This is part of our 2019 Al-Rodhan Prize series celebrating the six non-fiction books shortlisted for promoting global cultural understanding. In this extract from ‘How the World Thinks’ , Julian Baggini looks at the history of secular reason. I didn't learn as much as I wanted to, I was only really able to digest what I already had a grasp of, like karma, for example. Other than that, perhaps I should re-read this book when I get a better grasp of different philosophies. The finding of the Wellcome Trust of mostly very positive attitudes towards vaccines – a health intervention that saves millions of lives and eradicated one of the worst diseases humanity ever faced – is a very positive finding.

How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy - Goodreads

In conclusion, Will Rogers popularized the statement attributed to him in the 1935 movie. QI believes that he also created it. Over time the statement was replicated and modified. The year sequence was changed from 20, 30, 40 to 20, 40, 60. Also, the viewpoint presented in the first two parts was swapped. These changes generated the modern version. Thus, the modern saying does not have a single author. All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited. Julian Baggini sets out to expand our horizons in How the World Thinks, exploring the philosophies of Japan, India, China and the Muslim world, as well as the lesser-known oral traditions of Africa and Australia’s first peoples. Interviewing thinkers from around the globe, Baggini asks questions such as: why is the West is more individualistic than the East? What makes secularism a less powerful force in the Islamic world than in Europe? And how has China resisted pressures for greater political freedom? The attribution of this saying to Churchill may have been facilitated by another apocryphal attribution. QI examined the following saying about attitudinal changes occurring as one becomes older: If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a Conservative at 35 You Have No Brain.The idea that understanding was good for its own sake emerged in the West as part of the growth of science, which was still often known as natural philosophy until the late 19th century. Henri Poincaré, for example, advocated “science for its own sake”, saying, “Science has wonderful applications; but the science which would have in view only applications would no longer be science – it would only be the kitchen. There is no science but disinterested science.” He argued that all the hard work of scientists was “for seeing’s sake; or at the very least that others may one day see”. In this Poincaré was self-consciously evoking a tradition in Western thought of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, which he perhaps incorrectly thought was fully formed in antiquity. “The spirit which should animate the man of science is that which breathed of old on Greece and brought there to birth poets and thinkers.” One of the great unexplained wonders of human history is that written philosophy flowered entirely separately in China, India and Ancient Greece at more or less the same time. These early philosophies have had a profound impact on the development of distinctive cultures in different parts of the world. What we call ‘philosophy’ in the West is not even half the story.

How the World Thinks by Julian Baggini | Waterstones

This is a stark result for Venezuela in particular (although perhaps unsurprising) since the availability and coverage of child vaccination has fallen significantly over the last few years. For millennia, the world has been thinking about the most baffling of questions: why are we here, where have we been, where are we going, or are we just – here. Is this it? And what does it mean? There are, of course, a multitude of answers, and of practices, but How the World Thinks is a book about philosophy, and not about the minutiae of religions (although they cannot help but be often intertwined). Fascinating and unexpected details and contrasts turn up to choreograph the narrative: Chinese ancestor worship, for example, could involve real banquets for the departed with real food, the living in attendance, while of course Christians have the symbolism of the Eucharist, although he refrains from pointing out that secular cynics might think of that as something much darker. How the World Thinks' is an academic book that defines the basic/historical understanding of concepts, such as time, logic, self, relationships, society and much more, in Western and Eastern cultures. The book is written by a classical philosopher and discussed from the academic standpoint, and thus should be treated as academic material. Therefore, you should not expect to have an easy read and learn about concepts that would shake your understanding of the world or other cultures, instead, you will be welcomed by referenced materials of classical literature and thoughts on how the world was perceived by people many centuries ago and how that still translates in the modern world, our views, religions, politics etc. Reading this book aloud in the car, discovering gems together over Kopi and Roti Prata, letting a stranger skim through it just before the start of a lecture, discussing it with my boss after a workshop, trying to explain its gist to a curious 7-year-old. These were my favourite memories of reading this one.Most Irish people will use these words casually, and whoever they are talking to won’t take any offence because it’s normal. How The World Thinks by Julian Baggini is subtitled “A global history of philosophy”. I was expecting a cross-cultural, militias-faith tour of the topic, rather like Bertrand Russell‘s History of Western Philosophy without the direction. What Julian Baggini has assembled here, however, is something that initially surprised, but later rather disappointed as a result of a necessity to revisit similar concepts repeatedly. Terrific. The intellectual and spiritual generosity of this book makes it an essential text for our fractious and dangerously divided era.” Richard Holloway

How the World Thinks review – a global history of philosophy

We hope world leaders listen to Johnson’s warnings. But maybe he needs to listen to them himself,” Greenpeace’s Rebecca Newsom said. This approach gives the book a less well structured, more journalistic feel, than a clear exposition of different schools of thought, and Baggini also includes excerpts from interviews with a lot of experts. The term 'Indian philosophy' is misleading, though to be fair it is also used by many Indians. The correct term is Vedic philosphy, for two reasons: it is found in many other countries in South and South-East Asia. Secondly, there are other philosophies in India including Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, Sikh etc. It is a strange irony that at the beginning of this book Baggini points out that there are many cultures which have no need for secular philosophy. Many languages didn't organically develop a word for it until it was imported from the West and their home-grown scholars follow "philosophical" traditions that don't meet the purity test of philosophy being too close to theology. This raises the interesting question of whether modern secular philosophy actually has a history at all in any part of the world, let alone a global one. Have societies really tolerated such useless spongers for 2,500 years or were the schools of Athens and the great thinkers in other cultures pre-Enlightenment doing something fundamentally different to today's philosophy departments? It has left many environmentalists with a fear that Johnson has so far failed to heed his own apocalyptic rhetoric, even if he now grasps the problem.I read this in the wee hours of the night, a lullaby composed of fragments of musings over existence and ethics from around the world, if you will. It is only natural to wake up in the middle of disjoint dreams and muse over it myself. So rather than structuring the book around distinct bodies of ideas - e.g. Islam, Buddhism, western philosophy, etc. - and going through everything that body of thought think about how we know, who we are, etc., Baggini flips things around, only touching on philosophies he thinks relate to the topic of the chapter. E.g. In the chapter on No self, he talks about Buddhism, in the chapter on harmony he talks about Taoism, in the chapter on naturalism he talks about Shintoism, etc. with multiple philosophies considered within each chapter. Firstly, this book does more in one volume than any I have encountered to treat the philosophical thought of India, China, Japan, and the Muslim world as genuine philosophy without pedantically and in condescendingly unlettered fashion equating any of that with mysticism, theology, or spirituality. Though there certainly is overlap from philosophy in those fields, "The East," is hardly the only area where this happens. Also, Baggini does lay out a lot of these concepts very clearly so those with little experience in this area will be mostly caught up on the history and appropriate terminology. Lastly, the function of philosophy in these regions on the larger cultural zeitgeist and more practically that societies' political and social functioning is well-detailed.