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Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson
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Peter Watson's hugely ambitious and stimulating history of ideas from deep antiquity to the present day—from the invention of writing, mathematics, science, and philosophy to the rise of such concepts as the law, sacrifice, democracy, and the soul—offers an illuminated path to a greater understanding of our world and ourselves.
- Sales Rank: #434389 in Books
- Brand: Harper
- Published on: 2005-08-30
- Released on: 2005-08-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.81" w x 7.38" l, 3.55 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 848 pages
Features
From Publishers Weekly
Watson's (The Modern Mind) hefty tome distills history's greatest ideas and inventions into an impressive discourse on history's driving forces, enlivened by anecdotes and made approachable by Watson's casual, nearly conspiratorial, tone. Watson presents a vast amount of information, but his greatest strength lies in his ability to make an immensely varied body of material coherent and digestible. The author asks the reader to approach his history "as an alternative to more conventional history-as history with the kings and emperors and dynasties and generals left out," and assumes "readers will know the bare bones of historical chronology." Central to Watson's approach is his belief that the scientific experiment, as it took root in medieval Europe, forever changed history's intellectual landscape. (Watson goes as far as labeling the scientific method "the purest form of democracy there is.") Whereas the non-Western world once dominated intellectual spheres (The author notes that the Hindu mathematician Aryabhata calculated the value of pi and the solar year's length, determined that the earth revolved around the sun and discovered the cause of eclipses nearly a thousand years before Copernicus), Watson points to a grand-and specific-shift that changed that dynamic: "The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a hinge period, when the great European acceleration began. From then on, the history of new ideas happened mainly in what we now call the West." This analysis is indicative of Watson's scholarship, and the result is a rich tapestry of intellectual and cultural life through the ages.
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From Booklist
Pegging his narrative to three ideas--the soul, Europe, and experiment--Watson surveys intellectual history for a popular audience. Departing from the earliest indications of abstract thought--tools fashioned by ancestral human species--Watson highlights the crucial efflorescence of artwork 30,000 years ago, followed by the agriculture revolution. Watson then assesses classical Greece as the crucial incubator of ideas, incomparable to any other situation in history. This is the origin of his inclusion of "Europe" as one of his three organizers of a massive sweep of material: while Watson covers the important intellectual influences emanating from Islam, India, and China, he maintains Europe is where the cogitational action has been. Eurocentrism has been a field of fierce academic contests, traces of which bubble up in Watson's consideration of the main phases of Western thought. Judaism, Christianity, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment--Watson enfolds changing conceptions of the objective, material world, and of the subjective world of the human psyche in a confident, accessible presentation. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“This is a grand book...The history of ideas deserves treatment on this scale.” (Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Evening Standard (London))
“A superior specimen, with numerous interesting factoids...thought-provoking short essays.” (John Derbyshire, New York Sun)
“A masterpiece of historical writing.” (John Gray, Professor of European Thought, London School of Economics, New Statesman)
“[An] extraordinary new book....This is the history of ‘ideas’ as it has never been presented before.” (Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph (London))
Most helpful customer reviews
46 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
A book on History from a different perspective...
By Fernando Berzal Galiano
This is a fantastic book that covers how ideas have developed through History and explains a lot of things about ourselves, members of the Western world in the 21st century.
If you are like me, you didn't enjoy your History classes much when they were all about the particular (and too often unrelated) dates of political and military events. Fortunately, brilliant historians such as Peter Watson know how to weave countless facts into an engaging history, from Gilgamesh to the Cavendish Laboratory at the dawn of the 20th century.
Don't you know what Gilgamesh is? Maybe you should take a look at this book and enjoy yourself learning and thinking about things you might have taken for granted and never questioned.
This book is highly recommended for those who, keeping an open mind, want to be aware of how humans have evolved through History and would like to get to the roots of our many habits and traditions.
I wish all educated people could enjoy the insightful comments and innumerable associations of ideas that Peter Watson shares with us in his delightful history of ideas.
Maybe the most encompassing book on History ever written. Certainly the best I have ever read. A book on History from a different perspective.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting and thoughtful in parts, but overstuffed
By TRH
The book is impressive -- both in scope and scholarship. There are a few places I know Watson made errors, for example, in explaining what an integral is in calculus and the earthly orbit, but given a work of this scope, some mistakes are inevitable and forgivable. I would have greatly preferred a topical organization (a chapter on mathematical ideas; one on geographical knowledge; political ideas; etc.) to his choice of a chronological organization. My biggest complaint, though, is that Watson essentially writes a series of three-paragraph biographies strung end-to-end when he really gets going. For example, the chapter on the Romantic movement starts out with some excellent, really insightful summarizing and contextualizing. Then follows: a mini-biography of Byron, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Verdi, and Wagner (I am not exaggerating). They got tedious, and one example or two would have been sufficient to explain the general points about Romanticism with specific artists. (Watson could have buried the rest of the composer in the footnotes, if he couldn't bear to part with them.)
I would recommend Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy more highly.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Book was in great condition. The purchased quality had it ranked as ...
By Amazon Customer
Book was in great condition. The purchased quality had it ranked as Good. It appears hardly used. The only signs of use were a crease down the spine of the book and a slight fading of the word 'Ideas' on the cover sleeve.
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