The Two Greatest Ideas

Book excerpt: "In The Two Greatest Ideas, Linda Zagzebski tells the history of two hugely impactful ideas and their crucial role in shaping human culture over the last two thousand years. These ideas, Zagzebski argues, underlie virtually all of the intellectual innovations of human civilization, yet are so simple they are almost invisible. The first idea is that the human mind is capable of grasping the universe. The second is that the human mind is capable of grasping itself. Based on a series of lectures given in 2018 at Soochow University, Zagzebski offers an ambitious, big-history narrative of the emergence and influence of these two ideas and the tension and conflict between them. The idea that the human mind can grasp the universe had a significant influence on culture in many parts of the world in the first millennium BCE, giving rise to physics, mathematics, philosophy, and most major religions. In the early modern period, however, particularly in the West, the idea that the human mind can grasp itself supplanted some of the wider focus and popularity of the idea that human mind can grasp the universe, revealing something important was missing, namely, the subjectivity of minds. This transformation was reflected in radical changes in philosophy, political thought, art, literature, religion, and science. In this book, Zagzebski provides a new frame for understanding the intellectual underpinnings of Western culture and thought through an illuminating exploration of the history and contemporary legacy of these two great ideas (including reflections on their history in Eastern thought). Zagzebski also reveals the deep roots of some familiar divisions in contemporary culture (e.g. autonomy versus harmony, and rights versus responsibilities) as they relate to the great ideas. The book then concludes with a discussion of what reconciling the two great ideas might entail, including the possibility of a third great idea"--