I’m a historian who loves to tell unexpected stories about the interactions between science, religion, and philosophy. As a Christian with a physics degree, I knew the relationship between science and religion was much more interesting than an eternal conflict. So I went back to university, gained a PhD that involved reading lots of Latin and wrote God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. Since then, I’ve been exploring how traditional ways of seeing the universe differ from modern science, and how we got from one to the other.
How did we discover the world is round? The Globe tells the story of our quest to determine the shape of the earth, and why it took over 2,000 years for the truth to be widely accepted. Every culture and every holy book once assumed the earth is flat. The ancient Greeks gathered the evidence to show this isn’t so, but among Christians and Jews, in China, India and the Islamic Caliphate, this knowledge had to overcome traditional ideas about the universe. Challenging long-established beliefs about Greek philosophy, medieval religion and Christopher Columbus, The Globe shows how the realization that our planet is a sphere deserves to be considered humanity’s first great scientific achievement.
Julian Baggini has travelled the world to meet thinkers to find out how different philosophical traditions understand ethics, metaphysics, and reason. He sympathetically explains ideas that can seem unusual or surprising but he isn’t afraid to be critical in his observations.
I loved the way he uncovers the unique aspects of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Islamic, and American thought, comparing the ways they deal with questions about God, science, how to be good and how to be content.
Above all, he shows that philosophy is impoverished if it is restricted to ‘western’ thought.
'There to fill the Sapiens-size hole in your life' Observer
In this groundbreaking global overview of philosophy, Julian Baggini travels the world to provide a wide-ranging map of human thought.
One of the great unexplained wonders of human history is that written philosophy flowered entirely separately in China, India and Ancient Greece at more or less the same time. These early philosophies have had a profound impact on the development of distinctive cultures in different parts of the world. What we call 'philosophy' in the West is not even half the story.
What happens when two great civilizations change places?
Until the eighteenth century, the Muslim world felt confident and strong, not to mention clearly superior to Christian Europe. Then, when Napoleon invaded Egypt and Persia became a victim of Russian aggression, it was painfully clear that Europe was in the ascendant.
This book is the story of how Islam tried to come to terms with this stunning reversal, by turns embracing and then rejecting Western ideas. Persia and the Ottoman Empire made huge strides towards modernization, adopting women’s rights, scientific knowledge, and a Westernized military. But the fundamental tension between tradition and modernity was never quite resolved.
I particularly enjoyed the stories of people whose lives were consumed by the need to match the technological achievements of the West without wanting to emulate its values.
With majestic prose, Christopher de Bellaigue presents an absorbing account of the political and social reformations that transformed the lands of Islam in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Flying in the face of everything we thought we knew, The Islamic Enlightenment becomes an astonishing and revelatory history that offers a game-changing assessment of the Middle East since the Napoleonic Wars.
Beginning his account in 1798, de Bellaigue demonstrates how Middle Eastern heartlands have long welcomed modern ideals and practices, including the adoption of modern medicine, the emergence of women from seclusion, and the development of democracy. With trenchant political…
Peter Adamson’s fantastic and long-running podcast A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps is also a book series.
My favourite is the introduction to Indian thought, a subject that badly needed an accessible overview. Each chapter is a short taster on a major thinker or aspect of Indian philosophy, laced with Adamson’s trademark drollery. It begins with the ancient Vedas and encompasses Jain and Buddhist thought going up to the sixth century AD.
As someone brought up in the Western philosophical tradition, I found the explanations of Indian ideas thought-provoking and fascinating.
Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri present a lively introduction to one of the world's richest intellectual traditions: the philosophy of classical India. They begin with the earliest extant literature, the Vedas, and the explanatory works that these inspired, known as Upanisads. They also discuss other famous texts of classical Vedic culture, especially the Mahabharata and its most notable section, the Bhagavad-Gita, alongside the rise of Buddhism and Jainism. In this opening section, Adamson and Ganeri emphasize the way that philosophy was practiced as a form of life in search of liberation from suffering. Next, the pair move on to the…
I found this book a revelation. It reveals an entire theological and philosophical tradition that I was almost completely ignorant of.
I knew a bit about Philo and Maimonides, and of course the Hebrew Bible, but had no idea about the depth of Jewish thinking over the centuries. From the Talmud to modern Reform and Orthodox Judaism, via Saadia Gaon and the Kabbalah, this comprehensive survey is a magnificent achievement.
And it’s made all the more enjoyable by Martin Goodman’s clear prose and amazing erudition.
A sweeping history of Judaism over more than three millennia
Judaism is one of the oldest religions in the world, and it has preserved its distinctive identity despite the extraordinarily diverse forms and beliefs it has embodied over the course of more than three millennia. A History of Judaism provides the first truly comprehensive look in one volume at how this great religion came to be, how it has evolved from one age to the next, and how its various strains, sects, and traditions have related to each other.
In this magisterial and elegantly written book, Martin Goodman takes readers…
The people of Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean have a finely tuned understanding of their environment which enabled them to travel vast distances across the waves to colonise islands hundreds of miles apart, from Hawaii to New Zealand. This book starts with how European explorers tried to comprehend how they had done it but ends as a journey of self-discovery by the Polynesians themselves as they retrace the voyages of their ancestors.
A blend of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester's Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.
For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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