Searching for Great Ideas: Readings Past and Present

Searching for Great Ideas: Readings Past and Present shares two guiding principles with its predecessor, Great Ideas: Conversations Between Past and Present: that the development of clear thinking, critical understanding, and effective writing skills requires nourishing food for thought, and that because the problems we face today are rooted in the past, we can understand them better when we see them in a historical context. One of the most significant developments in the history of ideas, which this text, like the previous one, attempts to reveal is changes in attitudes in the authority of the past. The new title clarifies this concern, while it preserves the essence of what the former text implied by the subtitle: a searching and continuing conversation abiut questions as well as answers to some of the most pressing priblems of the last 3500 years.

1. Searching for Great Ideas: The Reading and Writng Process. 2. Confronting History: The Question of Moral Decline. 3. The Uses of History: How We Learn From The Past. 4. Spirituality and Religion: Monotheism and Western Culture. 5. Philosophy and Rationality. 6. The Scientific Revolution. 7. Democracy: The Pursuit of Liberty and Public Virtue. 8. Economics and Social Class. 9. The Arts and Humanities. 10. Multiculturalism: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and the Democratic Ideal. 11. Technology, Postmodernism, and the Cyberfuture: Turning in the Widening Gyre.