
The Age of Reason Begins
The Faiths Fight for Power
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Narrated by:
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Cory Herndon
About this listen
We are the creations of history. We are also the creations of the history in this book. We cannot understand ourselves without understanding this history.
The early modern era in Europe set the mold for the Western world today. It was a complex, tragic, yet pivotal time. It marked the transition between the dominance of the Catholic church throughout Western Europe and the present age of science, reason, and skepticism.
The path through this transition was an exciting yet bloody and sorrowful one. The wars between Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rivaled those of the present in cruelty and atrocity. Yet all the participants professed Christianity, forgetting the teachings of Christ while tearing one another apart over religious differences.
Will Durant, author of the monumental eleven-volume series The Story of Civilization, is an unparalleled guide to this culturally rich but brutal and complicated era. He explains how religious differences meshed with the self-interest of nations and monarchs, showing how the spirit of later times was shaped and molded.
Durant takes us through the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in France. His narrative reaches its climax with the titanic Thirty Years’ War, which pitted Spain and Austria against the rest of Europe, with appalling results.
Durant also shows how this mindless warfare led to a disillusionment with religious dominance of Western Europe, paving the way not only for reason and scientific progress but for individual rights—most crucially freedom of religious belief.
But this volume does not limit itself to wars and kings and politics. It explores the immense cultural heritage of the early modern era, including the golden age of Spanish art and literature, with painters such as Velásquez and El Greco and books such as Don Quixote. It reveals to us the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, the tragedian Pierre Corneille, and great artists from the Low Countries such as Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens.
Anyone wanting to understand the early modern era, which has shaped our minds and thought right up to the present, could find no better guide than Will Durant.
©2024 Richard Smoley (P)2024 Maple Spring PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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Overall
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Philosophy has often seemed like the castor oil of the disciplines: healthy, but never pleasurable, and best when swallowed quickly and forgotten. Will Durant’s classic The Story of Philosophy is a welcome remedy for this misconception, and—in view of the fact that it is nearly 100 years old—a remarkably refreshing one. This deluxe edition includes The Age of Faith, the fourth volume in the great series, The Story of Civilization. It covers the years 1095—the launching of the First Crusade—and 1300.
-
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-
Our Oriental Heritage
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-
Overall
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Performance
-
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Overall
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Overall
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Performance
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Durant lucidly describes the philosophical systems of such world-famous “monarchs of the mind” as Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, and Nietzsche. Along with their ideas, he offers their flesh-and-blood biographies, placing their thoughts within their own time and place and elucidating their influence on our modern intellectual heritage. This book is packed with wisdom and wit.
-
-
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-
The Story of Philosophy (Original Classic Edition)
- The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers
- By: Will Durant
- Narrated by: David Markus
- Length: 19 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Durant provides an immensely astute, clear, and enjoyable story of philosophy. He focuses not on schools of thought or subdisciplines, but on the most vigorous, powerful, and appealing thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition, starting with the founding figures of Plato and Aristotle, and taking us through Francis Bacon, the prime theorist of present-day scientific thought, and on to Spinoza, whom Durant prizes above all for his earnest effort to live his own philosophy.
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-
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- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
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Story
At Will Durant's death at 96, in 1981, his personal papers were dispersed among relatives, collectors, and archive houses. Twenty years later, scholar John Little discovered the previously unknown manuscript of Heroes of History in Durant's granddaughter's garage. Written shortly before he died, these 21 essays serve as an abbreviated version of Durant's best-selling, 11-volume series, The Story of Civilization.
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