Broadly, learning, especially in abundance. The term is generally used to refer to large amounts of knowledge, particularly of systematic (or at least coherent) form, particularly when it is in the possession of a human person, and readily accessible to that person. One could only awkwardly speak of a book “containing” erudition; the word carries with it, in ordinary usage, the implication of a conjunction of knower and knowledge, and, furthermore, tends to imply that the conjoint state is a felicitous one for the knowing subject (at least). It is interesting to note that the etymology of the word links it to the process whereby the rude or uneducated are led out of that condition—accordingly, brought to some measure of sophistication or polish. In this sense, the term would seem to have strong links to pedagogical traditions and the broader project of the formation of the youth in different cultural settings (see EDUCATION). At present, however, the term seems to have lost most or even all of these connotations, and is used almost exclusively to refer to a mass of learning in the possessed state, without reference to the process whereby it came to be possessed. For reasons that are obscure, the term seems to have little or no place in the physical or life sciences, and is closely linked to the domains of secular, text-based inquiry often grouped under the rubric of the HUMANITIES. It is tempting to suggest that the broad history of learned culture can be told as a dialectical (or zero-sum?) contestation between an ésprit érudit, on the one hand, and an ésprit critique, on the other (see DIALECTIC). The former embodies a program of proliferation, collation, and omniscient mastery; the latter, a program of excision, reduction, and foundational precedence. It is unclear if these respective enterprises are best thought of as mere tactical positions in the skirmish-spaces of intellectual conflict, deep characterological tendencies in the psychology of thinkers, or coherent strategies for advancing actual conceptions of what thought should do.