It's Monday, What are You Reading? The Science of Liberty

It's Monday, What are You Reading?

This is the eighth entry for this meme, suggested by Sheila@ One Persons Journey Through A World of Books.

I am currently reading "The Science of Liberty" by Timothy Ferris

From the Amazon site, editorial review from Booklist:
Ferris, the prominent science author and PBS series host, champions scientific and classical liberal values in this work. Holding that the rise of science blazed the trail for liberal democracy, Ferris opens with profiles of seventeenth-century philosophical pioneers in each arena, Francis Bacon and John Locke, and continues with embodiments of the Enlightenment’s intersection of science and self-government, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Historical episodes in which authoritarianism suppressed liberty and democracy occupy much of Ferris’ subsequent analysis: in his discussions of the regimes of Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, Ferris convincingly demonstrates that the disasters that befell science and scientists under their sway stemmed from the extinction of freedom. In contemporary times, the threat to scientific and democratic values, Ferris writes, comes from deconstructionist philosophers and their pilot fish in academia, and from Islamic radicalism. Disparaging illusions about a perfect society at the base of various stripes of totalitarianism––Communist, Fascist, or Fundamentalist Muslim––Ferris vindicates his thesis that humanity’s progress ensues only whenever science’s anti-authoritarian, egalitarian commitment to free inquiry is allowed to range wherever curiosity will take it. --Gilbert Taylor





Bill  ;-)

Author of "Back to the Homeplace"
http://eduscapes.com/v2a/back_to_the_homeplace.html
Hope you'll check out my book giveaways:
http://drbillsbookbazaar.blogspot.com/