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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... Question ix ONE Whatever Happened to Zeus and Hera ?, 600 BCE - 1 CE Greek Doubt 1 TWO Smacking the Temple , 600 BCE – 1 CE Doubt and the Ancient Jews 45 THREE What the Buddha Saw , 600 BCE – 1 CE Ancient Doubt in Asia 86 FOUR When in ...
... question the existence of the gods. They were an obvious part of the world; invisible but made apparent by the authority of the poets, the phe- nomena of the natural world and the heavens, the experience of their wor- ship, and ...
... question " Well , if there are no gods , why do so many people have religious experiences ? ” His answer was that when the gods , or suggestions of the gods , show up in dreams and visions , it is because the universe does in fact have ...
... question of what moves and animates individual human beings and found himself con- fronted with the idea of the soul . There had been some mention of souls in the Homeric poems , but the references were vague and did not suggest that ...
... question of immortality, just in this period the heavens were beginning to be considered eternal: a recent finding that centuries-old ancient Babylonian astronomical records matched Greek observations of the heavens suggested that 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 |