IGNORAMUS

PHILOSOPHICAL APHORISMS AND AGNOIOLOGISMS

By: Agustín Galán Machío

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

IGNORAMUS

The Latin expression Ignoramus et ignorabimus (“we do not know—and we shall not know”) was famously invoked by the nineteenth-century physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond in his lecture on The Seven Enigmas of the Universe. In it, he argued that when human thought reaches its logical limits, some fundamental problems concerning the nature and functioning of the universe may prove permanently insoluble. Since then, the phrase has often been regarded as a motto of modern agnosticism.

Despite the extraordinary advances of contemporary science—from quantum physics to precision cosmology and the standard model of the Big Bang—this agnostic insight retains its philosophical force. It is this enduring tension between knowledge and ignorance that gives this book its title. In Ignoramus, the author seeks to systematize the epistemological skepticism characteristic of late modernity.

The book offers a concise and systematic overview of the limits of both scientific and philosophical knowledge. Through a collection of aphorisms and short reflections, it outlines the boundaries that separate what we know, what we believe we know, and what may ultimately remain unknowable with respect to the problem of Being.

The central argument of the book can be summarized in two propositions. First, the ultimate fate and purpose of the universe remain unknown. Second, it is even conceivable that no intelligence—divine or otherwise—possesses a definitive answer to that question. In this sense, the uncertainty surrounding the end of our lives, much like the unpredictable outcome of a football match, may be precisely what makes existence meaningful and engaging.

The text is deliberately structured as a sequence of brief and highly readable sentences. Alongside philosophical statements—what the author calls “philosophical aphorisms”—the book also includes reflections on the limits of scientific knowledge. For these two forms of reflection, the author proposes two corresponding terms: “agnoiologisms”, referring to statements about the limits of human understanding, and “scientologisms,” referring to concise formulations of scientific knowledge.

Agnoiology (from the Greek agnoeō, meaning ignorance) designates the philosophical study of the nature and conditions of ignorance, particularly of what may be genuinely unknowable as distinct from merely unknown. The term was introduced by James Frederick Ferrier in Institutes of Metaphysic (1854) as a conceptual counterpart to epistemology, the theory of knowledge.