Inquiries
Volume One, Number One - Summer 2000
FREE AND RESPONSIBLE INQUIRY
As we launch this inaugural volume of Inquiries, what better set of issues to consider than those raised by Roger Shattuck? The Center for Free Inquiry, and the quarterly publication, Inquiries, are dedicated to exploring fundamental and enduring issues through the lens of the liberal arts. No set of issues is more fundamental and more enduring than those that deal with the question of the moral and ethical boundaries to human inquiry.
In late August of 1945, a young airman named Roger Shattuck flew a B-25 bomber over the smoldering ruins of Hiroshima. He was witness to the consequences of a shattering advance of human knowledge. In 1996, Shattuck produced a provocative and profound study of the moral and ethical boundaries of human inquiry entitled Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. In that book, Shattuck provided an analysis that ranged from the impassioned debatesabout moral relativism in literature and scholarship to recent advances in science and medicine, in order to make a case for the need for reasoned restraint in the quest for knowledge.
In this essay, excerpted from his talk at the Center for Free Inquiry in March of 1999, Shattuck traces a line of thought from ancient cautionary myths through the life's work of Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and the philosophical program of Isaiah Berlin, to argue that western civili-zation's most rigorous thinkers have always under-stood the necessity of caution and restraint.
Jeffrey Brautigam
Jeffrey Brautigam is the Director of the Center for Free Inquiry at Hanover College, where he also teaches modern European history and the history of science.