Ideas

This intellectual history surveys human thought and invention from prehistory to the early twentieth century. Watson begins with tools, language, and early social life, then moves through writing, the ancient Near East, Greece, the world religions, and medieval philosophy. He gives particular weight to three long-running ideas - the soul, the idea of Europe, and the scientific experiment - and to the medieval and early modern centuries in which they took modern form. Later chapters treat humanism, the scientific revolution, the self, Darwin, nationalism, and Freud. The book is a consecutive history of concepts rather than a chronicle of kings, and it ends before the present.

Bound in image blocked blue cloth. Dark blue two-volume slipcase.