Back to Blog
A terrible beauty peter watson5/24/2023 Watson clearly thinks that some distinction can be made between “cultural” and “intellectual” advances, and that the history of ideas is to some degrees independent of political events. Judging from what Watson has to say about postmodernism, identifying it with recent trends in French philosophy that have put too much stock in Marx and Freud, it’s likely he would disagree. It was the observation of Marx, for example, that ideas are merely the product of social and economic forces. Writing a history of ideas involves tricky questions of influence. In A Terrible Beauty, subtitled “A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind,” author Peter Watson sets out to correct this bias by taking an encyclopedic look at the intellectual heritage of the century that was. A TERRIBLE BEAUTY: A HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE AND IDEAS THAT SHAPED THE MODERN MINDĪmong the recent flood of books on the history of the twentieth century the focus has mostly been on political and military events.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |