The Passion of the Western Mind

A single-volume narrative of Western thought from ancient Greece to the late twentieth century, written for students and general readers. Tarnas tells the story in large movements. He begins with the Greek world view, from myth through the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools, then shows how Christianity absorbed and transformed classical thought in the medieval synthesis. The modern world view follows: the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, Descartes's division of mind from matter, and the critical turn of Hume and Kant, leading to the secular, disenchanted outlook of modern science. A section on the postmodern mind traces how confidence in a single objective truth broke down. In an epilogue Tarnas reads the whole story as a dialectic in which an increasingly autonomous, rational Western mind separated itself from nature, and calls for a participatory way of knowing that would heal the split. Critics have found that closing thesis speculative, while the historical chapters stand on their own.

It gives a connected picture of how Western ideas about knowledge, God and nature changed over 2,500 years, and provokes reflection on where modern thought has left us.