- Hardcover: 848 pages
- Publisher: Orion; Hardback Edition edition (12 May 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 029760726X
- ISBN-13: 978-0297607267
- Product Dimensions: 25.4 x 17.8 x 5.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 584,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £5.85
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Ideas: A history from fire to Freud for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £5.85, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
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 )
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 )
FELIPE FERNANDEZ ARMESTO, EVENING STANDARD
"The history of ideas deserves treatment on this scale."
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Barely five years after completing "A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind", Peter Watson has repeated that astonishing achievement. This time he goes back to the beginnings of human prehistory to examine ideas - their development and their impact on human life up to the year 1900. He brings together so many disciplines normally compartmentalised that you might think that a team working for decades had been needed, as with the original French Encyclopédie, whose noted contributors included Diderot, d'Alembert, Rousseau, Voltaire... But Watson has written this maximum opus by himself. Specialists may dispute some of his conclusions and he is certainly not unbiased, while the occasional error has crept in. However, his breadth and vision are truly encylopaedic. This is a book that everyone interested in the history of human ideas should have on their shelves.
57 of 61 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If you, like me, are the kind of person who doesn't want to be left out of any conversation because of his total ignorance of the subject, then this is the book for you. If you, like me, enjoy reading journals like The Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books, because of their wide scope, then this is the book for you. If you like reading books where experts in their field bring you up to date on advances in, say, physics, or linguistics, or archeology, then this is the book for you.
The author seems to have read all of the books I would have wanted to read, had I had the time and the opportunity, and to have built the most prodigious card-filing system, because this book is stuffed with facts (for instance, did you know why a circle has 360 degrees?).
As the title suggests, the book ends at the beginning of the 20th Century, where the author's history of ideas in the 20th Century begins (A Terrible Beauty: the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind [American edition: The Modern Mind]).
Of course, in a book of 800 pages which covers three million years, there is much that is touched on lightly: you will have to consult the references to go into depth. But this book will tell you where to start, and it puts thinkers into context with each other. It's a book that I will give as a Christmas present to bright teenagers, and will keep handy for consulting for the rest of my life.
38 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
First of all, I should say that I haven't read this book from cover to cover, but have dipped in and read it in several places. Nevertheless this has been enough both to appreciate the ambition of Watson's project and to see some of its failings. I am particularly interested in - and reasonably knowledgeable about - philosophy, and so started by reading Watson's accounts of various philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Descartes, Spinoza and so on. I was disappointed to discover that:
(i) Watson's knowledge of philosophy is patchy at best; for example saying, p.490 of my edition, that it was not clear why Descartes included appendices on meteors and dioptrics to his "Discourse on the Method". Well, I'm afraid it is clear to anyone who knows anything about Descartes: it was precisely as a demonstration of how his method could be applied, as his objective was to rebuild the sciences from scratch, rather than to construct a system of philosophy as Watson seems to believe. If you don't understand this you don't understand anything about Descartes' project. It seems to me here as elsewhere that Watson has leaned heavily on secondary literature rather than first-hand acquaintance with the sources which in this case are easy to read and would have enlightened him on this point.
(ii) what he does know is very much twisted to suit his objectives. For example, he gives a very biaised and rather dismissive account of Plato's thought, portraying it as "mysticism" when Plato was obviously more of a rationalist than a mystic. Plato is an immense thinker, and responsible for a huge step forward in rational thought - the development of the dialectical method and the concept, both of huge importance to subsequent thought yet barely if at all mentioned by Watson, who is however supposed to be writing a history of ideas.
These examples are from philosophy, something which I know something about, but this made me wonder if his coverage of other areas I am less familiar with can be trusted.
In another field, Watson affirms that "it is time to bury psychoanalysis as a dead idea, along with phlogiston, the elixirs of alchemy, purgatory and other failed notions that charlatans have found useful down the ages", (p.728 my edition) adding "It is now clear that psychoanalysis does not work as treatment". This is a highly subjective and controversial stance to say the least.
Watson clearly has an agenda, that of the no-nonsense British empiricist, prefering Aristotle to Plato, Locke to Descartes, which is fine, except that many people may be reading his work thinking that they are getting a reasonably unbiaised account of the history of thought, which I don't believe is the case. This is a pity as there is clearly a need for this kind of historical synthesis of ideas in today's confused world. So read this history, by all accounts: there is surely much of interest here, and perhaps Watson is stronger in areas other than philosophy, but do not believe that you are getting anything like an unbiaised account of the history of thought.
(i) Watson's knowledge of philosophy is patchy at best; for example saying, p.490 of my edition, that it was not clear why Descartes included appendices on meteors and dioptrics to his "Discourse on the Method". Well, I'm afraid it is clear to anyone who knows anything about Descartes: it was precisely as a demonstration of how his method could be applied, as his objective was to rebuild the sciences from scratch, rather than to construct a system of philosophy as Watson seems to believe. If you don't understand this you don't understand anything about Descartes' project. It seems to me here as elsewhere that Watson has leaned heavily on secondary literature rather than first-hand acquaintance with the sources which in this case are easy to read and would have enlightened him on this point.
(ii) what he does know is very much twisted to suit his objectives. For example, he gives a very biaised and rather dismissive account of Plato's thought, portraying it as "mysticism" when Plato was obviously more of a rationalist than a mystic. Plato is an immense thinker, and responsible for a huge step forward in rational thought - the development of the dialectical method and the concept, both of huge importance to subsequent thought yet barely if at all mentioned by Watson, who is however supposed to be writing a history of ideas.
These examples are from philosophy, something which I know something about, but this made me wonder if his coverage of other areas I am less familiar with can be trusted.
In another field, Watson affirms that "it is time to bury psychoanalysis as a dead idea, along with phlogiston, the elixirs of alchemy, purgatory and other failed notions that charlatans have found useful down the ages", (p.728 my edition) adding "It is now clear that psychoanalysis does not work as treatment". This is a highly subjective and controversial stance to say the least.
Watson clearly has an agenda, that of the no-nonsense British empiricist, prefering Aristotle to Plato, Locke to Descartes, which is fine, except that many people may be reading his work thinking that they are getting a reasonably unbiaised account of the history of thought, which I don't believe is the case. This is a pity as there is clearly a need for this kind of historical synthesis of ideas in today's confused world. So read this history, by all accounts: there is surely much of interest here, and perhaps Watson is stronger in areas other than philosophy, but do not believe that you are getting anything like an unbiaised account of the history of thought.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
becoming more human
I suspect that this book has had more impact on my life than any other I've ever read. I came across it by chance a few years ago and read it from cover to cover. Read more
Published 18 months ago by stilllearning
An eye-opener of a book
The mind boggles at the amount of reading Peter Watson must have done before he embarked on writing this book. Read more
Published on 16 Aug 2009 by Hugo Perks
Mr.Watson forgot one of the brightest ideas ever: to writte this book
Mr. Watson work is awasome, I give him 4 stars because I would like to see a further edition that deepens more on some topics: philosophy, politics, economy..... Read more
Published on 22 Nov 2008 by Jose Manuel Carranza Collao
A tremendous book
I think that anyone who professes to follow a religion should read this book, if only to see how closely these apparently mutually incompatible faiths are actually intertwined. Read more
Published on 29 Nov 2007 by A. Jones
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
