A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future

by Charles Van Doren

Overview

A one-voume reference to the history of ideas that is a compendium of everything that humankind has thought, invented, created, considered, and perfected from the beginning of civilization into the twenty-first century. Massive in its scope, and yet totally accessible, A HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE covers not only all the great theories and discoveries of the human race, but also explores the social conditions, political climates, and individual men and women of genius that brought ideas to fruition throughout history.
"Crystal clear and concise...Explains how humankind got to know what it knows."
Clifton Fadiman
Selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the History Book Club

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345373168
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/28/1992
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	212,765
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.72(d)

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xiii
	Author to Reader	xv
	Progress in Knowledge	xv
	Kinds of Progress in Knowledge	xvi
	Universal History	xvi
	Primitive Man	xviii
	Knowledge of Particulars	xix
	General Knowledge	xix
	Certain Knowledge	xxi
	Knowledge and Happiness	xxiii
	Outline of the Book	xxiii
1.	Wisdom of the Ancients	3
	Egypt	4
	India	6
	China	7
	Mesopotamia	9
	Aztec and Inca	11
	Human Sacrifice	13
	Judaism	15
	Christianity	16
	Judaism and Christianity Compared	18
	Islam	19
	Judeo-Christianity and Islam Compared	20
	Buddhism	21
	Lessons from the Past	23
	Alphabets	25
	Zero	27
2.	The Greek Explosion	29
	The Problem of Thales	30
	The Invention of Mathematics: The Pythagoreans	34
	The Discovery of Atomic Theory: Democritus	38
	The Problem of Thales: The Ultimate Solution	41
	Moral Truth and Political Expediency: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle	42
	The Fallacy of the Consequent	44
	Greece versus Persia: The Fruitful Conflict	48
	The Tragedy of Athens	51
	Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Invention of History	53
	The Spirit of Greek Thought	56
3.	What the Romans Knew	60
	Greek Theory, Roman Practice	65
	Law, Citizenship, and Roads	67
	Lucretius	70
	Cicero	72
	Seneca	77
	Tacitus	81
	What the Romans Did Not Know	84
4.	Light in the Dark Ages	86
	The Fall of Rome	86
	Post-Roman Europe	88
	The Triumph of Christianity: Constantine the Great	91
	The Promise of Christianity: Augustine	92
	After the Fall	95
5.	The Middle Ages: The Great Experiment	98
	The Struggle for Subsistence	98
	A World of Enemies	99
	The Problem of God	100
	The Science of Theology	100
	Theology in Other Religions	102
	Principles of Theocracy	103
	Empire and Papacy	105
	Monasticism	106
	Crusaders	109
	Millennial Fears, Postmillennial Achievements	110
	The Dispute about Truth	112
	Boethius	113
	Pseudo-Dionysius	113
	Avicenna	114
	Peter Abelard	115
	Bernard of Clairvaux	116
	Averroes	117
	Thomas Aquinas	119
	The Pyrrhic Victory of Faith over Reason	122
	Dante's Dance	124
6.	What Was Reborn in the Renaissance?	127
	The New Style in Painting: Perspective	128
	Man in the Cosmos	129
	The Revival of Classical Learning: Petrarch	130
	Inventing the Renaissance: Boccaccio	132
	The Renaissance Man	134
	Renaissance Men: Leonardo, Pico, Bacon	137
	The Renaissance Man and the Ideal of Liberal Education	141
	Renaissance Humanism	142
	Montaigne	144
	Shakespeare	146
	Cervantes	148
	The Black Death	151
	Gutenberg's Achievement	153
	Renaissance Cities	155
	Nation-States	156
	The Crisis of the Theocratic State	158
	Erasmus	159
	Thomas More	160
	Henry VIII	161
	Martin Luther	163
	Tolerance and Intolerance	165
	Man at the Center	166
7.	Europe Reaches Out	168
	Mongol Empires	169
	Marco Polo	170
	Voyages of Discovery	172
