Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

Jacob Bronowski was one of the best philosophers of science ever to walk the Earth. His perspectives on the role of science in our world are some of the most profound and meaningful statements on how humans view themselves, each other and the universe in general. This book is a reprint of six lectures he gave as part of the Silliman Foundation lecture series.
The titles of the lectures are:

*) The mind as an instrument for understanding
*) The evolution and power of symbolic language
*) Knowledge as algorithm and metaphor
*) The laws of nature and the nature of laws
*) Error, progress and the concept of time
*) Law and individual responsibility

and they sum up the essence of Bronowski better than anything I could coin.
If you have an interest in the philosophy of science, then you must read Bronowski. His thoughts are profound, human and very descriptive of how we humans continue to expand the body of knowledge and make the appropriate corrections when necessary.

It isn't clear how Jacob Bronowski came to be delivering the Silliman lectures for 1967 at Yale University, but in doing so he delivered a marvellous and, apparently, criminally overlooked book which many of today's leading popular science writers might do well to read. Bronowski was by training an academic algebraic geometrist (I'm not sure that there is any other kind), but by inclination a polymath, working in a remarkably eclectic range of fields from operations research to biology to anthropology to poetry, and as he did so taking time to publish an acclaimed biography of William Blake and write and produce a well-received BBC anthropology series, The Ascent of Man.

The Silliman foundation at Yale is dedicated to "illustrating the presence and providence of God, as demonstrated in the natural and moral world", so it made an odd choice in selecting Bronowski, a non-religious scientist, to present its 1967 lectures, but the choice was an inspired one, for instead of banging on sanctimoniously about how only science and mathematics can bring us to a true understanding of the universe, Bronowski the polymath instead put these endeavours in their human, social and - literally - literal context.

Bronowski's view is that our sciences contantly evolve and that they are a function of our favoured modes of observation (primarily visual) and means of description (wholly linguistic - in the sense that we can only theorise what we can commit to some formal symbolic system or other). Not just pure mathematics but any science - or language, for that matter - is a closed symbolic system, and is subject to the formal limitations of such systems which have been explained by mathematicians (such as Goedel's undecidability), practical limitations, and epistemological limitations. Even ignoring the formal limitations, practically we never have anything like enough evidence to soundly make a "true" theory - that would involve all data in the universe. But curiously, even if we had this, the theory wouldn't tell us anything interesting anyway, since we'd be able to deduce all possible consequences as a matter of logic - the empirical theory wouldn't add anything, in the same way that repeatedly rolling dice won't tell you anything you couldn't work out anyway about probability theory). In a fascinating chapter entitled "knowledge as algorithm and as metaphor" Bronowski charts this inevitable trade-off between theoretical completeness and practical usefulness and makes the (quite unexpected, but undeniable) observation that the very very incompleteness of a theory is what gives it its power.

Curiously, Bronowski speaks in terms of thorough reductionism - he says "I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe that are not tied to every other event in the universe" but in contrast to writers like Dawkins reaches a surprisingly pragmatist conclusion: since it is not just practically but *conceptually* impossible to gather all data in the universe (which is what you would need to truthfully explain any single one of these events) we should resign ourselves to an imperfect solution which we must always remember is contingent and subject to improvement or change. This argument, like Quine's as to the dogmas of empiricism, is arrived at from a purely traditional, analytic approach, and is relatively immune to charges of woolly postmodernism. But in every other way it resonates far more closely with anti-essentialists like Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend than it does with the latter day Dawkinses.

The final chapter strays off brief into political and moral matters, and suffers because of it: Bronowski makes an unconvincing attempt to rebut Hume's statement of the naturalistic fallacy that you can't convert an 'is' to an 'ought', and ends up saying (and immediately regretting) things like "once you know that there are two sexes, then certain behaviour becomes pointless". My guess is he wasn't talking about fishing. Leaving aside the quaint value-judgments this seems to imply, it also seems to have abandoned the idea, forcefully argued in the first five lectures, that these "truths" we know are contingent anyway and that behaviour which seems ridiculous from one perspective might have a perfectly sensible utility described from another: there's no priority of perspective, after all.

