Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily DickinsonIn the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn To Decadence, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind especially-from Socrates to Galileo and Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking. This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning, This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists. |
From inside the book
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... first Western philosophers were arguing in Ionia . They are the “ pre - Socratics ” —the philosophers that came before Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle — and what sets this new type of thought apart is that it is an attempt to explain ...
... first half of which was a description of the universe as unified and unchanging. It did not include God. In the sec- ond part of the poem, however, Parmenides offers the universe based on “the opinions of the mortals.” Here there are ...
... first pre - Socratics , in the sixth century BCE , the poet Xenophanes of Colophon ( 570-475 BCE ) began to criticize the actions of the Olympians — not as a scold , but because he thought that these gods couldn't really exist ...
... first reasoned argument for the existence of another world. Plato famously outlawed poetry, and why? Because the ... first taking in the facts of fire and puppets. One's eyes can bear a lake's reflections of animals before one can look ...
... first place because he is wandering, he is out of place, and he gets in trouble. The novel was hugely popular because its readers were uprooted migrants in a vast, multicultural empire, and, in that situation, too much freedom and too ...
Contents
1 | |
TWO Smacking the Temple 600 BCE1 | 45 |
THREE What the Buddha Saw 600 BCE1 | 86 |
FOUR When in Rome in Doubt 50 BCE200 | 125 |
FIVE Christian Doubt Zen Elisha | 169 |
SIX Medieval Doubt LoopstheLoop 8001400 | 216 |
SEVEN The Printing Press and | 264 |
EIGHT Sunspots and White House Doubters 16001800 | 315 |
NINE Doubts Bid for a Better World 18001900 | 371 |
The New Cosmopolitan | 428 |
Notes | 495 |
Bibliography | 521 |
Acknowledgments | 529 |
Other editions - View all
Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from ... Jennifer Hecht No preview available - 2004 |
Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from ... Jennifer Hecht No preview available - 2003 |