In the last fifty years, Nietzsche finally laid out Descartes. Descartes thought we could find out everything we need to know by looking at the world, as it were, from the spectator’s gallery. Nietzsche and his descendants said that “looking at the world” is something you do with your own mindset, and that mindset is not neutral. There is no spectator’s gallery, in short. We are all on the stage. So objective knowledge of the kind Descartes wanted is a fiction.
Stay with me - I’m going to get to the Prince of Wales and his new teacher training college shortly.
The end result is the world of ideas in which we now live. A world in which every idea is of equal value, because we do not believe any claims of one idea to be true. We think that knowledge is no more than opinion.
And of course Nietzsche was right so far as he went. He was right to puncture Descartes’ pretensions. The kind of knowledge Descartes wants, neutral, knowledge, is not possible. But there is an older, more deeply rooted idea of knowledge which Descartes himself made unfashionable, but on which we can rest. It is the idea that knowledge is a thing that emerges from a tradition. Not that the tradition stops us thinking for ourselves. But that the tradition helps us to grow up into people who can think in a way that gets thoughts thunk.
This set of ideas, the pre-eminent exponent of which was Thomas Aquinas, is a set of ideas that’s due for a comeback. The Prince of Wales is not being nostalgic. He is taking a respectable and useful position in a thousand year philosophical struggle.