OUT OF OUR MINDS

'What We Think and How We Came To Think It' is the theme of this immensely learned and ambitious and significant book by the editor of 'The Oxford Illustrated History of the World' and Chair in History at the University of Notre Dame. How do our minds create? As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the pictures in our minds. Traversing the realms of history, philosophy, science, politics, religion and culture, Fernández-Armesto reveals the thrilling and disquieting tales of our galactic overviews, inklings of afterlife, the earliest ethics, evidence of Ice Age ideas, magic and witchcraft, gods and totems, political thought, taboos, the first political economy, before going on to 'civilised' thinking, the first named thinkers, new religions, morals, slavery, new faiths and religions as societies with Christian and Muslim ideas, faith and war, the Renaissance, exploration and ideas, scientific revolutions, and the joined-up world with the idea of Europe, universal rights and gropings towards democracy. And finally new categories of social thought, effects beyond the West, relativity to relativism, existentialism to postmodernism, environmentalism, chaos and Eastern wisdom and the retrenchment of science plus much more. 'The thoughts that come out of our minds can make us seem out of our minds.' Endlessly fascinating. 464pp, paperback.