Beyond Human Nature

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Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 1846145724
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (461 download)

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Book Synopsis Beyond Human Nature by : Jesse J. Prinz

Download or read book Beyond Human Nature written by Jesse J. Prinz and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative, revelatory tour de force, Jesse Prinz reveals how the cultures we live in - not biology - determine how we think and feel. He examines all aspects of our behaviour, looking at everything from our intellects and emotions, to love and sex, morality and even madness. This book seeks to go beyond traditional debates of nature and nurture. He is not interested in finding universal laws but, rather, in understanding, explaining and celebrating our differences. Why do people raised in Western countries tend to see the trees before the forest, while people from East Asia see the forest before the trees? Why, in South East Asia, is there a common form of mental illness, unheard of in the West, in which people go into a trancelike state after being startled? Compared to Northerners, why are people in the American South more than twice as likely to kill someone over an argument? And, above all, just how malleable are we? Prinz shows that the vast diversity of our behaviour is not engrained. He picks up where biological explanations leave off. He tells us the human story.

Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind

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Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393080439
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind by : Jesse J. Prinz

Download or read book Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind written by Jesse J. Prinz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A loud counterblast to the fashionable faith of our times: that human nature is driven by biology . . . urgent and persuasive.”—Sunday Times (London) In this era of genome projects and brain scans, it is all too easy to overestimate the role of biology in human psychology. But in this passionate corrective to the idea that DNA is destiny, Jesse Prinz focuses on the most extraordinary aspect of human nature: that nurture can supplement and supplant nature, allowing our minds to be profoundly influenced by experience and culture. Drawing on cutting-edge research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Prinz shatters the myth of human uniformity and reveals how our differing cultures and life experiences make each of us unique. Along the way he shows that we can’t blame mental illness or addiction on our genes, and that societal factors shape gender differences in cognitive ability and sexual behavior. A much-needed contribution to the nature-nurture debate, Beyond Human Nature shows us that it is only through the lens of nurture that the spectrum of human diversity becomes fully and brilliantly visible.

Conversations on Human Nature

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315431521
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (154 download)

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Book Synopsis Conversations on Human Nature by : Agustín Fuentes

Download or read book Conversations on Human Nature written by Agustín Fuentes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent empirical and philosophical research into the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, the origins of the mind/brain, and the development of human culture has sparked heated debates about what it means to be human and how knowledge about humans from the sciences and humanities should be understood. Conversations on Human Nature, featuring 20 interviews with leading scholars in biology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology, brings these debates to life for teachers, students, and general readers. The book-outlines the basic scientific, philosophical and theological issues involved in understanding human nature;-organizes material from the various disciplines under four broad headings: (1) evolution, brains and human nature; (2) biocultural human nature; (3) persons, minds and human nature, (4) religion, theology and human nature; -concludes with Fuentes and Visala's discussion of what researchers into human nature agree on, what they disagree on, and what we need to learn to resolve those differences.

The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317655567
Total Pages : 569 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy by : Richard Joyce

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy written by Richard Joyce and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-16 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the relation between contemporary academic philosophy and evolutionary theory has become ever more active, multifaceted, and productive. The connection is a bustling two-way street. In one direction, philosophers of biology make significant contributions to theoretical discussions about the nature of evolution (such as "What is a species?"; "What is reproductive fitness?"; "Does selection operate primarily on genes?"; and "What is an evolutionary function?"). In the other direction, a broader group of philosophers appeal to Darwinian selection in an attempt to illuminate traditional philosophical puzzles (such as "How could a brain-state have representational content?"; "Are moral judgments justified?"; "Why do we enjoy fiction?"; and "Are humans invariably selfish?"). In grappling with these questions, this interdisciplinary collection includes cutting-edge examples from both directions of traffic. The thirty contributions, written exclusively for this volume, are divided into six sections: The Nature of Selection; Evolution and Information; Human Nature; Evolution and Mind; Evolution and Ethics; and Evolution, Aesthetics, and Art. Many of the contributing philosophers and psychologists are international leaders in their fields.

What's Left of Human Nature?

