A History of Knowledge

Van Doren — the editor who worked with Mortimer Adler on How to Read a Book and on the Britannica’s Great Books apparatus — compresses the whole story of Western knowing into one volume: what the ancients knew, what the Middle Ages preserved and lost, what the scientific revolution changed about the method of knowing, and how knowledge industrialised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The last section turns forward and guesses at what the next century will know that we do not.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s first section is the history of human civilization read as a single arc, and this is the survey version of that arc — the one-volume orientation a reader takes before the specialist histories later in the list.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the Himalaya Capital bibliography — 137 entries across six numbered sections. Kyle saved it as two X posts that between them photographed only the value-investing section; this entry came from the source PDF. Li Lu lists it as Ballantine Books, 1992.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Charles Van Doren — the author.
• Knowledge — the subject, taken as a historical object rather than a state.