Research & Academia

Never have so many papers been published, so many datasets produced, so many titles conferred. Knowledge has become a volume, a rank, an impact factor. A text can now be generated without anyone having wondered, a citation produced without anyone having read. One might believe that we have never known so much. If knowledge is measured only by what it yields — a grant, a rank, a patent, an “impact” — has it already ceased to be knowledge?

Socrates, before the court of Athens, claimed no other wisdom than this: he knew that he did not know. The sophists, opposite him, made of knowledge a merchandise — a skill to be sold, a reputation to be worn. The quarrel has not aged. A laboratory that produces in order to be counted, a mind that cites without having thought, already resembles the sophist more than the man who still admits that he does not know.

There is a knowledge that heals, that builds, that judges, and Forgr does not despise it. Usefulness is not the enemy of knowing. It becomes the enemy when it is the only reason left. To know is a purpose. To make known is another: not to sell a result, but to let another mind enter what one has come to know, so that the desire might continue, elsewhere, in someone who had not yet felt it.

The purpose of this work is then to know, or to make known — without first asking what it will yield.