Immerse In How The World Thinks: A Global History Of Philosophy Published By Julian Baggini Accessible As Hardcover

wish did read this book long ago! However, it is a recent book but the amount of knowledge here did reshape many of my ideas and understanding of how this world is.
While the language is more academic and not easy to consume, I was enjoying the slow reading and constructing ideas one after another.
The main conclusion of the book that the human perspective is unlimited to a certain philosophy.
The world is a diverse place for ideas and the human mind, is much more than concepts such as logic and traditions, I highly recommend this book for anyone who needs to get over the premade ideas of Western philosophy.
How the world thinks is a question of understanding the differences and not just the patterns.
This book is excellent at getting you to question the way in which you think and how this underpins your belief system in regards to life.
Western thinking with its colonial racism often views its scientific enquiry for truth and progress as superior to eastern respect for knowledge and tradition.
Where in the east focus is on the holistic view of reality, the west are argument based, logical and scientific.
Western scientific enquiry admonishes knowledge in search for new understanding and asks questions to extend knowledge, whereas eastern thinking respects tradition and the divine.
Before the internet we had to trust those more knowledgeable than ourselves and so the technological advancement making education more accessible can be argued to be detrimental, as there is with it a lack of experience knowing something and understanding something fully, are not the same.
Implied causation and actual causation are not the same, Eastern thought is less focused on conceptual understanding and more on feeling and intuition, which the west often disregard as being unscientific words are for meaning: when youve got the meanings, you can forget the words.
Although just because you can posit a question does not make it testable, for example what is the colour of the wind will likely lead to no answer because there simply isnt one, therefore the other questions we ask may be similarly futile.
Eastern society values right conduct, politeness and harmony with others and unlike the west are not affronted by their limitations but celebrate their humanness they see a person is only so through other people.
The east see things differently they focus on the space between things and are sensitive to changes in background whereas the west dont notice empty spaces as their focus is on the foreground.
Europe can be seen as an aggressive culture who sees other societies in decline or poorer and weaker than they, as they merit progress and individualistic advancement and yet it is due to this that we will likely kill ourselves off with consequences such as climate change.
The west rejects the importance of theology and how religious buildings are machines for people to think.
Eastern cultures may lack technological and societal advancement but they can be argued to be superior due to their capacity for sustainable survival.
The western mind is dichotomous and inflexible in its thinking and the antagonistic spirit of enquiry antithetical to cooperation and seeking common ground it is focussed on winning arguments often to a cavalier ilk.
There is often a common sense approach that distrusts intellectuals and has popular discontent with elites.
The focus on democracy and where the majority vote is the truth often illustrates groupthink and mediocracy and explains why communism never prospers.
That said, corrupt people are tolerated if they are capable of moving things forward as virtue which bears no fruits is useless.
Westerners enjoy thinking for themselves as this makes them feel they have a freedom to direct their own lives whereas Easterners have a fatalism in relation to karma.
The west are the truth seekers who are not satisfied with conceptual vagueness whereas the east are the way seekers who believe skills come from practise and cannot simply be conveyed by instruction.
A very thought provoking book however it was very dense and somewhat superfluous at times the start is better than the end.
There have been few times I've clicked the "five star" option as quickly as for this book.
'How the World Thinks' has moved me in ways I did not anticipate through shining a light on philosophies from East Asia to the subcontinent of India and from the Islamic world to Western philosophy.
It included a very neat distinction between European and American philosophy I did not see coming but phrased all the floating ideas I had about why NorthAmerica and the US in particular occasionally confuses me to no end.


This book connected all these different strains of philosophy not forgetting oral histories from around the world by focusing on a few key questions when trying to figure out "how the world thinks".
It helped me start to understand other cultures and gave me a newfound perspective on my own.
In short: it has "wow'ed" me and I highly recommend it,

Quote from the very end of the book:
"Inattention to the peculiarities of a philosophy's own place and to philosophy in other places confuses the admirable aspiration for greater objectivity with a misguided ideal of placeless universality.
Ideas are neither tightly tethered to specific cultures nor freefloating, universal and placeless, Like people, they are formed by a culture but can travel, If we truly aspire to a more objective understanding of the world, we have to make use of the advantages to be gained by occupying different intellectual places.
Doing so with reverence but not deference to the past and present of other cultures could help us transform our own philosophical landscapes.
" I so wanted to learn from this book Understanding philosophies from around the world sounded quite interesting and it grabbed my attention at the bookstore and no doubt the authors experience is extensive, but the writing just didnt invite me in to learn and understand.
To be fair, i enjoyed a number of parts of the books, such as the chapter on Japanese relational self and the anecdotes that illustrate it.
But he jumps around way too much for me and I found myself skimming more often than I prefer.
A comparison of western and eastern philosophy highlighting strengths and weaknesses of respective beliefs, I found it a great look at multiple philosophies for a first time reader of any philosophy book.
Don't expect an ultimate conclusion on what to believe but convincing case for the idea that our western philosophy isn't the most superior
How The World Thinks by Julian Baggini is subtitled “A global history of philosophy”.
I was expecting a crosscultural, militiasfaith tour of the topic, rather like Bertrand Russells History of Western Philosophy without the direction.
What Julian Baggini has assembled here, however, is something that initially surprised, but later rather disappointed as a result of a necessity to revisit similar concepts repeatedly.


