I think the book would have been crippled without it. Plus, even with those nonbelievers & skeptics I was familiar with (Lucretius, Montaigne, Spinoza, Cicero, Epicurus, Pliny, Gibbon, Paine, Jefferson, Bruno, etc.) she gave me whole new approaches and windows to see them through.įinally, Hecht also found an appropriate way to thread the Book of Job writer, Jesus, Buddha, Qohelet (wrote Ecclesiastes), etc., into the framework of doubt. I was very familiar with many of the doubters in Western and Classical traditions, but Hecht gave me a whole new group of Eastern, Jewish and Muslim doubters to get to know. It has given me a whole new group of thinkers and philosophers to examine. I felt myself slipping through the pages almost too fast. Strange to say, it was almost TOO readable. It examines the motives and believers and gives each its appropriate doubting due. It looks at doubt both from within and external to belief. It is a defense of doubt, a survey of doubt, a biography of doubters, a family tree of doubt's relatives. Hecht's historical survey of doubt is a lot of things and seems to do them all very well. ― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History “The history of doubt is not only a history of the denial of God it is also a history of those who have grappled with the religious questions and found the possibility of other answers.” This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists.
This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin-and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning, In the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn To Decadence, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind especially-from Socrates to Galileo and Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking.
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