Product Description

"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21589 in Books
• Published on: 1993-03-16
• Released on: 1993-03-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Tarnas charts the development of Western thought from the ancient Greeks, throwing a sharp light on ideas central to the modern outlook.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"The most lucid and concise presentation I have read of the grand lines of what every student should know about the history of Western thought." -- Joseph Campbell

From the Publisher
"No other such overview provides, in equal compass, as clear and cogent a survey. Its scholarship is impeccable....For its length it is the best intellectual history of the West I have ever seen." --Huston Smith, Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley
"The most lucid and concise presentation I have read of the grand lines of what every student should know about the history of Western thought."--Joseph Campbell

Customer Reviews

A Passionate Mind - Note the Passion!
The title of the book says it all, and not to be overlooked. This is a book that seeks to ascertain the passion that underpins the development of the western mind. Tarnas does a tremendous job of what is the Herculean task of tracing the roots of that development from the Ancient Greeks, through the birth of Christianity, the middle ages, the enlightenment and the birth of the modern world.

Make no mistake. This is NOT a text defining the means by which modernist science came to be the one and only defining truth of the cosmos. Those with a modern western mindset or scientific predilection might be lulled into this impression in the early chapters. But such an initial misunderstanding, to be fair to Tarnas, would be more due to the bias of the modern mind, rather than a function of the text. For throughout the development of his narrative, Tarnas is painstaking in his description of the interplay of the spiritual, the philosophical, and the empirical/scientific. I noted that a prior viewer fell into this trap, no doubt expecting Tarnas to conclude with a denunciation of the spiritual and philosophical vestiges of prehistory, depositing these schools into the waste bin of History, whilst announcing the triumph of the modernist worldview. Far from it. Tarnas' penultimate analysis examines what he calls "the crisis in modern science" and the emergence of postmodern thought, both of which undermined the roots of certainty. Yet the postmodernist too may be dismayed when Tarnas concludes in his epilogue with a broad sweep of the hand, finally positing an essentially spiritual teleological thrust to the very human development he has traced. It may be anathema to those within the dominant modernist science and postmodernist schools, where spirituality and grand narrative are respectively derided - but it is nonetheless a brave attempt to make sense of it all beyond the respective materialist and relativist stranglehold of the modern and postmodern discourses.

But it is not necessary to agree with Tarnas' worldview to benefit from this fine text. The 95% of the book that traces the history of the interplay between the often opposing spiritual/metaphysical and skeptical/empirical/scientific forces within western history is well worth the journey. I highly recommend the text for anybody wanting a broad overview of some of the most influential minds of the western world in the last three millennia.

It may be a little light on the twentieth century history of science. So, if you want a History of Science from the modernist perspective read John Gribbin's "Science: a History" or Andrew Gregory's "Eureka!" If you want a summative account of the modernist perspective on History/Evolution, read Bill Bryson's "A Brief History of Everything." But if you want something that broadens the horizons, Tarnas may be the man for you.

History and Philosophy Overview
Tarnas has produced in this book an accessible review of Western cultural developments. By condensing, sensing patterns, and editing as an author inevitably must, he omits some of what more specialized readers might want. However, his intention is less encyclopedic completeness than a hypothesis about the trajectory of Western cultural change. To this end he writes engagingly and informatively. His synthetic, pattern-sensing thought about history is interesting. He appears overly influenced by newer trends in theories about gender roles, psychology, and spirituality. Here he resembles Leonard Schlain of the "Goddess and the Alphabet" ramblings. By the last chapter he is fully immersed in speculation that many, myself included, find unjustified by the preceding survey and assembly of evidence. However, speculation is the stuff of philosophers and theoreticians, and I wouldn't necessarily dismiss the body of the book because of disagreements with Tarnas' prognostications. Alongside other surveys like Daniel Robinson's "Intellectual History of Psychology" and Robert Kegan's "In Over Our Heads," readers can derive fascinating insights about cultural development.

This author, and I, live in different twentieth centuries
This book starts well. I found the introduction to Greek philosophy rewarding in the way it made clear various strands running through the work of Plato and Aristotle. Later he piqued my interest in medieval scholastic philosophy. His summaries of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler seem sound. In fact as far as Kant it's hard to find fault with this book.

Unfortunately after Kant things become a little different. You see this is not what it purports to be - an introduction to the history of Western thought. It is the history of Western thought from the point of view of a member of a philosophy department in a Western university - and not just any philosophy department - a *Continental* philosophy department. To read this book you'd think that much of the intellectual life of the twentieth century had simply never happened. Tarnas chooses to completely ignore almost all Anglo-American empiricist philosophy in the last 100 years and clearly has little or no knowledge of sc! ! ientific developments. Almost his only mention of twentieth century scientists, besides the obvious Einstein, is a list of scientists who have prominence purely because of popular science literature - and even here Tarnas is unable to distinguish between genius and merely crackpot.

The book has a chapter called the 'Crisis in Science'. Besides the obvious and well known moral issues surrounding science this chapter bears no relation to anything that I experienced as someone who grew up within the scientific tradition. In fact I am at a complete loss to know what his crisis is - unless it be the general problem that academic work (in all fields) is now so specialised that philosophers, who like to make their field *everything*, can no longer hope to understand what takes place outside their field.

It's not just in the 'hard' sciences that Tarnas is out of his depth - I was astonished to find him citing the work of Sapir and Whorf in linguistics which has now been completely! ! discredited. Tarnas believes the feminist so-called critiq! ue of science to be one of the most significant advances in the philosophy of science - and yet a large number of intellectuals would find it laughable (though one might argue, of course, that this is a sign of genius).

Nonetheless I have still awarded this book a generous 3 out of 5 because the earlier parts of this book are so illuminating and because, for all I know, the later parts are a genuine reflection of the author's own particular strand of Western thought if not of a major part of it.

One last word: readers of this book would do well to review the epilogue first - that way they can find out just where the author is coming from.