An Excellent Book Review

I happened to accidentally read a book review by Robert Walker. The review was for The Invention of Science by David Wootton. The review was provided at Amazon website.

The review is a pleasure to read. I am compelled to read the book purely on the merits of the review provided by Robert Walker.

I am reproducing the review:

Robert Walker

5.0 out of 5 stars A lifetime of scholarship - in one text - a gift.

31 July 2016 - Published on Amazon.com

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It appears that some lament the length of this text and that it might be 'hard' from time to time. I disagree with both impressions. I think readers today are too used to the brief, bulleted, and conclusory rendering of information. What is wonderful about "The Invention of Science" is that it builds, brick by brick, what the edifice of science is and how it got to the preeminence it enjoys today. In teaching young doctoral students I have been disturbed by the degree to which people take "science" as fact and as offering conclusive answers to questions about social problems as well as natural things. Teaching them that the human mind has not always had 'facts' and that our rendering of the physical and historical world is relatively new and is now taken to mean far more than it can often handle. Listen to contemporary political debate and the ways in which all sides talk about 'facts' as if they were irrefutable things, not recognizing that we all take in everything through cognitive lenses and these lenses color all 'facts.' There are things in the world that exist utterly independent of human consciousness. Then, there are things that only exist because of human consciousness like justice, truth, freedom, and science. Wooton's text reminds us of the evolution of human thought into what we now recognize as science. It was not always this way. The detail with which Wooton explores even the evolution of the idea of 'fact' provides a way to more seriously critique what we hear today as facts. There is a soft underbelly here in contemporary thinking and having a grasp of the history behind even this one word, helps us re-think what we and others means when we say, "it is a fact." Wooton is not proposing a smarmy relativism, but he does educate us about the ways human history has changed thought patterns, consistent with available knowledge, media for exchange of ideas, and cultural values such as religion. As such, his work inspires a more independent reading of what we are told by all kinds of authorities who now claim the mantel of having 'facts.'

This is perhaps not an undergraduate read. Wooton has clearly drawn in a lifetime of scholarship and this is evident on every page. We should not draw back from this density. it should be a call for closer and more thoughtful reading. This is a book that might be best read in chunks then thought about for while before proceeding. I tend to think of it as a classic of scholarship about the formation of the modern mind.