Other reviews in the section may give you a good idea of the content of this book. I would rather give you an idea of the impact that Bronowski had on one life.

When I was a small boy living in London over 25 years ago, my father used to take me to the Science Museum in South Kensington almost every Saturday to attend the afternoon lectures. One Saturday it was not a lecture that we attended but a film by a gentleman named Jacob Bronowski. I sat mesmorised by the episode of the 'Ascent of Man' that was shown that afternoon. I understood much of the science which was being discussed and already had a good grounding in the subject. But within the despcription of man's pursuit of understanding was a humanity that I had never experienced before. At the end of the film, Bronowski crouched by a pond in a concentration camp and scooped a handful of ashes from the pool of water and, fixing his steady eye on the camera, said, 'I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, consider you may be wrong'. Bronowski was quoting Cromwell, but in that brief moment was encapsulated the escence of science, humanity, art,and understanding. The Ascent of Man, in the 1970s an attempt to bring a deeper and wider understanding of science and humanity to the public, is now confined to Open University television schedules. The book remains available to all. It is a revelation. Bronowski was a giant. Read this book and you may come closer to an understanding of the world around you, but when you finally put it down, having formed an opinion,'consider you may be wrong'. As for me, I went on to study physics as a first degree and the arts as a higher degree. I share Bronowski's atheism but there is never a day that passes or an opinion I offer when I do not heed that advice and question the world around me.

If there is a message in this book, it is a very optimistic one: Human beings matter. At some point during the late quaternary period, roughly 2 million years ago, a new creature appeared which had the ability to understand its own existence. The hand of man has literally changed everything, mostly for the better, Bronowski contends.

The scope of this book is vast; from the primitive hend-tool makers of the stone age, to the complex organization builders of the modern age, humans have evolved, and their ability to create has advanced.

There is also an important warning to people not to forget their biological and evolutionary roots. An atheist, Bronowski understood the value of life on earth, and the need for each successive generation of people to transmit the knowledge of culture, science, and technology to future generations. The last chapter states that, if we humans are to continue the Ascent, we must be prepared to invest more in our children.

Like all secularists, Bronowski understood that no god was going to 'save' humanity nor mourn humanity's destruction (should that ever come to pass), just as no god had created humanity. There never were, and are not now, future lives, there is only this life. Whatever the pretensions of humanity are, we are forever tied to the physical universe in which our DNA, and other matter exists.

If we want a better world, we need to make it ourselves. And to do that, we need to understand the theory and application of science. The book makes a strong, but subtle case for scientific thinking, learning, and the value of technology in making a better world.

''The Ascent of Man'' neatly complements ''The Western intellectual Tradition''. While the latter book looked at the role of great ideas in shaping civilizations and driving revolutions, the former looks at roles played by the technologies and science which developed in many civilizations, that often interacted with great ideas.

Because of America's phobia when it comes to secular, atheistic i! deas, Bronowski was forced to state that his PBS TV series was "a personal view". While that was not untrue, Bronowski's personal views are also those of many others, most of whom probably share his love of learning and find joy in the acts of invention and discovery.

-Brian Lynch

I grew in my teens watching, rerun after rerun, Jacob Bronowski's TV series "The Ascent of Man", from which I took my love for science; science as a very human activity, beautifully described by Mr Bronowski, and his words have well resisted the test of time as I read this book based on the series, and which I inevitably lend to anyone I know who have a thirst for the adventure of knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

I would highly recommend this book to people with an interest in the development of modern thought. The authors combine the impacts of science on the humanities and vice versa in a compelling book that leaves you waiting for the next page.

This is one of those survey books, in the style of the learned, impartial treatise by the wise man. But here, we have Bronowski the wise but biased man. He says evolution is true, and that as time goes by, we understand it better and better. By contrast, he's got a problem with John Calvin, to the point of qualifying as something of a "Calvinphobe." We'll get back to that; but first, as a survey text, this is popular at the college level.

