Passion of the Western Mind - by Richard Tarnas (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: New York: Harmony Books, c1991.

Book Synopsis

"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

Review Quotes

"No other such overview provides, in equal compass, as clear and cogent a survey. Its scholarship is impeccable....For its length it is the best intellectual history of the West I have ever seen." --Huston Smith, Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley
"The most lucid and concise presentation I have read of the grand lines of what every student should know about the history of Western thought."--Joseph Campbell

About the Author

Richard Tarnas is a Harvard-educated historian and professor of philosophy and psychology, and the author of The Passion of the Western Mind. In 2006 he published Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, which received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network in the UK. He is the founding director of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness graduate studies program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and also teaches on the faculty of Pacifica Graduate Institute.