How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy

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In this global overview of philosophy, Julian Baggini travels the world to provide a wide-ranging map of human thought, exploring the philosophies of Japan, India, China and the Muslim world, as well as the lesser-known oral traditions of Africa and Australia’s first peoples. Interviewing thinkers from around the globe, Baggini asks questions such as: why is the West is more individualistic than the East? What makes secularism a less powerful force in the Islamic world than in Europe? And how has China resisted pressures for greater political freedom? Offering deep insights into how different regions operate, and paying as much attention to commonalities as to differences, Baggini shows that by gaining greater knowledge of how others think we take the first step to a greater understanding of ourselves. This approach gives the book a less well structured, more journalistic feel, than a clear exposition of different schools of thought, and Baggini also includes excerpts from interviews with a lot of experts. Julian Baggini sets out to expand our horizons in How the World Thinks, exploring the philosophies of Japan, India, China and the Muslim world, as well as the lesser-known oral traditions of Africa and Australia’s first peoples. Interviewing thinkers from around the globe, Baggini asks questions such as: why is the West is more individualistic than the East? What makes secularism a less powerful force in the Islamic world than in Europe? And how has China resisted pressures for greater political freedom?

How the World Thinks | Granta

It's incredibly well written and easy to digest, but you will surely have to stop and do a lot of side reading given the amazing interest of so many of the perspectives discussed. At 20 we don’t care what the world thinks of us; at 30 we worry about what it thinks of us; at 40 we discover it doesn’t think of us.

At age 20, we worry about what others think of us. At 40, we don’t care what they think of us. At 60, we discover they haven’t been thinking about us at all. You all have heard what the educated Bellario has written. And I assume this is the lawyer coming now. It sounds weird when we break it down like that, but actually, to the Irish, the Toy Show is just as traditional as our Christmas tree. 5. Putting a ring inside a cake – our favourite Halloween cake Credit: Reddit / bigbob7567 There are a few reasons to read this moderately-sized work from Julian Baggini on philosophy from around the globe, and a few more reasons not to read it.

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Abroad, few were convinced. In Spain, El País noted Johnson appeared to have undergone something of a Damascene conversion to environmentalism since the days when “as a provocative political columnist for the Daily Telegraph, he flirted with a rather loutish kind of climate change denialism”. The idea that understanding was good for its own sake emerged in the West as part of the growth of science, which was still often known as natural philosophy until the late 19th century. Henri Poincaré, for example, advocated “science for its own sake”, saying, “Science has wonderful applications; but the science which would have in view only applications would no longer be science – it would only be the kitchen. There is no science but disinterested science.” He argued that all the hard work of scientists was “for seeing’s sake; or at the very least that others may one day see”. In this Poincaré was self-consciously evoking a tradition in Western thought of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, which he perhaps incorrectly thought was fully formed in antiquity. “The spirit which should animate the man of science is that which breathed of old on Greece and brought there to birth poets and thinkers.” All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited. Dear Quote Investigator: One’s sensitivity to the opinions of others often changes as one matures. The following statement has been attributed to statesman Winston Churchill: The book is replete with facile generalisations, e.g. the reference to extreme deference by Indians to authority which is contrasted with Western notions of argument and debate, all based on his experience in one conference. If Baggini had looked beyond his narrow view to the writings of historians and sociologists, it is the argumentative nature of Indians that has led to its amazing diversity. Amartya Sen, the Nobel-prize winning Indian economist, illustrated this in his book 'The Argumentative Indian'.

Ann Wroe

On the latter point, this isn't a book that is slowly building a coherent argument. Each chapter just dips into a lot of different ideas, but doesn't attempt to draw everything together into any pithy over-arching thought.

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The term 'Indian philosophy' is misleading, though to be fair it is also used by many Indians. The correct term is Vedic philosphy, for two reasons: it is found in many other countries in South and South-East Asia. Secondly, there are other philosophies in India including Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, Sikh etc.At the heart of our company is a global online community, where millions of people and thousands of political, cultural and commercial organisations engage in a continuous conversation about their beliefs, behaviours and brands. The book as a whole represents a covert plea for dialogue, compromise and humility. Time and again, Baggini exhorts us to follow the middle path between extremes, a principle that he sees as central to the philosophy of both Aristotle and Confucius. Sometimes these extremes map on to geography, as when he proposes that “it should be possible to avoid the excesses” of western “atomism without adopting wholesale an eastern-style relational conception of self”. But more often than not, what he advocates is simply a rebalancing, via greater self-consciousness about our moral choices. You may have good reasons for choosing personal freedom over obligation to the collective – but other ethical options are available.