Bronowski here was intends to tie it all up, or integrate a Western world view: History, politics, science, achievement, and freedom. Bronowski delivers on this assignment, and convincingly argues that the matrix of the modern Western world can be boiled down and studied. Bernard Lewis of Princeton would agree, and Lewis has contributed to this subject by looking at how much of the Islamic world, by contrast to the "West" (anyplace controlled by Europeans), has hankered after the money and the technology of the West, but has rejected "Westernization." Consequently, says Lewis, non-Westerners are left with modern versions of non-Western societies, and their people still want to leave to express themselves elsewhere.

Bronowski can explain why. He has it down to two main ideas (by the time you hit his conclusion after almost 500 pages). First: The Renaissance launched the idea of developing your human personality, which means realizing the "potential of many gifts" and "fulfill[ing] these gifts in the development of their own lives" (Hardcover, p. 499) insofar as these are "special gifts with which a man is endowed." (Id., logical reference to the Apostle Paul in Romans 12 omitted by Bronowski, but what the heck); and second: "the idea of freedom" (Hardcover again, p. 500). Since "human fulfillment is unattainable without freedom...these two main ideas are linked," says Bronowski (somehow missing Paul's letter to the Galatians, articulating this about 15 centuries prior to the Renaissance, but like I said, we all have our point of view).

Bronowski applies his two points in the first 400 or so pages: how human fulfillment and freedom have inspired and produced the scientific and technical progress, which in turn has produced leisure time unimaginable to all but a few rulers in earlier eras of history. Now the Islamic world will point out that this thesis conveniently starts 500 years after the glories and achievements of the Muslims were already firmly established. And we can also see how these same two impulses were released and also channeled by Christianity, 600 years before Mohammed. But isn't it a great thing to be free to express all of this in our own free time? And free to dispute it, in creative, progressive societies in which opposition is legalized, to achieve what Bronowski calls "this balance between power and dissent" which "is the heart of Western civilization." (p. 501). The conflict of dissenting ideas overtaking established ones, and fulfilling some thinker's potential contribution to our machinery, art, navigation, or hey, maybe legal administration-is how "history is made." People putting their stamp on ideas. Idea driven people stamping out automobiles; or compressing information to travel through glass fibers.

Despite its forbidding title, The Western Intellectual Tradition is a readable overview of Western thought from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Bronowski and Mazlish's book is an entertaining way to refresh your memory about that Western Civilization course you were forced to take in freshman year.

The authors make the ideas come alive by providing a thumbnail biography of each thinker, placing him (and I do mean 'him') squarely in the political and social context of his times. This can cast an entirely different light on a writer's work. For example, Rousseau, who created a philosophy based on a belief in the natural goodness of man, not only sired five children out of wedlock, but sent each of them off to a foundling hospital!

Bringing all these thinkers together in one volume highlights timelines that may have gone unnoticed. I had never thought about the fact that Shakespeare and Galileo were contemporaries. And how did England change within 50 years from a nation of baudy Elizabethans to one of strict Puritans?

One warning: The text is laden with footnotes. A few provide interesting background on the disputes over the ideas described, but most simply give references and can be skipped by the general reader.

While Bronowski's book, Science and Human Values is often lauded as a critique of logical positivism, I found it to be much more than just that. Bronowski launches a critique on a more pervasive foundation of western philosophy, that of dualism. Bronowski seeks to reduce the dualistic view that somehow science and technology are antithetical to the human spirit. The book is constructed as an extended essay consisting of three distinct, though closely related arguments:

a) The Creative Mind - an argument that the human mind operates creatively whether engaged in logical constructivist activities or in more subjective expressions of thought. In short, Bronowski argues here that the Poet and the Physicist have much more in common than we allow ourselves to believe.

b) The Habit of Truth - an argument that both the right (creative) and left (analytic) sides of the brain are doing the same thing, seeking truth, in the generative process.

c) The Sense of Human Dignity - an argument that the objective exploration of science and technology are just as "human" as the quest for introspective or subjective understanding of the human condition.

Epilogue) The volume also contains an interesting fictional dialogue titled The Abacus and the Rose, held between a public servant, a scientist and a literary figure regarding the nature of their thought processes.

