Upcoming Events

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A Brief History of Western Thought

at Kosmos Institute

Warm holiday greetings, friends. I have been invited by the Kosmos Institute to offer a nine-week online seminar on the history of the Western mind and spirit, from the ancient Greek to the postmodern and beyond, based on my book The Passion of the Western Mind. The course begins soon, on January 10, and will involve a live weekly lecture followed by informal discussion. Participants will have about eight pages of reading to do per day. No papers or tests, just learning and reflection.

In the course of these two months we will explore the major eras, thinkers, and movements whose impact has deeply shaped our current world: Homer and Plato, Judaism and Christianity, the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and onward to our own dramatic time. World views create worlds. Knowing their origins can help us create a better future. 

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The Passion of the Western Mind

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Passion

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“The most lucid and concise presentation I have read, of the grand lines of what every student should know about the history of Western thought. The writing is elegant and carries the reader with the momentum of a novel… It is really a noble performance.”
—Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces

“The best intellectual history of the West in one volume I have ever seen.”
—Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions

“It is a superb, enthralling book—a masterpiece: as gripping as a detective story; as moving as a poem. Tarnas writes lucidly, brilliantly, passionately, unfolding the great drama of the evolution of the Western mind act by act, scene by scene in precise and scholarly detail.”
—Anne Baring, Resurgence

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Cosmos and Psyche

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“It is hard to think of many books written in the past century that will still be read two hundred years from now. Cosmos and Psyche will top that short list. It is majestic, sweeping, and profound. This will be a book for the ages. It will stand over time with the seminal expressions of the human spirit.”
—William Van Dusen Wishard, author of Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and The Crisis of Meaning

“Cosmos and Psyche is an epoch-making work. It combines impeccably meticulous scholarship and extraordinary clarity of thinking and writing with deep creative vision. The evidence contained here represents the most significant challenge I have seen to the materialistic paradigm of modern science.”
—Stanislav Grof, author of Psychology of the Future

“This is the closest my head has been to exploding while reading a book.”
—Mary Hynes, CBC Tapestry

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