Description: 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 C. Merton:

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1997

Titles, data and places given above refer to the time of the award.
Photos: Copyright © The Nobel Foundation