Frontiers of Engineering Book

The basic premise of this book is to select 100 thinkers of all time and present their ideas by giving three or four pages to each. There are two problems with this idea. The first is how to select the thinkers in question. Admittedly, this sounds straightaway like a recipe for a very long argument, preferably with a glass or two of wine to quench the thirst which might well accompany such a debate. To my mind, for example, Philip Stokes bizarrely omits the incomparable Nicholas of Cusa while including a pointless nutter like Moritz Schlick, and this would be only the first of my many objections to his selection. The second problem has to do with the difficulties of any one person summarising the ideas of the thinkers in question in the aforementioned three or four pages. This might well be a task beyond the powers of any scholar living or dead or yet to be born. Encyclopaedias usually get around this problem by giving each separate summary to a particular expert in the field, thus dividing the labour. In the daunting circumstances in which Stokes was placed, his only strategy to write a book worth reading (in mine own humble opinion) would have been to just write something totally idiosyncratic, a kind of blogging riff on the eternal themes of philosophy in the spirit of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but instead he makes the fatal error of trying to write something conventional.