Hear the Professor of Art and Archaeology (PP618)

This fabulous ribbon piece of two long passages is called The Hedgehog and the Fox. The title refers to a famous typology of thinkers proposed by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, one based on the ancient saying that “a fox knows many things while the hedgehog knows one big thing.” (Berlin divided minds up in this way: Plato, Dante, and Proust were hedgehogs, he thought, while Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Joyce were foxes.) I imagine Serra means the work as an invitation to students to explore these two passages—to dive deeply into one subject, like the hedgehog, or to scout out various fields of study, like the fox.