Macat

English naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The idea of evolution and that all earth's species have descended from a common ancestor had already been around for some time. What was new about Darwin's work was that it found a way to explain evolution using a theory called natural selection. This claimed that species change in small ways, gradually, over long periods of time; the individuals who...

Aristotle wrote Nicomachean Ethics in Greece in the fourth century b.c.e., a period of extraordinary all-round intellectual development. He was a student of Plato, who in turn was a student of Socrates. Aristotle went on to teach the warrior and empire builder, Alexander the Great. More than two millennia later, Aristotle's thorough exploration of virtue, reason, and the ultimate human good still forms the basis of the values that lie at the heart...

Northern Irish academic, novelist, and broadcaster C. S. Lewis's 1943 philosophical work The Abolition of Man is subtitled Reflections on Education With Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. It is about the power of education to shape the minds of individuals and improve society (or harm it, if badly done), and encompasses everything from the scientific worldview at the time to philosophical arguments about right...

It was the vast frontier stretching out to the west of the developed land on the North American continent that shaped the American character-and the course of US history. That's the argument in historian Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Anthologized and reprinted many times, it gave historians a new lens with which to analyze the United States. Turner argues that in interacting with both...

In his 1997 work Theology of Discontent, Iranian American Hamid Dabashi suggests that the Iranian Revolution of 1978—9 would not have happened had it not been for the influential ideas of eight Iranian Islamic thinkers in the four decades before it occurred. Dabashi surveys these thinkers' contributions to the development of Iran's system of Islamic beliefs. He says this ideology was shaped both according to Iranians' perception of themselves and...

Edited and produced from the lecture notes of his students at the University of Geneva, Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics was first published in 1916, three years after his death. The book aims to explain Saussure's theory that all languages share an underlying structure, and that this underlying structure is the same, regardless of historical or cultural context. Although the book marked a break with the traditional, history-focused...

Albert Hourani's 1991 work, A History of the Arab Peoples, is unsurpassed as an overview of Arab history, from the rise of Islam to the late twentieth century. Going far beyond the political history that had generally characterized previous examinations, Hourani integrates a wide range of scholarship to provide a deep analysis of social, cultural, and economic structures. His interest in the everyday lives of Arab people and his desire to understand...