Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman memorial lectures) [Hardcover]

Jacob Bronowski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1978 | ISBN-10: 0300021925 | ISBN-13: 978-0300021929 | Edition: First Edition

The Silliman Memorial lecture series was established in 1888 in memory of Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman, the wife of Gold S. Silliman, the mother of Benjamin Silliman, one of the first professors of science at Yale University and the first person to fractionate petroleum. It was established from a legacy of $80,000 left in 1883 and the fund was possessed by Yale University, who publish the lectures, in 1901. The lectures are designed to illustrate the presence and providence, the wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the natural and moral world. It is the belief of the testator that any orderly presentation of the facts of nature or history contributed to the end of this foundation more effectively than any attempt to emphasize the elements of doctrine or creed; and he therefore provided that lectures on dogmatic or polemical theology should be excluded from the scope of this foundation, and that the subjects should be selected rather from the domains of natural science and history, giving special prominence to astronomy, chemistry, geology, and anatomy.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (April 1978)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300021925
• ISBN-13: 978-0300021929
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,011,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The shaper of minds : Mr. Bronowski, May 19, 2003

By 

Ashwin (Bangalore, India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (The Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Lectures Series) (Paperback)

Bronowski at his glittering brilliance in this book, is the memory I carry at the end of reading it, filled with a warmth of understanding and a calmness of knowledge.

It is not easy to find someone as wonderfully coherent and structured and yet intelligent and powerful in ideology, and yet so simple and easy to understand by the lay reader. Bronowski's series of lecture presentations here attempts as he himself says, to complete what Kant set out to do... to create a philosophy of mankind that is based on man's perceptual tools of biology. In this task, Bronowski succeeds brilliantly.

Starting with vision, through hearing, through language itself... Bronowski builds up a picture of human thought and action like never before and the essays read like a thriller through our own minds and its origins. If Ascent of Man was groundbreaking, this book is breathtaking in its scope and parallel simplicity.

39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Approach to Epistemology, May 24, 2000

By 

Richard Landau - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (The Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Lectures Series) (Paperback)

The late Jacob Bronowski delivered this series of lectures at Yale a quarter century ago, and it displays his enormous talent for making difficult material accessible. He looks at Godel's argument that any system built upon a consistent set of axioms will generate theorems that are true but that cannot be proved. He then develops this delicious paradox beyond mathematics to the broad sweep of human knowledge. He suggests that because all that we can know is interrelated, but for purposes of research and understanding we discard from consideration what seems irrelevant, our conclusions inevitably must be tentative and subject to revision as the weight of the discarded material is addressed by subsequent scholars and scientists. This is a stimulating books with but one major flaw. In the last of his essays, he suggests that the standards of scientific honesty that have advanced scientific knowledge so significantly in the last 300 years ought to be applied to problems of governance. But sadly, theories of governance are not subject to rigorous testing and replication by others the way theories of science are.

A good read.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars twentieth century book, December 21, 2001

By 

DAVID OKER (Alpine, california United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (The Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Lectures Series) (Paperback)

A very unifying book. Creativity comes about by means of viewing some other new subject from the perspective of a subject or set of skills already mastered. Jacob Bronowski creates a world view from the Human perspective.

The last chapter is about the spirituality and ethics that comes out of the activity of doing science. With reference to the review before this one, while governments don't set their ideas by persueing truth, they do so at their peril. A human lifetime might not be able to detect the fall of a nation, but the reason nations fall is because they did not base decisions on sound reasoning.