Doubt: A History

"Hecht gleefully invites readers on a lively stroll through three millennia of clashes between believers and nonbelievers" ( Detroit Free Press ). "Jennifer Hect's romp—lighthearted but serious—brings to life an awesome array of figures in philosophy, science, and literature, in a way that is wonderfully engaging." —Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States In the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn to Decadence, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Jennifer Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind especially—from Socrates to Galileo and Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking. This is an account of the world's greatest "intellectual virtuosos," who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning, This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists. "A magisterial book. . . . Hect's poetical prose beautifully dramatizes the struggle between belief and denial. . . . The breadth of this work is stunning." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Hecht is right that doubt's story deserves to be told . . .[and] she tells it in just the right spirit. . . . Hecht is the rare doubter who can simultaneously disagree with people of faith while granting them respect and taking their ideas seriously." — New Republic