Adventure of the Human Intellect

"In 1946, a series of lectures by scholars affiliated with the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute were assembled into a volume titled The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. The lectures explored themes of intellectual history and the development of abstract reasoning among the Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Hebrews. In The Adventure of the Human Intellect, fourteen scholars, led by editor Kurt A. Raaflaub, engage with the themes of that nearly seventy year old volume to bring its ideas into the twenty-first century. This work offers a new appraoch to an old debate about the beginnings of intellectual history and rational thinking, bring to bear modern theoretical approaches, up-to-date evidence, and the results of recent scholarship. The work is broader in scope than the 1946 original, including a discussion of civilizations from both the Old and New Worlds. It examines the worldviews of ten ancient or early societies, reconstructed from their own texts, concerning the place of human beings in society and state, in nature and cosmos, in space and time, in life and death, and in relation to those in power and the world of the divine, and illuminates a wide array of responses to particular environments, circumstances and challenges. The Adventure of the Human Intellect focuses on ancient responses to widely differing conditions, as they manifest in social practices and cultural products, and in which relationships between religions, sciBack cover.