Structure of Intellectual Evolution

A monumental history of human knowledge from the ancient world to the Enlightenment

The Structure of Intellectual Evolution challenges the widely held belief that humanity's most transformative intellectual advances resulted from dramatic ruptures with tradition, revealing instead how our greatest breakthroughs emerged from established systems of learning. It tells the stories of the people and institutions behind these changes, from the scribes of ancient Mesopotamia and the philologists of Alexandria to the astronomers of the Islamic world and the logicians of the medieval university. This sweeping, multifaceted history culminates in the Europe of Erasmus, Galileo, and Newton, offering bold new perspectives on the intellectual transformations of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

Dmitri Levitin takes us into temples, madrasas, universities, and other institutions of learning to show how new knowledge was anchored in educational practices and how those practices structured intellectual change. Spanning both the sciences and the humanitiesfrom alchemy to anatomy, grammar to geologyhe sheds light on the social and ideological forces that stimulated inquiry and gave rise to new ways of thinking that took on a life of their own.

A dazzling tour de force from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, The Structure of Intellectual Evolution reframes our understanding of human knowledge, showing how its gradual advance was rooted in established educational institutions and scholarly traditions.