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Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
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Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud Paperback - 2006

by Watson, Peter

  • Used

Description

Harper Perennial. Used - Good. Good condition. A copy that has been read but remains intact. May contain markings such as bookplates, stamps, limited notes and highlighting, or a few light stains. Bundled media such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks or access codes may not be included.
Used - Good
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Details

  • Title Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
  • Author Watson, Peter
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition 8/27/06
  • Condition Used - Good
  • Pages 852
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Harper Perennial, New York, New York, U.S.A.
  • Date 2006-09-26
  • Features Annotated, Bibliography, Index, Table of Contents
  • Bookseller's Inventory # V15A-04735
  • ISBN 9780060935641 / 0060935642
  • Weight 2.43 lbs (1.10 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.55 x 7.09 x 1.47 in (24.26 x 18.01 x 3.73 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Intellectual life - History, Civilization - History
  • Dewey Decimal Code 909

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Summary

In this hugely ambitious and stimulating book, Peter Watson describes the history of ideas, from deep antiquity to the present day, leading to a new way of understanding our world and ourselves.The narrative begins nearly two million years ago with the invention of hand-axes and explores how some of our most cherished notions might have originated before humans had language. Then, in a broad sweep, the book moves forward to consider not the battles and treaties of kings and prime ministers, emperors and generals, but the most important ideas we have evolved, by which we live and which separate us from other animals. Watson explores the first languages and the first words, the birth of the gods, the origins of art, the profound intellectual consequences of money. He describes the invention of writing, early ideas about law, why sacrifice and the soul have proved so enduring in religion. He explains how ideas about time evolved, how numbers were conceived, how science, medicine, sociology, economics, and capitalism came into being. He shows how the discovery of the New World changed forever the way that we think, and why Chinese creativity faded after the Middle Ages.In the course of this commanding narrative, Watson reveals the linkages down the ages in the ideas of many apparently disparate philosophers, astronomers, religious leaders, biologists, inventors, poets, jurists, and scores of others. Aristotle jostles with Aquinas, Ptolemy with Photius, Kalidasa with Zhu Xi, Beethoven with Strindberg, Jefferson with Freud. Ideas is a seminal work.

First line

In 1936, a collection of papers by Sir Isaac Newton, the British physicist and natural philosopher, which had been considered to be 'of no scientific value' when offered to Cambridge University some fifty years earlier, came up for auction at Sotheby's, the international salesroom, in London.

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