The Structure of Intellectual Evolution

A New History of Knowledge from the Bronze Age to Isaac Newton

How does intellectual change happen? How do societies generate new kinds of knowledge and ways of thinking? This book tells the story of knowledge from the scribes of ancient Mesopotamia and philologists of Alexandria to the astronomers of the Islamicate world and intricate logicians of the medieval university. It culminates in the Europe of Erasmus, Galileo and Newton to reassess what have become the classic exemplars of intellectual transformation: the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment.

Encompassing both the sciences and the humanities – alchemy to anatomy, grammar to geology – Dmitri Levitin explores the social and ideological forces that stimulated inquiry as well as the ways it transcended them, taking on a life of its own. Above all, he takes us into temples, madrasas, universities, and many other institutions of learning to show how new knowledge was anchored in educational practices, and how those practices structured intellectual change. A sweeping but intensely human study of all pre-modern intellectual endeavour, The Structure of Intellectual Evolution is a dazzling tour de force by one of the world’s leading historians of ideas.

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