Scott Milross Buchanan

Scott Milross Buchanan was an American philosopher, educator, and foundation consultant. He was dean of St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland (1937-1947), and he is best known as the founder, together with Stringfellow Barr, of the Great Books program at St. John's College. Buchanan was born Sprague, Washington, and raised in Jeffersonville, Vermont. He received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College in 1916, majoring in Greek and mathematics. After serving in the Navy during the final year of World War I, he studied philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar from 1919-21. He received his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard University in 1925.

Buchanan's various projects and writings may be understood as an ambitious program of social and cultural reform based on the insight that many crucial problems arise from the uncritical use of symbolism. Buchanan's program stressed what he saw as the need for reforms in the mathematical symbolism employed in modern science. Buchanan's first book, Possibility (1927), stated that science is "the greatest body of uncriticized dogma we have today" and even likened science to the "Black Arts". Buchanan pondered ways to mitigate the variety of threats to humanity that he perceived in the unmanaged and unsupervised growth of modern science and technology.

Source: Wikipedia