Foundations: A Prologue

One of my friends who has been reading this blog from the start with great interest and enthusiasm made a comment to me recently that gave me pause regarding my blog posts (a long pause as you can probably guess).

The comment was simply, "Very interesting!  But what did the last few posts about ancient Chinese culture have to do with Chinese science?  Or the greater enterprise of comparative science and philosophy between the three cultures you've targeted?"

With that in mind, I felt it necessary to write a tighter theoretical framework for those who didn't want to lose the thread of the narrative.  For those who are simply interested in the tidbits I bring forth from philosophy, history of science, and the actual disciplines of the natural sciences you might want to skip the next few posts.   They will probably put you to sleep.

But for those seeking a scaffold or structure or at least a little insight into what will appear on this blog, you might want to pay some attention. 

So my stated goals are:

 1.) Understanding the history and development of the Natural Sciences in the West.  This would also imply figuring out all the political, social, cultural, theological, and philosophical inputs into what shaped our current understanding on how we investigate Nature.

 2.) Taking all of that in Number 1 and comparing it against alternative approaches to Nature found in two other great civilizations - India and China.   This also implies figuring out the major inputs cited above and how their assumptions differ from our own.

 3.)  Give special focus to the role of medicine in each of these societies, for the reasons I said in a blog post a while back.

Yeah - I know what you are thinking.  I'm trying to catch too many eggs in one basket.   But you see, the strange thing is that I do view all of these issues as being completely interconnected.  

To help folks along, I've decided to write a set of posts called "Foundations" - which will hopefully offer a road map to the reader for future posts.

As the great English writer John Donne wrote in his work Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, "No man is an Island, entire of himself, every man is a piece of the Continent."   So before launching into it, I would like to acknowledge the debt I owe to my teachers and scholars whose works I have oftened read and pondered on these matters.

If anything I write sounds halfway intelligible - praise them for I am merely a transmitter not an originator.