Habermas wrote much later (in 2008) that, at the time, the ceremony did not strike him as unusual but that, as the years passed, he came to the view that the form, place and progression of the service were odd. Frisch himself had drawn up the menu for the meal that followed.

The mourners were made up mostly of people who had little time for church and religion. The ashes will be strewn somewhere.’ Two friends spoke but there was no priest and no blessing. Peter’s in Zurich … for their permission to place the coffin in the church during our memorial service. It stated, among other things: ‘We let our nearest speak, and without an “amen”. The service began with Karin Pilliod, Frisch’s partner, reading out a brief declaration written by the deceased.

Peter’s Church in Zurich as long ago as April 9, 1991. In 2008 he wrote a celebrated essay, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age.’ The thrust of what he had to say first occurred to him after he had attended a memorial service for Max Frisch, the Swiss author and playwright, which was held in St. IDEAS: A HISTORY concentrates on the activities and achievements of philosophers, writers, artists, scientists, inventors, religious thinkers, poets, historians, jurists and dramatists, investigating how their ideas have shaped our lives and thinking.So far as I know, Jürgen Habermas set the ball rolling. All the obvious areas are tackled - the Ancient Greeks, Christian theology, the ideas of Jesus, astrological thought, the soul, the self, beliefs about the heavens, the ideas of Islam, the Crusades, humanism, the Renaissance, Gutenberg and the book, the scientific revolution, the age of discovery, Shakespeare, the idea of Revolution, the Romantic imagination, Darwin, imperialism, modernism, Freud right up to the present day and the internet. Looking at animal behaviour that appears to require some thought - tool-making, territoriality, counting, language (or at least sounds), pairbonding - Peter Watson moves on to the apeman and the development of simple ideas such as cooking, the earliest language, the emergence of family life. The book begins over a million years ago with a discussion of how the earliest ideas might have originated. In this hugely ambitious and exciting book Peter Watson tells the history of ideas from prehistory to the present day, leading to a new way of telling the history of the world.

Ideas a history peter watson