How Do We Know: Advice for April

by Alan Macfarlane

All our knowledge is shaped by world views (paradigms, epistemes, weltanschauung) of which we are seldom aware. These systems of thought change in a dramatic way over time as a result of technological, political and intellectual revolutions. This book analyses the major paradigms in world history since Hunter-Gatherers up to the present. It examines oral, literate, axial, Renaissance, scientific, Enlightenment, evolutionary, modern and post-modern world views. It describes their major features and how the development of writing, printing, industrialism, imperialism and the Internet, among other great changes, have shaped the way we know - epistemology - over the last fifty thousand years.

136 pages, Paperback

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.