Out of Our Minds : What We Think and How We Came to Think It / Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Author.

Contributor:

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Contributor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Thought and thinking--History.

Thought and thinking.

Intellectual life--History.

Intellectual life.

Philosophy--History.

Philosophy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (421 pages)

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

To imagine-to see what is not there-is the startling ability that has fueled human development and innovation through the centuries. As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the picture in our minds. Traversing the realms of science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy, and history, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reveals the thrilling and disquieting tales of our imaginative leaps-from the first Homo sapiens to the present day. Through groundbreaking insights in cognitive science, Fernández-Armesto explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a tantalizing 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 masterful paean to the human imagination from a wonderfully elegant thinker, Out of Our Minds 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. Mind Out of Matter: The Mainspring of Ideas

Chapter 2. Gathering Thoughts: Thinking Before Agriculture

Chapter 3. Settled Minds: 'Civilized' Thinking

Chapter 4. The Great Sages: The First Named Thinkers

Chapter 5. Thinking Faiths: Ideas in a Religious Age

Chapter 6. Return to the Future: Thinking Through Plague and Cold

Chapter 7. Global Enlightenments: Joined-Up Thinking in a Joined-Up World

Chapter 8. The Climacteric of Progress: Nineteenth-Century Certainties

Chapter 9. The Revenge of Chaos: Unstitching Certainty

Chapter 10. The Age of Uncertainty: Twentieth-Century Hesitancies

Prospect: The End of Ideas

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780520974364

0520974360

OCLC:

1125184933