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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... them. Each of these realizations feels like that first glimpse of fire would feel. Only slowly, with pain, and with the jettisoning of each successive conclusion, did the person eventually see the world and then finally 16 DOUBT: A HISTORY.
... painful, savvy and wry. As we've seen, the religion of the Hellenic period was profoundly rooted in each polis, but the poleis were on their way out. During the period in which Plato and Aristotle wrote their philosophy, the individual ...
... painful reality, is preferable to living under false ideas. What looked like unbearable uncertainty to some was interesting, emanci- pating, and undeniably true to others. For them, the hard part was under- standing how the old model of ...
... pain of it. The central idea of Stoicism was that with the loss of the polis as the center of life, the universe should be conceived of as one giant polis. If men and women acted their parts in the universe as diligently as they had in ...
... pain, and fear of the gods. He dealt with fear of death by arguing that death is an utterly unconscious sleep and nothing more. Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don't know it. So long ...
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 |