	Columbus	174
	Sailing Around the World	177
	The Birth of World Trade	178
	Trade in Ideas	179
	Homage to Columbus	182
8.	The Invention of Scientific Method	184
	The Meaning of Science	184
	Three Characteristics of Science	187
	Aristotelian Science: Matter	190
	Aristotelian Motion	191
	The Revolt Against Aristotle	192
	Copernicus	195
	Tycho Brahe	196
	Gilbert	197
	Kepler	198
	Galileo	199
	Descartes	203
	Newton	205
	Rules of Reason	209
	The Galilean-Cartesian Revolution	211
9.	An Age of Revolutions	213
	The Industrial Revolution	213
	Human Machines and Mechanical Humans	214
	An Age of Reason and Revolution	216
	John Locke and the Revolution of 1688	218
	Property, Government, and Revolution	220
	Two Kinds of Revolution	222
	Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution of 1776	223
	The Declaration of Independence	224
	Property in Rights	226
	Robespierre, Napoleon, and the Revolution of 1789	228
	The Rise of Equality	232
	Mozart's Don Giovanni	234
	Goethe's Faust	238
10.	The Nineteenth Century: Prelude to Modernity	243
	The Difference Money Makes	244
	Economic Life Before 1800: The Peasant	245
	The Lord	247
	The Cleric	248
	The King	248
	The Merchant	249
	The Rise of the Labor Market: Economics	251
	Faustian Development	255
	Marxism: Theory and Practice	257
	Marxian Insights	261
	Economic Facts: Steam Power	264
	Equality in the Muzzle of a Gun	266
	The Magic of Electricity	269
	Magical Mathematics	271
	New Ways of Seeing	273
	The End of Slavery	275
	Shocking the Bourgeoisie	278
	Darwin and Freud	280
11.	The World in 1914	284
	Economic Divisions	284
	The Study of War	285
	Colonialism	287
	The Boer War	289
	The Powder Keg of Europe	289
	Character of the 1914-1918 War	291
	Thoughts on War and Death	292
	Causes of War	295
12.	The Twentieth Century: The Triumph of Democracy	297
	The Progress of Democracy	299
	Communism	304
	Totalitarianism	307
	Theocracy in the Twentieth Century	311
	Economic Justice	313
	Why Not World Government?	314
	One World, One Human Race	317
13.	The Twentieth Century: Science and Technology	321
	Greek Atomic Theory	321
	The Revival of Atomic Theory	323
	What Einstein Did	325
	What the Bomb Taught Us	327
	The Problem of Life	328
	The Science of Heredity	329
	How DNA Works	330
	The Size of the Universe	332
	Galaxies	332
	The Smallness of Earth	334
	The Big Bang and the Primordial Atom	334
	Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle	337
	Uncertainties of Knowledge	338
	One Giant Step	341
	Green Rebellion	342
	The Terrestrial Greenhouse	343
	Digital Computers and Knowledge	345
	Turing Machines	348
	Technological Dependence	350
	Triumphs of Medicine	351
	Drug Cultures	353
	The AIDS Challenge	354
14.	The Twentieth Century: Art and the Media	356
	The Media and Their Messages	356
	A Visual Revolution: Picasso, Braque, Cubism	359
	Pollock, Rothko, and the Hexagonal Room	361
	Urban Revolution: The Bauhaus and Le Corbusier	363
	Literary Prophets: Yeats	365
	A Passage to India	366
	The Castle and the Magician	367
	Waiting for Godot	369
	Mass Media and Education	370
15.	The Next Hundred Years	375
	Computers: The Next Stage	377
	The Moral Problem of Intelligent Machines	379
	Companion Computers	379
	The Birth of Thinking Machines	381
	Three Worlds: Big, Little, Middle-sized	383
	Chaos, a New Science	384
	Mining Language: Ideonomy	386
	Exploring the Solar System	387
	The Message?	390
	Man as a Terrestrial Neighbor	392
	The Gaia Hypothesis	395
	Genetic Engineering	397
	Eugenics	398
	Mapping the Genome	400
	Democracy and Eugenics	402
	Speed	403
	Addictions	406
	War in the Twenty-first Century	408
	Computer Revolt	410
	Index	413

Editorial Reviews

Van Doren's provocative, encyclopedic guide to great thinkers, concepts and philosophical trends was a BOMC and History Book Club selection in cloth. (Apr.)

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