The Greatest Thinkers - the thirty minds that shaped our civilisation
Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicolson London
Year Published: 1976
There is nothing more powerful than an idea in the mind of man. At some point
in time the thinking of a single man puts things together a new way and an
idea is born. That idea can change the world and the lives of everyone
living in the world. Something as insubstantial as thinking, someone as
unimportant as a single person can have this effect. That is the fascination
of thinking and ideas.
This book is about the greatest thinkers - the minds that have shaped our
civilisation. Essays on thirty great thinkers - de Bono's individual selection -
are set in the context of the history of Western thought. From Moses,
through such divere figures as Jesus, Columbus, Descartes, Marx and Freud,
to Sartre, the book ranges across the wide field of human achievment and perhaps
surprisingly includes few philosophers. A particularly original feature of
the book is the visualisation of each thinker's achievment and the way
it changed the existing line of thought. The book is fully illustrated with
portraits and other documentary material.
With 100 black and white illustrations and 30 diagrams.
The thirty people in the book
Moses, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Jesus,
Augustine, Aquinas, Columbus, Machiavelli, Copernicus, Luther,
Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Rousseau, Kant, Malthus,
Clausewitz, Darwin, Marx, Clerk Maxwell, William Jaems, Nietzsche,
Pavlov, Freud, Einstein, Keynes, Wiener and Sartre.
Further reading
Tony Buzan's Book of Genius (1994) follows a similar style of choosing
significant people and analysing their characteristics.
Updated: Thursday, 19 April 2001
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