What *Do* They Teach Them...?

[stoutfellow]

Today's Post-Dispatch includes a review by Amy Woods Butler of Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World, a novel about Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss ("two of [Kehlmann's] country's lesser-known prodigies"). In it, there appears the following remarkable assertion: "Both of these geniuses were born in the late 1700s, just as the light of reason had begun to penetrate the murk of fear and superstition in Europe..."

Francis Bacon. René Descartes. John Locke. Thomas Hobbes. David Hume. George Berkeley. Baron de Montesquieu. Denis Diderot. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Baruch Spinoza.

John Milton. Voltaire. Jonathan Swift. Michel de Montaigne.

Newton. Leibniz. Harvey. Gilbert. Boyle. Pascal. Lavoisier. Linnaeus. Leeuwenhoek. Hooke. Galileo. Copernicus. Tycho. Kepler.

The Bernoulli brothers. Leonhard Euler.

Hugo Grotius. François Quesnay. The Marquis de Condorcet. Adam freaking Smith.

Take me now, Lord.

Comments

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

Forgive my unwarranted giggle. I cannot see the name Leibnitz without laughing, because a particular seminar we had on him was both boringly taught and had the unfortunate focus on his ideas of "monadologie." Which we totally immature college students immediately dubbed "gonadologie." It kept us awake then, and I still today laugh about it. (g)

Butler does seem to think civilizations started rather late...

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Note that she said "in Europe"; I can't help thinking that she means "as opposed to America". As if the ideas of the Founding Fathers were absolutely new!