Is This the End?

Abstract

Abstract: In the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon called for both a new start to knowledge production and a reconsideration of its ends. In the reorganization of knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment, disciplines were conceived as having particular purposes as well as a point at which their projects would be complete. This essay revisits this foundational question at another inflection point in its long history: four hundred years after his Great Instauration , as we face the new era that will emerge from the coalescent crises of COVID-19, climate disaster, the right-wing war on education, and the precarity of the neoliberal university. We believe the time has come again for knowledge producers across fields and disciplines to reorient their work around the question of "ends." As scholars and disciplines pursue their individual knowledge projects, they must be able to answer the questions: why do we do what we do, and how could we know that we were done?