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Full Idea
For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another, …and the only machine capable of performing energy conversion was the body.
Gist of Idea
For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another
Source
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 17 'Intro')
Book Ref
Harari,Yuval Noah: 'Sapiens: a brief history of Humankind' [Vintage 2014], p.375
A Reaction
Hence the huge and revolutionary importance of the steam engine and the electricity generator.
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| 7504 | Modern science comes from Descartes' view that knowledge doesn't need moral purity [Descartes, by Foucault] |
| 19635 | Hegel produced modern optimism; he failed to grasp that consciousness never progresses [Hegel, by Cioran] |
| 7662 | Romanticism is the greatest change in the consciousness of the West [Berlin] |
| 8060 | In the 17th-18th centuries morality offered a cure for egoism, through altruism [MacIntyre] |
| 8021 | The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality [MacIntyre] |
| 8092 | Logic was merely a branch of rhetoric until the scientific 17th century [Devlin] |
| 9307 | Modern Western culture suddenly appeared in Jena in the 1790s [Svendsen] |
| 19648 | Since Kant we think we can only access 'correlations' between thinking and being [Meillassoux] |
| 19674 | The Copernican Revolution decentres the Earth, but also decentres thinking from reality [Meillassoux] |
| 21855 | Only in the 1780s did it become acceptable to read Spinoza [Lord] |
| 20678 | The Scientific Revolution was the discovery of our own ignorance [Harari] |
| 20686 | For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another [Harari] |