Famous quote by Master Oogway from the movie Kung Fu Panda ☯️

Commonplacing refers to the practice of collecting and compiling significant or interesting passages, thoughts, quotations, and information from various sources into a personal notebook or commonplace book. People jot down excerpts from books, lectures, conversations, and other sources, organizing them thematically for easy reference.

The purpose of commonplacing is to create a personalized resource that gathers valuable insights, knowledge, and reflections. These books became a way for individuals to create their own intellectual and philosophical repositories.

Famous historical figures, including thinkers like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, were known to keep commonplace books. The practice has evolved over time, and some contemporary note-taking methods or digital tools can be seen as modern iterations of this age-old tradition.

John Locke Index for commonplace books

This channel has videos regarding anything related to journaling, commonplacing, book reading and related topics. I will recommend her videos which are concise and beginner friendly for anyone wanting to explore this domain.

Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."

For the soul walks upon all paths.

The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.

The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

- Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

Florilegia is a practice of reading and pondering, of conversing with literature by pulling out the phrases that “sparkle,” removing them from their original context into a new one. Fresh meaning may be discovered in this aggregation of sparklets, their conversation with each other. In new context they may generate new ideas, create questions or beauties or conundrums.

Historically, some argue that the term 'interdisciplinarity' dates right back to the ideas of greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle who have been associated with the term 'interdisciplinary thinkers'.

Others say that it is from the 20th century, borne from educational reforms, research and transfer of knowledge across subject boundaries. This was mostly due to the post World War I problems, such as population shifts, housing, social welfare, war, labour and crime, that needed to be addressed by a range of different disciplines rather than through the lens of just one, to work towards the 'unity of knowledge'.

In 1959, C. P. Snow delivered an influential lecture titled 'The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution' at the University of Cambridge. Snow argued that 'the intellectual life of the whole western society' was split into two cultures - the sciences and the humanities - and that this was a major hindrance to solving the worlds' problems.

"Literary intellectuals at one pole - at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists....... the non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man's condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment." - C. P. Snow

Snow argued that practitioners in both areas should instead build bridges to further the progress of human knowledge and to benefit the society.

Snow, C. P., & Collini, S. (1993). THE REDE LECTURE (1959). In The Two Cultures (pp. 1–52). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The works of Leonardo da Vinci is a perfect embodiment of this argument.