History of Medicine and Healing from Antiquity to the Present Day

Does a person have free will? How real is the world around us? And what exactly did Thomas Aquinas manage to substantiate? This book is a gripping guide to the history of ideas: each chapter carries the reader into a different era and sets before them a new intellectual puzzle.

Beauty and morality, ideals and logic, happiness and truth do not exist without a human being—they are born in the consciousness of whoever looks at and evaluates. Perhaps there is no material world itself either—just as there may be no person; both could turn out to be only a dream, a mirage. And yet, God exists—this, as is claimed, back in the 13th century was proved by Thomas Aquinas—and freedom, many believe, is merely an appearance…

Philosophers have offered a wide variety of explanations for reality, and most of them are gathered in these pages by the British science popularizer Tom Jackson. For him, the history of philosophy is a hundred steps from Antiquity to relatively recent times: a hundred chapters on key ideas and discoveries. And also—questions without final answers, portraits of thinkers, the main lines of thought, important quotations, and a detailed chronology of the development of science.