Javier A. Tabush

 

 

Chapter 1: IDEAS BEFORE LANGUAGE

• Watson explains the importance of art in the development of ideas through cave paintings, Venus figurines, split houses, sexual imagery, textiles, and other rituals.

• The primitive mind is said to have been composed of three types of intelligences: technical (producing stone tools), natural history (understanding the lanscape and wildlife around him/her), and social (the skills needed to live in groups). (Theory by Steven Mithen) 

• In this chapter we can see some connections to the Origin of the Species since we learn how man evolved in order to adapt to survive.

• “The new specie’s small size is presumably explained by adaptation to an island environment, where there were no large predators”

 

Chapter 2: THE EMERGENCE OF LANGUAGE AND THE CONQUEST OF COLD

• Some of the things we are going to learn from this chapter are:

  • The size of early groups

  • Hunting tools

  • Proto languages

  • Tailored clothing

  • And many others…

• “One view is that language emerged in the click sounds of certain tribes in southern Africa, clicks being used because they enabled the hunters to exchange information without frightening away their prey.

 

 

Chapter 3: THE BIRTH OF GODS, THE EVOLUTION OF HOUSE AND HOME

• “The domestication of plants and animals took place some time between 14000 and 6500 years ago and it is one of the most heavily studied ideas in pre-history”

• Agriculture

• Increasing control of fire

• The intellectual impact of money

• The iron instrument

• “It was in Lydian city, Sardis, that the first retail market was introduced, when anyone could come to the market and sell, for money, whatever they had”

 

 

Chapter 4: CITIES OF WISDOM

• The first cities

• The creation of temples

• Tokens

• Syllabary and the alphabet

• Domestication of the horse

• “The first tokens dated to 8000-4300bc and were fairly plain and not very varied. They were found in such cities as Tepe Asiab in Iran, where the people still lived mainly by hunting and gathering.

 

 

Chapter 5: SACRIFICE, SOUL, SAVIOUR

• Sexuality in Agriculture

• Concepts of the soul

• Buddha

• Pythagoras

• This chapter talks about certain invasions that were important in history because they were invasion where a change in religion was involved. For example the Babylonians with the Israelis.

• Judaism

• Buddha had no conception of heaven

• “ In all cases, then we have, centring on the sixth century BC, but extending 150 years either side, a turning away from a pantheon of many traditional little gods, and a great turning inward, the emphasis put on man himself, his own psychology, his moral sense or conscience, his intuition and his individuality”

 

 

Chapter 15: The Idea of Europe

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• Muslim visions of European backwardness in the middle ages 

• Theories as to why Europe drew ahead 

• Braudel (geography) 

• "What had been inherited from the ancient world was very largely unco-ordinated. The scholars' aimwas to restore 'to fallen mankind, so far as was possible, that perfect system of knowledge which had been in the pssession or withing the reach of mankind at the moment of creation'"

• McCormick's Medieval Europe 

• Abu-Lughod (the plague, politics, Asia fell behind) 

• Needham (China's class structure) 

• Western and eastern scholarship compared 

• North and Thomas (changes in agriculture, economics, and market structure) 

• Southern (changes in Christianity)

• "Parallel changes were seen in the church's disciplinary arrangements. Before the middle of the eleventh century, those who sinned had to be forgiven before the full assembly of the church following, in the case of serious offences, a period of exclusion from full membership"

• Gratian's changes in law  

• Morris (the discovery of the individual)
   

 

Chapter 16: 'Half-way Between God and Man': the Techniques of Papl Thought- Control

 

• The investiture struggle

• "Towards the end of January 1077, in the middle of a bitter winter, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV arrived in Canossa, twenty miles south-east of Parma in north Italy. Henry was barely twenty-three at the time, a large energetic man, with blue eyes and flaxen hair, a typucal Teuton"

• Medieval ideas of kkingship

• the sacrament of marriage

• the Antichrist

• "Today, excommunication holds few terrors for most of us but in the Middle Ages it was very different. In fact, Gregory VII had himself extended both the idea and practice of excommunication. The idea originated partly in the pagan ritual of devotio, when citizens who had committed serious crimes were sacrificed to the gods"

• The Great Schism

• Inquisition

• "Torture techniques included the ordeal of water, when a funnel or a soaking length of silk would be forced down someone throat. Five litres was considered ordinary and that amount of water could burst blod vessels"

• the Benedictine order

• the new piety

 

 

Chapter 17: The Spread of Learning and the Rise of Accuracy

 

• Liberal Arts!

• "Let us remind ourselves of the concept of the liberal arts. For the Greeks the notion of liberal studies was that of an educational system suitable for the free citizen, though there were at least two versions- Plato's, which took a philosophical and metaphysical view of education designed to imprin moral and intellectual excellence, and Isocrates' version, which advocated a curriculum more suited to practical engagement with community and political life."

• "The four areas of inquiry which propelled the early universities were medicine, law, science, and mathematics"

• The changing concept of the Renaissance

• How the Renaissance began in italy

• Trivium and the Quadrivium!

• the earliest universities

• the rise in quantification

• maeasurement, counting, dating, punctuation, musical notations

• spelling

• "The original English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, differed from those on the continent in that they grew up in towns which had no cathedrals. Oxford, in a way ,evolved where it did by accident"

 

 

Chapter 18: The Arrival of the Secular: Capitalism, Humanism, Individualism.

