Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
    Unavailable
    Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
    Unavailable
    Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
    Ebook2,000 pages34 hours

    Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

    By Peter Watson

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Peter Watson's hugely ambitious and stimulating history of ideas from deep antiquity to the present day—from the invention of writing, mathematics, science, and philosophy to the rise of such concepts as the law, sacrifice, democracy, and the soul—offers an illuminated path to a greater understanding of our world and ourselves.

    Editor's Note

    Ideas Over Events...

    Watson’s ambitious tome covers more intellectual ground than battleground, relaying concepts & creations that govern the modern world with magnificent scope.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061800306
    Unavailable
    Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
    Author

    Peter Watson

    <p>Peter Watson has been a senioreditor at the London <em>Sunday Times</em>, a New York correspondentof the <em>London Times</em>, a columnist for theLondon <em>Observer</em>, and a contributor to the <em>New YorkTimes</em>. He has published three exposés on the world ofart and antiquities, and is the author of several booksof cultural and intellectual history. From 1997 to 2007he was a research associate at the McDonald Institutefor Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.He lives in London.</p>

    Read more from Peter Watson

    Related to Ideas

    Related ebooks

    History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      If Not Darwin, Who?: An alternative history of the great ideas of science.

      Dec 15, 2016

      What would physics look like if Einstein had never existed, or biology without Darwin? In one view, nothing much would change—the discoveries they made and theories they devised would have materialized anyway sooner or later. That’s the odd thing abo

      13 min read

    • Article

      Fear Of A Black Magic

      Mar 27, 2020

      Fear Of A Black Magic
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Secret History Of Alchemy

      Feb 28, 2020

      The Secret History Of Alchemy
      3 min read

    • Article

      Rites Of The Ancient Mages

      Mar 27, 2020

      Rites Of The Ancient Mages
      4 min read

    • Article

      Hypatia Of Alexandria

      Oct 19, 2021

      Hypatia Of Alexandria
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Witch's Spell Book

      Jan 31, 2024

      Since the concepts and practice of witchcraft date to classical antiquity, it follows reasonably that those who have concocted potions, chanted incantations, and cast spells throughout history should record their methods and makings for themselves an

      1 min read

    • Article

      Rosicrucianism

      Feb 28, 2020

      Europe in the early 17th century was not a happy place. It was a continent marked by religious divisions and political strife which would escalate into the bloody Thirty Years’ War that led to eight million lives being lost. At the same time, it was

      5 min read

    • Article

      Monsters, Marvels, and the Birth of Science: How the Unlikely and Unexplainable, Strange and Terrifying, Spawned the Age of Science.: How the unlikely and unexplainable, strange and terrifying, spawned the age of science.

      Aug 1, 2013

      Finding regularity in nature is the bread and butter of science. We know that reptiles lay eggs, while mammals bear live young; the Earth revolves around the sun every 365.25 days; electrons glom onto protons like bears onto honey. But what if some o

      11 min read

    • Article

      Secrets Of The Alchemists

      Feb 28, 2020

      Secrets Of The Alchemists
      7 min read

    • Article

      Magic Through The Ages

      Mar 27, 2020

      Paleolithic peoples create artwork based around the acknowledgement of prey animals and the ritual propitiation of their ancestors. Some paintings include strange, human-animal hybrids that are later theorised to be shamanistic figures. Paleolithic e

      3 min read

    • Article

      Reading Ancient Texts

      Oct 19, 2021

      It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the nameless medieval scribes who copied ancient texts and made sure they survived. However, these unsung heroes were only human. They made mistakes and copied only texts they believed to be useful.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Our Neanderthal Complex: What if our ancient relatives did “human” better?

      May 14, 2015

      In August 1856, limestone quarry workers blasting out the entrance to the Feldhofer grotto in the Neander Valley of west-central Germany found a set of skeletal remains. Assuming the skull scraps, arm bones, ribs, and pelvis were from an ancient cave

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Ancient Egyptian Underworld

      May 23, 2019

      The Ancient Egyptian Underworld
      10 min read

    • Article

      Pythagoras Of Samos

      Feb 17, 2022

      Pythagoras Of Samos
      3 min read

    • Article

      Mummies Unwrapped

      Sep 3, 2020

      Mummies Unwrapped
      3 min read

    • Article

      “Magic Is A Really Important Strand Of What It Means To Be Human”

      Jul 9, 2020

      Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book surveys a vast array of magical beliefs throughout human history. How do you define magic? Chris Gosden: My definition of magic is a human openness to the universe. And a universe’s openness to people. Let me give you

      9 min read

    • Article

      7 Things You (probably) Didn’t Know About Neanderthals

      Jul 7, 2022

      One of the most common questions on this topic is what exactly is a Neanderthal? From an evolutionary point of view, Neanderthals are hominins, so are within the same genus as Homo sapiens – the species to which modern humans belong. For a long time,

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Death and Life of the Frontier: A Voyage to the Limits of the Knowable.: A voyage to the limits of the knowable.

