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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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