At the End of an Age - Softcover

John Lukacs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300101619 ISBN 13: 9780300101614

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2003

Synopsis

At the End of an Age is a 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?
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 of the 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.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Selected by Choice as a 2003 Outstanding Academic Title

From the Back Cover:

"The author tackles weighty matters, but he is a consistently engaging writer, and some of his sly asides are among the best parts of the book."-Michael Potemra, National Review; "[Lukacs] is very much a voice worth listening to."-Jeet Heer, National Post (Canada); "Perhaps no historian has a better right to take stock of our times-and of the state of historical thinking-than Lukacs. . . . A beautifully crafted and unforgettable book, one that every serious historian should read."-Choice

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0300101619
• ISBN 13: 9780300101614
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240