Ideas: A History by Peter Watson ISBN 9780753820896, 0753820897, B00DZOEAX6 instant download

Ideas: A History by Peter Watson ISBN 9780753820896, 0753820897, B00DZOEAX6 instant download

In this hugely ambitious and exciting book Peter Watson tells the history of ideas from prehistory to the present day, leading to a new way of telling the history of the world. The book begins over a million years ago with a discussion of how the earliest ideas might have originated. Looking at animal behaviour that appears to require some thought - tool-making, territoriality, counting, language (or at least sounds), pairbonding - Peter Watson moves on to the apeman and the development of simple ideas such as cooking, the earliest language, the emergence of family life. All the obvious areas are tackled - the Ancient Greeks, Christian theology, the ideas of Jesus, astrological thought, the soul, the self, beliefs about the heavens, the ideas of Islam, the Crusades, humanism, the Renaissance, Gutenberg and the book, the scientific revolution, the age of discovery, Shakespeare, the idea of Revolution, the Romantic imagination, Darwin, imperialism, modernism, Freud right up to the present day and the internet.

"The history of ideas deserves treatment on this scale." -- FELIPE FERNANDEZ ARMESTO EVENING STANDARD "It would be a dull reader that failed to be stimulated either by the questions it raises or by the answers it gives to all sorts of questions that one would never have thought of asking." -- NOEL MALCOLM SUNDAY TELEGRAPH "In Ideas, Watson gives us an astonishing overview of human intellectual development which covers everything... In a book of such vast scope, a reader could easily get lost, but the narrative has a powerful momentum...For those who want something more engaging than the dreary Plato to Nato narrative that dominates conventional histories of ideas, this wide range of reference will be invaluable" -- JOHN GRAY NEW STATESMAN "This lively book may stimulate the intellectually curious as they seek to understand the history of the mind." THE TIMES

Peter Watson was born in 1943 and educated at the universities of Durham, London and