      Aug 29, 2013

      Where does the world begin and where does it end? In many creation stories the Earth has well-defined edges. In early Mesopotamian mythology it is a flat disk floating in the ocean and surrounded by a circular sky. The Hopi people of northeastern Ari

      20 min read

    • Article

      ‘Fossil Men’ Explores Breakthrough Science – And Human Nature

      Dec 8, 2020

      A new book tracks the discovery of a ground-shaking addition to the fossil record, and shows how science ultimately comes down to the human element.

      3 min read

    • Article

      7 Things You (probably) Didn’t Know About Neanderthals

      Jul 7, 2022

      One of the most common questions on this topic is what exactly is a Neanderthal? From an evolutionary point of view, Neanderthals are hominins, so are within the same genus as Homo sapiens – the species to which modern humans belong. For a long time,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Book Review | Past Continuous

      Feb 8, 2019

      With the past becoming the site for so many of today's battles, there's been a spate of books on history written for a general audience. Few of these popular histories are written by actual historians though, which makes Nayanjot Lahiri's Time Pieces

      2 min read

    • Article

      The New science Of History

      Mar 1, 2024

      The New science Of History
      16 min read

    • Article

      Living By Ritual

      Feb 13, 2024

      Living By Ritual
      2 min read

    Reviews for Ideas

    4/5

    10 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      A unique and sometimes idiosyncratic, but highly informed and intelligent account of world intellectual history (but predominently of the western world) down to the end of the 19th century. The closer I came to the end of this book, the more I appreciated it. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      One of the must read books who wish to understand and chronicle the evolution of human creature.
    • 5/5
      A History of Man written as an history of ideas. Companion to a Terrible Beauty
    • 3/5
      I am in two minds about this book. On the one hand, I was deeply stimulated and intrigued by most of the information and in the book. On the other hand, I found myself vociferously disagreeing with a lot of Watson’s surmises. Maybe both these responses are twined around each other, as Watson obviously wrote the book to elicit a strong response. But what disappointed me in the end was not so much the content of the book, objectionable as some of it is to me, as the style in which Watson writes. He gathers a lot of interesting facts together, which is fair enough, but then he generalises ad infinitum – leading to a reduction ad absurdum, to be frank.Let me start with a few positive aspects of the book. Watson introduces a lot of information with which I am not really familiar, and he does this engagingly. The early chapters I found a little tedious, perhaps because I am no anthropologist or archaeologist and consequently have little interest in pre-historical humanity. Despite that, I found these chapters well-written and fairly interesting. As Watson moves into territory with which I am more familiar, he asks interesting questions and posits interesting answers. A lot of the things he has to say about, for example, the Middle Ages, are if not original (the book is endlessly footnoted – not necessarily a bad sign) then at least fresh. Watson brings to the table broad reading of the latest controversies in historiography, and he gives a good overview of many contested points of canonical history. An example would be the reassessment of the role the Renaissance played in Western history. Watson questions the importance attributed to the period – in fact, he questions whether the period can even be considered as a homogenous block of history. Watson also presents both the Occidental and Oriental sides of the historical narrative, and in so doing calls into question whether we can really separate the world into such easily pre-digested chunks.In a book that spans so much of history, generalisations are to be expected. Where Watson does seem to trip up, to me at least, is in his somewhat arbitrary selection of historical figures. He seems sometimes to decide on historical figures merely out of personal taste. This would be more acceptable if he admitted to this, but instead he portrays his reading of the history of ideas as the ‘correct’, unquestionable version. Perhaps I am exaggerating, but that is the impression I got. My real problems with the book started with Watson’s writing on things of which I have a fair amount of knowledge, such as Greek philosophy and English literature. I would not claim to be a world authority on these topics, but I have read widely on the subjects, so I found myself often disagreeing with Watson’s generalisations about them. For instance, Watson contends that Aristotle has been much more influential than Plato, claiming that the ‘great success stories in the history of ideas have been in the main the fulfilment of Aristotle’s legacy, not Plato’s.’ To start with, I disagree with Watson’s thesis that Aristotle and Plato represent two contrasting, mutually exclusive ways of looking at the world. But what really irritated me was this: ‘It is a remarkable conclusion to arrive at, that, despite the great growth in individuality, the vast corpus of art, the rise of the novel, the many ways that men and women have devised to express themselves, man’s study of himself is his biggest intellectual failure in history, his least successful area of inquiry. But it is undoubtedly true, as the constant ‘turning-in’, over the centuries have underlined. These ‘turnings-in’ do not build on one another, in a cumulative way, like science; they replace one another… Plato has misled us.’ Now, I cannot emphasise how wrongheaded this conclusion is to me. Watson seems to completely misunderstand the point of the arts, something which I would not presume to define, but which is surely not to act like the sciences. If one could simplify art into something inherently useful – the aim of science – then one would no longer have art, as far as I am concerned. It is not that Plato has misled us, as much as that humanity has always struggled with whether something is ‘useful’, or ‘meaningful’. I would say that art has meaning, science has use. That is obviously a simplification (the two do not really form a strict dichotomy) but it seems a more ‘useful’ way of looking at things than Watson’s pessimism towards the humanities.Ok, polemic over. This book obviously made me think, for all its faults. Maybe Watson’s own idea was somewhat too ambitious to put into a single book. It ends up being a jack-of-all-trades book, which is not masterly on any of its various fronts.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Jan 3, 2010 8:04 PMIdeas, A History: From Fire to FreudPeter WatsonI read this continuously for about two weeks, with one break to tackle another shorter book. This general history of ideas and intellectual progress is about 1,000 pages, starting with pre-history, proceeding mostly historically to science and Romanticism in about 1900. I discovered that I had read or at least knew about many of the sources discussed, most of which are secondary sources and analyses, but the skill Watson demonstrates, putting thousands of years of thought together into a readable narrative, is considerable and appreciated. I cannot convey the whole narrative, but have marked some passages of interest. The prologue opens with a story about the realization in Europe of the origin of stone tools, and the implication that stone tools imply a time before history, and imply a time of earth origin much older than allowed by Biblical accounts. The ancient Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, are of course discussed at length. The Stoic philosophy mentioned with a quote from Zeno: “Man is a dog tied to a cart; if he is wise he will run with it”. I was surprised to find a reference to the Goddess of Wisdom, participating in the creative acts of God, in the Old Testament (Proverbs 8), perhaps a residual of the worship of woman gods that seemed to be common in late pre-history, and attesting to pagan influences on Hebraic religion. Empiricism in Alexandria may have begun with physicians, originally theoreticians (“iatrosophists”), who were allowed to perform autopsies on criminals, leading to “so many discoveries the Greek language was unable to name them all”. I encountered lattice, or “gelosia” multiplication, using a diagonal grid to simplify the calculation, in Venice, adapted from Arabic and Hindu numerals, in the early middle ages. The idea of the period 1050 to 1200 as the key time in which the idea of Europe and seeds of its dominance was planted, as more important than the Renaissance, is a new concept for me.Many will criticize the book on these grounds as Eurocentric, but Watson does credit and discuss Islam, China, India, and the Americas, returning to the theme of Western European dominance in trade, industry, science and discovery, which he says “cannot be denied.” Orientalism, the respect Europe paid to Sanskrit and Buddhist philosophy in the 18th century, was a new theme to me; Emerson was very attracted to Buddhist thought, for instance. The American revolution is discussed in the second volume, along with the Enlightenment. “Tradition has a fine ring to it, especially in the Old World. But another way of looking at it is as a principle by which the dead govern the living...” There was great reversal in the social and libertarian thought of the Enlightenment in Romanticism, when internal sensations would become the arbiter of truth. Fichte, puts it in terms of a creation of the will “I do not accept anything because I must. I believe it because I will.” In discussing Darwin, Watson points out that Robert Chamber’s popular account of Darwinism “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” was much more widely read. The account of American pragmatist philosophy, Watson admits, is taken from Menand’s book “The Metaphysical Club”. I admire the pragmatists and read Menand’s account previously. Freud, although as Watson points out is now thoroughly discredited as contributing anything in a scientific sense, is respectfully discussed as summing up the ideas of the unconscious that had been developing in Charcot, Schopenhauer, and others in the 19th century. One slip was identifying “propranolol” as a neurotransmitter. His discussion of early chemistry, the insight that oxygen combined with metals to yield bases and with non-metals to yield acids, was a generalization I missed as a chemistry major. 1900 is the end of this volume, although I have another on my shelf starting at that point, and the last scientific achievement discussed was the discovery of the electron. In a summary chapter, Watson chooses the soul, Europe, and experimentation, as the three greatest ideas. He argues that the Aristotelian concentration on the external world has been a success in advancing thought and the happiness of men, the Platonic concentration on introspection and ideas less successful. One can argue with the choice of emphasis on certain ideas, but to contain so much and tell it in a readable way is a remarkable accomplishment.