Where, and whence ?
André Hurst
Foreword

The questions go way back.

They are asked at the very beginning of Plato’s Phaidros (“My dear Phaedros, where are you going, and whence?”).

It could look just like a friendly inquiry about daily whereabouts, but evidently, at the beginning of a book in which ultimate views about the world will be exposed, it should certainly be read also as the ultimate question.

Asking the ultimate questions, giving the ultimate answers through various theories of everything has often been considered the major occupation of our species (“By its very nature, mankind wants to know”, says Plato’s pupil Aristotle).

Asking “where and whence?” has thus been done for a long time, in many ways, and is still done currently.

But it is done in very different ways, depending on whether you stand in the field of anthropology or in the field of quantum physics, to give just two examples.

If methodologies can differ and the fundamental questions remain the same, should we not help by a dialogue between the different fields of knowledge? This, up to a point, is already done in so-called interdisciplinary studies (but which, very often, turn out to present us with just one more “discipline”, such as the many “comparative-“ this or that to which the academic world has become familiarised).

The contribution of the “World Knowledge Dialogue” (WKD), with the help of scholars from all over the world, aims at trying to elucidate a new way of exploring all our different forms of knowledge (and, admittedly, their definition itself is unclear) in order to find methods and ways of expressing them that could help them to advance in harmony one or several steps further.

This view has been adopted unanimously by the Swiss Rectors’s Conference: the country not only enjoys the presence of many first-rank scholars, whether foreigners or Swiss, it can also take advantage of their world-wide networks and has in and of itself a long tradition of multiculturalism that favours all forms of dialogue.

The first session of the WKD at Crans-Montana ( Switzerland) provided up to a point the very proof that something of this kind was urgently needed. Indeed, it could be said that the dialogue was very timidly attempted, and what one could actually witness was only a first step towards the goal: representatives of sciences and of humanities accepting to make contact, to speak in the presence of colleagues of different fields about unfamiliar basic questions, sometimes unknowingly imitating each other. There was unanimous agreement on one thing: the perspective for dialogue had to be brought further, we had not succeeded completely at the first try and, hence, the problem was, and is, a real one.

One thing, at least, came undoubtedly out of this first session: we are not alone.

This very comforting consideration is applied in its synchronic and its diachronic dimension: participants came from the world at large, and this should go on, as it is an essential feature of the concept itself; in addition to this, participants bridged the generation gap. The young scientists, perhaps still less influenced by the traditional borders of their discipline, turned out to be very active and very effective participants. Their presence is a guarantee for the future of the dialogue to which we hope to bring our contribution.

If there is a message this publication would like to convey to its readers, it certainly is: feel invited (and free) to join us.