Scholarship's three questions
Alfred North Whitehead:
Scholarship can ask itself three questions: first, “What exactly did an ancient author mean when he wrote certain words, and what exactly did those words mean to his contemporaries?” … Next, it can ask, “What and where are those flashes of insight in the work of genius whereby he rises out of his own time into all time?” … And finally, “How can we perpetuate and propagate those rare flashes of genius in which humanity, as nowhere else, has risen above itself?”
As recorded by Lucien Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, pp. 77f
