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    Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It
    Unavailable
    Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It
    Unavailable
    Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It
    Ebook699 pages19 hours

    Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It

    By Felipe Fernández-Armesto 

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    ‘Immensely learned and ambitious…seam-bursting eclecticism and polymathic brio… This is by any standards a significant book and its author deserves high praise.’

    Literary Review

    To imagine – to see that which is not there – is the startling ability that has fuelled human development and innovation through the centuries. As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the pictures 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. Through groundbreaking insights in cognitive science, he explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a tantalising glimpse into who we are and what we might yet accomplish. Fernández-Armesto 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOneworld Publications
    Release dateJun 6, 2019
    ISBN9781786075826
    Unavailable
    Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It
    Author

    Felipe Fernández-Armesto 

    Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, USA. Some of his recent publications include 1492: The Year Our World Began (2011), Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (2006) and The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction (2011).

    Read more from Felipe Fernández Armesto 

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      This is an excellent, opinionated survey of the history of ideas, beginning with a brief review of neuroscience, and continuing through prehistoric thought, as well as it can be known from archeology, and adding from there through thoughts of agriculturalists, urban dwellers, and through the modern age. In the early stages, the ideas are ordered in a progressively more complex sequence, but that breaks down as history proceeds. Fernandez-Armesto makes valiant attempts to include Chinese, Islamic and Indian thought. He is opinionated and not afraid to state his opinions, making critical remarks about existentialism, the student rebellions of the 1960's, communism, and the current state of free inquiry in universities.