What does it mean to know something today? In an age shaped by data analytics, expert panels, algorithms, misinformation, and competing claims to truth, knowledge appears everywhere and nowhere at once. We are surrounded by facts and encouraged to make data-driven decisions, yet trust in knowledge is fragile. This course begins from that contemporary crisis and asks a question: how does something come to count as knowledge in our lives?

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Rather than treating knowledge as timeless truth or simple representation, this course approaches it as an active process of thought. Knowledge does not just reflect reality; it reorganises it by inventing concepts, redefining problems, and breaking with what previously seemed obvious. What matters is not only what we know, but how knowing becomes possible at all - how concepts are formed, how errors force rethinking, and how new forms of intelligibility emerge. To understand knowledge today, we must attend to its moments of invention and rupture, to the tensions that drive thought forward, and to the fragile constructions through which understanding takes shape.

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The course draws on a distinctive and often overlooked tradition of twentieth-century French thought that redefined knowledge from the ground up. Thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard show that scientific knowledge advances not by smoothly refining common sense, but by breaking with it. Knowledge progresses through ruptures, errors, and conceptual struggles, a perspective that resonates strongly in a world where established models are constantly revised in the face of crises, from climate science to epidemiology.

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This perspective is radicalised by Georges Canguilhem, whose work on life sciences reveals how knowledge is inseparable from norms and values. Concepts such as health, normality, and pathology are not neutral descriptions, but judgments embedded in practices, institutions, and ways of living. In a moment when medical data, mental health categories, and biological classifications increasingly structure everyday life, Canguilhem helps us see knowledge as something that actively shapes what counts as a viable form of life.

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The course also explores how knowledge operates in more abstract domains that nevertheless structure contemporary reality. In the philosophy of mathematics and science, Jean Cavaillès and Albert Lautman argue that knowledge does not arise from individual understanding alone, but from internal problems and structures that compel thought to invent new concepts. Their work offers a powerful counterpoint to contemporary fantasies of automated knowledge, reminding us that genuine knowledge emerges from tensions, limits, and unresolved problems rather than from calculation alone.

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Running through the course is the figure of Henri Poincaré, whose reflections on convention, creativity, and scientific invention anticipate many of today’s debates about models, simulations, and explanatory frameworks. Poincaré helps us see that knowledge always involves choices, perspectives, and imaginative constructions, even at its most rigorous moments.

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Finally, we follow how this philosophy of knowledge opens onto broader social and political questions. Through the work of Jean-Toussaint Desanti, we trace how epistemology becomes entangled with ideology, institutions, and power, preparing the ground for later critiques of knowledge regimes. Knowledge is never just about truth; it is also about authority, legitimacy, and who gets to speak.

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Throughout the course, classical texts are brought into dialogue with contemporary situations. We will ask how knowledge functions in contexts such as digital platforms, expert culture, scientific controversy, education, and public debate. How do errors circulate productively or destructively? When does critique deepen knowledge, and when does it undermine it? What happens when knowledge loses its authority, and what new forms of thinking might emerge in its place?

This course does not aim to provide a final definition of knowledge. Instead, it treats the question “What is knowledge?” as a living problem that cuts across science, politics, and everyday life. By following how knowledge is invented, challenged, and transformed, participants are invited to rethink not only what they know, but how they inhabit a world increasingly organised around competing claims to truth.

What will we cover?

- How information operates as the connective tissue between living systems, machines, and societies.

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- How processes of regulation, feedback, and adaptation define both technical invention and biological life.

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- How the management and circulation of information shape the forms of freedom, responsibility, and cooperation in today’s world.