The Two Greatest Ideas: How Our Grasp of the Universe and Our Minds Changed Everything

Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. The Two Greatest Ideas: An Overview of the Narrative
	A Vignette of Two Ideas in Two Buildings: The Roman Pantheon and Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum
Chapter 2. The World Precedes the Mind: The Primacy of the First Great Idea (First Millennium BCE to the Renaissance)
	The Two Great Ideas in a Narrative
	The Origin of Mathematics, Science, and Metaphysics
	Art and Architecture
	Epic Poetry
	Morality as Harmony with the Universe
	The Transcendence of the Mind
		A Vignette of the Unity of Knowledge: Pythagoras, Kepler, and String Theory
Chapter 3. The Mind Precedes the World: The Primacy of the Second Great Idea (The Renaissance to the 20th Century)
	The Big Shift: Philosophy Confronts Empirical Science
	Art and the Rise of Subjectivity
	The Novel
	Autonomy and the Changing Ground of Morality
	The Twentieth Century: The Attack on the Second Great Idea
		A Vignette of the Extreme of Nonobjectivity: Malevich’s Black Square
Chapter 4. The Moral Legacy: Autonomy vs. Harmony with the World
	Persons and Selves
	Autonomy and Rights
	The Two Great Ideas and Political Conflicts
		A Vignette of the Utopian Self: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chapter 5. Can We Grasp All of Reality?
	Can the Eye See Itself?
	Reality from the Inside Out
	Reality from the Outside In
		A Vignette of the Person and the Self: “Borges and I”
Chapter 6. The Future: A Third Greatest Idea
	Intersubjectivity
	“I,” “You,” and Disagreement
	The God’s-Eye View: What Is the Whole of Reality?
		A Vignette of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise
Notes
Bibliography
Index