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262549689
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis What's Left of Human Nature? by : Maria Kronfeldner

Download or read book What's Left of Human Nature? written by Maria Kronfeldner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges. Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development result from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether.

The Iconic Imagination

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1441151915
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)

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Book Synopsis The Iconic Imagination by : Douglas Hedley

Download or read book The Iconic Imagination written by Douglas Hedley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it merely an accident of English etymology that 'imagination' is cognate with 'image'? Despite the iconoclasm shared to a greater or lesser extent by all Abrahamic faiths, theism tends to assert a link between beauty, goodness and truth, all of which are viewed as Divine attributes. Douglas Hedley argues that religious ideas can be presented in a sensory form, especially in aesthetic works. Drawing explicitly on a Platonic metaphysics of the image as a bearer of transcendence, The Iconic Imagination shows the singular capacity and power of images to represent the transcendent in the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. In opposition to cold abstraction and narrow asceticism, Hedley shows that the image furnishes a vision of the eternal through the visible and temporal.

A Mind for Language

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108619932
Total Pages : 595 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (86 download)

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Book Synopsis A Mind for Language by : Harry van der Hulst

Download or read book A Mind for Language written by Harry van der Hulst and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-21 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrated with real-life examples throughout, this book provides a complete introduction to one of the most fundamental question about what it means to be human: how does human language arise in the mind? Theory is explained in an easy-to-understand way, making it accessible for students without a background in linguistics.

Problems of Living

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Publisher : Academic Press
ISBN 13 : 0323904394
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (239 download)

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Book Synopsis Problems of Living by : Dan J. Stein

Download or read book Problems of Living written by Dan J. Stein and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Problems of Living: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Cognitive-Affective Science addresses philosophical questions related to problems of living, including questions about the nature of the brain-mind, reason and emotion, happiness and suffering, goodness and truth, and the meaning of life. It draws on critical, pragmatic, and embodied realism as well as moral naturalism, and brings arguments from metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics together with data from cognitive-affective science. This multidisciplinary integrated approach provides a novel framework for considering not only the nature of mental disorders, but also broader issues in mental health, such as finding pleasure and purpose in life. Draws on the strongest aspects of polar positions in philosophy and psychiatry to help resolve important perennial debates in these fields Explores continuities between early philosophical work and current cognitive-affective sciences, including neuroscience and psychology Employs findings from modern cognitive-affective science to rethink key long-standing debates in philosophy and psychiatry Builds on work showing how mind is embodied in the brain, and embedded in society, to provide an integrated conceptual framework Assesses both the insights and the limitations of cognitive-affective science for addressing the big questions and hard problems of living

Verbs, Bones, and Brains

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Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268101175
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (681 download)

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Book Synopsis Verbs, Bones, and Brains by : Agustín Fuentes

Download or read book Verbs, Bones, and Brains written by Agustín Fuentes and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A benchmark collection of essays on the contemporary understanding of human nature. . . . [engaging] biology and anthropology to theology and philosophy.” —Robin W. Lovin, Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics emeritus, Southern Methodist University, author of What Do We Do When No One is Listening: Leading the Church in a Polarized Society The last few decades have seen an unprecedented surge of empirical and philosophical research into the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, the origins of the mind/brain, and human culture. This research has sparked heated debates about the nature of human beings and how knowledge about humans from the sciences and humanities should be properly understood. The goal of Verbs, Bones, and Brains: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Nature is to engage these themes and present current debates, discussions, and discourse for a range of readers. The contributors bring the discussion to life with key experts outlining major concepts paired with cross-disciplinary commentaries in order to create a novel approach to thinking about, and with, human natures. Throughout, they emphasize the importance of seeking a convergence in our views on human nature, despite metaphysical disagreements. They caution that if convergence eludes us and a common ground cannot be found, this is itself a relevant result: it would reveal to us how deeply our questions about ourselves are connected to our basic metaphysical assumptions. Instead, their focus is on how the interdisciplinary and possibly transdisciplinary conversation can be enhanced in order to identify and develop a common ground on what constitutes human nature. “A landmark volume. . . . It shows the fruitfulness of a mutually respectful and yet rigorous approach to cross-disciplinary engagement.” (William Storrar, Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, NJ, editor of A World for All?: Global Civil Society in Political Theory and Trinitarian Theology “Fascinating, well-organized, and well-edited.” —Choice

Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry

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Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1467447048
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (674 download)

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Book Synopsis Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry by : Robin W. Lovin

Download or read book Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry written by Robin W. Lovin and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-12 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a neuroscientist help a theologian interpret a medieval mystical text? Can a historian of religion help an anthropologist understand the effects of social cooperation on human evolution? Can a legal scholar and a theologian help each other think about how fear of God relates to respect for the law? In this volume leading scholars in ethics, theology, and social science sum up three years of study and conversation regarding the value of interdisciplinary theological inquiry. This is an essential and challenging collection for all who set out to think, write, teach, and preach theologically in the contemporary world. CONTRIBUTORS: John P. Burgess Peter Danchin Celia Deane-Drummond Agustín Fuentes Andrea Hollingsworth Robin W. Lovin Joshua Mauldin Friederike Nüssel Mary Ellen O'Connell Douglas F. Ottati Stephen Pope Colleen Shantz Michael Spezio

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315410079
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (154 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science by : Lee McIntyre

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science written by Lee McIntyre and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science is an outstanding guide to the major themes, movements, debates, and topics in the philosophy of social science. It includes thirty-seven newly written chapters, by many of the leading scholars in the field, as well as a comprehensive introduction by the editors. Insofar as possible, the material in this volume is presented in accessible language, with an eye toward undergraduate and graduate students who may be coming to some of this material for the first time. Scholars too will appreciate this clarity, along with the chance to read about the latest advances in the discipline. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science is broken up into four parts. Historical and Philosophical Context Concepts Debates Individual Sciences Edited by two of the leading scholars in the discipline, this volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of social science, and its many areas of connection and overlap with key debates in the philosophy of science.

Merleau-Ponty for Architects

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317291999
Total Pages : 134 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Merleau-Ponty for Architects by : Jonathan Hale

Download or read book Merleau-Ponty for Architects written by Jonathan Hale and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as informing renowned schools of architectural theory, notably those around Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Pérez-Gómez in North America and Juhani Pallasmaa in Finland. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the value of people’s experience of the world gained through their immediate bodily engagement with it remains greater than the value of understanding gleaned through abstract mathematical, scientific or technological systems. This book summarizes what Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has to offer specifically for architects. It locates architectural thinking in the context of his work, placing it in relation to themes such as space, movement, materiality and creativity, introduces key texts, helps decode difficult terms and provides quick reference for further reading.

Elusive Brain

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300235607
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Elusive Brain by : Jason Tougaw

Download or read book Elusive Brain written by Jason Tougaw and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring a foreword by renowned neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux, The Elusive Brain is an illuminating, comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. This fascinating book explores how literature interacts with neuroscience to provide a better understanding of the brain’s relationship to the self. Jason Tougaw surveys the work of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Siri Hustvedt, and Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay—analyzing the way they experiment with literary forms to frame new views of the immaterial experiences that compose a self. He argues that their work offers a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Building on recent scholarship, Tougaw’s evenhanded account will be an original contribution to the growing field of neuroscience and literature.

Dark Matter of the Mind

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022652678X
Total Pages : 395 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Dark Matter of the Mind by : Daniel L. Everett

