Book : Ideas A History Of Thought And Invention, From Fire..

-Titulo Original : Ideas A History Of Thought And Invention, From Fire To Freud

-Fabricante :

Harper Perennial

-Descripcion Original:

Peter Watsons 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. Review “This is a grand book...The history of ideas deserves treatment on this scale.” -- Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Evening Standard (London) “A superior specimen, with numerous interesting factoids...thought-provoking short essays.” -- John Derbyshire, New York Sun “A masterpiece of historical writing.” -- John Gray, Professor of European Thought, London School of Economics, New Statesman “[An] extraordinary new book....This is the history of ‘ideas’ as it has never been presented before.” -- Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph (London) About the Author Peter Watson has been a senioreditor at the London Sunday Times, a New York correspondentof the London Times, a columnist for theLondon Observer, and a contributor to the New YorkTimes. He has published three exposes 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. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Ideas A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud By Peter Watson HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2006 Peter WatsonAll right reserved. ISBN: 0060935642 Chapter One Ideas Before Language George Schaller, director of the Wildlife Conservation Division of the New York Zoological Society, is known to his fellow biologists as a meticulous observer of wild animals. In a long and distinguished career he has made many systematic studies of lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, wild dogs, mountain gorillas and hyenas. His book, The Last Panda, published in 1993, recorded many new and striking facts about the animal the Chinese call the bearcat. He found that on one occasion a sick panda had gone freely to a human family in the Wolong area, where it was fed sugar and rice porridge for three days, until it recovered and returned to the forest.1 In the late 1960s Schaller and a colleague spent a few days on the Serengeti plain in Tanzania, East Africa, where they made a simple observation which had escaped everyone else. In the course of those few days, they stumbled across quite a lot of dead meat just lying around. They found dead buffalo, the butchered remains of lion kills, and they also came across a few incapacitated animals that would have been easy prey for carnivores. Smaller deer (like Thompsons gazelles) remained uneaten for barely a day but larger animals, such as adult buffalo, persisted as significant food resources for about four days.2Schaller concluded from this that early humans could have survived quite easily on the Serengeti simply by scavenging, that there was enough ruin in the bush for them to live on without going hunting. Other colleagues subsequently pointed out that even today the Hadza, a hunter-gathering tribe who live in northern Tanzania, sometimes scavenge by creeping up on lions who have made a kill and then creating a loud din. The lions are frightened away. This outline of mans earliest lifestyle is conjectural.3 And to dignify the practice as an idea is surely an exaggeration: this was instinct at work. But scavenging, unromantic as it sounds, may not be such a bad starting-point. It may even be that the open African savannah was the type of environment which favoured animals who were generalists, as much as specialists, like a hippopotamus, for example, or a giraffe, and it is this which stimulated mankinds intelligence in the first place. The scavenging hypothesis has, however, found recent support from a study