Nonetheless, these final comments aren't anything like enough to detract from the quality of this overall book, which I recommend warmly to all inquiring minds.

Olly Buxton

I wrote the majority of this when e-mailing a youtube guy who recommended reading 'Science and Human Values' and obviously decided to replicate it here!

glad to know Jacob Bronowski, the best 20th century philosopher where Philosophy/Philosopher means to unify and see connections amongst everything and how that relates to our human condition. Jacob Bronowski was in a unique position to do it; he was not that great a mathematician, but he tried and profited spiritually/intellectually from it; he did science, art, engineering, and mathematics and looked for connections between it all and the human condition because why do it if your not going to do it meaningfully? Jacob Bronowski started buy gave incomplete proofs for what are called 'Godel's theorems.' He lived in a time when Newton's 'world view' was shaken to the core, and he gave the best interpretation of those events which are still influencing people in all walks of life today, but they never read Jacob Bronowski.

Jacob Bronowski has strangly disappeared from the human consciousness; i remember seeing 'Ascent of Man' in book stores; book stores were small back then; or at least, the science shelves were usually one or two shelves in the nature section comprising one stack. I myself never picked the book up thinking it was just another science/historian book. This phenomenon happens because there is a new generation born every fifteen to twenty years and there is only so much knowledge to go around, but Jacob Bronowski's knowledge is so universal and of a more constructive character that humanity has missed the boat.

My first Jacob Bronowski read was "The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination." This is his definitive work not 'Ascent of Man.' 'Ascent of Man' reminds me of the intro chapter to Kip Thornes 'Black holes and Time warps.' As Mr Thorpe says, "read it after you've read the book to enjoy the details; Ascent of Man is something you read after you've read enough of his other small slender volumes. Basically, 'Science and Human Values', and 'Origins of Knowledge and Imagination' are good for getting the basics down; all of his books say the same thing but from different historical periods and historical details. In a lot of ways, Jacob Bronowski was able to rewrite the history of humanity and give the real scientific humanistic religion by writing all these books(he basically started the whole 'two cultures' debate popularized by Snow). Origins goes back millions of years before Australopithecus(so does Ascent of Man); i must say I need to re-read 'Science and Human Values' to see where it fits in historically; 'Science, Magic, and Civilization' covers the dark ages, and 'Westurn Civilization' covers the renaissance up to the industrial revolution(Ascent of Man also covers the industrial revolution). And in a way, Origins finishes in the 20th century with his explanations of 20th century science/mathematics.

He also has some pretty good compilations of articles he wrote in 'Visionary Eye' and 'Sense of the Future.' They have important historical details. Other books are good if your interested in Poetry or other details. Identity of Man has a couple of good last chapters I find stimulating when thinking about artificial intelligence, but I find the above books his better.

This one book is so thoughtful and broad in perspective that it can't fail to nourish your intellect.

It is easy today to get depressed about mankind. Bronowski demonstrates that there is hope for us yet. He also demonstrates that we, perhaps know more and are capable of more than we thought. I wish I had had the chance to meet him.

Exceptionally engaging volume on the role of science in our lives. Bronowski does a pretty good job of how we learn and manages to be entertaining at the same time; treating science as a sort of language. At points his language and usage are a bit "steep"---and given that Bronowski is a humanist (I am not.) I find some of his argument disagreeable. The short section toward the end where he deals with Godel and inconsistency is worth the 130+ pages. A good read and recommended if the topic holds any interest.

I've probably read this volume of lectures a dozen times because of their clarity, their insight into the nature of science and scientific understanding. Bronowski is a genius. He taps into the history of science and how imagination works in the minds of Newton and Einstein. He bridges the worlds of art and science, and finds how imagination connects them both. If you write software code by day and read the poetry of Pound and Eliot by night, you'll know what Bronowski's vision is all about.

-Tom Maremaa, Author of the Forthcoming novel "Metal Heads" from Kunati Books in Spring 2009