A Passing Knowledge: A Field Guide to the Ideas Everyone Around You Seems to Have Read - Couverture souple

Dalton, Sam

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798174046351

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

There is a moment about forty minutes into a party when a conversation drifts somewhere you cannot follow. A novel you have not read. A philosopher named in passing. A physics idea turned into a slogan. You know the words. You could not build a useful sentence from them.

This book is for that moment.

A Passing Knowledge is a working map of the ideas that educated people keep bringing up. Philosophy, quiet Eastern traditions, psychology, physics and evolution, literature, art and music, politics, money and the climate. Fifty short chapters, each built the same way. The idea itself, with the complication that usually gets left out. A name and a date, held lightly. A sentence you could say if it genuinely belongs in the room. A question worth asking. And the trap, the point where a familiar version becomes too easy or simply wrong.

Sam Dalton writes as a working reader rather than a specialist. Offshore supervisor, Open University psychology graduate, dyslexic latecomer to reading. The tone is direct and unshowy. Nothing here is padded to sound clever. The aim is not to help you win an argument. It is to help you listen properly, ask a better question, and go and read the book the idea came from if it interests you.

Inside you will find:

Plato's cave without the greeting card version. Nietzsche past the T shirt slogan. The Tao Te Ching, the I Ching and the raft of the Buddha, treated as thinking traditions rather than décor. Freud's actual survivors. The half second before you decided. Entropy without the messy flat metaphor. Schrödinger's cat as the joke it was meant to be. Tragedy as a machine for pity and fear. Duchamp's urinal. Rothko's rooms. Keynes, Hayek and the mathematics of trust. Climate done properly.

Two kitchen table interludes. An appendix called The Party Survival Kit. A reading list that respects your time.

Read it in order. Or open it where a conversation left you standing at the edge.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798174046351
• Reliure: Paperback
• Nombre de pages: 224
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible