The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God [Kindle Edition] Author: Peter Watson | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DPM7QXO | Format: PDF, EPUB
Download Epub The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God
Posts about Download The Book Download Epub The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link From one of Britain’s most distinguished historians comes the stirring story of one of the modern world’s most important yet controversial intellectual achievements: atheism.
Since Friedrich Nietzsche roundly declared that “God is dead” in 1882, a raft of reflective and courageous individuals have devoted their creative energies to devising ways to live without Him, turning instead to invention, enthusiasm, hope, wit and, above all, various forms of self-reliance. Their brave, imaginative story has gone untold—until now. In The Age of Atheists, acclaimed historian Peter Watson offers a sweeping narrative of the secular philosophers and poets, psychologists and scientists, painters and playwrights, novelists and even choreographers who have forged a thrilling, bold path in the absence of religious belief.
Synthesizing nearly a century and a half of recent history, The Age of Atheists is a stunning, magisterial celebration of life without recourse to the supernatural.
From Paul Valéry and George Santayana to Richard Rorty and Ronald Dworkin, from Georges- Pierre Seurat and Constantin Brâncuşi to Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, from André Gide to Philip Roth, from Rudolf Laban to Merce Cunningham, from Henrik Ibsen to Samuel Beckett, from Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke to Elizabeth Bishop and Czesław Miłosz, from Sigmund Freud and Benjamin Spock to E. O. Wilson and Sam Harris, The Age of Atheists brilliantly explores how atheism has evolved, deepened and matured, and gained unprecedented resonance and popularity as it has sought to replace an unknowable God in the afterlife with the voluptuous detail and warmth of this life, to be found in art, philosophy and science, all woven into a rational, secular morality.
Atheism has had its share of ideologues, tyrants and charlatans, but it is above all a history of brave accomplishment—and one that is far from finished.
From Nietzsche and his nihilism to Dawkins and Dennett, Nagel and Habermas, Watson’s stimulating intellectual narrative explores the revolutionary ideas and big questions provoked by these great minds and movements. A sparkling and ultimately triumphant history, The Age of Atheists is the first full story of our efforts to live without God. Direct download links available for Download Epub The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 2312 KB
- Print Length: 641 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1476754314
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (February 18, 2014)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DPM7QXO
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- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,961 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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Seven years to the day, I finished this after the same author's "Ideas: A History of Thought from Fire to Freud" (reviewed by me Feb. 2007). Both hefty works share this veteran journalist and now intellectual historian at Cambridge's dogged devotion to rational thinking over supposition, and the view, as his 2006 book concluded, that our human perspective is better suited to watching our world pass by and act out as if in a zoo rather than a monastery. He acknowledges the scientific mission to dissect and pin down all that we observe, yet he nods to the atavistic tendency embedded within many of us to yearn for transcendence. That impulse, his new book agrees, will not fade soon, but the twentieth century charted here (although starting with Nietzsche towards the end of the nineteenth) celebrates the triumph of evolution, the breakthroughs in physics, the insights of psychology, and the wisdom of philosophy, art, literature, and communal engagement which enrich our current times and allow us so much liberty.
"Ideas" took me a month of evenings to study, given its 740 pages and 36 topical chapters, book-ended by a substantial introduction and conclusion, to chart the multi-millennial span of civilized endeavor. By contrast, I fairly raced through about 540 pages of the present book, which I highlighted (on a Kindle advanced copy, which was wildly and incompletely formatted; this presumably is cleaned up in the copy you may download) in eighty-five instances that show my engagement with its provocative exchanges, cover roughly 125 years; Watson has also written (unread by me) "The Modern Mind" (2001) about the twentieth century, so I wondered how much of that third big book overlapped with "The Age of Atheists.
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