a book
The Measure of Reality
Alfred Crosby · 1998 · 245 pages
Western Europeans were among the first, if not the first, to invent mechanical clocks, geometrically precise maps, double-entry bookkeeping, precise algebraic and musical notations, and perspective painting. More people in Western Europe thought quantitatively in the sixteenth century than in any other part of the world, enabling them to become the world's leaders. With amusing detail and historical anecdote, Alfred Crosby discusses the shift from qualitative to quantitative perception that occurred during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Alfred W. Crosby is the author of five books, including the award-winning Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 1986)
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Nassim Taleb
“In his book The Measure of Reality (Crosby, 1997), the historian Alfred Crosby presented the following thesis: what distinguished Western Europe from the rest of the world is obsession with measurement, the transformation of the qualitative into the quantitative. (This is not strictly true, the ancients were also obsessed with measurements, but they did not have the Arabic numerals to do proper calculations.)”
