists have begun to develop a new picture of the world: in this picture, the Earth is no longer at the center of the Universe. Instead, the Earth is a planet (a wanderer) among the stars. Some religionists up north have challenged the idea that the central religious authority has properly interpreted the chief religious texts. They have suggested that each individual is capable of interpreting these texts, thanks to a kind of common reason/sense which all humans share. They also believe that this shows that individual believers don't need someone standing between them and their God: they can approach God directly. Voyages of exploration have revealed the existence of peoples and customs very different from those with which your ancestors had been familiar. The practical needs of these voyages have also spurred the development of new machines, e.g., clocks which are far more accurate than any which have come before. In fact, some of the new machines can mimic the behaviors of human beings! There is even a philosopher who has argued that the new understanding of the world reveals that human beings are also machines, thus challenging older conceptions of what it means to be human. Finally, people have come to realize that they are developing new methods for coming to know the world--methods based on analytical reason and observation. The success of these methods seems to stand in stark contrast to the products of the older methods for gaining knowledge.

This is the world into which you are born. You are educated by a group--the Jesuits--representing the older order of things. You gain from them a belief in the distinctiveness and importance of humans, a belief which is shared by most of your contemporaries. But, you are also fascinated by the new knowledge. You go on to make contributions in math (coordinate geometry) and science (physics). You are also fascinated by machines, and are especially impressed by the machines in the Royal Gardens which can imitate the actions of human beings.

Given this situation and your background, What intellectual problems would seem most important to you? Why? How might you try to solve these problems?

(Revised, 30 May 1997)

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Copyright 1998 by David H. Calhoun and Brian B. Clayton.  This page last updated on May 28, 1998.