ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the features of specialization and its discontents which lie at the heart of our contemporary condition, and to weigh the extent of the issues at stake. This is the promise and pathos of specialization: its potential both to liberate and to alienate, to open up new worlds and to create new inequalities. The chapter also focuses on mathematics, philosophy and other forms of abstract theoretical knowledge that were, before the seventeenth century, with rare exceptions, linked to and legitimized by the moral order, by the spiritual tradition of society. Theoretical knowledge developed, sometimes in concert with a specializing practical knowledge, as in Archimedes' case; more often insulated from it. The great Greek scholars like Euclid and Archimedes travelled to learn and teach in Alexandria, which is where abstract mathematics as a hypothetico-deductive system emerged, parting company with the empirical geometry used by the Egyptian surveyors.
