Tikalon Blog by Dev Gualtieri

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The Western Intellectual Tradition

April 15, 2011

Before Carl Sagan enthralled television viewers with his "billions and billions " of stars, there was Jacob Bronowski and The Ascent of Man . Bronowski was a British mathematician who received his Ph.D. for a dissertation in algebraic geometry in 1935. He was interested in writing as well as technology, and he had the good fortune to hobnob with many famous physicists of the atomic age .

Bronowski's Ascent of Man was a thirteen-part television series that aired in 1973. There was a companion book that was nearly a verbatim transcript of the series, replete with many excellent illustrations. A copy of this book, purchased in 1973, sits on my bookshelf, and it attests to the permanence of "dead tree " media as contrasted with today's electronic media . I bought another copy for my father, who was interested in science and technology , and he would often refer to "Bronowski's book." Bronowski died just a year after the series aired,

One phrase that Bronowski used often in the course of his narration was "the western intellectual tradition ." Of course, there have been significant intellectual accomplishments in non-western countries, such as the invention of the number zero and advanced metallurgy in India, Chinese technology that transcends the hackneyed example of gunpowder , and the considerable corpus of astronomical observations in the Islamic world .

However, progress in human culture, especially in philosophy , mathematics and science, follows an unbroken lineage from ancient Greece through modern Europe and its descendant America . Critics have complained that this view is just a celebration of dead white males ; but I, for one, welcome our dead white male overlords .

This tradition is celebrated in a list of Great Books that influenced many students of my generation . As you can imagine, there has been much controversy as to what should be included on such a list. Mortimer Adler , whose name is most associated with the idea of the great books, published a list of 161 essential authors in 1940.[3] Forty-two of these wrote on scientific, mathematical and medical topics, and these appear as follow: