Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius - Hardcover

Fritjof Capra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1609949897 ISBN 13: 9781609949891

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013

Synopsis

Leonardo da Vinci was a brilliant artist, scientist, engineer, mathematician, architect, inventor, and even musician—the archetypal Renaissance man. But he was also a profoundly modern man.

Not only did Leonardo invent the empirical scientific method over a century before Galileo and Francis Bacon, but Capra’s decade-long study of Leonardo’s fabled notebooks reveals that he was a systems thinker centuries before the term was coined. At the very core of Leonardo’s science, Capra argues, lies his persistent quest for understanding the nature of life. His science is a science of living forms, of qualities and patterns, radically different from the mechanistic science that emerged 200 years later.

Because he saw the world as an integrated whole, Leonardo always applied concepts from one area to illuminate problems in another. His studies of the movement of water informed his ideas about how landscapes are shaped, how sap rises in plants, how air moves over a bird’s wing, and how blood flows in the human body. His observations of nature enhanced his art, his drawings were integral to his scientific studies, and he brought art, science, and technology together in his beautiful and elegant mechanical and architectural designs.

Capra describes seven defining characteristics of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius and includes a list of over forty discoveries he made that weren’t rediscovered until centuries later. Capra follows the organizational scheme Leonardo himself intended to use if he ever published his notebooks. So in a sense, this is Leonardo’s science as he himself would have presented it.

Obviously, we can’t all be geniuses on the scale of Leonardo da Vinci. But his persistent endeavor to put life at the very center of his art, science, and design and his recognition that all natural phenomena are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent are important lessons we can learn from. By exploring the mind of the preeminent Renaissance genius, we can gain profound insights into how to address the complex challenges of the 21st century.

About this title

About the Author

Fritjof Capra, PhD, physicist and systems theorist, is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy. Capra is on the faculty of Schumacher College in England and frequently gives management seminars for top executives. He is the author of several international bestsellers, including The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point, The Web of Life, The Hidden Connections, and The Science of Leonardo.

Review

“This remarkable exposition of Leonardo’s work provides in analysis and illustration not only the nature of genius but the intellectual epic that can unfold whenever the human mind is set free.”
—Edward o. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, and author of the best-selling The Social Conquest of Earth and Letters to a Young Scientist

“ In this meticulously crafted work, Capra leads us into the mind and heart of Leonardo so that we experience firsthand his relentless curiosity, his desire to understand the living world on its own terms, his willingness to let go of treasured ideas and concepts in exchange for new ones. Journeying so intimately with Leonardo has given me a rich appreciation for the qualities of a Renaissance person, and what shines through above all is Leonardo’s never-faltering love for that which he was observing: this beautiful, interwoven, life-sustaining planet.”
—Margaret Wheatley, author of So Far from Home and Leadership and the New Science

Edition details

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1609949897
• ISBN 13: 9781609949891
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 408