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On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean PostScript

Name: On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean PostScript
Author: Merton, Robert , Bowen, Catherine D.
ISBN: 9780156687812

by Merton, Robert, Bowen, Catherine D.

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Overview

With playfulness and a large dose of wit, Robert Merton traces the origin of Newton's aphorism, "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Using as a model the discursive and digressive style of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Merton presents a whimsical yet scholarly work which deals with the questions of creativity, tradition, plagiarism, the transmission of knowledge, and the concept of progress. "This book is the delightful apotheosis of donmanship: Merton parodies scholarliness while being faultlessly scholarly; he scourges pedantry while brandishing his own abstruse learning on every page. The most recondite and obscure scholarly squabbles are transmuted into the material of comedy as the ostensible subject is shouldered to one side by yet another hobby horse from Merton's densely populated stable. He has created a jeu d'esprit which is profoundly suggestive both in detail and as a whole."--Sean French, Times Literary Supplement

"A great and universal book. . . . On the Shoulders of Giants is a forest of ramifying tangents and digressions. Some join and reinforce, thus fostering the central theme. But others are thrown in just for fun, as true digressions that record the scholar's most noble obligations, as sacred in wit as in any other mode, to teach, to illuminate, to connect."--Stephen Jay Gould Robert K. Merton is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. He has also served as President of the American Sociology Society and the Eastern Sociology Society. Included among his many publications are On Theoretical Sociology, Social Theory and Social Structure, The Sociology of Science, and Sociological Ambivalence.

Synopsis

Book by Merton, Robert K.

About the Author, Merton, Robert , Bowen, Catherine D.

Robert K. Merton is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, Foundation Scholar of the Russell Sage Foundation, and a MacArthur Prize Fellow. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he has received numerous honors and prizes for his work in both science and the humanities. His many books include the classic Social Theory and Social Structure, the Sociology of Science, Sociological Ambivalence, and Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England.

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Originally published by Free Press in 1965, this edition sports a foreword by Umberto Eco (1990), a preface (1985), an afterword (1985), and a postface (1993). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)