World of Patterns by Rens Bod

World of Patterns by Rens Bod

A comprehensive account of the methods of knowledge production throughout human history and across the globe. The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights—it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles began 40,000 years ago, when striped patterns were engraved on mammoths' bones to keep track of the moon's phases. What routes did human knowledge take to grow from these humble beginnings through many detours and dead ends into modern understandings of nature and culture? In this work of unprecedented scope, Rens Bod removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to bring us the first global history of human knowledge. Having sketched the history of the humanities in his ground-breaking A New History of the Humanities, Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity back to the Stone Age to answer the question: Where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? Drawing on developments from all five continents of the inhabited world, World of Patterns offers startling connections. Focusing on a dozen fields—ranging from astronomy, philology, medicine, law, and mathematics to history, botany, and musicology—Bod examines to what degree their progressions can be considered interwoven and to what degree we can speak of global trends. In this pioneering work, Bod aims to fulfill what he sees as the historian's responsibility: to grant access to history's goldmine of ideas. Bod discusses how inoculation was invented in China rather than Europe; how many of the fundamental aspects of modern mathematics and astronomy were first discovered by the Indian Kerala school; and how the study of law provided fundamental models for astronomy and linguistics from Roman to Ottoman times. The book flies across continents and eras. The result is an enlightening symphony, a stirring chorus of human inquisitiveness extending through the ages.

World of Patterns is an impressive work, not only thanks to its truly global grasp but also because it spans huge periods of time, from the Paleolithic to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and furthermore because it covers a wide variety of knowledge fields, from the natural sciences to the human sciences—among them astronomy, mathematics, medicine, history, philology, linguistics, literary sciences, and jurisprudence
—Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society

Rens Bod is a professor of digital humanities at the University of Amsterdam and the president of the Society for the History of the Humanities. He is the author of A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781421443447
ISBN 10	1421443449
Title	World of Patterns
Author	Rens Bod
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Johns Hopkins University Press
Year published	2022-07-05
Number of pages	400
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.