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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... notion that the God functions through mind ( nous ) ; that the universe is guided by mind . This God doesn't look human , and doesn't have a smattering of traits and abilities , but rather " sees as a whole , perceives as a whole ...
... notion, which a mature claim, and which a parting sigh. Fierce academic battles have been fought over the order of things— computer analysis is now in on it. The Timaeus in particular has been hotly claimed as a particularly early work ...
... notion that the Forms or ideals actually existed as such , but the sense that good had an ultimate ver- sion was always at the center of his interpretation of the world . Philosophy was the work of coming closer to it - an intensely ...
... notion of him is so high above us. Some primary reasons that both Plato and Aristotle had for believing in God were utterly erroneous—simple errors caused by our being stuck to the planet and misled by the sensation that the planet is ...
... notion of the sublunar realm, where we are, as radically distinct from the superlunar realm, where the gods can be found. Naturalist and ethical philosophy had made the idea of personified, involved gods appear naïve—especially ones ...
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 |