Acknowledgements.- About the Author.- Table of Figures.- Part I - The Emergence of the Theoretic Life in Classical Greek Philosophy.- Chapter 1. The New Barbarism: The Contest between Classical Humanist Culture and Techno-Economic Pragmatism.- Chapter 2. In Pursuit of the Noble: The Classical Birth of the Liberal Arts.- Chapter 3: The Political and the Theoretic Life - the Challenge of Socrates.- Chapter 4. Aristotelian Teleology: The Bridge Between Natural Philosophy and the problem of "the Good Life".- Chapter 5. The Aristotelian Revolution: The Autonomy of the Theoretic Life and the Dream of Universal Science.- Part II. The Baconian Revolt against Greek Theoria and the Modern Birth of the Technological Mind.- Chapter 6. The Rebirth of Time: Sir. Francis Bacon and the Origins of Modernity.- Chapter 7. Bacon s New Magic: The Transfigured Aim of the Sciences.- Chapter 8. Technology Displaces Metaphysics - Bacon s New Hierarchy of the Arts and Sciences.- Chapter 9. Breaking Aristotle s Bridge: The Modern Philosophical Critique of Teleology.- Chapter 10. The Enlightenment as a Baconian Revolution.- Chapter 11. Metaphysics Dethroned: Hume, Kant, and the "Self-Limitation of Reason".- Chapter 12. -Progressivism, Commerce, and the Triumph of Machine Civilization.- Chapter 13. The Classical Ideal of High Culture in the Democratic Age.- Chapter 14. Dewey and the Greeks in Contention: The Theoretic Life and the Challenge of American Pragmatism.- Chapter 15. A Reply to Dewey.- Chapter 16. The Contemporary Crisis of the Humanities: The Ideological Attack on the Western Canon and The Long Arm of Nietzsche, Marx, and Foucault.- Chapter 17. The New Protrepticus: A Concluding Exhortation to the Theoretic Life.- Index.