Bronowski emphasizes the notion that the outcomes of science and technology are mere tools and artifacts, it is the spirit and creative energy behind them form the basis for human values and ideals. For Bronowski human values are what drive scientific discovery just as they drive public policy or artistic creativity. We get into trouble when we try and separate these ventures from human values, and thus confuse means and ends. In this way Bronowski offers a compelling argument that is less a critique of positivism than a call for a more holistic vision of human development and the creative spirit.

The essay is well written and easy to follow and provides some solid insight on the ever more difficult task of linking scientific and technological progress with human value systems.

"Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different; the need to explore remains the same." (Bronowski, 1965, p. 72)

Bronowski's "Science & Human Values" should be purchased with A.J. Ayer's "Language, Truth & Logic" --the quintessential explanation of the "verifibility criterion of meaning". Just as the Russell/Whitehead "Principia Mathematica" sought to ground mathematics upon a foundation of pure logic, the "verifibility criterion of meaning" sought to provide an empirical basis for all scientific enquiry. However, the inescapable conclusion is that ethical imperatives (sentences containing the word "ought" or its equivalent) are non-sensical. However logical, this position may be untenable from a practical standpoint. Jacob Bronowski's crtique of the "logical positivist" position in his "Science and Human Values" pointed out an underlying social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. That implied imperative is: "we OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so". Ironically, Bronowski's critique may have saved logical positivism from its own inflexible consistency, placing its edifice not upon an unassailable axiom but rather upon an "ought statement" which will not admit of proof by the very method which is its logical offspring.

...P>This book was written in 1951. "The Ascent of Man" was still 20 years in the future; the richly humanistic outlook of that celebrated series of programs is the same, but here Bronowski restricts himself to examining science, and putting it in the context of other sorts of mental activities that people engage in.

Most of what people think about (or for that matter animals in a more rudimentary way) involves using their experiences to guide their actions, and then evaluating how well they did. "Learn from your mistakes" epitomizes much common sense. Science does the same sort of thing; what makes it difficult for people is the often technical language it is couched in, and the exactness of the conditions it specifies and predictions it calculates. Yet over time science tries to learn from its mistakes (in spite of the rearguard actions of many older scientists!) and revise its views of the world, just the way a sensible individual does. The only difference between the common sense of an individual and that of a scientist is this business of technical language and precise definition. In our ordinary lives we don't bother to define things very well, because we are talking to ourselves or a few others in our circumstances. Besides, we have only one life, and setting up controlled experiments is usually out of the question.

Still, people form theories of the world that they act upon in their personal affairs, and change those theories if they don't seem to work. In this way, Bronowski insists, we are all scientists. We may believe in angels and lucky numbers, but we know that boiling an egg or shooting a basketball well or getting a good seat in the movies requires the application of our intelligence to the world. (For that matter, we may believe in angels but find that it makes more sense to depend on ourselves.)

Bronowski wrote this book in 1951, in the shadow of WWII, the atomic bomb and the new and more terrible hydrogen bomb. Moreover, quantum mechanics was still quite bizarre and controversial to the mass of scientists, nor had they really absorbed the deeper message of Relativity Theory. In 1905 Einstein had shown that there is no "out there" to be studied: the observer and the observed are, and must be, intertwined; to look at something is to interact with it.

The workers building up quantum mechanics absorbed this tremendous insight and added one of their own: that cause-and-effect descriptions of the world may not always be available. One should be satisfied, in the realm of the very small, with predicting a range of probable outcomes and specifying no particular underlying mechanism that controls them.

This book discusses the massive shift in attitudes these two new views required of scientists. Ironically, the average layman was more used to dealing with the world in these ways: one learns about the world by participating in it, and all thought of the future must be provisional, because the world always has surprises in store.

While these thoughts were penned half a century ago, the issues are still current. Also, of course, there are a myriad of newer and sexier books discussing these issues, and relating them to newer technologies and more recent science. Yet Bronowski's book is still a good authoritative read. He was a mathematician and participant in much of the intellectual ferment of the time, and knew many of the thinkers, such as Fermi and von Neumann. He is a master of the intellectual history, and this is a book that relates scientific attitudes to the cultural milieus in which they grew up. But especially, this book is worth reading because it gives a rounded picture, in rich, intelligent prose, of an issue that is of concern not merely to scientists, but to all of us.