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Forerunners of Darwin, 1745-1859

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This is not the kind of book that I feel I need to know everything it has to appreciate intellectual history. I like the chapters by Arthur O. Lovejoy on Kant and Herder for showing how leading scholars play around with leading ideas without making a commitment. Kant was key to setting limits on knowledge. One example that is not part of this book is Kant's method of keeping the supernatural at arm's length in Kant On Swedenborg, a translation of Kant's work and letters on someone who had the knowledge of events he could not have known about before asked to get knowledge from another world that most of us do not experience. Kant clearly considered any change in a species out of the ordinary, so he openly expressed doubt about trying to imagine such things. Such limitations imposed by the times in which great thinkers helps me try to break free form the kind of thinking that put cyberpower mechanism in charge of global capital allocation just recently with results that were not too surprising to people who had the power to think about how things shuffling and shifting faster and more so from now on than ever before might not be the coolest thing since sliced bread.