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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... biographies, and some posited a whole other world of meaning that did not rely on the gods in any important way. THE MECHANISM OF THE UNIVERSE In the second half of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ZEUS AND HERA?, 600 BCE–1 CE 3.
... meaning that the forces that were the gods were very much like the magnetic force.2 Following Aristotle, some modern scholars have held that Thales's use of the word soul was purely naturalistic.3 Thales's student Anaximandros was the ...
... meaning for humanity—some of Anaxagoras's students equated the universe's mind with Air and others then equated the Air with God. But some of his students continued in the master's way of thinking, referring to the mind of the universe ...
... maintained. Although these rites were full of myth and fantasy, they hid some meaning in them and, most important, they honor the gods and provide occasions for the members WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ZEUS AND HERA?, 600 BCE–1 CE 19.
... meaning, in which human life was a magical game of fear, supplication, and avoidance in a pointless world. THE HELLENISTIC AGE AND EUHEMERUS We conventionally date the Hellenistic period as the three hundred years between Alexander the ...
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 |