The Ascent of Man

Abstract

man behind these extraordinary programs is Jacob Bronowski, a Polishborn, Cambridge-educated British subject who has been working in America for past decade, as a senior fellow at Salk Institute in California. A mathematician, philosopher, and historian of science, he is also a poet, playwright, literary critic and authority on poetry of William Blake. In this age of specialization, he is a throwback in best sense-to a time when scientists were called natural philosophers. With his Renaissance approach to knowledge and natural world, he has for past two decades been happily crossing boundaries between scientific disciplines and bridging that legendary gap between two cultures of science and humanities. Bronowski, in fact, helped initiate great debate known as the two cultures. His book Science and Human Values, like so much he has done since, focused on common ground shared by science and humanities. C. P. Snow has said book is one of six works he would choose to explain to an intelligent nonscientist something of deepest meaning of science. The Ascent of Man is culminating expression of philosophical inquiries begun by Bronowski in that work. My ambition has been .. . to create a philosophy for 20th century which shall be all of one piece. This series presents a philosophy rather than a history, and a philosophy of nature rather than of science.