I have very slowly been working my way through my dad’s papers, digitizing what’s not already out there and mostly uploading to PhilPapers. This undated essay and syllabus represents the project of his that I most vividly remember and admire. There is a longer manuscript proposal to be scanned down the road, but this brief overview captures the core. He taught a course based on this at Hunter College in 1977, as the intro mentions, and at least one instance of a seminar at George Washington in 2013. – HCE 7/7/2025
THE MAP OF KNOWLEDGE
Peter Caws, The George Washington University
“The Map of Knowledge” is the name of a course that I introduced at Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1977, as part of a curriculum development project funded by a grant to the College from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The idea of the course went back to an earlier period when, as an officer of a major foundation (Carnegie Corporation of New York), I had had an opportunity to study at close quarters the curricula of a large number of American colleges and universities, and had come to certain conclusions about their deficiencies. Its title was borrowed from the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood, who wrote a book entitled Speculum Mentis, or the Map of Knowledge, although my use of the metaphor differs somewhat from his. Also its conception no doubt owed something to two books that strongly influenced my own intellectual formation: William Rose’s An Outline of Modern Knowledge (London, Victor Gollancz, 1931) and Alan Pryce-Jones’s A New Outline of Modern Knowledge (London, Victor Gollancz, 1956), though the internal structure of these works to some extent shares the deficiencies in question.