Red Enlightenment

Download Red Enlightenment full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Red Enlightenment ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

Red Enlightenment

Author : Graham Jones
Publisher : Watkins Media Limited
ISBN 13 : 1914420209
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (144 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Red Enlightenment by : Graham Jones

Download or read book Red Enlightenment written by Graham Jones and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why we need a materialist spirituality for the secular left, and how to build one. The left commonly rejects religion and spirituality as counter-revolutionary forces, citing Marx’s famous dictum that "religion is the opium of the people." Yet forms of spirituality have motivated struggles throughout history, ranging from medieval peasant uprisings and colonial slave revolts, to South American liberation theology and the US civil rights movement. And in a world where religion is growing, and political movements are ridden with conflict, burnout, and failure, what can the left learn from religion? Red Enlightenment argues not only for a deepened understanding of religious matters, but calls for the secular left to develop its own spiritual perspectives. It proposes a materialist spirituality built from socialist and scientific sources, finding points of contact with the global history of philosophy and religion. From cybernetics to liberation theology, from ancient Indian and Chinese philosophy to Marxist dialectical materialism, from traditional religious practices to contemporary art, music, and film, Red Enlightenment sets out a plausible secular spirituality, a new socialist praxis, and a utopian vision.

The Shock Doctrine of the Left

Author : Graham Jones
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 150952858X
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (95 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Shock Doctrine of the Left by : Graham Jones

Download or read book The Shock Doctrine of the Left written by Graham Jones and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shocks, from natural disasters to military catastrophes, have long been exploited by the state to impose privatization, cuts and rampant free markets. This book argues that the left can use such moments of chaos to achieve emancipation. Graham Jones illustrates how everyone can help to exploit these shocks and bring about a new world of compassion and care. He examines how combining mutually reinforcing strategies of ‘smashing, building, healing and taming’ can become the basis of a unified left. His vivid personal experience underpins a compelling, practical vision for activism, from the scale of the individual body to the global social movement. This bold book is a toolkit for revolution for activists and radical millennials everywhere.

Fictions of Enlightenment

Author : Qiancheng Li
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 9780824825973
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (259 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Fictions of Enlightenment by : Qiancheng Li

Download or read book Fictions of Enlightenment written by Qiancheng Li and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-12-31 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictions of Enlightenment is the first book to examine the fascinating and intricate relationship between Buddhism and the development of Chinese vernacular fiction. Qiancheng Li brings Buddhist models to bear on the vision, structure, and narrative form of three classics of late imperial literature—Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber—arguing that by fashioning their plots after the narratives of certain Mahāyāna sutras, the novelists transformed Buddhist concepts into narrative structures. Within the traditional Chinese novel Li even defines a new genre: the fiction of enlightenment.

The Gentlemen's Book Of Enlightenment

Author : Oheen Imara
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 120 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (772 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Gentlemen's Book Of Enlightenment by : Oheen Imara

Download or read book The Gentlemen's Book Of Enlightenment written by Oheen Imara and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if one day you discover everything you have ever believed about world and relationships was a lie? Imagine everything you have ever been taught concerning women and how to engage them was fabricated? What if you discovered your family, the media, the film industry, the music industry, women, as well as the government were greatly invested in your miseducation? The Gentlemen's Book Of Enlightenment seeks to explore these questions and reveal a truth that has been hidden in plain sight. Men were bred to be utilities and are disposable. Weather through war, taxes, marriage, children, divorce, alimony, or child support men are forced to sacrifice their happiness and live a life of servitude in many if not all these areas. The reality is men are not valued as people. Men receive value based on what they can provide. This book is a guide to help men avoid the pitfalls of a society who has laid various traps in the minefield we call life. Join us on this journey as we discover the truth in chapters like "Love Vs. Respect", "What Does She Have To Offer You", and "You Will Never Make Her Happy". This book seeks to enlighten men and help start their journey to true happiness and walk away from system that only wants to keep them in bondage.

The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses

Author : Carolyn Purnell
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393249360
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (932 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses by : Carolyn Purnell

Download or read book The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses written by Carolyn Purnell and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch—as they were celebrated during the Enlightenment and as they are perceived today. Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing “flea”-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century, they made perfect sense. As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages. Journeying through the past three hundred years, Purnell explores how people used their senses in ways that might shock us now. And perhaps more surprisingly, she shows how many of our own ways of life are a legacy of this earlier time. The Sensational Past focuses on the ways in which small, peculiar, and seemingly unimportant facts open up new ways of thinking about the past. You will explore the sensory worlds of the Enlightenment, learning how people in the past used their senses, understood their bodies, and experienced the rapidly shifting world around them. In this smart and witty work, Purnell reminds us of the value of daily life and the power of the smallest aspects of existence using culinary history, fashion, medicine, music, and many other aspects of Enlightenment life.

