History

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a successful and established historian cum author. He has penned down more than twenty five books which have also been translated in over twenty two languages. If students are looking for the true story of the evolution in the past, The World History Combined Volume is one history that will fulfill this purpose. This book not only shows the world but does so from different aspects such as through a holistic, truly attractive narration, the elementary connections between environment and the people. The able author Armesto will help students not only in learning the global history but also helps educators around the world in teaching history.
Axial age coupled with the secularism is another way of describing the transformation of the modern world. In literary terms, Axial means forming an axis and apparently not all but most of the philosophies and religions taught in the axial age are continuing in the modern world as well that is why it is sometimes referred to as the axis age. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is educated in the striking similarities among a disparate group of sages who shaped theological and philosophical teachings.  The best ideas are old. We have added deplorably little to humankinds stock of thoughts in the past 2,000 years. We still turn for worldly guidance to Confucius, to Buddha for a sense of the transcendent, to Aristotle for clear rules of thought. We still abide by the moral teachings of the rabbinical tradition that culminated in Jesus Christ. Our philosophers write footnotes to Plato. Between them, the sages of the first millennium BC came up with ideas as influential as to justify a term that has become popular with scholars the axial age.

But how can one eradicate or remove the originality of the philosophies presented by Aristotle, Plato, and Thucydides Armesto in many ways tries to do this. He pulverizes these philosophies, applies different approaches, and analyzes these philosophies, otherwise recognized for its actually indifferent style of coherent presentation, with Chinese and Indian and also cultic, inexplicable thoughts and feelings and all within one but not so very organized chapter number 6 entitled The Great Schools. (Felipe, 158)

Discussion of the Axial Age is one of the most provocative topics in this book.  Armesto, however, in the second edition misses the former lengthy versions but still signifies the  astonishing attainments of the thinkers discussed above who have shaped the conversations according to what our world looks like today.  His comparison of environments gives a handful of thoughts as can be seen in his analysis of why the Sahel fails to play the same role in Africa as done in Eurasia. In an examination of the various societies namely Southwest, Mississippian, Norse Greenlander and Mayan societies, their problems in escalating into new ecological functions which are compared with the more triumphant hard works of various Eurasian citizens during the 11th and 12th centuries and with the Inuit.

The age was axial, too, because the regions in which the thought of the sages unfolded lay, axis-like, across Eurasia. China, India, Greece and southwest Asia were the linked locations in which axial thinking happened. The religious leaders of the time founded traditions of such power that they have huge followings to this day. The secular sages ran out, as if with their fingernails, grooves of logic and science in which people still think. They raised problems of human nature -and of how we can devise appropriate social and political solutions -that still preoccupy us and because much of their teaching found disciples who wrote it down, a body of texts survived to become reference points for subsequent study. Monotheism, republicanism, legalism, rationalism, logic, science, skepticism, the worlds most enduring religions and ethical systems -the tally of new thinking in the axial age looks impressive by any standards, but especially so in the light of its legacy to us.