| Edition |
[First edition] |
| Description |
xvi, 464 pages ; 24 cm |
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text txt rdacontent |
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unmediated n rdamedia |
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volume nc rdacarrier |
| Note |
"First published in Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2019"--Title page verso |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 403-452) and index. |
| Contents |
Chapter one. Mind out of matter: the mainspring of ideas. Big brains, big thoughts? -- The galactic overview -- Becoming imaginative -- Remembering wrongly -- Anticipating accurately -- Thinking with tongues -- Producing cultures -- The power of thought. |
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Chapter two. Gathering thoughts: thinking before agriculture. The moral cannibals: the earliest ideas? -- Inklings of afterlife -- The earliest ethics -- Identifying the early thoughts of Homo sapiens -- The clash of symbols -- The modern Stone Age: foraging minds -- Cold cases: environment and evidence of Ice Age ideas -- Distrusting the senses: undermining dumb materialism -- Discovering the imperceptible -- Magic and witchcraft -- Placed in nature: mana, God, and totemism -- Imagining order: Ice Age political thought -- Cosmic order: time and taboos -- Trading ideas: the first political economy. |
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Chapter three. Settled minds: 'civilized' thinking. After the ice: the Mesolithic mind -- Thinking with mud: the minds of the first agriculturists -- Farmers' politics: war and work -- Civic life -- Leadership in emerging states -- Cosmologies and power: binarism and monism -- Oracles and kings: new theories of power -- Divine kings and ideas of empire -- Enter the professionals: intellectuals and legists in early agrarian states -- The flock and the shepherd: social thought -- Fruits of leisure: moral thinking -- Reading God's dreams: cosmogony and science. |
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Chapter four. The great sages: the first named thinkers. An overview of the age -- The Eurasian links -- New religions? -- Nothing and God -- Along with God: other Jewish ideas -- Jesting with Pilate: secular means to truth -- Realism and relativism -- Rationalism and logic -- The retreat from pure reason: science, skepticism, and materialism -- Morals and politics -- Pessimism and the exaltation of power -- Optimism and the enemies of the state -- Slavery. |
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Chapter five. Thinking faiths: ideas in a religious age. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism: facing the checks -- Redefining God: the unfolding of Christian theology -- Religions as societies: Christian and Muslim ideas -- Moral problems -- Aesthetic reflections by Christian and Muslim thinkers -- Expanding faith's intellectual frontiers -- The frontier of mysticism -- Faith and politics -- Social thought in Christianity and Islam: faith, war, and ideas of nobility -- Spiritual conquest. |
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Chapter six. Return to the future: thinking through plague and cold. Forward to the past: the Renaissance -- Spreading the Renaissance: exploration and ideas -- Scientific revolution -- Political thought -- Redefining humanity. |
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Chapter seven. Global enlightenments: joined-up thinking in a joined-up world. An overview of the age -- Eurocentric thought: the idea of Europe -- The Enlightenment: the work of the philosophes -- Confidence in progress -- Economic thought -- Political philosophies: the origins of the state -- Asian influences and the formulation of rival kinds of despotism -- The noble savage and the common man -- Universal rights -- Groping toward democracy -- Truth and science -- Religion and romantic reactions. |
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Chapter eight. The climacteric of progress: nineteenth-century certainties. Demography and social thought -- Conservatisms and liberalism -- 'Women and children first': new categories of social thought -- The apostles of the state -- Public enemies: beyond and against the state -- Christian politics -- Nationalism (and its American variant) -- Effects beyond the West: China, Japan, India, and the Islamic world -- Struggle and survival: evolutionary thinking and its aftermath -- The balance of progress. |
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Chapter nine. The revenge of chaos: unstitching certainty. Relativity in context -- From relativity to relativism -- The tyranny of the unconscious -- Innovation in take-off mode -- Reaction: the politics of order. |
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Chapter ten. The age of uncertainty: twentieth-century hesitancies. The undeterminable world -- From existentialism to postmodernism -- The crisis of science -- Environmentalism, chaos, and Eastern wisdom -- Political and economic thought after ideology -- The retrenchment of science -- Dogmatism versus pluralism -- Prospect: the end of ideas? |
| Summary |
Traversing the realms of science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy, and history, Fernández-Armesto reveals the tales of our imaginative leaps--from the first Homo sapiens to the present day. He explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a glimpse into who we are and what we might yet accomplish. Unearthing historical evidence, he begins by reconstructing the thoughts of our Paleolithic ancestors to reveal the subtlety and profundity of the thinking of early humans. A paean to the human imagination, the author shows that bad ideas are often more influential than good ones; that the oldest recoverable thoughts include some of the best; that ideas of Western origin often issued from exchanges with the wider world; and that the pace of innovative thinking is under threat. --From publisher description. |
| Subject |
Thought and thinking -- History.
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Cognition and culture -- History.
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Intellectual life -- History.
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Civilization -- History.
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Civilization. (OCoLC)fst00862898
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Cognition and culture. (OCoLC)fst00866482
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Intellectual life. (OCoLC)fst00975769
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Thought and thinking. (OCoLC)fst01150249
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| Genre/Form |
History. (OCoLC)fst01411628
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| Added Title |
What we think and how we came to think it |
| ISBN |
9780520331075 (hardcover) |
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0520331079 (hardcover) |
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9780520377509 (paperback) |
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0520377508 (paperback) |
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