Enlightenment Now

Author : Steven Pinker
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0525427570
Total Pages : 578 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (254 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Enlightenment Now by : Steven Pinker

Download or read book Enlightenment Now written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

Nietzsche's Enlightenment

Author : Paul Franco
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226259846
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (262 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Nietzsche's Enlightenment by : Paul Franco

Download or read book Nietzsche's Enlightenment written by Paul Franco and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-08-26 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While much attention has been lavished on Friedrich Nietzsche’s earlier and later works, those of his so-called middle period have been generally neglected, perhaps because of their aphoristic style or perhaps because they are perceived to be inconsistent with the rest of his thought. With Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, Paul Franco gives this crucial section of Nietzsche’s oeuvre its due, offering a thoughtful analysis of the three works that make up the philosopher’s middle period: Human, All too Human; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. It is Nietzsche himself who suggests that these works are connected, saying that their “common goal is to erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit.” Franco argues that in their more favorable attitude toward reason, science, and the Enlightenment, these works mark a sharp departure from Nietzsche’s earlier, more romantic writings and differ in important ways from his later, more prophetic writings, beginning with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Nietzsche these works reveal is radically different from the popular image of him and even from the Nietzsche depicted in much of the secondary literature; they reveal a rational Nietzsche, one who preaches moderation instead of passionate excess and Dionysian frenzy. Franco concludes with a wide-ranging examination of Nietzsche’s later works, tracking not only how his outlook changes from the middle period to the later but also how his commitment to reason and intellectual honesty in his middle works continues to inform his final writings.

Bedlam in the New World

Author : Christina Ramos
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469666588
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Bedlam in the New World by : Christina Ramos

Download or read book Bedlam in the New World written by Christina Ramos and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rebellious Indian proclaiming noble ancestry and entitlement, a military lieutenant foreshadowing the coming of revolution, a blasphemous Creole embroiderer in possession of a bundle of sketches brimming with pornography. All shared one thing in common. During the late eighteenth century, they were deemed to be mad and forcefully admitted to the Hospital de San Hipolito in Mexico City, the first hospital of the New World to specialize in the care and custody of the mentally disturbed. Christina Ramos reconstructs the history of this overlooked colonial hospital from its origins in 1567 to its transformation in the eighteenth century, when it began to admit a growing number of patients transferred from the Inquisition and secular criminal courts. Drawing on the poignant voices of patients, doctors, friars, and inquisitors, Ramos treats San Hipolito as both a microcosm and a colonial laboratory of the Hispanic Enlightenment—a site where traditional Catholicism and rationalist models of madness mingled in surprising ways. She shows how the emerging ideals of order, utility, rationalism, and the public good came to reshape the institutional and medical management of madness. While the history of psychiatry's beginnings has often been told as seated in Europe, Ramos proposes an alternative history of madness's medicalization that centers colonial Mexico and places religious figures, including inquisitors, at the pioneering forefront.

A Death on Diamond Mountain

Author : Scott Carney
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 069818629X
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (981 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis A Death on Diamond Mountain by : Scott Carney

Download or read book A Death on Diamond Mountain written by Scott Carney and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigative reporter explores an infamous case where an obsessive and unorthodox search for enlightenment went terribly wrong. When thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson died from dehydration and dysentery on a remote Arizona mountaintop in 2012, The New York Times reported the story under the headline: "Mysterious Buddhist Retreat in the Desert Ends in a Grisly Death." Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, was struck by how Thorson’s death echoed other incidents that reflected the little-talked-about connection between intensive meditation and mental instability. Using these tragedies as a springboard, Carney explores how those who go to extremes to achieve divine revelations—and undertake it in illusory ways—can tangle with madness. He also delves into the unorthodox interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Thorson and the bizarre teachings of its chief evangelists: Thorson’s wife, Lama Christie McNally, and her previous husband, Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University, where Thorson died. Carney unravels how the cultlike practices of McNally and Roach and the questionable circumstances surrounding Thorson’s death illuminate a uniquely American tendency to mix and match eastern religious traditions like LEGO pieces in a quest to reach an enlightened, perfected state, no matter the cost. Aided by Thorson’s private papers, along with cutting-edge neurological research that reveals the profound impact of intensive meditation on the brain and stories of miracles and black magic, sexualized rituals, and tantric rites from former Diamond Mountain acolytes, A Death on Diamond Mountain is a gripping work of investigative journalism that reveals how the path to enlightenment can be riddled with danger.

Imperfect Spirituality

Author : Polly Campbell
Publisher : Cleis Press
ISBN 13 : 1936740184
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (367 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Imperfect Spirituality by : Polly Campbell

Download or read book Imperfect Spirituality written by Polly Campbell and published by Cleis Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses how to render everyday moments and challenges into opportunities for spiritual growth, describing how to build a traditional spiritual life on top of a modern routine by engaging in short meditations and mindfulness.

