The Foxes and the Hedgehogs, Yet Again

摘要

The Greek poet Archilochus (c 680–645 BC) wrote, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” This quote echoed widely after being used by the British philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) in his essay on Leo Tolstoy (1, 2). In his other works Berlin addressed issues such as liberty and political judgement. He was strongly against monism, i.e., the view that there exist absolute, unassailable truths (3). He was also interested in the differences between natural sciences and the humanities. He maintained that they were different, the former being essentially focused on the study of the outside world and the latter on the internal world of the humans. His essay The Hedgehog and the Fox contrasted writers and thinkers such as Plato, who saw the world through one unifying idea (the hedgehogs) and those, like Montagne, who accepted the world as multiplicity of ideas and systems (the foxes) (1).Here I would like to apply Archilochus's quote to a somewhat more practical issue, to our views of …