The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel

By: Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish

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Synopsis: The history of science has been successfully integrated with other intellectual and political developments in the Western tradition, instead of being cut off as a recondite specialty untouched by the humanists. The method used by Brunswick and Mazlish is to select twenty-five or more key persons or events and to weave the whole chronicle of Western thought from Leonardo to Hegel (inclusive) around them. Their work is therefore less abstract than some histories of thought of a similar compass, since it does not hesitate to deal with specific persons and even political events: intellectual history is not reduced to themes and elements. The individual chapters, since they are really examples, present the newest learned evidence with some detail and even indicate the scholarly controversies that are involved. References to the learned literature in these essays are invariably apt.