Ch6&7

Does Mason argue that it is better to believe that you can understand everything, and that nothing is unintelligible? Or does he think that it is better to agree that not everything can be understood.

Also, he present the idea of relative understanding that maybe it is naive to try and pin down some particular kind of understanding as right or wrong.

"styles of understanding need not be limitied to the mechanical or the pseudomathematical or to straightforward visual imagination. Simply because something seems beyond one form of understanding, it need not be beyond another (102)"

At the end of the chapter, it seems like Mason is saying you cannot talk about being beyond understanding without first taking this relativism into account. If you were to agree that context or framing produce different understandings then it is impossible to say that something is completely unintelligable, maybe it is just unintelligable outside of that context.

I really like how wisdom and understanding were related to philosophy in the last chapter. I like that Mason rejects the idea of pure knowledge as a means to obtain wisdom. Wisdom, he says is a broad and vague version of knowledge which also fits with the ideas of understanding presented in chapter 6. Mason seems to be giving philosophy and understanding a more noble aspiration then pure knowlege and he attempt to define both in terms of wisdom.