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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... EPICUREANS Epicurus was a fascinating character in the history of doubt. He said that not only can human beings manage to be virtuous in this chaotic, unsuper- vised world, they can actually be happy. In fact, there is no reason for ...
... Epicurus cited crocodiles as an ugly and ter- rible danger whose presence did not seem to indicate a benevolent creator. The one thing that Epicurean gods did provide was the 35 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ZEUS AND HERA?, 600 BCE –1 CE.
... Epicurean gods did provide was the service of exam- ple—but this one was a big deal. For an Epicurean, somewhere there are beings that are truly at peace, are happy, and are eternal. The mere idea of this gentle bliss is, itself, a kind ...
... Epicurean pleasures did not include politics or much interaction with the world at large. Unlike the Stoics, the Epicureans tended to stay away from public life, seeing it as concerned with false ideals, and likely to trick people into ...
... Epicureans, but one gets the sense that there were practices, that this was a meditative and ritual- ized life. Epicurus kept enjoining people to work at fully knowing the truth: “Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to ...
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 |