The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge

Author : Peter B. Kaufman
Publisher : Seven Stories Press
ISBN 13 : 1644210614
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (442 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge by : Peter B. Kaufman

Download or read book The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge written by Peter B. Kaufman and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone? In The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, MIT Open Learning’s Peter B. Kaufman describes the powerful forces that have purposely crippled our efforts to share knowledge widely and freely. Popes and their inquisitors, emperors and their hangmen, commissars and their secret police—throughout history, all have sought to stanch the free flow of information. Kaufman writes of times when the Bible could not be translated—you’d be burned for trying; when dictionaries and encyclopedias were forbidden; when literature and science and history books were trashed and pulped—sometimes along with their authors; and when efforts to develop public television and radio networks were quashed by private industry. In the 21st century, the enemies of free thought have taken on new and different guises—giant corporate behemoths, sprawling national security agencies, gutted regulatory commissions. Bereft of any real moral compass or sense of social responsibility, their work to surveil and control us are no less nefarious than their 16th- and 18th- and 20th- century predecessors. They are all part of what Kaufman calls the Monsterverse. The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge maps out the opportunities to mobilize for the fight ahead of us. With the Internet and other means of media production and distribution—video especially—at hand, knowledge institutions like universities, libraries, museums, and archives have a special responsibility now to counter misinformation, disinformation, and fake news—and especially efforts to control the free flow of information. A film and video producer and former book publisher, Kaufman begins to draft a new social contract for our networked video age. He draws his inspiration from those who fought tooth and nail against earlier incarnations of the Monsterverse—including William Tyndale in the 16th century; Denis Diderot in the 18th; untold numbers of Soviet and Central and East European dissidents in the 20th—many of whom paid the ultimate price. Their successors? Advocates of free knowledge like Aaron Swartz, of free software like Richard Stallman, of an enlightened public television and radio network like James Killian, of a freer Internet like Tim Berners-Lee, of fuller rights and freedoms like Edward Snowden. All have been striving to secure for us a better world, marked by the right balance between state, society, and private gain. The concluding section of the book, its largest piece, builds on their work, drawing up a progressive agenda for how today’s free thinkers can band together now to fight and win. With everything shut and everyone going online, The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge is a rousing call to action that expands the definition of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.

Yung-chia's Song of Enlightenment

Author : Yung-Chia
Publisher : Empty Bowl Press
ISBN 13 : 9781734187311
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (873 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Yung-chia's Song of Enlightenment by : Yung-Chia

Download or read book Yung-chia's Song of Enlightenment written by Yung-Chia and published by Empty Bowl Press. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Translated by Red Pine. For over a thousand years the SONG OF ENLIGHTENMENT has been one of the most popular texts in all of Eastern Asia.

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II

Author : Simon Burrows
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1441182179
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II by : Simon Burrows

Download or read book The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II written by Simon Burrows and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-09 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a rich and path-breaking comparative study of reading tastes in the final years of old regime Europe. Based on extensive research in the account books of the Swiss publishers, the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), and related archives, it charts the dissemination of literature and reading tastes across Europe in the years leading up to the French revolution. In the process, it recasts our understanding of late 18th-century print culture and the contours of the enlightenment. The fruit of a widely acclaimed five year database project, the STN database, it is also a story of pioneering efforts to apply the latest digital technology and GIS mapping techniques to traditional historical and bibliographic problems. Although written to serve as a standalone study, this book is ideally complemented by its companion volume, Mark Curran's The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I: Selling Enlightenment, which offers a radical reinterpretation of the structure and practices of the European book trade. The STN database is now recognised as a cutting-edge digital project of global significance. Robert Darnton has called it "a prodigious accomplishment and a joy to use" while Jeremy Popkin adds, "No one working in the field of French Enlightenment studies ... can afford to ignore the rich mine of data that Simon Burrows and his collaborators have made accessible, in an eminently usable form, and the new possibilities it opens up for scholars." The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I and II offer a roadmap of that data and what it can show us.

The Village Enlightenment in America

Author : Craig Hazen
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252068287
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (682 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Village Enlightenment in America by : Craig Hazen

Download or read book The Village Enlightenment in America written by Craig Hazen and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000-01-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Village Enlightenment in America focuses on three nineteenth-century spiritual activists who epitomized the marriage of science and religion fostered in antebellum, pre-Darwinian America by the American Enlightenment. A theologian, writer, and apologist for the nascent Mormon movement, as well as an amateur scientist, Orson Pratt wrote Key to the Universe, or a New Theory of Its Mechanism, to establish a scientific base for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Robert Hare, an inventor and ardent convert to spiritualism, used his scientific expertise to lend credence to the spiritualist movement. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, generally considered the initiator of the American mind-cure movement, developed an overtly religious concept of science and used it to justify his system of theology. Pratt, Hare, and Quimby all employed a potent combination of popular science and Baconianism to legitimate their new religious ideas. Using the same terms--matter, ether, magnetic force--to account for the behavior of particles, planetary rotation, and the influence of the Holy Ghost, these agents of the Enlightenment constructed complex systems intended to demonstrate a fundamental harmony between the physical and the metaphysical. Through the lives and work of these three influential men, The Village Enlightenment in America opens a window to a time when science and religion, instead of seeming fundamentally at odds with each other, appeared entirely reconcilable.

