How the World Thinks
Book description
*SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*
'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…
Why read it?
2 authors picked How the World Thinks as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This book makes philosophy exciting again.
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.
From James' list on how non-western cultures think about the world.
Is philosophy a strictly western phenomenon, a stream of thinking that originated roughly in early sixth-century BCE Greece and flowed through forward the Roman Empire, Islamic culture, and into western modernity? Does it do a kind of violence to force the intellectual achievements of other traditions into a western philosophia-shaped box? Or is it more accurate to say that philosophy has flowered all over the world – in India, China, Africa, Australia, the Americas, and elsewhere? This book makes a compelling case for the latter. It helped introduce me to arguably philosophical traditions of thought all over the world…
From Peter's list on starting out in philosophy.
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