The history and philosophy of science is an unusually dull and unpromising discipline. Yet it managed to produce at least two illuminati in the last century: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn.
But there is another thinker in the field whose depth and brilliance at least matched Popper and Kuhn's. Jacob Klein has been a cult hero in select academic circles but is rarely known outside of them. This is unfortunate. Though his work deals with obscure subjects in ancient Greek mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, it shines a light on how and why what people nowadays call 'The West' came to be in its best modern incarnations: its scientific outlook, its rationality and self-critiques.
These 'values', at least to me, have been the best the West has had to offer the world; everything else that Western powers have hitherto forced upon the rest of us is of questionable value.
At a time when the West seems to have lost its way and is seen by many, whether with alarm or with glee, as being in decline relative to the East, Klein should be a profound spiritual guide. Hopefully, whatever economic or military decline the West is suffering from does not mean the decline or disappearance of our respect for science, rationality and reflective self-criticism.
To study Klein, you will have to either read his seminal work, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra or spend four years studying the Great Books curriculum, an undergraduate programme based on the Western canon co-founded by Klein at St John's College in Maryland. Here, let us just deal with the book.
Among Klein's followers and cognoscenti, the book, with its more-than-a-mouthful title, is simply known as 'the maths book'. Klein unfortunately did not have a genius publisher like the one who told Isaiah Berlin to forget about calling his long-winded essay 'On Tolstoy's Historical Scepticism', and retitled it The Hedgehog and the Fox; it went on to become one of the most celebrated literary works of the last century.
'The maths book' is a rich treasure trove that you can easily read and reread over a lifetime, if you are into that sort of thing. I first studied it in college, when it was taught by Eva Brann, its English translator, a former dean of St John's College and one of America's truly great living scholars.