The Enlightenment of Work

Author : Steve Nobel
Publisher : Watkins Media Limited
ISBN 13 : 1780284152
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (82 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Enlightenment of Work by : Steve Nobel

Download or read book The Enlightenment of Work written by Steve Nobel and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work affects most of us at some point in our lives. Work can be a source of growth, connection, and purpose, but too often it is a source of feeling aimless, bullied or manipulated. Sometimes it comes through overarching ambition, striving to climb up the corporate ladder only to find it is leaning in the wrong direction. There are degrees of emotional and physical suffering when we feel anger, misery and unhappiness with unenlightened work. The Enlightenment of Work is about ending that suffering. This book is essential for anyone wishing to: Transform your suffering at work: Suffering can come in many ways. It can come through feeling aimless and bored where the only reason for being there is to collect a salary each month. It can come through stress, overwork and burnout. This book offers a simple philosophy: suffering happens - but we can transform that suffering. Realise their innate gifts, talents and purpose: Most work disconnects us from knowing our authentic self - our essence or soul. Trust your courage, ideas, intuition, and discover your true self. Reclaim their time: Time is your most precious resource and one you cannot afford to waste. However, many of us work in busy environments that leave little time for real thinking or reflection, or for doing anything very new or interesting. Busy and idle minds can get locked into different forms of anxiety about the past and the future. The changing world of work demands emotional and spiritual intelligence. No one has to stay with work that oppresses the spirit. This new world is about choice.

Enlightenment

Author : David L. Phillips
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
ISBN 13 : 1465317309
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (653 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Enlightenment by : David L. Phillips

Download or read book Enlightenment written by David L. Phillips and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2007-08-30 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Statue of Liberty likeness illustrated on the cover of Enlightenment is a very symbolic image not only for Americans but for many other people of the world who harbor dreams for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, there are many individual and collective responsibilities that come with any such vision. Most Americans know orderly governmental systems are required to maintain a civilized culture, but in many societies one often wonders what type is most appropriate. While the western democracy structure has had significant success to date, it is far from perfect even within the United States. The author has spent the past forty years working within national and international governmental systems from the grass roots local level to regional, state, and federal jurisdictions. In this book, he notes the timeless lessons learned from experience and history as well as new and innovative ways to utilize the modern age of information technology. The net result is an effort to create new public excellence from tired work cultures. In the future, it is clear that economic globalization with its associated social and cultural impacts will bring about a new competition between many societies and their related governmental structures. This simple reality means that less efficient future governments will jeopardize the very viability of their own cultures. Therefore, if Americans wish to effectively compete on the coming international level of tomorrow, they must get their collective governmental house in order today. Enlightenment illustrates how a healthy competitive environment can be developed and sustained without jeopardizing any of the freedoms and opportunities we have come to expect.

Lost Enlightenment

Author : S. Frederick Starr
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691165858
Total Pages : 694 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Lost Enlightenment by : S. Frederick Starr

Download or read book Lost Enlightenment written by S. Frederick Starr and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forgotten story of Central Asia's enlightenment—its rise, fall, and enduring legacy In this sweeping and richly illustrated history, S. Frederick Starr tells the fascinating but largely unknown story of Central Asia's medieval enlightenment through the eventful lives and astonishing accomplishments of its greatest minds—remarkable figures who built a bridge to the modern world. Because nearly all of these figures wrote in Arabic, they were long assumed to have been Arabs. In fact, they were from Central Asia—drawn from the Persianate and Turkic peoples of a region that today extends from Kazakhstan southward through Afghanistan, and from the easternmost province of Iran through Xinjiang, China. Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects. They gave algebra its name, calculated the earth's diameter with unprecedented precision, wrote the books that later defined European medicine, and penned some of the world's greatest poetry. One scholar, working in Afghanistan, even predicted the existence of North and South America—five centuries before Columbus. Rarely in history has a more impressive group of polymaths appeared at one place and time. No wonder that their writings influenced European culture from the time of St. Thomas Aquinas down to the scientific revolution, and had a similarly deep impact in India and much of Asia. Lost Enlightenment chronicles this forgotten age of achievement, seeks to explain its rise, and explores the competing theories about the cause of its eventual demise. Informed by the latest scholarship yet written in a lively and accessible style, this is a book that will surprise general readers and specialists alike.