So what exactly is How The World Thinks Well, it is something like a tour brochure for the philosopher of the history of ethics and morals, both geographically and through time.
Organized thematically, rather than by author, culture or history, its chapters deal with concepts such as logic, time, unity, virtue and impartiality, quoting and contrasting ideas from Western philosophy alongside examples from other cultural and religious traditions, especially Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Muslim, and Shinto, and occasionally from oral perspectives.
The result is always interesting, but also sometimes frustrating in that ideas presented do sometimes become a procession, the lack of critical discussion takes most that is offered as read and without critical analysis of the messages from the banners carried by the protagonists.
There is also, sometimes for this reader, too much condescension to the arbitrary assumptions that underpin religions.
Overall, How The World Thinks would not be of much interest to logical positivists!

Personally, I have a problem with the interface between religion and philosophy.
For me there always seems to be a leap of faith rather obvious isnt it that precludes serious critical analysis.
“We dont all die” were the words of a broadcast bishop recently in the United Kingdom, implying that those of a good life equals conforms to his interpreted prescriptions will be saved for all eternity.
This is not bad for a faith that promises to respect and deal equally with all humanity.
Of course, there is individual behavior to be accounted for, but the implication of the bishops words are that anyone who is perfectly faithful but not a Christian will be excluded from eternal life an ambition which, it has to be said, has not one iota of evidence to suggest it might exist

I have digressed to illustrate a major frustration with How The World Thinks.
Throughout, I wanted the descriptions of other cultures and other religions ideas to be addressed critically, but throughout they were merely cataloged.
Its interesting and engaging and indeed informative, to such an extent that I would recommend the book to anyone interested in the subject.
It is always easy to criticize something for what it is not,

Julian Bagginis explanation of Yin Yang, for instance, is a beautiful account of how these colloquial opposites are in fact complementary.
Bagginis quotes about the esoteric and exoteric in relation to Islam makes sense only to a believer: to a rationalist it is entirely the wrong way around.
Elsewhere discussion of a compromise between extremes is marred by a misinterpretation of the meaning of the mathematical average.
And late in the book, dealing with impartiality, when Baggini says that the Western tradition does not look kindly on those in public life who make advantageous space for members of the family, he ignores the fact that unless the family of an American president, it seems, are exempt.


Overall How The World Thinks does what it says and despite its being rarely analytical, it is always informative, especially in relation to the Confucian and Hindu philosophies.
It is a strange irony that at the beginning of this book Baggini points out that there are many cultures which have no need for secular philosophy.
Many languages didn't organically develop a word for it until it was imported from the West and their homegrown scholars follow "philosophical" traditions that don't meet the purity test of philosophy being too close to theology.
This raises the interesting question of whether modern secular philosophy actually has a history at all in any part of the world, let alone a global one.
Have societies really tolerated such useless spongers for,years or were the schools of Athens and the great thinkers in other cultures preEnlightenment doing something fundamentally different to today's philosophy departments

The answer would appear to be the latter and whilst

Baggini tries to downplay the practical and theological aspects in the work of, say, Aristotle, it rapidly becomes obvious that modern Western philosophy has sprouted from the impractical and useless results of the pursuit of technical knowledge science, higher purpose in life theology and community cohesion traditional stories amongst others it comes from the deadends of intellectualism if you will.
Things which had practical application eg capitalism or psychoanalysis rapidly disassociated themselves from philosophy and the narrow, inflexible, arbitrary constraints of axioms, propositions and inductive reasoning i.
e. rationality.

Whilst navelgazing has a long tradition cf the book of Ecclesiastes, it clearly hadn't been tolerated by any society on a large scale until the wealth and abundance ofth century Europe allowed such wasters to make a living spouting drivel of no practical use to anyone.
I'm heartened to read that many societies reject secular philosophising even to this day and can only hope that in the West we will also come to our collective senses and realise that it is a fool's errand to derive meaning or anything of practical benefit to the world by reason and/or logic alone.
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