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Out of Our Minds : What We Think and How We Came to Think It
Title
Out of Our Minds : What We Think and How We Came to Think It / Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
ISBN
9780520974364
Publication
Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2019]
Copyright Notice Date
©2019
Physical Description
1 online resource (480 p.)
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
In English.
Access and use
Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Summary
To imagine-to see what is not there-is the startling ability that has fueled human development and innovation through the centuries. As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the picture in our minds. Traversing the realms of science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy, and history, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reveals the thrilling and disquieting tales of our imaginative leaps-from the first Homo sapiens to the present day. Through groundbreaking insights in cognitive science, Fernández-Armesto explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a tantalizing glimpse into who we are and what we might yet accomplish. Unearthing historical evidence, he begins by reconstructing the thoughts of our Paleolithic ancestors to reveal the subtlety and profundity of the thinking of early humans. A masterful paean to the human imagination from a wonderfully elegant thinker, Out of Our Minds shows that bad ideas are often more influential than good ones; that the oldest recoverable thoughts include some of the best; that ideas of Western origin often issued from exchanges with the wider world; and that the pace of innovative thinking is under threat.
Variant and related titles
De Gruyter University Press eBook pilot project 2019.
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
June 17, 2022
Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. Mind Out of Matter: The Mainspring of Ideas
Chapter 2. Gathering Thoughts: Thinking Before Agriculture
Chapter 3. Settled Minds: 'Civilized' Thinking
Chapter 4. The Great Sages: The First Named Thinkers
Chapter 5. Thinking Faiths: Ideas in a Religious Age
Chapter 6. Return to the Future: Thinking Through Plague and Cold
Chapter 7. Global Enlightenments: Joined-Up Thinking in a Joined-Up World
Chapter 8. The Climacteric of Progress: Nineteenth-Century Certainties
Chapter 9. The Revenge of Chaos: Unstitching Certainty
Chapter 10. The Age of Uncertainty: Twentieth-Century Hesitancies
Prospect: The End of Ideas
Notes
Index
Subjects
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