Download or read book Dark Matter of the Mind written by Daniel L. Everett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-06 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it in our nature to be altruistic, or evil, to make art, use tools, or create language? Is it in our nature to think in any particular way? For Daniel L. Everett, the answer is a resounding no: it isn’t in our nature to do any of these things because human nature does not exist—at least not as we usually think of it. Flying in the face of major trends in Evolutionary Psychology and related fields, he offers a provocative and compelling argument in this book that the only thing humans are hardwired for is freedom: freedom from evolutionary instinct and freedom to adapt to a variety of environmental and cultural contexts. Everett sketches a blank-slate picture of human cognition that focuses not on what is in the mind but, rather, what the mind is in—namely, culture. He draws on years of field research among the Amazonian people of the Pirahã in order to carefully scrutinize various theories of cognitive instinct, including Noam Chomsky’s foundational concept of universal grammar, Freud’s notions of unconscious forces, Adolf Bastian’s psychic unity of mankind, and works on massive modularity by evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Jerry Fodor, and Steven Pinker. Illuminating unique characteristics of the Pirahã language, he demonstrates just how differently various cultures can make us think and how vital culture is to our cognitive flexibility. Outlining the ways culture and individual psychology operate symbiotically, he posits a Buddhist-like conception of the cultural self as a set of experiences united by various apperceptions, episodic memories, ranked values, knowledge structures, and social roles—and not, in any shape or form, biological instinct. The result is fascinating portrait of the “dark matter of the mind,” one that shows that our greatest evolutionary adaptation is adaptability itself.

Human Communication

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Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119684315
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (196 download)

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Book Synopsis Human Communication by : Maria D. Sera

Download or read book Human Communication written by Maria D. Sera and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting edge scholarship on the origins and functions of human communication In Volume 40 of Human Communication: Origins, Mechanism, and Functions, a distinguished team of editors delivers the latest scholarship to researchers, students, and practitioners interested in and working in the field of human communication. This vital resource explores the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins, as well as the functions, of human communication. It will earn a place in the libraries of developmental psychologists, researchers and professionals dealing with speech, as well as a wide range of other academics and practitioners in language-related fields.

The Biology of Human Behavior

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Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1527545776
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (275 download)

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Book Synopsis The Biology of Human Behavior by : Thomas Rowland

Download or read book The Biology of Human Behavior written by Thomas Rowland and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do human beings behave the way they do? What governs how they act out their daily lives? It is not difficult to provide the traditional argument that it’s largely a matter of the culture in which we live, a product of the influences of family, peers, teachers, religious leaders, the movies we see, the books we read, and so forth. Such behavior often contradicts the independent nature of the human spirit, demanding a certain compromise—we depend on others for our needs, and to obtain these, we must behave accordingly. Evidence grows, however, that, in addition, much of our behavior has its roots in biological processes. Such information indicates that, whether we like to accept it or not, our conduct is often governed by biochemical agents within in the brain, an expression of our animalistic ancestral past, governed by our genetic inheritance, and all beyond the level of our conscious decision-making. This book addresses a series of such behaviors—love, jealousy, travel, suicide, etc.—and examines new-found perspectives that speak to a biological component in explaining just why we behave as we do. Certainly, such scientific insights are limited and currently provide only a narrow insight into human behavior. However, this information clearly forecasts the coming of a greater appreciation that, as members of the animal kingdom, we remain biological beings as well as members of a cooperative society.

The Intellective Space

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452944040
Total Pages : 146 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis The Intellective Space by : Laurent Dubreuil

Download or read book The Intellective Space written by Laurent Dubreuil and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-03-20 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Intellective Space explores the nature and limits of thought. It celebrates the poetic virtues of language and the creative imperfections of our animal minds while pleading for a renewal of the humanities that is grounded in a study of the sciences. According to Laurent Dubreuil, we humans both say more than we think and think more than we say. Dubreuil’s particular interest is the intellective space, a space where thought and knowledge are performed and shared. For Dubreuil, the term “cognition” refers to the minimal level of our mental operations. But he suggests that for humans there is an excess of cognition due to our extensive processing necessary for verbal language, brain dynamics, and social contexts. In articulating the intellective, Dubreuil includes “the productive undoing of cognition.” Dubreuil grants that cognitive operations take place and that protocols of experimental psychology, new techniques of neuroimagery, and mathematical or computerized models provide access to a certain understanding of thought. But he argues that there is something in thinking that bypasses cognitive structures. Seeking to theorize with the sciences, the book’s first section develops the “intellective hypothesis” and points toward the potential journey of ideas going beyond cognition, after and before computation. The second part, “Animal Meditations,” pursues some of the consequences of this hypothesis with regard to the disparaged but enduring project of metaphysics, with its emphasis on categories such as reality, humanness, and the soul.