Jacob Bronowski

Many have referred to the late Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) as a Renaissance man in the 20th century. His research and writings spanned a wide range of subjects that cut across both the sciences and the arts: mathematics, physics, biology, anthropology, history of science, philosophy of science, the visual arts, poetry, literature and drama. He was an Honorary Editorial Advisor to Leonardo, a journal that especially gives attention to the interplay between art, science and technology, and its readers should therefore be delighted with the recent publication of 19 of his major essays in the book, A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural Philosophy [1]. These essays, selected by his wife Rita and Piero E. Ariotti, reveal the many themes developed by Bronowski that together form his contribution to natural philosophy. A major goal in Bronowski's intellectual life was 'to create a philosophy for the 20th century which shall be all of one piece' [2, p. 15]. An assessment of his contribution to this effort has begun, and, as a step toward that goal, I offer here a sketch of the various elements (or themes) that together constitute his philosophy. For this sketch I shall draw upon the material found in these essays as well as that found in his other writings [3]. As I read Bronowski, there are five major themes that he repeated and developed throughout his writings, which surface in the essays collected in A Sense of the Future. First, he believed that the fundamental concepts of science were not too esoteric to be understood by an average person. Second, he believed that the scientific enterprise, contrary to popular opinion, involves basic human values, that is, that science is not a neutral activity. Third, Bronowski asserted that, contrary to the logical positivists, the development of science is an open-ended process, with regard both to its past and present and to its future. Fourth, science is a creative endeavor involving mental processes similar to those usually attributed to artists. Finally, in the latter decade of his life, he explored the boundary between humans and other animals in an attempt to discover the uniqueness of humans. This led to his fifth theme or hypothesis: the uniqueness of humans lies in their imagination, a faculty brought into play by both scientists and artists. That the latter theme dovetails amiably with the former ones indicates how, in fact, his natural philosophy was 'all of one piece'

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