 

• How the Renaissance began in Italy.

• the origins of capitalism

• The abbaco schools

• "The abbaco schools took their name from the LIber abbaco written in the early thirteenth century by Leonardo Fibonnaci, the son of a Pisan governmental official sent to direct the Pisan trading colony at Bougie, Algeria"

• the improved status of the artist

• the humanities in Florence

• "The new humanism, which we shall come to presently, essentially provided an alternative to the divine order, settin up in its stead a reational order based upon practical experience."

• life in the Renaissance

• schooling in Italy

• Erasmus!

• religious tolerance

• "Tolerance, in particular religious tolerance, was a particular aspect of humanism with long-term consequences and here the names of Crotus Robanius, Ulrich von Hutten and Michel de Montaigne shine through"

 

 

Chapter 19: The Explosion of Imagination

 

• the invention of oil painting

• "The greater realism allowed by oil painting and perspective was added to by both the close study of anatomy that many artists made in the fifteenth century- allowing a much more accurate rendering of musculature, thanks to the advances in meical science, and a new affinity in nature..."

• greater realism

• "Renaissance thinkers also believed that the entire universe was a model of the divine idea and that man was 'a creator after the divine creator'"

• "What is pleasing to the eye and ear and mind is good, is morally valuable in itself. More important, it discloses part of the divine plan for mankind..."

• sinfonia, concertos, sonatas

• pagan mythology

• the explosion of London Theatres

• orators become actors

• Shakespeare

• Don Quixote!!

• "There was no one reason for the explosion of imagination (and of story-telling, and of story-telling techniques). But the extent to which many of these great works began to move beyond Christianity ought not to go unrecognised"

 

 

Chapter 20: The Mental Horizon of Christopher Columbus

 

• The Greeks discover the Atlantic

• "The first major adventurer of the Atlantic, after Pytheas, and the first Christian explorer in history, was the Irish monk known as St. Brendan the Navigator"

• Ptolemny

• The land of Promise

• the monstrous races

• Columbus' known reading

• "Columbus'mental horizon was thus determined at least in part by the past experiences of early travellers. Travel was arduous, and frequently dangerous, but long, very long, journeys were made, and knowledge about the world was expanding sufficiently to whet the appetite of people like the Genoese general"

• the exploration of the west African coast

• Casco da Gama reaches India

• Columbus finds the Bahamas.

 

 

Chapter 21: The 'Indian' Mind: Ideas in the New World.

 

• The reactions to Columbus' discoveries

• Why is it that the Europeans discovered America rather than the other way around? 

• "One of the most powerful - if implicit- ideas at the time of the discvoery of America was the dual classification of mankind, whereby peoples were judged in accordance with their religious affiliation or their degree of civility or barbarity"

• the Spanish encomienda

• dimensions of New World people

• Culture

• "Arguably the most important difference between the two hemispheres lay in ideas concerning economics."

• "In the realm of ideas, the discovery of America may have had an effect on the Catholic Counter Reformation going on at much the same time, in that it robbed the Catholics of some of their most energetic and talented evengelists"

• Beliefs

• Counting and time

• writing and textiles

• the different ideas about art. 

 

 

Chapter 22: History Heads North: the Intellectual Impact of Protestantism

 

• differences between northern and southern catholicism

• German character of the Reformation

• the cult of the sermon

• the Baroque style

• Protestantism's effects on literacy, discipline and marriage

• "In the course of nationalisation of Protestantism, however, the first hints of its own form of corruption began to appear. In its original guise Lutheranism mantained that, in order to be free, one should never act, or be forced to act, against one's consciousness 

• varieties of Protestantism

• "The new spiritual confidence was also relected in an era of church building, in Rome in particular, in which the churches, often dedicated to the orders, were vast"

 

 

Chapter 23: The Genius of Experiment

 

• Was there a scientific revolution?

• "The scientific revoultion outshines exerything since the rise of Chritianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements within the sustem of medieval Christendom"

• "For scientists, we are now living our lives surrounded by the second scientific revolution"

• Galileo

• the telescope

• Principia Mathematica

• Copernicus

• "Everyone remembers that Copernicus displaced the earth as the centre of the universe"

• universities and science

• the rise of scientific instrumentation

• logarithms and the calculus

• Harvey

• "According to a list of the most influential people in history, published in 1993, Isaac Newton ranked as number 2, after Muhammad and ahead of Jesus Christ".

• "Newton's first experiments with light involved him making a small hole in the wooden shutter to his rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge. This let in a narrow shaft of light, which he so arranged that it struck a prism and was then refracted on to the wall opposite" CAMERA OBSCURAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

Chapter 24: Liberty, Property and Community: the Origins of Conservatism and Liberalism

 

• The rise of the nation-state

• absolute monarchy

• Hobbes

• "The first man to make the most of the scientific revolution was Thomas Hobbes, the son of a vicar in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, in the west of England. Hobbes was never a fellow of the Royal Society..."

• Leviatan

• the invention of the public

• Machiavelli

• "Machiavelli was a humanist and this coulored The Prince. It meant for example that he had a ridgidly secular attitude to politics. Like Leaonardo Da Vinci he was a scientis..."

• "Man can now himself more profoundly and clearly than even Newton can grasp the laws of matter: consequently  knowledge of history, being the story of human motives and their effects, can in principle be far more profoundly and minutely known than the external world, which is ultimately opaque"