-- please visit www.uottawaglobe.ca, see discussion on library access in global health and development discussions.

I was fortunate to be exposed to some interesting history that led me to abandon a notion of ‘western knowledge’, and in fact decide that what was Western was increasingly proprietary approaches of knowledge. If we trace any disciplines’ knowledge there is a seamless transmission, even through paradigm shifts, and the development of a branch of science rests on the collection of knowledge from vast sources. In my undergrad, I kept being taught the history of philosophy as tracing from the Greeks, then stalling in the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance picking it up from Aristotle/Ptolemy, restoring humanism and rationalism leading through the Enlightenment to the modern era. This is a view of the history that places the tradition and its ownership squarely in the West.