How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking

Written by Aristotle

Narrated by Shaun Grindell

What we can learn about fostering innovation and creative thinking from some of the most inventive people of all times-the ancient Greeks.

When it comes to innovation and creative thinking, we are still catching up with the ancient Greeks. Between 800 and 300 BCE, they changed the world with astonishing inventions-democracy, the alphabet, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematical proof, rational medicine, coins, architectural canons, drama, lifelike sculpture, and competitive athletics. None of this happened by accident. Recognizing the power of the new and trying to understand and promote the conditions that make it possible, the Greeks were the first to write about innovation and even the first to record a word for forging something new. In short, the Greeks "invented" innovation itself-and they still have a great deal to teach us about it.

How to Innovate is an engaging and entertaining introduction to key ideas about-and examples of-innovation and creative thinking from ancient Greece. Armand D'Angour provides lively new translations of selections from Aristotle, Diodorus, and Athenaeus. These writings illuminate and illustrate timeless principles of creating something new-borrowing or adapting existing ideas or things, cross-fertilizing disparate elements, or criticizing and disrupting current conditions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Translator: Armand D'Angour
• Release date: Nov 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781696606899

Aristotle

Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist whose works have profoundly influenced philosophical discourse and scientific investigation from the later Greek period through to modern times. A student of Plato, Aristotle’s writings cover such disparate topics as physics, zoology, logic, aesthetics, and politics, and as one of the earliest proponents of empiricism, Aristotle advanced the belief that people’s knowledge is based on their perceptions. In addition to his own research and writings, Aristotle served as tutor to Alexander the Great, and established a library at the Lyceum. Although it is believed that only a small fraction of his original writings have survived, works such as The Art of Rhetoric, Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics, and Metaphysics have preserved Aristotle’s legacy and influence through the ages.