Beginning Ideas

Last night was, as is traditional at our house, library night. In need of new ideas for books to read, I prepared myself by noting down some recommendations various people have provided more or less recently.* Some time back Bill reported hearing an author on the radio and thought I might find that author's book appealing. The author was Peter Watson; his book: Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud. (New York : HarperCollins, 2005).

As suggested by the title, the book is about the history of ideas, an ill-defined intellectual discipline that attracts my attention.# It's a weighty volume, comprehensive and thorough looking, which is all to the good but does present the problem of an over abundance of intellectual stimulation. I only started the book late last night and already there are more ideas than I can process in all my usual ways.

Consider just this one of several that have popped up so far. Stone tools have been known since antiquity, but were long thought to be the products of natural phenomena. For instance, one popular theory held that they were frozen thunderclaps. It was only in the 15th and 16th centuries, when explorers made contact with stone-age tribes of people that the thought occurred to Europeans that a stone ax may have been fabricated by the hand of early humans, an idea first proposed by Georgius Agricola (1490-1555).

And so we find, in 1655, one Isaac La Peyrère writing a book called A Theological Systeme upon that presupposition that Men were before Adam. Based on the identification of stone tools as things fabricated by humans, he presented the idea of "pre-Adamites", humans who existed before the time of Adam and Eve as recounted in the Bible and understood to be of much more recent times than the apparent age of the stone tools.

How to reconcile this notion with the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden? Well, here's a clever idea. Adam and Eve were the parents of only the Jewish race; the pre-Adamites were all gentiles! La Peyrère was, of course, denounced, seized by the Inquisition, and imprisoned. His book was burned on the streets of Paris. But what a clever idea.

Now, here's my problem: this interesting business is all from one paragraph on page 13 of the prologue of the book! How will I ever survive the remaining 740 pages?

Too many ideas, too little time.
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* I also took a recommendation of Mel's and checked out Lydia Millet's novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, which looks like great fun.

# It's possible that the history of ideas is the area of research that I'm moving into. I've done some writing lately on ideas, I keep reading books that I enjoy and analyze from the perspective of the history of ideas, and the subject seems to be a preoccupation of Ars Hermeneutica, which should come as no real surprise if it's a preoccupation of mine.

So, if you find yourself tying to figure out what theme unifies the various actual and proposed activities of Ars, I suggest that you look at them as using the history of ideas as a context or framework for provoking rational and analytical responses in the public. This is one way of looking at my operational theory of informal science education.

Posted on January 29, 2008 at 14.50 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Books, The Art of Conversation

One Response

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  1. Written by Bill Morrison
    on Thursday, 31 January 2008 at 19.31
    Permalink

    "A weighty volume." Egad, I had no idea it was so big. I just lugged it home from the library. Figured if you were following my recommendation, I should probably have a look at it myself.

    Fortunately, "Walking Zero" (lugged home in the same bag)is positively anorexic by comparison, and the other two books I wanted were out.

    I've brought it home. Will I actually read it? Hmmmm

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