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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... rejection of the pantheon was based on the unknow- able nature of the universe and the unseemly behavior of the traditional gods , but those arguments only disrupt belief in a particular kind of God . Generally Plato's work was natural ...
... rejected supernatural descriptions of them, and he spoke of life itself as daemonic, calling attention to the awesome strange- ness of consciousness—but he wasn't implying that it was divine. In the wake of Aristotle's rather ...
... Yet honesty, ease, and repose were available to anyone who merely stopped lying, role-playing, and striving. Cynics wanted to live virtuously and calmly, the way the animals do, and so rejected all 30 DOUBT: A HISTORY.
... rejected all possessions and social forms and slept outdoors. Diogenes boasted that he performed all his phys- ical ... rejection of all custom included a rejection of religious obser- vance: he did not take part in any social, political ...
... rejection of meaning and conven- tion, but it had power to sustain and uplift its followers. To be cynical about even the things dogs love is hollow and demoralizing; to be a true Cynic leaves one a few devotions: loyalty, for instance ...
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 |