Re: Friday Question

Subject: Re: Friday Question
From: Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 09:42:02 +0900

Ideas: a history from fire to Freud
Peter Watson

This from a review by John Gray:

"... a universal history of ideas seems an impossibly daunting project. Yet in /Ideas: a history from fire to Freud/, Watson gives us an astonishing overview of human intellectual development which covers everything from the emergence of language to the discovery of the unconscious, including the idea of the factory and the invention of America, the eclipse of the idea of the soul in 19th-century materialism and the continuing elusiveness of the self. In a book of such vast scope, a reader could easily get lost, but the narrative has a powerful momentum. Watson holds to a consistently naturalistic philosophy in which humanity is seen as an animal species developing in the material world. For him, human thought develops as much in response to changes in the natural environment - such as shifts in climate and the appearance of new diseases - as from any internal dynamism of its own. This overarching perspective informs and unifies the book, and the result is a masterpiece of historical writing."

Fascinating, stimulating, readable. Something interesting and surprising on every one of its 1000+ pages (well, at least on the first 364 pages, which is where I'm up to).

It touches on the origin and development of language, writing, books, grammar, punctuation, translation and experiment, so you can even kid yourself that you're buying it for the TW tie-in.

Stuart
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