How do we know?

by Alan Macfarlane

We often tend to believe that we can understand the world around us by just applying our eyes and ears to what is happening. In fact, our knowledge is filtered through many cultural and intellectual forces which shape our understanding. This short book looks at changing world views and paradigms over the last ten thousand years, from oral hunter gatherers to twenty-first century social media. It shows some of the effects of the Axial Age, Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and Evolutionism. This is done through a broad comparison of the East and the West.

98 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 3, 2014

About the author

Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.