Any way you read his outline, though, it's quite brilliant. Of course I could have read it in order, as Tarnas wrote it, with a fine, clear linearity straight from Greece to post-post-everything, but that's not the way that the collective unconscious of the western world has collaged these ideas together. Richard Tarnas is a Harvard-educated historian and professor of philosophy and psychology, and the author of The Passion of the Western Mind.In 2006 he published Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, which received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network in the UK. The Passion Of The Western Mind: Understanding The Ideas That Have Shaped Our Wo Richard Tarnas, Beyond The Scoreboard: Examining Teamwork, Tension, And Triumph In High School AthleticsJohn P.

It was a best seller and is still widely used in universities today. I finished that extended session somewhere round the Newtonian revision of physical laws, and had to go and lie down, brain fizzing too much. Tarnas, a respected scholar and cultural historian, wrote his first book, The Passion of the Western Mind, in 1991. It's irresistible to dip in to double check on exactly what were the original classical neoplatonist beliefs, then follow the index to my hero Marsilio Ficino (Renaissance humanist philosopher, reviver of neoplatonism and the motivator of Botticelli), then absentmindedly amble along into some of the practical reasons for the change of consciousness (artillery clock compass) in western thought during Botticelli's working lifetime. I never thought before that a modular approach to a subject – every section kept firmly within its brief allotment of pages – was any way to learn, but Tarnas redeems modularity.

Tarnas passion of the western mind