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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... Plato , and Aristotle — and what sets this new type of thought apart is that it is an attempt to explain the universe by thinking it through rather than relying on handed - down tradition . Thus the birth of philosophy is , in itself ...
... Plato and others we know that Socrates respected the traditional rites of piety . At his famous trial , Socrates ... Plato's description , in the Phaedo , of his final day has been a model of a cool . philosophical death scene ever since ...
... Plato was born in 429 BCE and thus grew up under its misery and came of age as Athens breathed its last inde- pendent breath . He had been Socrates ' student , and the execution of his bril- liant teacher , combined with what felt like ...
... Plato advanced aspects of both these two traditions : he borrowed heavily from the ecstatic - ritual aspect of Greek religion , replacing the emotional with the cognitive - philosophy was now the route to the divine state — and he also ...
... Plato found it conceptually satisfying because of the relationship between the idea of moving stars and planets in the sky and moving bodies here below. Both move and seem purposeful in a way that separates them from almost everything ...
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 |