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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... doctrines about things in the sky.” While Anaxagoras had gone too far for some in talking about the sun as a hot rock, his other ideas doubting the pantheon were too common to be very shocking. At about the same time, Thucydides (460/55 ...
... everything on Earth is a specific and flawed copy of an ideal model that actually exists in another reality. The doctrine can seem silly if applied to a chair—it offers 15 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ZEUS AND HERA?, 600 BCE –1 CE.
... doctrine can seem silly if applied to a chair—it offers a fine metaphor for representation and the problem of language (after all, how can we call each of the variety of chairs by the same name and yet be intelligible?), but it is a ...
... doctrines are all relatively familiar. It's the choice we human beings have. Serious rationalism allows for self-sufficiency, but on a very small scale and with the expectation of many setbacks ... doctrine , Concealing 20 DOUBT: A HISTORY.
... doctrine , Concealing with his lying speech the truth.22 The piece goes on to say that it is smart to claim that the ... doctrines and became his suc- cessor as head of the Academy . His name was Speusippus , he was a nephew of Plato's ...
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 |