At the End of an Age
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
At the End of an Age isa deeply informed and rewarding reflection on the nature of historical and scientific knowledge. Of extraordinary philosophical, religious, and historical scope, it is the product of a great historian's lifetime of thought on the subject of his discipline and the human condition. While running counter to most of the accepted ideas and doctrines of our time, it offers a compelling framework for understanding history, science, and man's capacity for self-knowledge.
In this work, John Lukacs describes how we in the Western world have now been living through the ending of an entire historical age that began in Western Europe about five hundred years ago. Unlike people during the ending of the Middle Ages or the Roman empire, we can know where we are. But how and what is it that we know?
Read more
In John Lukacs's view, there is no science apart from scientists, and all of "Science," including our view of the universe, is a human creation, imagined and defined by fallible human beings in a historical continuum. This radical and reactionary assertion—in its way a summa ofthe author's thinking, expressed here and there in many of his previous twenty-odd books—leads to his fundamental assertion that, contrary to all existing cosmological doctrines and theories, it is this earth which is the very center of the universe—the only universe we know and can know.
Liked At the End of an Age? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked At the End of an Age. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
-
Light and Liberty: Reflections on the Pursuit of Happiness Shares philosophy, history, nonfiction -
The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters Shares philosophy, history, nonfiction -
Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern Western World Shares philosophy, history, nonfiction -
Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History Shares history, philosophy, nonfiction
